# State-Building and Rebellion in the Run-Up to the French Revolution

MICHAEL ALBERTUS

University of Chicago, United States

VICTOR GAY

Toulouse School of Economics, France

Early modern European powers were beset by episodic unrest as they sought to consolidate their authority and build empires. We examine how growing state communication networks and the penetration of society impacted unrest by combining original and detailed parish-level data from pre-Revolutionary France on the expansion of the horse-post relay network with rebellion in this period. Using a staggered difference-in-differences framework, we find that new horse-post relays are associated with more local rebellion. We argue that the main mechanisms are the material consequences of state centralization. New horse-post relays are linked with more rebellion against state agents and associates—the military, police, tax collectors, and the judiciary—that conscripted civilians, enforced taxes and laws, and increasingly monopolized roads. Pre-existing state and administrative fragmentation also mediated this relationship. Our findings have implications for the scholarly understanding of the co-evolution of states and order.

Rebellion and unrest have long been central subjects of inquiry for social scientists and historians. Social conflict reflects underlying discontent as well as competition over power disparities, contested values, perceptions of fairness, and expectations for the future. Because of its critical role in social transformation and long-term development (Skocpol 1979; Thompson 1964; Tilly 1986), scholars have examined how conflict shapes phenomena as wide-ranging as state formation (Slater 2010), political consciousness (Porchnev 1963; Thompson 1971), regime durability (Levitsky and Way 2013), and identity and beliefs (Ladurie 1966). Many early students of conflict focused on episodes of violence and unrest in early modern Europe, a period marked by rapid social, cultural, and economic change alongside the emergence of centralized states (Ladurie 1966; Porchnev 1963; Thompson 1971; Tilly 1986). Because of the historical importance and prominence of such disorder, as well as rapid improvements in data availability and processing, a branch of emerging scholarship has turned to reexamining rebellion and unrest in this era.<fnref n="1" />

We contribute to this growing literature by focusing on eighteenth-century France in the run-up to the

French Revolution. While the Revolution has played an outsized role in history and is one of the most studied political events of the past two centuries, the thousands of localized uprisings that erupted across the French territory in the preceding decades have received comparatively little attention. These rebellions often simmered and were periodically suppressed by state agents, yet they ultimately fed into the broader revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, the monarchy heavily invested in state-building throughout the eighteenth century (Burguière and Revel 1989). A central element of this effort was the expansion of the horse-post relay network, which nearly doubled in size over the period. These relays established attended lodging quarters and a well-prepared set of fresh horses for messengers carrying information for the royal administration where there had previously been no support. The horse post represented one of the primary means of consolidating the hierarchical French state's informational capacity as it sought to rule and control a fragmented territory (Marchand 2006).

Did this intensive expansion of the state's informational capacity through the horse-post relay network generate backlash among populations exposed to these state-building efforts? To investigate this question, we combine original data on the development of the horse-post relay network over the eighteenth century with a comprehensive database of rebellions in pre-Revolutionary France. Using a staggered difference-in-differences framework centered on parishes—the most granular territorial unit then—we show that the introduction of a new horse-post relay in a parish was associated with more local rebellions in subsequent decades. We attribute this finding mainly to the material consequences of state efforts at penetrating and ordering local society as it centralized and enhanced its informational capacity.

The increasingly present state that was behind and facilitated by new horse-post relays became a target of popular ire for its activities, such as heavy-handed efforts

Corresponding author: Michael Albertus ID, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, United States, albertus@uchicago.edu.

Victor Gay ID, Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics, France, victor.gay@tse-fr.eu.

Handling editor: Carles Boix.

Received: October 24, 2024; revised: February 21, 2025; accepted: November 12, 2025.

<footnote n="1">¹ See, for instance, Chambru (2019), Degrave (2023), Chambru and Maneuvrier-Hervieu (2024), Waldinger (2024), and Davoine, Enguehard, and Kolesnikov (2025).</footnote>
at forced conscription, tax enforcement, monopolization of the roads, and inflexible enforcement of royal acts and laws perceived as unfair (Aubert 2015; Nicolas 2002). Accordingly, we find that horse-post relays were strongly associated with rebellions against agents with coercive powers to maintain and enforce order: the military, the police, and the judiciary. They were also associated with rebellions against various forms of taxation as well as rebellions by notables that had private interests along postal roads. Furthermore, while these relationships broadly prevail and encompass the lion's share of rebellions, we also find a disproportionate response of rebellions to horse-post relays in places of pre-existing state fragmentation and territorial divisions. These findings demonstrate an increasingly powerful state that nonetheless struggled to control local activity across a heterogeneous territory as many of its efforts were contested.

Our empirical approach and additional data give us a unique opportunity to evaluate and challenge several alternative explanations—namely, the erosion of traditional social hierarchies, the role of war zones and war involvement, information and collective action possibly spurred by the contemporaneous letter-post system, changes in the recording of rebellions by police brigades (maréchaussée) charged with keeping order, and the contemporaneous transit infrastructure. These latter three alternatives are often challenging to dismiss in more commonly studied cases where communication and transportation networks are built together from scratch and can be widely used. In eighteenth-century France, however, the horse-post relay network was built atop existing transit routes and served as a state-monopolized communications network. Moreover, the development of police brigades and the letter-post system followed a different logic than the horse post.

Our findings have implications for the scholarly understanding of the co-evolution of states, order, and disorder, as well as for the vast corpus of work on the origins of the French Revolution. While greater state capacity may ultimately support political stability and order, the process of state-building itself can be disruptive to pre-existing social structures and contested, even for decades at a time. This process likely fueled the accumulation of grievances and repertoires of resistance that ultimately exploded during the Revolution.

## THE LONG AND CONTESTED PROCESS OF STATE FORMATION

There is a broad, rich literature on state formation, including the emergence of states, state centralization and consolidation, and the exercise of power. This literature makes clear that building a strong state is a long, complex, and often contested process. As Elias ([1939] 1994) emphasizes, it has taken most states centuries to overcome powerful fragmented regional and religious elites that had private armies and taxation rights, and many states around the world still face fundamental weaknesses (Centeno et al. 2017; Soifer

2015). In Europe, monarchies slowly absorbed feudal capacities as they centralized their administration and bureaucracy, a process that Elias ([1939] 1994) describes as not only coercive and political but also social, as regional consciousness declined and increasing state presence in society created “civilizing” norms of state control over the use of violence.

Weber (1968) prominently described the newly powerful states that ultimately resulted from this process as defined by a monopoly over the use of violence within their territory, which entails the legitimation of authority and a centralized hierarchy of administration that embodies and enforces a legal-rational domination of society. Subsequent seminal scholarship elaborated concepts, such as state capacity and autonomy (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985) and underscored the importance of a strong state to establishing and maintaining social order (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Huntington 1968; Skocpol 1979).<fnref n="2" />

State formation in Europe advanced through both external pressures and internal incentives and innovations. Tilly (1990) emphasizes how military and fiscal demands associated with regional competition and warfighting pressured early states to accelerate their efforts at centralization and extraction in order to build the capacity to wage war and defend their territory.<fnref n="3" /> Eventually, state efforts to penetrate society and build capacity became fortified by institutional innovations that responded to disparate interests and in doing so, fostered greater compliance with extraction (Levi 1989).

However, most states spent numerous decades and even centuries attempting to penetrate society and centralize control and administration. A core component of those efforts has been the expansion of transportation and communication routes to facilitate the penetration of the state's reach into society and the administration of its territory. This is closely tied to what Mann (1984) termed infrastructural power—namely, the capacity of the central state to penetrate its territories andlogistically implement its decisions. This implicates both the state's material capabilities and its territoriality (Soifer 2008). As Mann (1984) underscores, infrastructural power can vary separately from the despotic power used to impose mandates over society. It can also be very uneven across the territory (Boone 2003; Pierskalla, De Juan, and Montgomery 2019).

Historically, states and empires built paths, stone roads, postal routes, ports, and canals to reach remote populations, transmit information and correspondence, and deploy military forces (Bulliet 1990; Rogowski et al. 2022). Today, governments continue to build and improve roads in remote rural areas, expand railway networks, construct telecommunications infrastructure, and establish stations and outposts for their security

<footnote n="2">² Of course, states can deploy that same capacity to perpetrate violence against civilians or armed groups (Straus 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Recent scholarship identifies similar pressures in Latin America (Schenoni 2025). Internal threats can also provoke state-building, as Slater (2010) demonstrates in select postcolonial Southeast Asian countries where elites coalesced behind strong states and authoritarianism to protect against systemic popular unrest.</footnote>
apparatus. Alongside these efforts—and in some cases facilitated by them—states typically seek to centralize their administration, strengthen tax collection and police presence, and provide public goods as they broaden their ability to project power and penetrate more deeply into society (Centeno et al. 2017; Lindvall and Teorell 2016; Müller-Crepon, Hunziker, and Cederman 2021).<fnref n="4" />

## Disruption and Contention During State Centralization

While stronger states can effectively monopolize violence, enforce rules, and centrally administer territory and social groups (Weber 1968), the process of state-building itself can be contested and contentious (Boone 2003; Garfias and Sellars 2022). We build on seminal theories of state formation that emphasize the development and consolidation of a centralized administrative network across the territory. Transportation and communication infrastructures that connect localities more directly to central government authorities enhance the ability of the state to penetrate society through the control and administration of local activity and rules, extraction in the form of taxation and military service, and the disruption of existing social relations and expectations. In France, as throughout Europe, this historic process entailed the extension of authority over—and even the absorption of—disparate regional nobles, lords, church authorities, and other elites (Elias [1939] 1994).

Our focus, however, highlights how this process was characterized by frictions with society more broadly, and to a lesser degree, by frictions with regional elites. Indeed, the material consequences of increased but incomplete state power can generate social contestation and popular resistance stemming from the greater local capacity of the state to enforce taxes, carry out rules of justice, and conscript civilians into military service. It can also result from the crowding out of private interests and activities in spaces that the state comes to dominate. These consequences of state expansion disrupt status-quo activities and expectations, generating grievances.<fnref n="5" /> At the same time, the state may lack sufficient coercive power and legitimacy to deter popular challenges, a dynamic that has been documented in other contexts of state-building (e.g., Pruett 2024).

The extent of contestation stirred by state efforts at expansion and centralization may also vary across the territory in accordance with pre-existing fragmentation in authority and administration. Centralizing states routinely encounter regional divisions linked to historical competing authorities and power centers across

their territorial expanse, which can, as Migdal (1988) highlights, condition the interactions between society and the state. That poses a challenge to the state's ability to effectively penetrate and order society in a consistent fashion across space and can raise regionalized grievances and backlash. This raises the potential for the link between state-building and unrest to be characterized at least in part by heterogeneity across space in accordance with fragmentation.

We explore these dynamics in pre-Revolutionary France, where increased connectivity and penetration of society associated with state centralization fostered disruption and social unrest. While this relationship prevailed across the entire French territory, it also varied to some extent with pre-existing administrative fragmentation: where fragmentation mapped onto historic disparities in the mode of ruling and extent of intended extraction by the state, opposition to the state's imposition of central authority through new horse-post relays varied accordingly.

## STATE-BUILDING AND REBELLION IN THE RUN-UP TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Eighteenth-century France remained an overwhelmingly rural society, undergoing gradual yet profound transformations with deep historical roots (Ladurie 1966). In the countryside, the state, the nobility, and the Church competed for dominance, generating persistent frictions and local conflicts. By Lefebvre's (1947) classic account, this competition gave rise to a dense web of taxes, tithes, and seigneurial dues that weighed increasingly heavily on the peasantry in run-up to the Revolution. Canonical studies have examined how these burdens spurred grievances and uprisings, and resulted in a revolution (de Tocqueville [1856] 2010; Shapiro and Markoff 1998). Recent scholarship points to additional factors behind peasant revolts during this period, such as adverse climatic shocks (Chambru 2019; Waldinger 2024) and the degree of centralization of the tax collection system (Degrave 2023).

There is broad consensus, however, that the monarchy made significant strides during this period in centralizing and extending its authority, as its influence spread across the kingdom and into peripheral provinces (Burguière and Revel 1989). As the state expanded and assumed a more prominent role in controlling daily life—though still far from an all-encompassing one—it disrupted the delicate balance of relationships, obligations, and expectations that had long structured society. A key element of this expansion was the monarchy's exclusive communication network: the horse post (*poste aux chevaux*).

