Violence of The French Crowd

THE VIOLENCE OF THE FRENCH CROWD FROM CHARIVARI TO REVOLUTION*
When common people protested in early modern France, theyemployed language and behaviour that strike us as violent and destructive. Peasants, craftsmen, labourers, women, even children resorted to collective violence. Houses were torn apart, authorities threatened, scapegoats beaten and dragged through the streets. How are we to evaluate these actions? Any attempt requires imaginative reconstruction of rioters intentions based on titbits of information gleaned from many sources. In the best of cases we have reports from several observers with differing points of view, permitting a sort of triangulation of the evidence. Occasionally we have transcripts of the testimony of rioters in judicial interrogations, as recorded by unsympathetic scribes. The only way to arrive at the intentions of the demonstrators is to piece together clues from their slogans, assertions and gestures, and combine them with the logic suggested by a carefully reconstructed sequence of events. When common expressions or parallel tactics and targets appear repeatedly in different times and in multiple revolts, condence grows that there is a decipherable language involved. Historians have followed divergent paths in dealing with this kind of evidence. Some have made a sympathetic attempt to interpret the violence of the crowd as a crude but understandable way of inuencing decisions vital to the protesters survival. Excluded from active participation in political decisions that fundamentally affected their lives, and unable to devise any broader societal strategy for lack of perspective and information, so the argument goes, crowds drew on traditional cultural resources. They expressed their discontent through language and gestures borrowed from carnival rituals when the world was temporarily turned upside down and from charivaris against neighbours. They perceived
* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2003), at the James Vann Seminar of Emory University (2004) and at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry of Emory (2006). I am grateful to the participants for their helpful comments, and especially to Millie Beik, John Cole, David Hunt, Judith Miller and Gyan Pandey for their suggestions.
Past and Present, no. 197 (Nov. 2007) doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm013 The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007
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their interests in traditional, stereotypical terms that evoked myths of a prior golden age or a land of Cockaigne.1 Other historians have taken a much more sceptical view of this folkloric interpretation and have focused instead on the primitive brutality of popular protests, or the multiplicity of the motivations of members of the crowd, or their vulnerability to elite manipulation. Confrontations could be bloody and nasty. Authorities were beaten to death, bodies disembowelled, property ruthlessly smashed and ruined. Some critics distinguish between different kinds of crowds, such as those of bread riots, tax riots and riots against marauding soldiers.2 In the past a major debate raged over the degree of spontaneity in popular protests, with some critics claiming that they were autonomous and others that they were instigated behind the scenes by upper-class leaders.3 Certain recent studies criticize the assumption that crowds had common purposes or argue that riots had multiple meanings not related to the class interests of the demonstrators.4 When I was studying seventeenth-century urban protests, I was struck by one feature that was often left in the background by commentators focusing on the objective of the protest.5 Groups of relatively disenfranchised individuals from the middle to lower ranks of a local community, but lacking any formal institutional identity, would mobilize either spontaneously or after informal meetings and discussions, to attack an abuse of power by those in authority. I called such a movement an expression of the culture of retribution. The common feature of these riots was the
1 ` Yves-Marie Berce, Fete et revolte: des mentalites populaires du XVI e au XVIII e siecle (Paris, 1976); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Reasons of Misrule, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966), i, 40514; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979). 2 ` For example Yves-Marie Berce, Histoire des Croquants: etude des soulevements popu` laires au XVIIe siecle dans le sud-ouest de la France, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1975), pt 3, ch. 1. 3 On the MousnierPorchnev debate, see J. H. M. Salmon, Venality of Ofce and Popular Sedition in Seventeenth-Century France, Past and Present, no. 37 (July 1967). 4 John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); David Martin Luebke, His Majestys Rebels: Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 17251745 (Ithaca, 1997); Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London, 2002). 5 William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997).
