The French Revolution is more obviously associated with paranoid and deadly suspicion than with trust, but it was in the pervasive desire to rebuild a political system that could be trustworthy that much of that suspicion was born.

Trust in pre-revolutionary France was a multi-faceted object of attention. Up and down the social scale, individuals and households survived on credit, for everything from daily groceries and servants’ wages to business investments and property transactions. Borrowing and lending, and weighing the complex calculus of trust and risk involved, was central to daily life.

It was also central to the functioning of the state, which groaned under the burden of debt piled up in multiple wars, and had tottered since the 1760s from one failed tax-reform scheme to the next. Public trust, la confiance publique, was endlessly discussed as both the foundation of fiscal survival, and a fragile bloom in constant need of tender care. This was particularly clear after further ministerial efforts at reform in 1787 had led to brutal collision with elite opposition, and a brush with literal state bankruptcy in the summer of 1788. Government ministers, and King Louis XVI himself, were forced to concede that trust would not return without a wider consultation with the public.

This was the function of an Estates-General, that had not met since 1614. Allowing a nationwide process of election for it was a tremendous, but now unavoidable, risk. The crown might paternally declare that remedies would emerge ‘by a mutual trust and by a reciprocal love between the sovereign and his subjects’, but few of those subjects were inclined to be so innocently trusting.

What they did do, when tens of thousands met to elect deputies and compose the ‘registers of grievance’ that embodied their concerns, was invoke trust in myriad ways that pointed to both the fervent desire for reform and the potential for dire conflict ahead.

Trust featured in at least one of the grievance cahiers (of the three ‘orders’ of clergy, nobility and commoner ‘third estate’) in more than four out of five of the country’s electoral districts. Fewer than a fifth of these mentions, however, concerned trust in the king, and of those that did, many beseeched him to back reform and crack down on the abuses of his own ministers ‘recognised as having abused the public trust’. Half of all invocations of trust concerned the need for, and objectives of, a catalogue of specific reforms: from the debt-burden itself to the functioning of justice, the administration of the Church, future local and national government, and the preservation of rights of privacy and free expression.

Trust in future improvement existed in clear tension with denunciation of the scale and depth of crisis, and how far that crisis stemmed from neglect of good government and the interests of the nation. Time and again, assemblies warned the men they were deputising for them not to betray their interests, to remain firm, and ‘answer to our trust’ in them. One noble assembly even ordered their deputy to return in person, to receive either ‘testimony of their esteem’ or be declared ‘forever unworthy of their trust’, depending on how well he had resisted the corruption of the royal court.

The drafters of the cahiers of 1789 used trust as a critical lens through which to envision their place in the past, present and future of the French polity. It was not the unconditional, childlike trust that royal absolutism demanded of them, but rather an active faculty of judgment and concern, that identified their gatherings as manifestations of a civic, citizen identity. In a cruel irony, when their deputies met at Versailles later that spring, it was the scale of the crisis as seen from the centre that would prompt them to push forward with a new constitutional order: more egalitarian by far, but also uniform and centralised beyond the dreams of the old-regime monarchy. The collision between that centralising vision and the local judgment manifested by the cahiers was a key ingredient in the decade of strife that followed.