## The Functioning of the Horse-Post Relay Network

From its inception under Louis XI in the late 1470s, the horse post served as a pivotal state-building instrument of the royal authority to consolidate its informational capacity across the kingdom, particularly in its outlying

<footnote n="4">⁴ Infrastructure can also enable state repression and appropriation of resources like land, as occurred in Paraguay under Stroessner (González et al. 2025). On the interrelationships between various dimensions of state capacity, see Hanson and Sigman (2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Transportation and communication networks could also facilitate collective action by lowering transaction costs and enabling coordination (García-Jimeno, Iglesias, and Yildirim 2022; Pengl et al. 2025). We examine these alternative mechanisms below.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Depictions of the Horse Post</figcaption></figure>

Note: This figure displays contemporary depictions of an eighteenth-century horse-post relay in Panel a and a postillon galloping two horses back to a relay in Panel b. Sources: in Panel a, lithography by Victor-Jean Adam and Louis-Philippe-Alphonse Bichebois, based on a painting of Jean-Antoine Duclaux, *La malle au relai* [sic], 1817; in Panel b, painting of the French School, *Postillon en livrée ramenant deux chevaux au galop*, mid-nineteenth century. © Musée de La Poste, La Poste, photographs by Thierry Debonnaire.

provinces (Marchand 2006, 183–221).<fnref n="6" /> This infrastructure consisted of a nationwide network of relays where horse-post messengers (*postillons*) could exchange their horses for fresh ones in order to ensure the rapid transportation of directives, reports, and other communications of the royal administration (Jamaux-Gohier 2001; Marchand 2006; Gazagnadou 2013, 109–16). Relays were spaced at regular intervals of 10–15 kilometers, allowing riders to switch horses after an hour or two of travel. This system enabled postillons to maintain high speeds while minimizing the risk of injury to the horse, in line with their physiological limits (Minetti 2003).<fnref n="7" /> The horse-post relay network was connected by a road infrastructure maintained by the Bridges and Roads (*Ponts et Chaussées*) administration, which operated independently of the horse post (Arbellot 1973).

Located at the entrances to towns or at rural crossroads, horse-post relays were relatively large buildings —comprising stables, lodging quarters, and often a tavern—that stood out prominently in the rural landscape (see Panel a of Figure 1). The postillons who galloped postal roads day and night were typically young local laborers, easily identifiable by their distinctive uniforms: a royal-blue vest, a round leather hat,

leather breeches, heavy black boots, and an arm badge bearing the name of their relay (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 237–40; Marchand 2006, 258–64). Their horses, bred in royal stud farms, were superior to those of private horse renters and bore distinctive markings, such as a knotted or trimmed tail (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 262–7; Marchand 2006, 270–5). Together, postillons’ uniforms and horses made them instantly recognizable in the public space (see Panel b of Figure 1).

In addition to the short distance between relays—which allowed for frequent changes of horses—a series of regulations enabled the horse-post system to achieve a higher speed of information transmission than alternative postal systems available to the general public, such as the letter post or private messenger companies (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 100–8).<fnref n="8" /> Indeed, postillons held a monopoly on galloping and on traveling at night on roads connecting relays, which were generally better maintained by the Bridges and Roads administration than other roads and directly connected to administrative centers (Arbellot 1973, 766). The horse post also held a monopoly on horse rentals along these roads, effectively preventing private travelers from switching horses when traveling along them.<fnref n="9" /> In addition, it had

<footnote n="6">⁶ The French horse-post system emulated the organization developed by the Visconti in the Duchy of Milan beginning in the 1380s, which in turn drew inspiration from earlier systems under the Mongol Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Gazagnadou 2013, 95–109).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ In fact, similar distances between relays were a common feature of horse-post systems throughout history—including those of the Tang Dynasty in seventh-century China, the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultanate in fourteenth-century Egypt, the Duchy of Milan in fifteenth-century Italy, and the Pony Express in the nineteenth-century United States (Minetti 2003, 786).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ For instance, when the *subdélégué* of Rennes sent a letter to his counterpart in Nantes at 7:15 p.m. on Monday, December 31, 1764, the postillon of the horse post arrived in Nantes by 6 a.m. the next morning—after 11 hours of travel through 11 relays (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 39–40). By contrast, according to the 1763 edition of the *Guide des lettres* (61), a letter sent via the letter post would leave Rennes only on Wednesday at 4 p.m. and arrive in Nantes on Thursday at 7 a.m., requiring 15 hours of travel (Cauvin, Lepetit, and Reymond 1987).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ The vast majority of the population traveled through alternative, regulated, modes: messenger services (*messageries*), coaches and</footnote>
priority access to hay for feeding horses and the right of passage on congested roads. Postmasters (*maîtres de postes*) profited substantially from these privileges and were quick to report violations to their *intendant*—the provincial representative of the monarchy—who usually swiftly enforced these regulations (Vaillé 1953, 166–70; Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 101–4).

The establishment of horse-post relays provided the opportunity for the royal authority to form alliances with and co-opt local elites who came to serve as post-masters. Postmasters were typically recruited among wealthy local notables—bourgeois farmers and inn-keepers aspiring to noble status (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 189–94; Marchand 2006, 223–8). Each held a postal certificate (*brevet de poste*) that granted them the exclusive right to operate a given relay. The certif-icate imposed several obligations on postmasters: they were required to reside at the relay, to manage their relay directly (*faire-valoir direct*) and not farm out its operations, and to maintain its proper functioning—such as keeping at least five or six healthy horses available at all times. In addition, they were expected to serve as intelligence agents and auxiliary police on behalf of the central administration (Vaillé 1953, 268–71; Marchand 2006, 210–4). Their duties included monitoring passen-gers passing through the relay—by the late eighteenth century, this involved keeping records of names, occu-pations, and destinations—as well as reporting notable local political events to their intendant.

Overall, the horse-post relay network positioned the state as the sole authority controlling rapid communi-cations in France, significantly expanding its ability to monitor society and exert control over its territory.

## Consequences of the Horse Post for Local Order and Rebellion

The development of the horse-post relay network had several distinct consequences. At the national level, it enabled the rapid communication essential to the effec-tive functioning of the state. For instance, it allowed central officials, tax farmers (*fermiers généraux*), and provincial intendants and local tax officials (*élus*) to coordinate swiftly through directives, reports, and fiscal orders on matters of tax collection and enforcement. That included efforts to suppress salt smuggling (*faux-saunage*) across the kingdom's disparate and consequen-tial salt-tax zones (*gabelles*). This coordination required frequent and timely exchanges between central adminis-trators and local agents, who were responsible for esti-mating tax yields and implementing their collection (Caillou 2005, 177–293; Deharbe 2010, 243–344). The

speed of communication was especially critical in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of natural disasters (Favier 2007). The horse-post system also facilitated the trans-mission and enforcement of military recruitment orders, enabling directives to travel efficiently from central authorities to intendants and onward to local recruitment and conscription officers (Corvisier 1964, 147–61).

Beyond these nationwide implications, the expansion of the horse-post relay network disrupted local social equilibria. A range of local actors benefited from these developments. Chief among them were postmasters. In addition to the profits they derived from their exclusive right to operate a relay, postmasters enjoyed a wide range of privileges, including substantial exemptions from taxation—most notably, from the onerous *taille*— as well as relief from military obligations, from accom-modating passing soldiers, and from churchwarden responsibilities (Demangeon 1995, 44–8; Tonnaire 2005, 48–59). They were also exempt from taxes on ancillary activities tied to relay operations, such as the sale of wine in the relay's tavern. These material advan-tages fostered broad loyalty to the monarchy among postmasters (Vaillé 1953, 233–48; Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 189–235; Marchand 2006, 200–46).<fnref n="10" /> Other local groups also derived material benefits from the introduc-tion of horse-post relays: innkeepers benefited from the increased traffic along roads connecting relays (Tonnaire 2005, 59–63), and families allied with postmasters often enhanced their local influence through closer ties to representatives of the royal authority (Tonnaire 2005, 48).

Local elites also likely benefited from the establish-ment of horse-post relays, as improved communication with provincial and central authorities may have enhanced their influence and elevated their status. For instance, historical accounts suggest that tax agents often relied on the knowledge and assistance of local notables as they traveled along the relay network in preparation for their annual round of tax collection (Caillou 2005, 177–293; Deharbe 2010, 243–344). These interactions may have fostered mutually beneficial relationships, reinforcing the authority of local elites and further integrating them into the state's adminis-trative and logistical apparatus. Local notables may also have engaged with military officials and royal agents passing through or lodging at relays, for instance, by sharing local information, though such ties were likely kept discreet and remain difficult to cor-roborate in historical records.

By contrast, the various monopolies associated with the horse post crowded out competing private interests. First and foremost, horse-rental businesses were severely disrupted by the ban on renting their horses along roads connecting horse-post relays. Indeed, examples of horse renters attempting to violate this

<footnote>carriages (*coches* and *carrosses*), or stagecoaches (*diligences*) following the 1775 Turgot reform (Marchand 2006, 43). These contractors were not allowed to set up relays and had to travel with the same carriage, either walking or trotting, during the day, and on a regular schedule. They also had very local perimeters: by the early 1790s, half of the 915 messagerie services covered a distance under 40 kilometers (Marchand 2006, 84). The transportation of merchandise heavier than 25 kilograms was the privilege of private companies (*voituriers* and *rouleurs*).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Historical accounts indicate that many postmasters displayed por-traits of French kings in their relays. In addition, during the Revolu-tion, they were often accused of collaborating with the monarchy, and a significant number of them were subsequently imprisoned or executed (Marchand 2006, 216–7).</footnote>
ban abound (e.g., Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 101–4).<fnref n="11" /> Local farmers and innkeepers situated off postal roads also lost out, as postmasters had priority access to hay and animal fodder for their relays—a shortage potentially worsened by the increased demand brought on by rising traffic along postal roads (Tonnaire 2005, 61–4). More broadly, the monopolization of these roads by the monarchy through the horse post imposed constraints on travelers as privately owned horses were restricted to trotting during daytime and could not be exchanged at horse- rental establishments.<fnref n="12" />

Additional social groups, such as commoners, peas-
ant, and merchants, may have also lost out with the
establishment of horse-post relays as they brought
increased surveillance and stricter enforcement of state
regulations. Indeed, enhanced state communication
through the horse-post relay network likely made it easier
for authorities to monitor and enforce tax collection,
military conscription, and judicial decisions. In addition,
local residents could have been subjected to new burdens,
including maintaining postal roads through the unpaid
labor system of the *corvée* (Tonnaire 2005, 65–86;
Conchon 2016).

We hypothesize that these disruptions to local soci-
ety fueled grievances, and eventually rebellion, though
the material consequences of a new horse-post relay
likely took time to fully materialize and for discontent
to boil over. Adverse events such as repeated food
shortages, tax enforcement campaigns, labor requisis-
tions, or conscription orders, combined with policy
changes such as tax increases or stricter judicial pro-
cedures or penal codes, could have tipped simmering
discontent into open rebellion. State agents who con-
tributed to—or were perceived as contributing to—
these pressures could have become targets of local
hostility. Counterfactual parishes that did not host
new horse-post relays were less exposed to such state
intrusion and thus avoided the same stratifying pres-
sures that divided communities into winners and losers
of state centralization. Hence, residents of these par-
ishes may not have experienced these adverse events to
the same degree, and where they did experience them,
they might have been less inclined to attribute them to
the presence or actions of state agents.

Several rebellious events in our data exhibit just such
reactions against state agents and activities. One exam-
ple occurred in 1781 in the town of Mirande, in the
southwestern généralité of Auch. A decade earlier, the
establishment of a new horse-post relay marked a
deeper state presence in this formerly isolated region
of the kingdom, as before the 1770s, this généralité had

only two relays, in Pau and Orthez. Military recruit-
ment in the area had long been among the lowest in
France, but the increased needs resulting from the
Anglo-French War (1778-83) brought renewed scrutiny
to local enlistment.<fnref n="13" /> In this context, the new horse-post
relay facilitated information gathering on draft-eligible
men. In 1781, as the subdélégué (the local representative
of the monarchy), military officers, and local notables
assembled in Mirande to conduct a conscription draw,
draft-eligible peasants and farmers emerged from the
forest with sticks and knives, shouting at the authorities,
"They should all be killed!" A confrontation over draft
resistance followed, resulting in several arrests before a
local notable managed to defuse the situation.

A rebellion in the coastal town of Blaye in Gironde
in 1783, just three years after the introduction of a horse-
post relay, offers another revealing example. Members of
a patache brigade—widely despised mobile tax-farming
agents charged with collecting gabelles and seizing con-
traband—attempted to inspect the load of a Breton
ship.<fnref n="14" /> Following the establishment of a series of new
relays connecting La Rochelle to Bordeaux along the
eastern shore of the Gironde Estuary in the early 1780s,
patache patrol boats began to more closely monitor
maritime commerce in the region, including in Blaye.
When the patache approached, the ship’s crew resisted
inspection and joined forces with local residents to stone
the patache agents once ashore at the encouragement of
the ship’s captain and the owner of the merchandise.
Members of the crew denounced the patache brigade as
an “enemy of society” that had come to “outrage
citizens” who were merely going about their usual busi-
ness. In short, heightened tax enforcement facilitated by
the recent expansion of the horse-post relay network
sparked a wave of local resentment that quickly escalated
into open resistance.

