ABSTRACT
Arlette Farge was looking at court archives in eighteenth-century Paris, but a similar feeling has come over this author when reading texts which are often referred to as Bittbriefe, Bittschreiben or Bittschriften (letters of petition). The authors of the universal letter-writing manuals strongly advised that 'modesty and a regard for decency' should prevail in every petitioning letter, which meant avoiding any kind of pushiness and not exaggerating even the most 'desperate misery' or 'neediness' by depicting it 'in garish colours'. These texts were found in the most diverse places; in local community or town archives as well as in some sections of the central Austrian state archive. Petitioning letters were subject to a noticeable change in the course of the nineteenth century which corresponds to the transition from a 'traditional' to a 'legal system of rule'. Letters remain the complex results of the interweaving of fact and fiction.
