KIVELSON Petitions

PETITIONS in Information: A Historical Companion, ed. by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton University Press, 2021), 652-4. In June 1648, a crowd of supplicants approached Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich as he returned to Moscow from a pilgrimage. Rather than accept their petitions, his retinue waved them off and rode into the Kremlin. Still hopeful, the crowd approached the tsaritsa, who followed her husband into the city. This time, the guards drove them off by force. The refusal of the traditional right to petition the tsar proved costly: the city erupted in insurrection. When the ash settled, half of Moscow had burned, and thousands of people had died. Spurning petitions was not the sole cause of the uprising, but it provided the spark. Disappointed petitioners might seem an unlikely set of rebels. A petition, after all, is an exercise in groveling. It is a document or speech that asks, begs, or humbly requests. According to the Oxford En glish Dictionary, it can be “a supplication or prayer; an entreaty; esp. a solemn and humble prayer to the Deity, or to a sovereign or superior.” In Muscovy, petitions were called chelobitnye, literally, forehead-beating documents, and indeed the supplicants ritually bowed their foreheads to the ground before the tsar. Moreover, the potential benefits of petitioning would seem too low to be worth a rebellion. Even if the tsar had personally received their supplications, there was no guarantee that their requests would have been granted. Yet Muscovite subjects energetically availed themselves of what they saw as their ancient and inalienable right to hand petitions to the tsar, and, moreover, they expected the ruler would attend to their woes. Petitions historically have served as a primary means of conveying information from below, funneling news upward and allowing rulers to measure the pulse of their people. The expectation that those in power would attend to the information contained in petitions was not unique to Russia or to the seventeenth century. Shakespeare had Julius Caesar hurry into the Capitol, leaving petitioners futilely proffering their “humble suits.” His murder follows immediately after. Charles I’s refusal of petitions added an irritant to already tense relations in seventeenth-century England, contributing at some level to his ultimate demise. Back in Russia in 1905, another group of humble petitioners marched, crosses and icons aloft, to present a petition to Nicholas II, only to be gunned down by the Cossack guard. Revolution ensued. Most scholarly work on petitions considers the significance of petitions as informational instruments intended to provoke political action. In older work, petitioning is often represented as a lesser, “immature” form of political engagement, one invoked by those without other forms of redress. Yet a fascinating body of recent scholarship has upended this impression, showing that petitions can provide a powerful basis for rights claims. Studies demonstrate not only the ubiquity of petitioning practices but also the obligation, both ideological and practical, of those in authority to respond. Norms of reciprocity in such situations are not just polite fictions but are observed as both important cultural touchstones and hardnosed pragmatic strategies of state building and survival. As we have seen, historically monarchs ignore them at their own peril. PETITIONS 653 Despite their usual vocabulary of humility, petitions can make strong bids for recognition on the grounds of firm, nonnegotiable rights. It is not at random that the right to petition is included in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Petitions and the law might seem to work at odds with each other: the first entreats with pathos and hopes for merciful response; the latter rests on objective rules, positive rights, and expectations of impersonal justice. Yet the two spheres are far closer together than might first appear. Petitions frequently salt their “humble” appeals with strong legal claims and clear demands. Historically, even where the language of petitions was relentlessly abject, petitioners did not stint in pointing out when they had the law on their side. In many cultures, petitioners did indeed have legal standing. In Qing China (1644– 1912), for instance, local magistrates were legally obliged to attend to the petitions they received, and the power of the law, rather than capricious whim, dictated their rulings. This relatively recent finding upends earlier presumptions about the arbitrary authority of Qing local officials and corrects the idea that magistrates could simply ignore their constituents’ petitions or could refuse to accept them at will. Reanimated by the possibilities of mass organization via the *internet, petitions circulate widely today, popping up in our email and Facebook feeds. These online petitions inform and animate targeted publics and also convey a sense of the scale of mobilization. As has been true historically, political leaders are free to consider or ignore these collective expressions, but the very fact of their circulation guarantees that a broad population will be made aware of the issues and will have taken a