Other examples illustrate how the introduction of
horse-post relays could have crowded out private inter-
ests. About a decade after a series of relays was estab-
lished along the route between Dijon and Auxerre,
members of the local bourgeoisie complained that inns
near the new relays were monopolizing supplies of food
and animal fodder (Tonnaire 2005, 63–4). In response,
the subdélégué issued a ban preventing innkeepers from
making early purchases at local markets to preserve
access for other buyers—setting, for instance, an 8
a.m. cutoff in Avallon. Tensions between innkeepers
and the bourgeoisie escalated, and although the restric-
tion remained in place despite numerous complaints
from innkeepers, many of the underlying grievances
persisted. In another such example in 1775 in Picardy,
in the context of the Flour War, a crowd of townspeople

<footnote n="11">¹¹ In fact, the horse post did not reach Brittany until 1738—following an earlier, failed attempt in 1648—partly due to the opposition of local messenger services and horse-renting companies, who feared the competition would undermine their profits (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 11–28; Marchand 2006, 187–8).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Wealthier travelers may have benefited from the expansion of the horse post, as they could afford to travel in stagecoaches (*diligences*), which could exchange horses at relays following the 1775 Turgot reform—although after 1782, this privilege depended on the post-master’s discretion (Marchand 2006, 33–6, 88–90).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ While the nationwide average recruitment rate in 1716 was 525 men per 100,000 inhabitants, it was only 327 in the généralité of Auch. In 1763, the national average stood at 523, compared to 301 in Auch (Corvisier 1964, 415–27). See also Figure E6 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ There are numerous documented cases of violent attacks targeting patache brigades, as well as reports of their abusive conduct toward local populations through aggressive searches, raids, and extortion (e.g., Briais 1984).</footnote>
in Chauny attacked and ransacked the local horse-post relay on rumors that the postmaster had stockpiled wheat despite the local shortage. A detachment of troops was unable to stop the crowd.

Of course, horse-post relays could have impacted
rebellion through other channels beyond those illus-
trated in these examples. For instance, they could have
generated local income shocks, disrupted traditional
social hierarchies, introduced more policing, and called
attention to the recording and registration of rebellious
activities. We examine these and other potential alter-
native mechanisms below.

DATA

Our analysis dataset comprises a panel of 35 thousand
parishes of the kingdom of France as of 1789—except
for Corsica—spanning eight decades from the 1710s to
the 1780s. Parishes were the smallest units of adminis-
tration in Ancien Régime France and no prior study has
analyzed this period at such a granular level.<fnref n="15" /> Further
details on data sources are provided in the Data
Appendix section of the Supplementary Material. For
replication data, see Albertus and Gay (2025).

The Horse-Post Relay Network

To document the development of the horse-post relay
network over the eighteenth century, we construct an
original historical geographic information system
(GIS) based on administrative sources.<fnref n="16" /> Beginning
in 1708, the General Superintendent of Posts had a list
of horse-post relays printed and updated annually: the
*Liste générale des postes de France* (Arbellot 1980, 100–
2; 1992, 110–4). This publication was designed to pro-
vide state messengers with the locations of horse-post
relays together with distances between them. Each
*Liste des postes* was organized by itinerary, with depar-
ture and destination relays clearly marked.<fnref n="17" /> Distances
were reported in *postes*—a measure of distance equiv-
alent to 8–12 kilometers (Bretagnolle and Verdier
2006, 68–9).<fnref n="18" />

We digitized one edition of the *Liste des postes* per
decade from the 1710s through the 1790s.<fnref n="19" /> From each

edition, we extracted all the segments between relays as
listed by itinerary and matched each location to the
corresponding parish. We then reconstructed itinerar-
ies by drawing straight lines between successive relays
and combining the resulting segments. Figure 2 displays
the spatial distribution of the horse-post relay network
at the beginning and end of our period of analysis.<fnref n="20" /> We
also report the number of horse-post relays along with
the length of associated postal roads for each edition of
the *Liste des postes* included in our sample in Panel a of
Figure 3.

The spatial configuration of the horse-post relay
network at the beginning of the eighteenth century
reflected the monarchy's long-standing strategic and
military concerns vis-à-vis neighboring adversaries,
consistent with accounts of subnational state-building
efforts that emphasize responses to prevailing geopo-
litical and bellicist threats (Boone 2003; Tilly 1990). In
the late fifteenth century, relays were established in
Bordeaux, Dijon, Lyon, Arras, and Amiens due to their
strategic positions relative to the Kingdoms of Spain
and England, the Duchies of Burgundy and Savoy, the
County of Flanders, and the Holy Roman Empire
(Gazagnadou 2013, 112). During the sixteenth century,
postal routes expanded toward the kingdom's borders,
with relays established in Bayonne under Louis XII and
in Nantes under Henry III. This strategic expansion
continued throughout the seventeenth century, follow-
ing territorial conquests: northeastward to Strasbourg
after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), southwestward to
Narbonne after the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), and
eastward to Besançon after the Treaties of Nijmegen
(1678-79) (Marchand 2006, 186-8). These strategic and
military concerns led to a center-periphery logic result-
ing in a star-shaped network radiating from Paris and
reinforced by key nodes along the kingdom's borders.<fnref n="21" />

In contrast, the eighteenth century was a period of
internal densification of the horse-post relay network
(Bretagnolle and Verdier 2005; 2007; Verdier 2009). By
then, the horse post had become a key instrument in the
monarchy's strategy to assert a more uniform and
centralized control over the territory and to project its
power into the remotest parts of the kingdom
(Marchand 2006, 189).<fnref n="22" /> The network first densified
in the north following the permanent establishment of
the royal court at Versailles in 1682 and the consolida-
tion of the kingdom's territorial boundaries. From the

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Parishes were the primary units of local organization until they gave way to *municipalités* in 1789–93 and later to *communes* (Gorry 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ The horse-post relay network data we construct is more compre-
hensive than that in existing literature (Bretagnolle and Verdier 2005;
2007; Verdier et al. 2025). We provide more details on this point in
the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Figure A1 in the Supplementary Material displays an excerpt from the 1751 edition of the *Liste des postes* that depicts the 29 horse-post relays along the postal route from Lyon to Marseille.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ The term *poste* referred both to a relay and to the distance between two relays. For instance, Furetière's (1690, 1636) dictionary defines a *poste* as "the space between two post houses. Each post is one and a half leagues or two leagues" (quoted in Bretagnolle and Verdier 2006, 66).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Because all editions of the *Liste des postes* have not been pre-
served, we rely on the editions from 1714, 1721, 1731, 1741, 1751,</footnote>

<footnote>1760, 1770, 1780, and 1790. We do not use the 1708 edition—the first edition of the *Liste des postes*—because the year 1709, marked by the War of the Spanish Succession and a subsistence crisis, represents an outlier with 290 rebellions, as many as in 1789 (Aubert 2023). In addition, few horse-post relays were created between 1708 and 1714. See the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material for more details.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Maps for intermediate decades are provided in Figures A3 and A4
in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Figure A2 in the Supplementary Material reproduces a map of the
horse-post relay network in 1632.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² This strategy aligns with Pierskalla, De Juan, and Montgomery (2019, 712), who argue that early subnational state-building efforts often sought to maximize territorial coverage and fill in “blank spots” of state absence.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. The Horse-Post Relay Network</figcaption></figure>

Note: This figure displays the horse-post relay network based on the 1714 and 1790 editions of the *Liste des postes*. Horse-post relays correspond to black dots while horse-post roads, to red segments. The underlying shapefile of the kingdom of France as of 1789 is based on Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi's (2024a) jurisdictions database.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Evolution of the Horse-Post Relay Network</figcaption></figure>

Note: Panel a displays the evolution of the number of horse-post relays and the length of postal roads in kilometers from 1714 to 1790. Panel b displays the mean and standard deviation of the distance from the 35 thousand parishes in our sample to the nearest horse-post relay in kilometers. Horse-post relay data are based on various editions of the *Liste des postes*.

mid-eighteenth century onward, the network expanded around regional centers, such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Dijon, Toulouse, and Rennes. By the end of the century, the horse post had evolved into a national network struc- tured around the political center in the north and con- nected to secondary centers, creating the conditions for the emergence of an integrated city system (Bretagnolle and Franc 2017).

We quantify the expansion of the horse-post relay network over the eighteenth century in Panel a of Figure 3. The network grew steadily, essentially

doubling both in length and density over the period. Whereas in 1714, it comprised 841 relays spanning 11 thousand kilometers of postal roads, by 1790, it had expanded to 1,403 relays covering 24 thousand kilo- meters.<fnref n="23" /> This expansion substantially improved local accessibility to the network, as the average distance

<footnote n="23">²³ These figures count parishes with at least one relay. Some urban parishes (e.g., Paris) had multiple, so the total number of relays was slightly higher—845 in 1714 and 1,413 in 1790.</footnote>
between a parish and the nearest relay decreased from 22 kilometers in 1714 to 13 kilometers in 1790, as shown in Panel b of Figure 3. These gains were spread across all parishes, as the standard deviation of this distance also fell from 26 to 13 kilometers.<fnref n="24" /> More broadly, the proportion of parishes located near a horse-post relay rose substantially, from 18% in 1714 to 31% in 1790.<fnref n="25" />

However, the development of the horse-post relay network was not entirely linear as it was periodically reconfigured at the local level (Bretagnolle and Verdier 2007; Verdier 2009). While net gains amounted to 562 relays over the eighteenth century, this reflected the creation of 1,001 relays and the retirement of 439 of them.<fnref n="26" /> In particular, substantial reconfigurations occurred in the interior of the country in the 1740s and 1750s—between Bordeaux and Limoges, Bordeaux and Poitiers, Poitiers and Tours, and Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand. These reconfigurations were generally driven by local practical considerations, such as the retirement of a postmaster or the development of nearby roads in better condition (Arbellot 1980, 106).<fnref n="27" /> A comparison of the spatial distribution of newly established and retired relays by decade reveals that retired relays were, on average, 11 kilometers away from the nearest new relay.

While the initial configuration and expansion of the horse-post relay network were largely shaped by national strategic considerations, its local development over the eighteenth century was driven by practical constraints. Beyond the quality of the road network, the specific placement of relays was primarily determined by the need to maintain regular 10–15 kilometer intervals—reflecting the physiological limits of horses (Minetti 2003). As a result, many relays were located in small towns and villages situated along routes between administrative centers, often on riverbanks or on foot-hills.<fnref n="28" /> Accordingly, about one-third of relays were located in cities with more than two thousand inhabitants—typically administrative centers—while nearly half were in towns with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, and 19% in villages with fewer than five hundred inhabitants.<fnref n="29" /> Horse-post relays established after 1714 were even more likely to be located in smaller towns and villages.

<table><caption>TABLE 1. Summary Statistics across Parish-Decades</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Mean</th><th>S.d.</th><th>Min.</th><th>Max.</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td colspan="5"><strong>A. The horse-post network</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Horse-post relay present in parish</td><td>0.029</td><td>0.167</td><td>0</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Horse-post relay present in canton</td><td>0.224</td><td>0.417</td><td>0</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Distance to nearest horse-post relay (km)</td><td>18.5</td><td>20.7</td><td>0</td><td>256</td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"><strong>B. Rebellions</strong></td></tr><tr><td>All rebellions</td><td>0.020</td><td>0.225</td><td>0</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>Weak rebellions (4–10)</td><td>0.007</td><td>0.107</td><td>0</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Moderate rebellions (11–50)</td><td>0.009</td><td>0.121</td><td>0</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>Strong rebellions (50+)</td><td>0.004</td><td>0.075</td><td>0</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Rebellions against state authorities</td><td>0.012</td><td>0.161</td><td>0</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>Rebellions against non-state authorities</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.056</td><td>0</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Rebellions against taxation</td><td>0.008</td><td>0.138</td><td>0</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>Rebellions against military</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.050</td><td>0</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Rebellions against judiciary</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.057</td><td>0</td><td>10</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: This table reports summary statistics for the main variables used in the analysis, excluding the city of Paris. The unit of observation is a parish-decade from the 1710s to the 1780s. There are 282,288 parish-decade observations in the dataset. *State authorities* include the fiscal, military, and judiciary authorities. *Non-state authorities* include the nobility, seigneurial and municipal authorities, and the Church.

Summary statistics on the horse-post relay network at the parish-decade level are reported in Panel A of Table 1.<fnref n="30" />

## Rebellions

We collect data on eighteenth-century rebellions from the Jean Nicolas survey (Nicolas 1985; 2002).<fnref n="31" /> Com-piled from extensive archival research conducted from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, this survey documents 8,516 rebellions that occurred between 1661 and 1789 (Gay 2025, 7–11). It focuses on popular uprisings aimed at challenging authorities, protesting subsistence crises,

<footnote n="24">²⁴ An analysis based on a Shimbel (1953) index confirms this trend (Bretagnolle, Giraud, and Verdier 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ See Figure A5 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ See Figure A6 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ For instance, the relay of Vivier in Brittany—established in 1749—was transferred 7 kilometers away to Dol in 1760 to enable access to Pontorson via a better-maintained road. Likewise, a series of relay transfers between Rennes and Lorient in July 1763 shortened this route (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 24). See Panel a of Figure A7 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ For instance, in Touraine, many horse-post relays were located in villages nearby river crossings in addition to administrative centers, such as Tours or Amboise. See Panel b of Figure A7 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ See Figure A8 in the Supplementary Material. Parishes that were administrative centers had a median population of 3.2 thousand inhabitants in 1793 and a mean of 6.5 thousand.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ This table excludes the city of Paris, which is an outlier in terms of rebellious activity. An analogous table that includes Paris is provided in Table A1 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Our dataset on eighteenth-century rebellions in France uses one of the same sources as the HiSCoD database (Chambru and Maneuvrier-Hervieu 2024)—that is, Jean Nicolas’s (2002) survey. The Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material details how our database, in containing *all* of the variables from Nicolas’s (2002) survey, extends beyond the HiSCoD database.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. Annual Number of Rebellions</figcaption></figure>

Note: This figure displays the annual number of rebellions from 1714 to 1789 based on Nicolas's (2002) original survey along with a decade-moving average.

or resisting state and local policies and actions—it excludes brigandage and strictly criminal activities. The survey sets an inclusive threshold, recording any uprising that lasted only a few hours or involved as few as four individuals. These criteria thus cast a wide net, making the Jean Nicolas survey an unparalleled thermometer of the rebellious fever that swept through France in the run-up to the Revolution.

