Origins and Challenges of Surveillance Committees: The Case of Upper Normandy Upper Normandy’s surveillance committees are fairly well known thanks to a set of studies covering almost the entire region. These studies make use of a wide variety of sources in order to tackle three main themes: the establishment of these committees (place, time, and circumstances of creation), their personnel, and their practices. The studies show that far from being merely tools for the Terror, along with other institutions, these committees were instrumental in the exercise of citizenship and feature prominently among the political experiments of the French Revolution.