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crowds desire to punish the authorities for abuse of power. This aspect was shared by riots with a variety of other objectives and trajectories. The element of vengeance distinguishes the culture of retribution from E. P. Thompsons concept of the moral economy of the crowd in that it highlights the desire to punish the audacity or negligence of people who should have known better, whereas the moral economy emphasizes the crowds reimposition of traditional norms and procedures.6 This popular impulse to punish was certainly primitive, but nevertheless it seemed to be political in the sense that it was a commentary by protesters on the behaviour of people of higher status who should have taken more care in looking out for the needs of the lesser members of the community. Like the moral economy, it was an expression of moral outrage. But what was distinctive in these French instances was the vindictive aspect. The riot was not simply an attempt to oppose a novelty or correct an abuse. It was a focused and very dynamic move to humiliate or harm the responsible parties. Most of these riots were started by popular crowds. But there was another kind of riot, which was organized or fomented by instigators who did not belong to the crowd of angry demonstrators. These factional conicts were urban movements led by identiable leaders, who put forth programmes and slogans and organized public demonstrations. They tended to represent a group of people rather than an issue. They had chiefs who were socially inuential and their membership included a cross-section of local society. Sometimes they were loyal to a particular noble; sometimes they were syndicates organized to intervene legally against theactionsofthecitygovernment.Theycouldbegroupsmanoeuvring to take over control of a city from a rival faction in power. Factional movements are an essential part of the story because they looked spontaneous, but they were actually fomented.7 This essay is an attempt to follow the concept of the culture of retribution forward and backward in time. I explore the role of the retributive impulse in other circumstances and other centuries and examine the meaning of the violence in these early modern
6 E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, in The Essential E. P Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York, 2001). . See also Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society (University Park, 1993); Judith Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 17001860 (Cambridge, 1999). 7 Beik, Urban Protest, ch. 8.
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collective actions. Then I pose the question whether the wellknown violence of the Revolution would look different if seen from the perspective of the long-standing traditions of popular protest. I do not offer new research on the revolutionary crowd, but simply an inquiry into how the revolutionary crowd meshes with the centuries-long experience of popular protest and what this might tell us about the Revolution itself. To cover this vast terrain, I juxtapose instances of many types from many times and places. I describe a few cases in detail and then mention many others briey to bring out similarities. The point is to highlight elements they had in common, not to deny or ignore the many ways that riots differed in purpose and form. I
A TRADITION OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE
Collective violence can be dened as social interaction involving threatened or real physical damage to persons or property, carried out by a group of individuals whose efforts are co-ordinated, either by improvising on the spot, or through prior planning.8 Early modern popular protest constituted a particular subset of the broader category of collective action. It was generated in local communities that had some sort of social coherence and ongoing sociability, whether they be rural villages or neighbourhoods in cities. It involved relatively focused action, limited in time and directed at attacking people who were to be punished for activities of an ofcial or public nature that were perceived as being corrupt. When crowds rallied to protest an abuse they often acted upon prior commonly held beliefs concerning the wrongness of the threat they faced. Their behaviour could fall into patterns learned from common talk or previous experience. Let me elaborate by examining a specic case. It takes place in Sisteron in Provence in 1618 upon the arrival of Francois Alby de Bresc, a judge from the Chambre des Comptes of Aix, who was coming to enforce court orders about the imposition of a new excise tax. The tax had already caused a stir in other towns and
8 Denition adapted from Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge, 2003), 34. See also Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001).
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the city fathers of Sisteron had already launched several appeals against it. The general population had therefore had ample time to grumble over this intrusion and to talk about what should be done. Their righteous indignation over the injustice of the tax was bolstered by the fact that the local authorities had themselves already questioned its legitimacy. Here is an account of what happened when de Bresc appeared:
Men, women and children left their work in the elds and massed outside the Saunerie Gate. They followedthe man, throwing rocks, uttering threats and letting out insulting catcalls. When de Bresc and his party had arrivedat the inn where they were to stay, they were besieged by a great number of people. Their horses were removed from the stable. The doors, walls and oors of the building were smashed with hatchets and hammers. About 9 p.m. just after the gentleman had escaped through a breach in the wall with the aid of the consuls, he was seized by the people, thrown on the ground, beaten with blows from rocks and clubs, dragged by his feet through the streets, had his clothes torn and ruined and his money stolen. Then, virtually assassinated, he was left for dead in a heap of dung.9
The distinguished 67-year-old judge later died of his wounds, a predictable but probably unintended consequence. This development transformed a rough attempt to intimidate tax agents into a serious offence against the kings sovereign justice. The local authorities, who might well have sympathized with the movement to oppose the new tax, were now in a difcult spot. Their fellow citizens expected them to support this movement, or at least turn a blind eye, but the city council was responsible to higher authorities for maintaining law and order. The consuls turned defensive and began to denounce the rebellion, while sending assurances of co-operation to the commissioners coming from the Parlement of Aix to investigate the situation. Feeling betrayed by their own ofcials, the angry protesters then turned their anger against them. They cornered the authorities and their elite supporters, viewed now as the enemy, in the city hall, and occupied the streets and gates while angry citizens cried out that if the commissioners entered the city they would kill them and everyone who aided them.10 This episode contains the classic symptoms of the culture of retribution. A community is inamed by prior discussions about the injustice of some new procedure. They watch fearfully for the
Archives departementales des Bouches-du-Rhone, Marseille, B 3287. Ibid. See also the analysis in Rene Pillorget, Les Mouvements insurrectionels de Provence entre 1596 et 1715 (Paris, 1975), 284300.