Figure 4 depicts trends in rebellious activity between 1714 and 1789, our period of analysis. Rebellions began to intensify in the 1740s before accelerating sharply in the 1760s, with more than a hundred events per year from that point onward. This escalation coincided with the growing presence of the state across the territory and rising levels of taxation (Burguière and Revel 1989).<fnref n="32" /> Rebellious activities further intensified until the outbreak of the Revolution. Their territorial spread—over about three thousand locations—is shown in Figure 5.<fnref n="33" />

We digitized all forty thousand original coding sheets of Nicolas’s (2002) survey to construct a comprehensive database of the 6,000 rebellions that took place in 3,172 parishes within the boundaries of the kingdom of France between 1714 and 1789.<fnref n="34" /> In addition to recording the date and location of each event, we also collected information on its motives, size, and the characteristics of its participants.<fnref n="35" /> To measure

rebellious activity, we create a variable that counts the number of rebellions per parish and decade. We report summary statistics in Panel B of Table 1.<fnref n="36" />

Nearly half of all rebellions (46%) that occurred from 1714 to 1789 were of moderate size, involving between 11 and 50 participants. Another 21% were relatively large, with more than 50 participants. State authorities were targeted in 60% of rebellions, while 11% were directed against non-state actors—the nobility, seigneurial and municipal authorities, and the Church. Among rebellions against the state, most were aimed at taxation (66%), followed by the military (19%) and the judiciary (23%).<fnref n="37" /> Finally, 69% of rebellions in our sample include information on the social categories of their participants. Among these, 39% involved laborers; 32%, craftsmen; 23%, notables; and 22%, socially marginalized individuals.<fnref n="38" /> The rebellions in our dataset thus span a broad range of the social strata of French society.

While Nicolas’s (2002) survey remains the most comprehensive source of rebellious activity in France prior to the Revolution, its use requires careful attention to potential gaps and reporting biases common to historical data (Gay 2025, 29–46). These include not only the archival recording of events, but also the possibility that the establishment of a horse-post relay may have

<footnote n="32">³² The administrative divisions used for taxation—typically the *élections*—were independent of the horse post (Touzery 2024). They also operated at a much coarser scale than the units we use for identification in our analysis, that is, parishes within the same canton.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Maps for individual decades are provided in Figures A3 and A4 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ We exclude rebellions that occurred after April 1789 and the onset of the French Revolution.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ We include both primary and secondary rebellion motives as recorded in Nicolas’s (2002) survey. Of the 6,000 rebellions in our dataset, 1,398 (23%) have secondary-motive information.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Because Paris experienced the highest number of rebellions throughout the eighteenth century—except in the 1720s—Table 1 excludes this city. An analogous table, including Paris, is provided in Table A1 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Table A2 in the Supplementary Material provides a detailed breakdown of rebellion types along with the number of cases for each type.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ See Table A3 in the Supplementary Material. These categories are not mutually exclusive, as individuals from different social groups could have participated in the same rebellion. Among the 4,154 rebellions for which social categories are available (69% of all rebellions), 37% involved individuals from more than one social category.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. Spatial Distribution of Rebellions (1714–89)</figcaption></figure>

Note: This figure displays the spatial distribution of rebellions from 1714 to 1789 based on Nicolas's (2002) original survey. Each point corresponds to a parish that experienced at least one rebellion over the period—6,000 rebellions across 3,172 parishes in total. The underlying shapefile of the kingdom of France as of 1789 is based on Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi's (2024a) jurisdictions database.

increased the capacity of state or local authorities to record rebellions. We address these concerns below by assessing the robustness of our results to these potential sources of bias, showing that they are unlikely to account for our findings.

## Administrative and Territorial Divisions

Central for our empirical strategy, parishes were embedded within a hierarchical system of administrative and territorial divisions. The largest of these were *généralités*. Created in the fourteenth century, these broad territorial divisions served as the basis for the administration of the territory under the authority of intendants (Gorry 2014). On the eve of the Revolution, there were 32 généralités.<fnref n="39" /> *Subdélégations* were territorial divisions established in the mid-seventeenth century as subdivisions of généralités to extend the territorial reach of the royal authority at

the local level. The prerogatives of *subdélégués*—the royal agents who administered subdélégations under the authority of the intendant of their généralité—increased during the eighteenth century to encompass the fiscal, military, economic, social, and sanitary administration of their territory (Goubert, Arbellot, and Laclau 1989). By 1789, there were nearly 700 subdélégations. A more localized territorial unit was the *canton*, which held various electoral and judicial functions (Ozouf-Marignier, Graziani, and Bonin 1989). Alongside parishes, cantons represented the most granular level of administration, totaling over 4,500.<fnref n="40" /> Although they were only formally created in 1790 along with *départements* and *districts*, their territorial scope closely reflected pre-existing patterns of local interaction and daily exchange between parishes (Tanguy, Le Bihan, and Lagadec 2009). At the median, each généralité had 988 parishes, 782 thousand inhabitants (as of 1793), and covered a radius of 70 kilometers; each subdélégation had

<footnote n="39">³⁹ The precise number of généralités varies depending on whether we account for *intendances* as well as territories not strictly in the kingdom of France.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ See Figure A9 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>
39 parishes, 31 thousand inhabitants, and a radius of 15 kilometers; and each canton had 7 parishes, 5 thousand inhabitants, and a radius of 6 kilometers.

## Other Data

We supplement our parish-level data with additional sources, although data for this time period remain relatively sparse. Our research design explicitly accounts for this constraint. In particular, we construct a parish-level measure of decade-average wheat prices based on data from Ridolfi (2019), so as to control for shifting local economic conditions and for potential income shocks associated with the local development of the horse-post relay network—subsistence crises and broader changes to the price of staple foods were common triggers of collective action in eighteenth-century France (Bouton 1993; Chambru 2019; Mar-koff 1985).41 In addition, we measure the size of each parish by its population in the 1793 census—the first census conducted in France. We also assess the connectivity of parishes to the road network based on Cassini’s maps published in 1756–90. Furthermore, we determine whether a parish served as the seat of an administrative division, and we collect information on the type of gabelle taxation regime to which it was subject. Finally, we construct a historical GIS of both the letter-post system and maréchaussée brigades, which we describe in more detail below.

## RESEARCH DESIGN

The substantial variation in rebellious activity and the expansion of the horse-post relay network over the eighteenth century offer a unique opportunity to examine how state-building efforts affected unrest in the run-up to the French Revolution. Our primary estimand of interest is the causal effect of the establishment of a horse-post relay in a parish on subsequent rebellious activity in that parish over time. While rebellions ultimately stem from social and economic changes, the introduction of a relay could have triggered these changes and their associated grievances.

We employ a staggered difference-in-differences design that compares changes in rebellion in parishes that received (or lost) a horse-post relay to those that would later receive (or lose) one. This strategy accounts for fixed parish-level characteristics that might influence both the likelihood of receiving a relay and the propensity for rebellion, such as a prior history of political activism, ease of collective action, the structure of civil society, or the presence of natural resources. It relies on the identifying assumption that, absent the introduction of a relay, parishes that received a new

relay and those that did not would have followed parallel trends in rebellion. While this assumption is fundamentally untestable, we assess its plausibility through event-study regressions below.

Our treatment is staggered, binary, and non-absorbing, as parishes could both enter and exit treatment over time. Within our sample, 33,602 parishes (95.2%) were never treated—they never hosted a horse-post relay between 1714 and 1789. Another 586 (1.7%) were always treated—they maintained a relay throughout the period. The remaining 1,099 (3.1%) were “ever treated” parishes that experienced at least one change in treatment status over time. Of these, 203 (18.5%) began with a relay in 1714 but lost it at some point, while 896 (81.5%) entered treatment at least once. Among the latter, 387 (43.1%) exited treatment at least once.42

To account for the specific features of this empirical design, we follow de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille (2024), which provide consistent and unbiased estimators for staggered difference-in-differences models in which treatment effects may be heterogeneous as well as dynamic over time.43 Specifically, de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille’s (2024) approach estimates period-specific average treatment effects $\delta_{\ell}$ of having been treated rather than untreated for $\ell$ periods by comparing switchers to not-yet switchers with the same period-one treatment.44 This setup also ensures that the coefficients are not “contaminated” by assuming continual exposure when parishes could exit treatment. We implement this approach at the parish-decade level by estimating the following regression equation:

$$rebellions_{pda} = \alpha_p + \lambda_d + \sum_{\substack{\ell=-t \\ t \neq 0}}^{+T} \delta_{\ell} \times 1[\text{horse\_post}_{pd} = 1] \\ \times 1[d = \ell] + \text{prices}_{pd} + \gamma_{da} + \varepsilon_{pda}, \quad (1)$$

where $rebellions_{pda}$ denotes the number of rebellions that occurred in decade $d$ and parish $p$ that is part of administrative division $a$. Index $d$ ranges from 1 to 8, corresponding to decades 1710 to 1780. The indicator variable $horse\_post_{pd}$ equals one if parish $p$ hosted a horse-post relay in decade $d$. $\alpha_p$ denotes parish fixed effects; $\lambda_d$, decade fixed effects; $\text{prices}_{pd}$, average wheat prices in parish $p$ and decade $d$; and $\gamma_{da}$, decade-by-administrative division fixed effects, where we

<footnote n="41">41 Wheat was the most important staple, due to both its dominant role in bread consumption and its widespread cultivation (Ridolfi 2019). Because food is a normal good, local positive income shocks should have resulted in a substantial increase in the local demand for wheat and thus its price, given the inelasticity of the local supply of wheat.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 Figure A10 in the Supplementary Material documents the 52 unique treatment histories among parishes that switched treatment status at least once during our period of analysis.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Unlike other estimators, such as those proposed by Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021), Sun and Abraham (2021), or Borusyak, Jaravel, and Spiess (2024), this approach accommodates staggered binary treatments that are non-absorbing.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 In addition to assuming no anticipation of treatment and parallel trends, this approach requires that past treatments before the starting period do not affect outcomes during the analysis period (de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille 2024, 9–12). We discuss this assumption in the Robustness section below.</footnote>
alternatively consider subdélégations and cantons. This last term enables the coefficients $\delta_e$ to be identified through the comparison of parishes within the same administrative division, thus accounting for administrative division-specific time trends. We cluster standard errors at the parish level.

An important practical consideration is the timing of the assignment of horse-post relays and rebellions. Our baseline approach links rebellions in a given decade to the edition of the *Liste des postes* published at the beginning of that decade. For instance, for the 1720 decade, we use the 1721 edition of the *Liste des postes* together with rebellions that occurred between 1721 and 1730.<fnref n="45" /> A second consideration is the number of leads (*t*) and lags (*T*) to include in the estimation. While de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfœuille's (2024) methodology allows for up to three leads and seven lags in our setting, the preferred number of leads and lags should ensure that the estimation is based on a sufficiently comparable sample of switchers. While we report estimates for the full range, our preferred specification follows de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfoeuille's (2024, 39–40) rule of thumb, which recommends including only those leads and lags for which at least half of ever-treated parishes contribute to the estimation. This corresponds to including two leads and three lags in our setting.

## IDENTIFICATION

A causal interpretation of estimates resulting from Equation 1 requires that the development of the horse-post relay network be exogenous with respect to rebellion dynamics at the parish level. As discussed above, the initial spatial configuration of the network reflected long-standing strategic political and military concerns (Panel a of Figure 2). In contrast, its development over the eighteenth century was primarily driven by the state's efforts to expand and centralize its authority across the interior of the kingdom, resulting in the densification of the network around major regional nodes (Panel b of Figure 2).<fnref n="46" /> However, the opening of new horse-post relays in growing urban centers may have been endogenous to population dynamics—a potential determinant of rebellious activity. To address this concern, our preferred specification exploits local variation through decade-by-administrative division fixed effects ($\gamma_{da}$). Indeed, while the establishment of a relay in an urban center may be endogenous, the precise location of a relay *between* regional nodes was ultimately

constrained by the need to establish rest stops every 10–15 kilometers due to the physiological limits of horses (Minetti 2003).

