Everyday life for ordinary country dwellers in eighteenth-century France was substantially defined by their relationship to their seigneur–even in 1789 lords continued to exercise power over village life and local political affairs. Few historians of rural France still find persuasive Alexis de Tocqueville's view that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the central state gradually replace the local lord in village affairs, ultimately leading to antiseigneurial revolt in 1789. By demonstrating the depth of peasant frustration and anger over seigneurial authority, analyses of popular revolts in 1789 and antiseigneurial criticisms in cahiers de doléances emphasize the continued influence of lords over daily life in the villages of France. Peasants from every region revolted against their lords at some time from 1789 to 1793, and many refused to pay seigneurial dues after the summer of 1789, despite the fact that many dues and rights were not formally abolished until three years later. We also know that antiseigneurial sentiment did not spring out of nowhere in 1789, and indeed was rising in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Analysis of popular revolts in France throughout the eighteenth century shows that antiseigneurial violence, most often directed against lords' attempts to partition commons, enclose meadows, and drain marshes, was over three times more frequent from 1760 to 1789 than from 1690 to 1720. And finally, it is clear from parish cahiers de doléances that when ordinary people thought about what was wrong with their society, the injustice and unfairness of their exploitation by lords came immediately to mind.