stand. As with any petition campaigns, these contemporary iterations may register legal claims or ignite moral indignation, or both, and in either case, aim simultaneously to inspire popular support and to press high officials for positive resolution. Recent studies have gone a long way toward recuperating petitions as a form of fully fledged political engagement. This is important work but in some ways has constrained the horizon of investigation. When we limit our definition of what constitutes true political engagement narrowly to fit modern, Western, rights-based frameworks, we risk overlooking other, equally vibrant forms of political life. In many undemocratic societies, petitions testify to alternative forms of membership in a polity, membership based on personal appeal and on reciprocal acknowledgment. Rulers in nonegalitarian societies commonly have to recognize an obligation to protect and affirm the status of each petitioner or group and to protect the entitlements incumbent on that status, negligible and manifestly unequal though it might be. Petitions not only operate on a political level but also play an active role in the creation and circulation of information. Through their petitions, subjects air their grievances to those above, while reports of their reception communicate important information to their communities back home. This exchange of information can work smoothly, consolidating the status quo, or it can threaten that precarious balance. Disillusioned petitioners disseminate their resentments and can fuel the work of activists who challenge the system. As Francis Cody writes of Dalit petitions in South India, “The textual structure of petitions themselves constitutes a zone where competing models of social power are also rendered evident.” Petitions can produce information that goes far beyond the pragmatic two-way flow between center and periphery or ruler and ruled. Petitioners can craft their narratives 654 PETITIONS to satisfy the demands and expectations of the people who will decide their cases, or in very different ways, to suit purposes quite distinct from the ostensible goals of their suits. Natalie Zemon Davis famously developed these ideas in her Fiction in the Archives (1990). The fictions she explored were those elaborated in petitions seeking royal clemency in *early modern France. Along the same lines, in his trenchant examination of petitions for clemency for death row inmates in the United States, Austin Sarat sets out several distinct narrative strategies. He asks why the inmates and their lawyers bother with these petitions when their success rate is close to zero. He identifies in the petitioners a desire to dictate the terms of their own life stories and to memorialize their own being, even in the face of imminent execution. Caroline Wigginton brings the skills of literary analysis to bear on nineteenth-century Native American petitions and uncovers a similarly potent motivation, distinct from the documents’ apparent aims. “Through these petitions,” she writes, “Natives assert their active presence. . . . They assert their intellectual right to tell their own stories. They assert their ability to construct their own versions of history.” Petitions, then, can create or reinforce ideas of self and of community. If we consider what motivates people to go through the often costly and difficult process of submitting petitions, we can better understand what information mattered to the petitioners themselves, what information they chose to communicate, to what audience, and to what purpose. These self-abnegating documents communicate powerfully, pushing us beyond the issues of law and rights that generally preoccupy scholars. They demand that we attend to the ideas of inclusion and reciprocity that they advance and that we listen to the ways their authors, whether the petitioners themselves or hired scribes, narrate their own histories. Products of radically unequal power, petitions can crack open the field of political participation and claims making, allowing the disempowered some limited degree of enfranchisement and self-assertion. Viewed in this way, petitions offer a crucial insight into contributions of information not only, as is widely recognized, to democratization, but also to the stability and success of nondemocratic regimes, whether in the past or the present. Valerie Kivelson See also bureaucracy; governance; public sphere; publicity/publication; scribes FURTHER READING Valerie Kivelson, “‘Muscovite Citizenship’: Rights without Freedom,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 3 (2002): 465–89; Linxia Liang, “Rejection or Acceptance: Finding Reasons for the Late Qing Magistrate’s Comments on Land and Debt Petitions,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 68, no. 2 (2005): 276–94; Austin Sarat, “Memorializing Miscarriages of Justice: Clemency Petitions in the Killing State,” Law and Society Review 42, no. 1 (2008): 183–224; Caroline Wigginton, “Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration in the Petitions of Samson Occom,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, ser. 2, 20, no. 4 (2008): 24–55; David Zaret, “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (1996): 1497–555.