We illustrate this argument in Figure 6, which maps the postal route between Auxerre and Dijon—two regional centers and subdélégation seats in Burgundy that hosted horse-post relays throughout the eighteenth century. Since the early seventeenth century, this route had run northbound along pre-existing roads and waterways via the subdélégation seat of Montbard and eleven additional relays, spaced 11 kilometers apart on average (Nougaret 1960, 30–2). However, only two of these were located in the most populous parishes of their respective cantons; the remaining nine were located in villages with fewer than five hundred inhabitants. This relay configuration formed a relatively straight route, minimizing the travel distance between the two regional centers. And although the road passed right near the subdélégation seat of Bussy-le-Grand, no relay was ever established there. In 1742, this postal route was rerouted southward through the subdélégation seat of Vitteaux and ten other relays, following road improvements carried out in the early 1730s (Nougaret 1960, 32, 125–6; Tonnaire 2005, 98–9). As before, relays were spaced 11 kilometers apart on average, and only three of these relays were located in the most populous parishes of their respective cantons; the remaining seven were located in villages with fewer than five hundred inhabitants. This new configuration also formed a relatively straight route, minimizing travel distance between the two regional centers.

This example illustrates that while the placement of central nodes of the horse-post relay network was likely endogenous to regional population dynamics, its local configuration *between* these nodes was plausibly exogenous, as it was designed to minimize travel time along pre-existing roads, subject to the constraint that relays be spaced 10–15 kilometer apart. We therefore exploit local variation in the network through decade-by-administrative division fixed effects. Because this assumption is more credible the finer the scale of analysis, our preferred specification relies on within-canton variation —the average canton contained only two towns with more than a thousand inhabitants in 1793, compared to ten per subdélégation.

This strategy restricts the sampling variation available for identification, as it requires that a canton contains at least two parishes with the same initial treatment status, and that one of them changes treatment status over time. This restriction implies four non-mutually exclusive exclusions from the sample: (i) 201 cantons composed of a single parish; (ii) 3,694 cantons where no parish ever switched treatment—either because none ever hosted a horse-post relay or those that did never lost it; (iii) 105 cantons where only one parish switched treatment and no other parish had the same initial treatment status—typically cantons where a single parish began with a relay, then lost it, while no others ever hosted one; and (iv) 14 cantons where all parishes that ever had a relay followed identical treatment paths. Together, these restrictions remove 3,847 cantons (84% of all cantons) when decade-by-canton fixed effects are introduced.

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Given the availability of *Liste des postes* editions, some parish-decade observations are slightly shorter than others. For instance, for the 1710 decade, we use the 1714 edition of the *Liste des postes* together with rebellions that occurred between 1714 and 1720, since the next available edition is from 1721.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ We further show in Table A4 in the Supplementary Material that more populous parishes, those closer to a road, and those serving as administrative centers, were more likely to ever host a horse-post relay. However, these observable characteristics explain no more than 15% of the variation in relay assignment.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. The Horse-Post Road from Auxerre to Dijon</figcaption></figure>

*Note:* This figure displays the postal road from Auxerre to Dijon in Burgundy between 1714 and 1741 (northerly red dashed lines) and between 1751 and 1789 (southerly blue dashed lines). The extent of the map corresponds to the subdélégations (thick boundaries) and cantons (thin boundaries) through which this postal road passed. It also displays the spatial distributions of parishes in the area (marking the most populous ones by canton and subdélégation) and of 1756–90 roads (white lines). Horse-post relay data are based on various editions of the *Liste des postes*, and 1793 census data, on Cristofoli et al. (2021). The shapefile of subdélégations is based on information in Cristofoli et al. (2021), that of cantons, on information in cassini.ehess.fr (Motte and Vouloir 2007; Motte et al. 2003), and that of roads, on Perret, Gribaudi, and Barthelemy (2015).

This leaves 732 cantons (out of 1,342 that ever hosted a relay) for identification.<fnref n="47" />

## MAIN RESULTS

Table 2 reports the main results on the impact of the development of the horse-post relay network on rebellion across eighteenth-century France. Specifically, we report the average total effect of decade-specific event-study estimates $\delta_t$, which represents the sum of

cumulated period-specific treatments (de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfœuille 2024, 24–5). This table further provides the effective number of parishes-decade and parish observations used for identification, the number of parish-decades that switched treatment, as well as the outcome mean and residual standard deviation calculated on the effective sample.<fnref n="48" />

Column 1 reports results from a model without controls estimated using the maximum number of leads and lags allowed by the structure of the data. The establishment of a horse-post relay in a parish was associated with a subsequent increase in rebellion. The average total effect implies an increase in the

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ We illustrate this selection in Figure A9 in the Supplementary Material. Note that while the average parish population in 1793 was 811, those located in cantons used for identification had 769. However, a regression of the log parish population on an indicator variable that equals one if a parish was in such a canton yields a small and insignificant coefficient (estimate: -0.0274; standard error clustered at the canton level: 0.0205), suggesting little selection into the effective sample along this dimension.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ We follow Mummolo and Peterson (2018) and rely on residual standard deviation as a measure of sampling variation for interpreting the magnitude of regression estimates. The raw standard deviation in rebellions in our sample is about twice as large as the residual standard deviation after accounting for parish and decade fixed effects.</footnote>
<caption>TABLE 2. Average Total Effect of New Horse-Post Relays on Rebellions</caption>

Outcome

Number of rebellions

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th><th>5</th><th>6</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Horse-post relay</td><td>0.057***<br>[0.011]</td><td>0.029***<br>[0.010]</td><td>0.029***<br>[0.010]</td><td>0.040***<br>[0.009]</td><td>0.029***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.029***<br>[0.004]</td></tr><tr><td>Wheat prices</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>8 decades × 696 subdélégations FE</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td><td>No</td></tr><tr><td>8 decades × 4,579 cantons FE</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Parish-decades</td><td>282,296</td><td>282,296</td><td>282,296</td><td>183,904</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td></tr><tr><td>Parishes</td><td>35,287</td><td>35,287</td><td>35,287</td><td>22,988</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (overall)</td><td>3,522</td><td>2,561</td><td>2,561</td><td>2,352</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (at least once)</td><td>1,099</td><td>1,099</td><td>1,099</td><td>1,018</td><td>849</td><td>849</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome mean</td><td>0.021</td><td>0.021</td><td>0.021</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.017</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome residual s.d.</td><td>0.225</td><td>0.225</td><td>0.225</td><td>0.148</td><td>0.122</td><td>0.122</td></tr><tr><td>Periods (-t; +T)</td><td>(-3;+7)</td><td>(-2;+3)</td><td>(-2;+3)</td><td>(-2;+3)</td><td>(-2;+3)</td><td>(-2;+3)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: This table reports the average total effect of non-normalized event-study effects $δ_t$ estimated through Equation 1. All regressions include parish and decade fixed effects. *Parish-decades* and *Parishes* denote the number of observations effectively used in the estimation. *Switchers (overall)* denotes the number of parish-decade observations that switched treatment over the period, while *Switchers (at least once)* denotes the number of parishes that switched at least once. *Outcome residual s.d.* denotes the outcome standard deviation once decade, parish fixed effects, and other controls are accounted for. Summary statistics are calculated relative to the effective sample used in the estimation. *Periods (-t; +T)* denotes the number of event-study effects and placebos estimated. Estimates are calculated using de Chaisemartin et al.'s (2023) *did_multiplegt_dyn Stata* command. Standard errors are clustered at the parish level and reported in brackets. ***$p \le 0.01$. **$p \le 0.05$. *$p \le 0.10$.

number of rebellions by 0.057. This represents a little more than twice the average incidence of rebellion and one-quarter of its residual standard deviation. Column 2 restricts the number of periods used in the estimation to two leads and three lags. The coefficient decreases to 0.029 but remains significant at the 1% level and of sizable magnitude, corresponding to the average incidence of rebellion and one-tenth of its residual standard deviation. Column 3 introduces wheat prices as a time-varying control to assess whether local income shocks following the establishment of a relay might account for the results. The estimate remains unchanged, suggesting that the introduction of a relay was unrelated to changing local economic conditions that could have triggered rebellion. This finding aligns with evidence from Tonnaire (2005, 44–62), who concludes on the basis of *taille* and *capitation* information that parishes along the postal road between Auxerre and Dijon that received a relay in the 1740s did not become wealthier in subsequent decades. If anything, her evidence points toward distributional effects, consistent with the mechanisms we propose below. Columns 4 and 5 introduce decade-by-administrative division fixed effects to compare parishes over time within the same subdélégation or canton.<fnref n="49" />

Results are consistent with the baseline at 0.029, suggesting limited heterogeneity in treatment effects across administrative divisions. Finally, column 6 further controls for wheat prices. The resulting coefficient of 0.029 is again essentially identical to the baseline in column 2. However, its relative magnitude is about twice as large due to the reduced sampling variation after accounting for the additional controls used in this specification.

Figure 7 presents an event-study plot that encapsulates the estimates from columns 1 and 2. This figure serves three purposes: first, to assess the plausibility of the parallel-trends assumptions; second, to examine the temporal dynamics of the treatment effect; and third, to display event-study coefficients without restricting the number of leads and lags. Placebo lead estimates show no evidence of differential pre-trends between treated and untreated parishes, supporting the credibility of the parallel-trends assumption. In contrast, post-treatment estimates reveal substantial dynamic treatment effects: rebellions increase in the second decade after a horse-post relay is established and continue to grow thereafter. Additional analyses using sliding decadal intervals in rebellions indicate that the treatment effect begins to materialize generally within the first decade and grows thereafter.<fnref n="50" /> Finally, the figure indicates that the third

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ The effective sample reduces to 22,988 parishes when including decade-by-subdélégation fixed effects, as only 370 of the 696 subdélégations contain at least two parishes with the same initial treatment status, with one switching treatment over the period. It further reduces to 6,834 parishes when we include decade-by-canton fixed effects, as only 732 of the 4,579 cantons meet this criterion. To ensure</footnote>

<footnote>that this sample selection does not drive the results, we re-estimated the specification of column 3 without interacted fixed effects on these restricted samples, finding broadly similar results.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ See Table A6 in the Supplementary Material. Our results are also robust to using alternative timing specifications such as excluding</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 7. Event-Study Effects of New Horse-Post Relays on Rebellions</figcaption></figure>

Note: The top half of this figure reports event-study effects $\delta_t$ estimated through Equation 1 along with 95% confidence intervals. The specifications correspond to Columns 1 and 2 in Table 3. Dark blue estimates correspond to restricting the estimation to two leads and three lags, while light blue estimates use the full three leads and seven lags in the estimation. The bottom half of this figure reports the number of switchers used for the identification of each event-study effect. The red dashed line denotes half of first-period switchers. The full set of results is available in Table A5 in the Supplementary Material.

placebo lead and the fifth, sixth, seventh period estimates rely on a relatively small number of switchers, supporting our choice to emphasize estimates using two leads and three lags. An event-study plot relative to the specification in column 6 of Table 2 leads to similar conclusions.<fnref n="51" />

## Robustness

Table 3 assesses the robustness of our main results. These tests build on the full specification reported in column 6 of Table 2—reported here in column 1—which includes controls for wheat prices and decade-by-canton fixed effects.

### Periodization

To assess the credibility of the “initial conditions” assumption (de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille 2024, 9–12), column 2 excludes the 1710 decade from the sample. The resulting estimate of 0.028 remains close to the baseline and is significant at the 1% level, suggesting that this assumption is reasonable.<fnref n="52" />

### Sample Composition

Next, we hold constant the sample of switchers used for identification to assess whether changes in the effective sample drive our results. The estimate in Column 3 of 0.035 suggests that they do not. Column 4 further restricts the sample to parishes that switch *into* treatment—that is, parishes that receive a new horse-post relay—as opposed to using both switchers in and switchers out—that is, parishes that also lose a relay. The estimate declines slightly to 0.022 but remains significant at the 1% level and consistent with the baseline.

