Abstract EN:

In the eighteenth century, people and their land were still submitted to the law of the lords, in the East of France, especially in the church domains of the south of Franche-Comté (the abbeys of St-Claude, Gigny, and Baume-les-Messieurs). In 1733, Dunod de Charnage, a lawyer from Franche-Comté, recorded the theory of the servile right in a famous treaty. This study consists in revealing the daily life of bondmen and the practice of the servile right, from notarial and judicial archives. The fraud concerned the refusal to acknowledge the seignorial rights, to pay the taxes of transfer or to give the expired estates back to their lords. The protest, which was isolated at the beginning of the century, became massive after 1750. Bondmen suffered the consequences of the "burghers' management" of the lords, income and offered resistance to the attempts of increasing the amount of the feudal duty (seignorial reaction). From 1770 on, Voltaire supported the communities of bondmen in Saint-Claude and thus the compelled the authority to modify the servile statute (the edict of 1779). The inducements to the setting free of these people were of no wail. Just before the revolution, the debate about the suppression of bondage (with brochures, pamphlets, grievances) underlined the lords' foundness for the right of bondage in Franche-Comté, where was the peasants claims pleaded in favour of alleviation of the seigneurial burden.