ABSTRACT
The French Revolutionary Wars were not a struggle between liberty on the one hand and tyranny on the other. As Jeremy Black has written, 'In the 1780s, Europe's rulers were not planning for the French Revolutionary War, but they were preparing for major conflicts, such as that which nearly broke out in 1790—91 between the Prussian alliance system and Austria and Russia'. The cahiers des doleances, therefore, emerged on the crest of a wave of public debate that was completely unprecedented and drew its impetus from a much wider segment of French society than just the salons. The peoples of Europe were mere pawns who were to be mobilised or called to endure suffering exactly as their rulers thought fit. For the French elites, the 1780s was an extremely frightening period. At the heart of this was a combination of economic instability, agrarian and industrial backwardness and population growth.