### Heterogeneity

In column 5, we estimate Equation 1 with 1793 population weights to gauge the heterogeneity of treatment effects across parish sizes. We find an effect of 0.075, suggesting that larger parishes may respond more strongly to the introduction of a new relay. However, given the higher weighted outcome mean and residual standard deviation, the magnitude remains comparable to the baseline. Similarly, in column 6, we further include decade-by-rural status fixed effects, where rural status is defined as an indicator variable that equals one if the parish had fewer than two thousand inhabitants in 1793—the threshold used to classify rural communes in nineteenth-century censuses (Le Mée 1972). We find an estimate of 0.019, again comparable to the baseline. We further investigate the nature of heterogeneous treatment effects along various characteristics in Appendix B of the Supplementary Material, showing that baseline differences in population, administrative status, gabelle taxation regime, historical opposition to

<footnote>rebellions that occurred during the year the *Liste des postes* was published, with an estimate of 0.027 (standard error: 0.004), or assigning rebellions to the following decade, with an estimate of 0.051 (standard error: 0.005).</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ See Figure A11 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² We further report estimates when running Equation 1 on shorter panels in Table A7 in the Supplementary Material. The estimates remain stable, suggesting limited decade-specific heterogeneity.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 3. Robustness</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Outcome</th><th colspan="10">Number of rebellions</th><th rowspan="2">1[rebellion]<br>10</th></tr><tr><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th><th>5</th><th>6</th><th>7</th><th>8</th><th>9</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Horse-post relay</td><td>0.029***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.028***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.035***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.022***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.075***<br>[0.008]</td><td>0.019***<br>[0.003]</td><td>0.017***<br>[0.003]</td><td>0.037***<br>[0.005]</td><td>-0.005<br>[0.006]</td><td>0.023***<br>[0.003]</td></tr><tr><td>Specification</td><td>Baseline</td><td>No<br>1710</td><td>Same<br>switchers</td><td>Switchers<br>in</td><td>Pop.<br>weights</td><td>Rural-<br>decade FE</td><td>Moderate/<br>strong</td><td>New<br>relays</td><td>Reconf.<br>relays</td><td>Indicator</td></tr><tr><td>Parish-decades</td><td>54,672</td><td>45,934</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>43,088</td><td>54,672</td><td>42,984</td><td>16,544</td><td>54,672</td></tr><tr><td>Parishes</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,562</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>5,386</td><td>6,834</td><td>5,373</td><td>2,068</td><td>6,834</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (overall)</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,826</td><td>1,404</td><td>1,840</td><td>1,896</td><td>1,565</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,424</td><td>573</td><td>1,929</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (at least once)</td><td>849</td><td>817</td><td>468</td><td>809</td><td>835</td><td>689</td><td>849</td><td>643</td><td>234</td><td>849</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome mean</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.018</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.073</td><td>0.014</td><td>0.011</td><td>0.017</td><td>0.019</td><td>0.014</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome residual s.d.</td><td>0.122</td><td>0.130</td><td>0.122</td><td>0.122</td><td>0.235</td><td>0.108</td><td>0.099</td><td>0.122</td><td>0.153</td><td>0.098</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: This table reports the average total effect of non-normalized event-study effects $\delta_r$ estimated through Equation 1. All regressions include parish and decade fixed effects, as well as wheat prices and decade-by-canton fixed effects. The estimation is restricted to two leads and three lags. Column 2 removes parish-decades of the 1710s. Column 6 includes an additional set of decade-by-rural status fixed effects. Column 8 restricts horse-post relays to those that are at least 15 kilometers from a retired relay in the same decade, and column 9, to those that are within 15 kilometers, where Reconf. denotes reconfigured relays. The outcome is the number of rebellions in columns 1–9, and an indicator variable for the occurrence of at least one rebellion in column 10. Parish-decades and Parishes denote the number of observations effectively used in the estimation. Switchers (overall) denotes the number of parish-decade observations that switched treatment over the period, while Switchers (at least once) denotes the number of parishes that switched at least once. Outcome residual s.d. denotes the outcome standard deviation once decade, parish, and canton fixed effects, as well as wheat prices are accounted for. Estimates are calculated using de Chaisemartin et al.'s (2023) did_multiplegt Dyn Stata command. Standard errors are clustered at the parish level and reported in brackets. ***$p \le 0.01$. **$p \le 0.05$. *$p \le 0.10$.
the central state, and mode of ruling do not account for
our results. We also show that the treatment effect is
generally homogeneous across regions and that the
results are also robust to excluding one region at a
time.<fnref n="53" />

Rebellion Intensity

In column 7, we show that the effect we identify is not
driven by small rebellions, as results are similar when
focusing on moderate to strong rebellions.<fnref n="54" />

Type of Horse-Post Relays

Columns 8 and 9 explore the nonlinear expansion
dynamics of the horse-post relay network by contrast-
ing entirely new relays with those arising from local
reconfigurations.<fnref n="55" /> We find that new relays are driving
the results, while those stemming from local reconfi-
gurations have no discernible impact on rebellion—
likely because they did not meaningfully alter the local
presence of the state.

Rebellions Indicator

Column 10 confirms that the results are robust when
the outcome is instead specified as an indicator variable
that equals one if there was at least one rebellion in a
parish-decade.

Archival Reporting Biases

In addition to the robustness tests reported in Table 3,
we assess whether our results could be driven by archival
gaps or recording biases Nicolas’s (2002) rebellion data.
For instance, information for some départements is
mostly drawn from national archives, which are gener-
ally less comprehensive than departmental archives.
This could introduce biases in the representativeness
of rebellious events across départements. Reassuringly,
our empirical strategy mitigates this potential source of
bias by leveraging variation in rebellious activity within
the reach of departmental archives through the use of
decade-by-canton fixed effects.

But other forms of selection bias could affect our
results. One concern is that the expansion of the horse-
post relay network may have enhanced the state's ability
to record rebellions. However, monitoring rebellions
was not part of the horse post's surveillance function,
which was primarily to control individuals passing
through relays (Marchand 2006, 210-4). Moreover, spa-
tial patterns presented below show no evidence of over-
recording in areas surrounding relays beyond host par-
ishes themselves. Furthermore, archives of the horse
post are not among the sources of the Jean Nicolas
survey, as a major flood in 1910 and destruction during
the Second World War damaged much of the archives of
Ancien Régime postal institutions (Krakovitch et al.
2000, 2). Surviving records were deposited in the
National Archives in 1998, and were therefore largely
inaccessible at the time the survey was conducted.<fnref n="56" />
Instead, the main actors monitoring and punishing rebel-
lious activity were the *maréchaussée* and the judiciary,
much as the police and the courts today. The main
sources of information on rebellion thus come from
the archives of these institutions, which are well pre-
served and were extensively surveyed by Jean Nicolas
and his collaborators (Gay 2025, 27-8).

Alternatively, the introduction of a horse-post relay
may have increased the recording of rebellions by other
local actors. To assess this possibility, we reproduce our
analysis using only rebellions recorded by state-level
authorities and preserved in national archives, finding
that the results remain robust.<fnref n="57" /> We further sequen-
tially exclude rebellions recorded by the most frequent
reporting institutions: the central government, the cen-
tral financial administration, the *maréchaussée*, local
courts and justices, and provincial administrations.
Results are again consistent with the baseline, suggest-
ing little selection bias arising from Nicolas’s (2002)
archival sources.

Additional Robustness Tests

In addition to the tests discussed above, we conduct
further analyses to address the high incidence of zeroes
in the outcome variable and to probe robustness to
clustering standard errors at higher levels of aggrega-
tion. We also examine the potential for post-treatment
bias arising from the use of canton fixed effects, given
that canton boundaries were established after the Rev-
olution (Homola, Pereira, and Tavits 2024). To that
end, we re-estimate our models using fixed effects

<footnote n="53">⁵³ See Tables A8 and A9 in the Supplementary Material, where we divide the territory into eight regions (see Figure A12 in the Supplementary Material). Only one region—Normandy—exhibits a negative coefficient, driven by four outlier subdélégations (out of 58 in Normandy). Removing these subdélégations yields an estimate of 0.017 (standard error: 0.005) for Normandy (see Table A10 in the Supplementary Material). Excluding the city of Paris from the sample—an outlier in terms of rebellious activity—yields an estimate of 0.029 (standard error: 0.004).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Moderate rebellions are defined as involving 10–50 participants, and strong rebellions, more than 50. We report the average total treatment effects by rebellion intensity in Table A11 in the Supplementary Material. We also provide additional information on the measurement and reliability of rebellion intensity in the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ A typical example of a local reconfiguration is shown in Panel a of Figure A7 in the Supplementary Material. We define entirely new relays as those located at least 15 kilometers away from a retired relay in the same decade.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Postal administrations and their agents are also absent from Nicolas's (2002) typology. This omission reflects the thematic focus of the typology, which emphasized actors and institutions highlighted by the historiography when Jean Nicolas developed it in the early 1980s (Nicolas 1985, 15). In particular, research at that time had primarily focused on resistance to the fiscal, judicial, and military actions of the central state, the nobility, the Church, and municipal authorities, but not to the postal administrations (see, e.g., Bercé 1980; Mandrou 1969).</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ We report the distribution of rebellions in our sample across the type of sources used by Nicolas’s (2002) survey in Table A12 in the Supplementary Material. The results of this robustness test are reported in Table A13 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 4. Mechanisms</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Outcome</th><th colspan="6">Number of rebellions</th></tr><tr><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th><th>5</th><th>6</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Horse-post relay</td><td>0.018***<br/>[0.002]</td><td>-0.001<br/>[0.001]</td><td>0.007***<br/>[0.002]</td><td>0.006***<br/>[0.002]</td><td>0.007***<br/>[0.001]</td><td>0.005***<br/>[0.002]</td></tr><tr><td>Authorities<br/>Protagonists</td><td>State</td><td>Non-state</td><td>Taxation</td><td>Military</td><td>Judiciary</td><td>Notables</td></tr><tr><td>Parish-decades</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td><td>54,672</td></tr><tr><td>Parishes</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td><td>6,834</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (overall)</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td><td>1,929</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (at least once)</td><td>849</td><td>849</td><td>849</td><td>849</td><td>849</td><td>849</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome mean</td><td>0.009</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.006</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.002</td><td>0.003</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome residual s.d.</td><td>0.089</td><td>0.040</td><td>0.073</td><td>0.043</td><td>0.039</td><td>0.046</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: This table reports the average total effect of non-normalized event-study effects $\delta_e$ estimated through Equation 1. All regressions include parish and decade fixed effects, as well as wheat prices and decade-by-canton fixed effects. The estimation is restricted to two leads and three lags. The outcomes are rebellions against state authorities in Column 1, non-state public authorities (seigneurial, nobility, municipal, and Church) in Column 2, taxation authorities in Column 3, military authorities in Column 4, and judiciary authorities in Column 5. Column 6 includes rebellions involving local notables as protagonists. *Parish-decades* and *Parishes* denote the number of observations effectively used in the estimation. *Switchers (overall)* denotes the number of parish-decade observations that switched treatment over the period, while *Switchers (at least once)* denotes the number of parishes that switched at least once. *Outcome residual s. d.* denotes the outcome standard deviation once decade, parish fixed effects, and other controls are accounted for. Estimates are calculated using de Chaisemartin et al.'s (2023) *did_multiplegt Dyn Stata* command. Standard errors are clustered at the parish level and reported in brackets. \*\*\*p ≤ 0.01. \*\*p ≤ 0.05. \*p ≤ 0.10.

based on arbitrary square grids of varying sizes. In all cases, the results remain robust. Further details and results are provided in Appendix C of the Supplementary Material.

## MECHANISMS

In this section, we provide evidence that suggests that the mechanisms linking the introduction of new horse-post relays to increased rebellion are rooted in the material consequences of the network's expansion. By facilitating state centralization and penetration into local society, the horse post enabled greater tax enforcement and conscription, stricter administration of laws and regulations, and the disruption of private interests.

Table 4 probes these mechanisms in several ways. Column 1 restricts the dependent variable to rebellions targeting state authorities, including tax, military, and judicial authorities.<fnref n="58" /> These agents represented some of the most consequential manifestations of central state power, charged with transmitting royal communications, maintaining order, and enforcing rules and directives handed down from the monarchy—reaching deep into local society. Our rebellion data capture a wide range of actions against these agents, including

resistance against court rulings, conscription efforts, tax collection, and interventions by the military and maréchaussée. Results reveal a robust link between the establishment of new horse-post relays and rebellions against these authorities. These account for over three-fifths of the total effect of horse-post relays on rebellions. In contrast, column 2 indicates no comparable relationship between the expansion of the horse post and rebellions directed against non-state authorities—the nobility, the Church, as well as seigneurial and municipal authorities.

Columns 3–5 unpack the relationship between the expansion of the horse-post relay network and rebellions targeting state authorities. Column 3 focuses on rebellions specifically directed against taxation. As the reach of the central state expanded, obligations to local nobles diminished, but were replaced by new and increasingly burdensome taxes owed to the state, which became a major source of popular anger (Touzery 2024). Indeed, drawing on an analysis of the Revolution-era *Cahiers de doléances*, Shapiro and Markoff (1998) find evidence that peasants harbored grievances over taxation that were shaped by concerns over utility and fairness. Although the establishment of new horse-post relays did not directly alter local tax regimes, the improved speed and reliability of communication likely facilitated stricter tax enforcement, thereby crystallizing ire against state tax obligations. Column 3 confirms that this mechanism translated into greater local rebellion, as the estimate suggests that rebellions against taxation account for about one-fourth of the total effect of the introduction of new horse-post relays on rebellions.

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ See Table A2 in the Supplementary Material for a breakdown of rebellion types by target—state versus non-state authorities—along with the number of cases in each category.</footnote>
Column 4 examines rebellions targeting the military, including its conscription activities. This category further encompasses rank-and-file mutinies as well as uprisings targeting the maréchaussée, the state-sponsored security force policing the countryside. The results show a positive and statistically significant effect. Consistent with this result, we find that rebellions are more responsive to the introduction of horse-post relays in areas that were larger contributors of troops over the eighteenth century.<fnref n="59" /> The coefficient in column 4 accounts for about one-fifth of the total effect of the introduction of new horse-post relays on rebellions.

In column 5, we turn to rebellions targeting the judiciary, including uprisings triggered by judicial actions, such as court-ordered imprisonments and the repossession of property. Indeed, the stricter enforcement of order and rules set by the monarchy—likely facilitated by greater information flow through the horse-post relay network—may have disrupted local social balance and generated grievances. Once again, we find a positive and statistically significant link between new horse-post relays and this subset of rebellions. The coefficient in column 5 comprises another one-fourth of the total effect of the introduction of new horse-post relays on rebellions.

