This dissertation is a study of the Cabochien revolt in Paris in 1413 and the political culture of the period that created the possibility for the uprising to take place. A wide variety of sources - chronicles, court records, political treatises, poems, didactic manuals and other materials - were consulted in order to depict late medieval Parisian political culture in the fullest sense of the political. The experience of the Cabochien Revolt, in which aristocrats, University men, trade guilds and rank-and-file Parisians all participated in a loose alliance based on a common ideology of antagonism towards the growth of taxation, the state bureaucracy and the increased centralization of governmental power in the court space, reveals how political action and consciousness in the late Middle Ages were not contained within elite groups but extended throughout the population.
The dissertation also has a wider theoretical point, and approaches medieval revolution as a historiographical problem. Incorporating post-colonial observations on the state and history, the dissertation argues that the experience of social conflict in the Middle Ages - the pre-West as opposed to the non-West - can serve as a corrective to a teleological modernist historiography of revolution. In dislodging medieval revolution from criteria derived from modern experiences of revolution and politics that necessarily marginalize pre-modern forms of these phenomena, it is hoped that an expanded notion of revolution can be added to this wider historiography. The fifteenth-century Parisians did not seek to replace the stewards of the state; they sought to limit the role the centralized state should play in society as a whole, a challenge to power as radical as that attempted by modern revolutionary movements. This movement as well as similar other revolts in the late Middle Ages were unsuccessful, but the sheer fact of their popularity shows how the nation-state, which was to become the dominant form of political organization throughout the world in the modern period following its origins in late medieval France and England, was not born of a gradual evolutionary process but was instead imposed on its subjects in specific moments of coercion and violence.