Malte Griesse

Early-Modern Revolts as Communicative Events: Cross-Border Flows of Knowledge and the Development of Political Grammars

Early-modern revolts were communicative events. My project studies both communication in revolts and communication on revolts.

1) In a revolt a) communicative spaces were extended for the sake of organization, and b) this often had cathartic effects on the formation of opinions, so that subjects discussed questions they never even touched under ordinary circumstances: political grammars concerning social justice and political order. Verbal and symbolic contestations by subjects often forced governments into justification of their rule.

2) But once the authorities had managed to repress resistance, they tried to cut short all communication on the revolt. This policy of damnatio memoriae was to push away the burning question of legitimacy the revolt had raised. Commentators, analysts and political advisers were therefore obliged to refer almost exclusively to examples of revolts having taken place abroad or in a distant historical past. I thus explore a) the ensuing chains of cross-border representations and cultural translation of revolt-experience, b) the public and learned debates on political grammars (legitimacy of rule, legitimacy of resistance) that built on these representations, as well as c) the use governments made of these discourses for their further preventive policies, including processes of juridicization (Verrechtlichung).

3) In parallel to the public spheres of exchange, I examine arcane channels of communication on revolts such as a) archival documentation generated by juridical investigation and the use (or rather non-use) that was made of it in the face of further analogous events, b) and diplomatic accounts on foreign revolts that were not under the constraint of public justification.