Lastly, column 6 adopts a different approach by focusing on the protagonists of rebellions rather than their targets. Specifically, it examines whether rebellions led by notables increased following the introduction of new horse-post relays. As discussed above, the private interests of notables—such as the provisioning of goods along postal roads—may have been disrupted as the state asserted its presence by monopolizing roads through the new horse-post relays. Consistent with this mechanism, we find a positive link between new relays and rebellions led by notables, with this subset accounting for about one-fifth of the total effect of the introduction of new horse-post relays on rebellion.<fnref n="60" /> This finding is also in line with De Juan (2016) and Garfias and Sellars (2022), who argue that local elites may resist infrastructure and associated state expansion when such efforts threaten their authority and local dominance.

## The Role of Pre-Existing State and Administrative Fragmentation

The causal relationship we have identified between horse-post relays and rebellions thus far was part of a broader process of state-building—one in which persistent state fragmentation and enduring subnational

divisions continued to undergird local unrest. For instance, boundaries between different tax regimes, particularly those associated with the gabelles, became hotspots for tax evasion and smuggling that disproportionately resisted the state's centralization efforts (Davoine, Enguehard, and Kolesnikov 2025). More broadly, responses to the establishment of horse-post relays may have varied with the historical relationship to the central state, as territories incorporated earlier into the kingdom (*pays d'Élection*) were under direct monarchic authority—especially in fiscal matters—whereas peripheral territories incorporated later (*pays d'États* and *pays d'Imposition*) retained some degree of autonomous ruling. Indeed, these latter regions had historically offered stronger opposition to the central state and were more likely to oppose efforts at state centralization and its penetration into local society (Degrave 2023).

We provide evidence for the conditional role of pre-existing state and administrative fragmentation along these dimensions. To test for the role of fiscal fragmentation, we split the sample between parishes located near gabelles frontiers—defined as those in cantons directly adjacent to these fiscal boundaries—and those farther away. We then estimate the treatment effect of the introduction of horse-post relays on rebellions specifically targeting taxation authorities.<fnref n="61" /> The results, reported in Table 5, indicate a markedly stronger response to state expansion in fiscally fragmented areas. Indeed, the estimate in column 1 represents a little more than the average incidence of rebellions against taxation, while the column 2 estimate represents only one fifth. Next, to test for the role of the mode of ruling more broadly, we split the sample between parishes in *pays d'États* and *pays d'Imposition* relative to the more historically centralized *pays d'Élection*.<fnref n="62" /> We then estimate the treatment effect of the introduction of horse-post relays on all rebellions. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a stronger response to state expansion in areas that were historically more remote from the state's direct authority, with the estimate in column 3 representing about three times the average incidence of rebellions relative to a little less than this average in column 4.<fnref n="63" />

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ See Table A14 in the Supplementary Material, where we divide the kingdom of France into low and high military-recruitment areas based on data from Corvisier (1964, 410–48) for 1716 and Komlos (2003) for 1716–84. See the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material for more details.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Unfortunately, Nicolas’s (2002) survey does not document whether other non-state elites—such as members of the clergy or the nobility—participated in rebellions.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ See Figures A14 and A15 in the Supplementary Material. Rebellions targeting taxation account for 66% of all rebellions in areas near gabelles frontiers (677 out of 1,025), compared to just 34% in areas farther away (1,671 out of 4,975).</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² See Figure A12 in the Supplementary Material and Appendix B of the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Another dimension of administrative fragmentation stemmed from the legal system, which varied substantially across customary regions. At the border of these jurisdictions, litigants frequently resisted the state's attempts to impose uniform legal structures, oftentimes pitting jurisdictions against each other in the hope of securing more favorable legal outcomes (Gay, Gobbi and Goñi 2024a; 2024b). When splitting the sample between parishes located near customary frontiers—defined as those in cantons directly adjacent to these judicial boundaries—and those farther away (see Figure A16 in the Supplementary Material), we find a stronger response to state expansion in judicially fragmented areas.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 5. Heterogeneity Across State and Administrative Fragmentation</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="3">Outcome</th><th colspan="4">Number of rebellions</th></tr><tr><th colspan="2">Gabelles</th><th colspan="2">Pays</th></tr><tr><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Horse-post relay</td><td>0.036***<br>[0.010]</td><td>0.003*<br>[0.002]</td><td>0.044***<br>[0.004]</td><td>0.017***<br>[0.006]</td></tr><tr><td>Authorities<br>Group</td><td>Taxation<br>Close to<br>gabelles front.</td><td>Taxation<br>Far from<br>gabelles front.</td><td>All<br><i>États or<br>Imposition</i></td><td>All<br><i>Élections</i></td></tr><tr><td>Parish-decades</td><td>7,768</td><td>46,904</td><td>22,280</td><td>31,864</td></tr><tr><td>Parishes</td><td>971</td><td>5,863</td><td>2,785</td><td>3,983</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (overall)</td><td>255</td><td>1,674</td><td>834</td><td>1,089</td></tr><tr><td>Switchers (at least once)</td><td>119</td><td>730</td><td>340</td><td>507</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome mean</td><td>0.021</td><td>0.016</td><td>0.014</td><td>0.019</td></tr><tr><td>Outcome residual s.d.</td><td>0.139</td><td>0.119</td><td>0.110</td><td>0.130</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: This table reports the average total effect of non-normalized event-study effects $\delta_p$ estimated through Equation 1. All regressions include parish and decade fixed effects, as well as wheat prices and decade-by-canton fixed effects. The estimation is restricted to two leads and three lags. Columns 1 and 2 distinguish between parishes that are in cantons adjacent to gabelles frontiers versus not, and focus on rebellions targeting taxation authorities, and Columns 3 and 4 distinguish between parishes that are in pays d'États or pays d'Imposition versus pays d'Élection, and focus on all rebellions. Parish-decades and Parishes denote the number of observations effectively used in the estimation. Switchers (overall) denotes the number of parish-decade observations that switched treatment over the period, while Switchers (at least once) denotes the number of parishes that switched at least once. Outcome residual s.d. denotes the outcome standard deviation once decade, parish, and canton fixed effects, as well as wheat prices are accounted for. Estimates are calculated using de Chaisemartin et al.'s (2023) did_multipletDyn Stata command. Standard errors are clustered at the parish level and reported in brackets. \*\*\* $p \le 0.01$. \*\* $p \le 0.05$. \* $p \le 0.10$.

## Gathering Effects

Next we investigate whether the establishment of new horse-post relays impacted rebellious activity in nearby parishes. If new relays brought material changes that extended beyond their host parish—as state agents sought to reach into surrounding areas as well—they could have “gathered” rebellions from nearby, drawing people to express grievances at the locales of this new representation of state authority. The built environment and increased traffic associated with new horse-post relays may have opened new spaces for contention, taking a step in the direction of Tilly’s (1986) theory of evolving repertoires of contention from dispersed, parochial revolts to more clustered and cosmopolitan forms of collective action. Contributing to this shift, new horse-post relays and postillons clearly identified with the markings of increased state visibility and may have represented a disruptive threat to the existing social order. This dynamic constitutes a complementary potential mechanism that extends beyond the parishes where new relays were established.

To test this hypothesis, we estimate three versions of Equation 1, redefining the treatment as an indicator variable that equals one for the presence of a horse-post relay in neighboring parishes within 5 kilometers, 5–10 kilometers, and 10–15 kilometers.<fnref n="64" /> Results in

Figure 8 imply that the number of rebellions decreased by 0.007 in parishes located within 5 kilometers of a new horse-post relay and by 0.005 in those 5–10 kilometers away, with both estimates significant at the 5% level. Rebellions further decreased by 0.002 in parishes located 10–15 kilometers away from a new relay, although this estimate is not statistically significant.

We interpret these results as suggestive evidence that part of the main effect we identify may reflect a local reconfiguration of rebellious activity from surrounding parishes toward those hosting new horse-post relays. Given the small size of parishes and their close proximity, it would have been relatively easy for people to coordinate resistance locally and direct it toward nearby symbols of state authority. Importantly, however, even after accounting for this “gathering effect” of rebellion, the overall net effect of a new relay on rebellion remains positive and twice as large as the cumulated spillover effects.

## ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

We now explore five main alternative explanations that could account for the observed link between the expansion of the horse-post relay network and rebellion, independent of our primary hypothesized mechanisms: (i) disruption of local social hierarchies; (ii) the role of wartime dynamics and the proximity to war zones; increased capacity of the populace for

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Recall that we are comparing parishes over time within cantons, and the average radius of a canton was about 6 kilometers.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 8. Average Total Effect of New Horse-Post Relays on Rebellions across Distance to Nearest Horse-Post Relay</figcaption></figure>

Note: This figure reports the average total effect of a new horse-post relay on rebellion when various treatment variables are input into Equation 1, along with 95% confidence intervals: a horse-post in a given parish and decade, up to 5 kilometers away from a new horse-post (excluding parishes with a relay), 5–10 kilometers away, and 10–15 kilometers away. All regressions include parish and decade fixed effects as well as wheat prices, decade-by-canton fixed effects, and distance to the nearest horse-post relay. Standard errors are clustered at the parish level. The full set of results is available in Table A15 in the Supplementary Material. \*\*\*p ≤ 0.01. \*\*p ≤ 0.05. \*p ≤ 0.10.

collective action thanks to the concurrent expansion of alternative information channels, such as (iii) the letter-post system and (iv) the underlying road infrastructure; and (v) shifts in the presence of the maréchaussée, the public security force policing the countryside.

## Disruption of Local Social Hierarchies

Research in other contexts suggests that the erosion of traditional social hierarchies and networks that once structured local society can lead to disorder and to reprisals against declining authorities. For instance, Scott (1976) and Lecce, Ogliari, and Orlando (2022) show that when the disruption of traditional social relations weakens the monopolistic grip of local elites and social networks, it can leave populations vulnerable to severe risks and enable everyday grievances to metastasize rather than be absorbed or resolved locally. These grievances may be directed at both declining elites and the state. Hence, if the expansion of the state near horse-post relays undermined traditional authorities—such as the Church, the nobility, and seigneurial authorities—without eliminating the rents and tithes they extracted, resulting discontent against these declining figures could generate the observed link between new horse-post relays and rebellion. Grievances may also have been targeted at the state itself, especially if it failed to replace the functions previously carried out by these traditional institutions with equivalent state-provided services.

Several pieces of evidence cast doubt on this competing explanation. The establishment of new horse-post relays typically involved forging alliances with

select local elites rather than their weakening, suggesting little disruption to traditional hierarchies (Jamaux-Gohier 2001; Marchand 2006). Accordingly, we find little evidence that new horse-post relays triggered rebellions against traditional non-state authorities. Unpacking the null coefficient in column 2 of Table 4, we find no significant impact on rebellions against the Church or municipal authorities, and if anything, a slightly negative effect on rebellions against seigneurial authorities and nobles. We also find no effect on the broader set of local civilian elites, such as notables and labor authorities.<fnref n="65" />

## War Zones and Wartime

War considerations may also have impinged on the horse-post relay network and rebellion by fueling both the network's expansion and grievances against the military in border areas prone to or exposed to war. While most changes to the network during the eighteenth century occurred in the interior of the country, substantial extensions took place in the 1740s and 1750s along the northeastern border with the Holy Roman Empire and in the 1760s along the Swiss border. However, the treatment effect is broadly homogeneous across regions and not driven by a single one. Moreover, these border areas were not necessarily those

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Specifically, the estimate for rebellions against the Church is 0.0002 (standard error: 0.0009); against municipal authorities, 0.0002 (standard error: 0.0002); against seigneurial authorities and nobles, -0.0016 (standard error: 0.0009); against notables, -0.0001 (standard error: 0.0002); and against labor authorities, 0.0009 (standard error: 0.0007).</footnote>
with the highest levels of conscription, nor were rebellions against the military concentrated there.<fnref n="66" /> Furthermore, the supply routes and stations for troops were organized through the *routes d'étape* system, which was distinct from the horse post and followed a different spatial logic (Kroener 1980).<fnref n="67" /> Nonetheless, to ensure that the military geography does not confound our results, we exclude subdélégations that experienced battles or were along the borders of the kingdom.<fnref n="68" /> The results remain in line with our baseline estimates. We also assess the role of wartime involvement directly by excluding all rebellions that occurred during periods of war, where we define wartime as any year in which France was engaged in a military conflict in Europe.<fnref n="69" /> The results are again similar.

## Information and Collective Action Through the Letter-Post System

Another potential alternative explanation is the simultaneous development of the letter-post system, which may have increased the likelihood of rebellion by lowering barriers to collective action through the wider dissemination of information.<fnref n="70" /> Indeed, such dynamics linking improved communication infrastructure to collective mobilization have been observed with the expansion of railways and telegraphs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States (García-Jimeno, Iglesias, and Yildirim 2022) and Europe (Melander 2020; Pengl et al. 2025). In eighteenth-century France, the letter post operated as a private service for collecting, forwarding, and delivering letters via an infrastructure of post offices (Marchand 2006, 95–180). If the establishment of letter-post offices coincided with that of horse-post relays—and if those offices facilitated collective action—this correlation could confound our results.

