The revolutionary elite responded to evidence of rural lassitude and dissent with preventive solutions and reactionary explanations. If the deputies of the National Assembly professed difficulty understanding why the good farmers of the nation were wary of political change, they wasted little time in addressing the problem. To counteract the ignorance they perceived to be the underlying issue, some deputies struck committees to ensure that decrees were arriving in the provinces, while others discussed translating them for regions where French was not everyone's mother tongue. Members of the Assembly frequently pointed to the improvement of roads and the augmentation of the postal service as key to the solution. Civic missionaries traveled the countryside “correcting misunderstandings” and spreading the gospel of the Revolution, and an increasingly radical political culture translated political meaning into visual symbols and pageantry. Where government left off, private citizens willingly took up the noble task of enlightening the unenlightened, as political clubs and newspaper editors targeted the rural majority with propaganda of varying degrees of subtlety.

Despite such determined efforts to counteract dissenting views with education, the problem was not a lack of information. For those interested in political news and change, there was plenty available, and from competing sources; rural political apathy may in fact have been exacerbated by an excess of information. A lively oral culture existed in the French countryside, so a certain proportion of political opinions were bound to be disparaging.