To address this potential concern, we collected information on the locations of letter-post offices for the same years as our data on the horse-post relay network.<fnref n="71" /> Critically, the spatial configuration of

letter-post offices followed a different logic from that of horse-post relays, as their establishment followed economic rather than strategic and logistical considerations (Cauvin, Lepetit, and Reymond 1987; Verdier and Chalonge 2018). Letter-post offices were as numerous as horse-post relays and expanded at a comparable pace throughout the eighteenth century, so that they covered most of the territory by the early eighteenth century.<fnref n="72" /> However, unlike the horse post, the letter post was not designed as a network requiring offices at regular intervals. Instead, letter-post offices were generally located in populous towns, in sharp contrast with horse-post relays.<fnref n="73" /> Their buildings were also much smaller, as they handled only letter distribution and did not serve as rest stops or provide fresh horses. Mail delivery in the letter-post system relied primarily on private couriers (*entrepreneurs de dépêches*), who rode their own horses, and on mail coaches (*malles-poste*), which consisted of two-wheeled carts operated by employees of the letter-post administration.<fnref n="74" />

To empirically assess whether the development of letter-post offices confounds our results, we apply de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfœuille's (2023) estimator, which accommodates staggered designs with binary, non-absorbing *multiple* treatments that may exhibit heterogeneous and dynamic effects. Specifically, we augment Equation 1 by including a set of event-study coefficients on an indicator variable that equals one if a letter-post office was present in a given parish and decade. The results closely mirror our baseline estimates: the average total effect of the horse post on rebellion, accounting for the concurrent development of the letter post, is 0.027 (standard error: 0.011), suggesting that this alternative mechanism does not drive our findings.<fnref n="75" />

## Transit Infrastructure and the Road Network

Another potential confounder is the underlying road network on which the horse-post relay system depended, although this infrastructure was managed separately by the Bridges and Roads administration

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ See Figures E6 and A13 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ See, for example, the 1787 map of the routes d'étape at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7100446h.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ See Figure A13 in the Supplementary Material. Battle locations are drawn from Miller and Bakar's (2023) Historical Conflict Event Dataset (HCED). See the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material for more details. The results of this analysis are reported in Table A16 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ This includes the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–47), the Seven Years’ War (1756–62), and the Anglo-French phase of the American Revolutionary War (1778–83). The results of this analysis are reported in Table A17 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Although the horse-post relay network was initially reserved for official state communication, by the mid-eighteenth century, it had opened to private correspondence and passenger transport through stagecoaches. However, its private use remained prohibitively expensive compared to the letter post and private-messenger services, effectively limiting its use to the wealthy (Arbellot 1980, 115; Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 35–80).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ We draw on the *Ordre général des courriers* published in the annual editions of the *Almanach royal*, the contents of which we cross-validated with the *Cartes des bureaux de postes* of 1741 and with the 1754 and 1782 editions of the *Dictionnaires des postes*. See the</footnote>

<footnote>Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material for more details.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² See Figures A17 and A18 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ See Figure A19 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Although the mail could also be transported by agents of the letter-post administration (*courriers*) using horses from the horse-post relay network (but escorted by postillons), their numbers remained modest throughout the eighteenth century: there were only six *courriers* in 1694; 18 in 1741; 29 in 1771; 79 in 1785; and 173 in 1792 (Marchand 2006, 162–4). By contrast, the number of postillons was far larger—four thousand in 1763 and as many as seven thousand in 1790 (Marchand 2006, 259).</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ See Panel a of Figure A20 in the Supplementary Material. We also report event-study estimates of the treatment effect of letter-post offices on rebellion in Panel b of Figure A20 in the Supplementary Material. We find a slightly positive effect, but pre-trends are such that one may not have a causal interpretation of these results: letter-post offices developed in locations that were already experiencing upward trends in rebellion, consistent with the economically-oriented development logic of the letter post.</footnote>
(Arbellot 1973). If improvements to the road network coincided with the establishment of new horse-post relays, it is possible that the effects we observe were instead driven by changes in the transit infrastructure itself—whether by fostering economic development, disrupting non-state local authorities, or facilitating popular coordination.

In the early eighteenth century, French roads were in a deplorable state (Arbellot 1973, 766). These conditions had been a longstanding concern and lamented since the Colbert administration as a major obstacle to the expansion of internal trade (Blond 2013, 65). However, it was not until the 1730s—by which point the situation had become critical—that the Controller General of Finance Philibert Orry launched an ambitious program of road repair and construction (Massounie 2013).<fnref n="76" /> Spearheaded by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, the program ultimately resulted in the construction of nearly 26 thousand kilometers of road by the 1780s—although only two-thirds of this network remained in passable condition by that time (Arbellot 1973, 772–3).

The order of priority for new road construction, however, was not directly linked to the location of horse-post relays, as roads connecting relays were considered only after those linking Paris to ports, provincial capitals, and the kingdom's borders (Blond 2007, 69–70). While the upkeep of existing roads may have occasionally favored those used by the horse post (Arbellot 1973, 766), it was exceedingly rare for the creation of a horse-post relay to prompt a request for road construction or maintenance from the Bridges and Roads administration, or that such requests would be granted (Demangeon 1995, 66–71; Verdier 2009, 13). Overall, historical accounts suggest that the horse post was not tied to the road network and followed its own logic, and that the actual routes taken by postillons between relays often varied seasonally depending on weather and road conditions (Jamaux-Gohier 2001, 125–45).

A comprehensive empirical test of this alternative mechanism is however not feasible due to the severe limitations of available quantitative information on road construction and maintenance at the local level in the eighteenth century.<fnref n="77" /> Nevertheless, we show in Tables B1 and B2 in the Supplementary Material that there is little heterogeneity in the treatment effect of horse-post relays across parishes located at different distances from a road. This suggests that our results are unlikely to be driven by connectivity to the road network.

## Policing by the Maréchaussée Brigades

A final potential alternative mechanism is the presence of maréchaussée brigades, the state-sponsored security force that policed the countryside. These men-at-arms formed part of the security apparatus of the royal authority and maintained public order along the kingdom's roads (Fressin 2022). Following their consolidation in 1720, brigades consisting of four to five men were stationed in barracks located in the center of towns and urban areas (Fressin and Georges 2022). Their spatial distribution closely resembled that of letter-post offices: they covered the entire territory and were generally located in populous towns.<fnref n="78" /> However, the expansion of the maréchaussée was relatively limited: the number of brigades remained stable at five hundred units during the first half of the eighteenth century, increased to about eight hundred in the 1750s and 1760s, and then plateaued until the Revolution.<fnref n="79" /> While these brigades embodied the symbolic presence of the state, they never mustered more than three thousand men and primarily operated in the vicinity of towns and major roads.<fnref n="80" />

Maréchaussée brigades could potentially account for our findings through two distinct channels. First, if brigades systematically accompanied the establishment of new horse-post relays, the effect we identify might reflect the presence of the maréchaussée rather than that of the horse post itself. Second, if the presence of brigades made rebellions more likely to be recorded by these state actors, our results could be driven by selection bias in the archival sources used to document rebellious activity.

We address these concerns in a number of ways. First, we show that although parishes that received a horse-post relay were more likely to eventually host a maréchaussée brigade, pretreatment trends indicate that they were also more likely to have received a brigade prior to the establishment of the relay.<fnref n="81" /> In other words, while the spatial development of the two institutions was correlated, there is no evidence of a causal link between them. Second, we extend Equation 1 to control for the potential incidence of maréchaussée brigades using de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfœuille's (2023) estimator for multiple treatments. The results closely resemble our baseline

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ This initiative relied on the implementation of the *corvée des chemins*, a system of forced labor requiring able-bodied men living within 16 kilometers of a road to contribute up to one month of labor per year. Though widely unpopular and a source of local resentment (Shapiro and Markoff 1998, 397; Tonnaire 2005, 78–80), only ten rebellions were directed against this labor institution in our data. Indeed, opposition to this system rather took the form of passive resistance—workers simply failed to appear to work or slacked on the job (Conchon 2016, 120–6).</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ This is in part because the Bridges and Roads administration primarily relied on local topographic maps rather than statistical tables (Lepetit 1984, 17–44; Blond 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ See Figures A18 and A19 in the Supplementary Material. Data on the spatial distribution of maréchaussée brigades are drawn from Fressin's (2021) *Atlas historique de la gendarmerie*. See the Data Appendix section of the Supplementary Material for more details.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ See Figure A17 in the Supplementary Material.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Urban security remained under the jurisdiction of municipal authorities. More broadly, policing in Ancien Régime France was highly fragmented, with each jurisdiction maintaining its own corps. Rebellions specifically targeting municipal security forces were rare, with only 39 cases recorded in our data.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ See Figure A21 in the Supplementary Material. Our data contain 300 rebellions explicitly targeting the maréchaussée (5% of all rebellions). Consistent with the response of rebellions against military authorities in column 4 of Table 4, we find that the horse-post relay network fostered rebellions against the maréchaussée (estimate: 0.0037; standard error: 0.0012).</footnote>
estimates, suggesting that the presence of maréchaussée brigades does not account for our findings.<fnref n="82" /> Third, we restrict the analysis to parishes that never hosted either a letter-post office or a maréchaussée brigade. Results in Table A18 in the Supplementary Material suggest that these “uncontaminated” parishes still exhibit a positive causal relationship between the establishment of horse-post relays and rebellion. Finally, we test the robustness of our findings to removing rebellions recorded in the archives of the maréchaussée, finding similar results (see column 6 of Table A13 in the Supplementary Material).

## CONCLUSION

Alongside ongoing international rivalries and wars across early modern Europe, major powers—especially France and England—also faced episodic but significant outbreaks of rebellion and revolt. These episodes of domestic unrest unfolded against the backdrop of ambitious state-building efforts. France was among the first states to pursue a systematic program of state consolidation, encompassing a wide range of infrastructural, communication, and extractive initiatives. Yet state-building initiatives can themselves become a site of contestation, even when their ultimate goal is to establish centralized control and social order. We find that improvements in communication infrastructure through the expansion of France’s horse-post relay network sparked episodic rebellions across the territory in the run-up to the French Revolution. We attribute this relationship to pushback against the material consequences of state penetration, such as greater tax and law enforcement, conscription, control over the roads, and the crowding out of private interests. This pushback also varied with prior levels of state fragmentation and underlying territorial heterogeneity.

The dynamics we identify may also have had important implications for the French Revolution itself. Indeed, exploratory analyses suggest that, while the horse-post relay network in itself did not facilitate information diffusion among citizens or reduce their collective action costs, parishes that received relays—and experienced an associated uptick in rebellion—were more likely to later host political societies during the Revolution.<fnref n="83" /> These societies played a central role

in coordinating revolutionary action and asserting local control as the Ancien Régime collapsed. Prior grievances fostered by the expansion of the horse-post relay network thus appear to have resurfaced when subsequent shocks created an opportunity for mobilization, amplifying more immediate dynamics such as those linked to the 1788 drought or to the diffusion of democratic ideals by French soldiers returning from the American Revolutionary War (Jha and Wilkinson 2023; Waldinger 2024). This could have operated through long-standing frustrations over issues such as taxation or conscription, or even corvée labor—grievances that may not have triggered major rebellions in earlier decades but were prominently expressed in the *Cahiers de doléances* (Shapiro and Markoff 1998). This suggests that efforts to build state capacity can generate long-lasting consequences for social order that may unfold in ways that state planners neither anticipate nor intend.

Our findings underscore the importance of conceptually distinguishing the process of state-building from state strength itself. State-building can affect social order through multiple channels, from material consequences, such as taxation and conscription to information diffusion, ease of communication, and popular coordination. Scholars might fruitfully explore these channels in other canonical cases of early contested state-building in order to deepen our understanding of historical as well as ongoing state-building efforts.

## SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055425101342.

## DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Research documentation and data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M1XRXT.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Carles Boix, Charlotte Cavaillé, Anne Degrave, Bogdan G. Popescu, Louis Rouanet, Megan Stewart, Ronan Tallec, and Dean Yang for insightful feedback. They also thank Loris Cuenot, Annie Dago, Mario Fernandez, Magdeline Fikri, Wyatt Leaf, Navid Mazidabadifarahani, Gabriel Perez, Maximilien Pointurier, Carly Taylor, Diego Villamizar, and Louis Vitrand for excellent research assistance.

## FUNDING STATEMENT

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Pearson Institute at the University of Chicago for this

<footnote n="82">⁸² See Panel a of Figure A22 in the Supplementary Material. We also report event-study estimates of the treatment effects of maréchaussée brigades on rebellion in Panel b of Figure A22 in the Supplementary Material. While we find a positive effect, pre-trends are such that one cannot have a causal interpretation of these results. Indeed, maréchaussée brigades developed in locations that were already experiencing upward trends in rebellion, suggesting that their placement was endogenous.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ The relationship between the eighteenth-century horse-post relay network and political societies during the Revolution holds both in an OLS and a 2SLS framework, using horse-post relays as an instrument for rebellion in predicting the presence of political societies, along with controls and canton fixed effects. See Appendix D of the Supplementary Material for details.</footnote>
project. V.G. also acknowledges funding from the ANR under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d'Avenir program) and ANR-20-CE38-0015 (ObARDI).

## CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.

## ETHICAL STANDARDS

The authors affirm this research did not involve human participants.

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