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arrival of an individual from outside the community who is coming to institute the dreaded measure. This man and his task take on almost mythical stature in the minds of the townspeople. His presence is an intrusion which insults and threatens the community by undermining a fundamental principle involving survival. The immediate impulse is to humiliate and expel this personication of bad faith and ill will. Later the crowd turns against local citizens or city ofcials who seem to be in league with the enemy. Sometimes, in a third phase, the attack turns against other wealthy citizens, viewed as collaborators. Such crowds expressed a erce collective sense of anger and betrayal. A councillor from the Parlement of Dole who confronted such a crowd in 1668 described the participants disturbing mixture of deference and deance:
They all received me with acclamations of Vive le Roy . . . but at the same time they were uttering threats against the traitors and against anyone who tried to prevent [the crowd] from killing them. One said, lets go and attack so-and-so; another, he will die only by my hand; a third, its long overdue. All of them were breathing nothing but vengeance, and it was no longer a matter of pillage but of killing.11
Note the focused rage of these rioters. They did not have the slightest thought of attacking this particular citizen, whom they respected, but at the same time they were expressing their contempt for particular guilty parties through the violence of their language. Their mood was shifting from pillage to murder. These last examples illustrate a feature of my analysis. I have juxtaposed a riot in Sisteron in 1618 with a riot in Dole in 1668 because the Dole incident offers details that suggest what a crowd like the one in Sisteron would have been saying and doing. Of course there is no reason to connect the two incidents. In order to be valid, this leap requires the assumption that French urban crowds shared a broader common culture or that similar circumstances produced similar results. These protests occurred over many different issues in many different places, and their distribution in time and space was uneven. It is well known that the period 1600 to 1660 was notable for its tax rebellions, that the 1560s and 1570s were lled with religious violence and that the eighteenth century was notable for its grain riots. There were reasons for
11 ` Jules Chifet, Memoires, in Memoires et documents inedits pour servir a lhistoire de la Franche-Comte, vi (Besancon, 1868), 299. Thanks to Darryl Dee for pointing me to this source.
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these differences of timing and location, but they do not concern us here. We need to focus on the forms of violence that were similar, not the circumstances that were different. I list some examples, not in chronological order but where they t in logically as an illustration of a type of behaviour which could be considered to be political. First, one better-documented example is worth exploring: the uprising in Lyon in 1529 called the Grande Rebeine.12 Like so many other popular disturbances, the Rebeine has been presented by commentators as essentially a grain riot.13 This is understandable. Ever since the summer of 1528 the city had faced an impending grain shortage. There had been a series of preliminary protests and incidents concerning grain prices throughout the autumn. During the riot the crowd stormed the municipal granary and carried off sacks of grain. The next day they marched out of the city and invested an abbey on the Ile Barbe where grain was stored. They were nally dispersed by 120 armed men who had been assembled by the city. A grain riot it certainly was. But invoking this familiar term tends to neutralize the event by tting it into a safe, predictable category. High prices, shortages, then rioting: these announce grain riot and set off expectations of a certain sequence of events. But let us look further. On 14 April 1529 a manifesto appeared on city walls:
Let it be known to all the people of the commons (commune) of the city of Lyon, especially those who wish to support the public good and repulse the evil fury of the deceptive usurers: see how the scarcity of grain is crushing us when we dont deserve it, because of their attics full of grain, which they want to sell only when they are ready, which is not reasonable . . . Pretending to act fairly, our governors and councillors, who are usurers and crooks, are scalping us day by day, until you can see before your very eyes a coming shortage of grain and other foodstuffs, which is vile and scandalous. Following the example of other cities, the whole commons should intervene to make this thing right. Threshing wheat means separating it from the chaff; we must do the same to these
12 ` M.-C. and Georges Guigue, La Grande Rebeyne de Lyon, 1529, in Bibliotheque historique du Lyonnais: memoires, notes et documents, 6 vols. (Lyon, 18868), i, 23396, 35883, 41739. 13 Richard Gascon saw it as an emeute des grains, emeute de type classique sur ` venant au moment ou le cours des bles monte si vite que les petites gens manquent ` de pain: Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVI e siecle: Lyon et ses ` marchands, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971), ii, 771. For Francoise Bayard, la premiere grande ` emeute frumentaire eclate en 1529: Francoise Bayard, Vivre a Lyon sous lAncien Regime (Paris, 1997), 177.
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accursed usurers and to those who have grain reserves which drive up the price. Know that we are from four to ve hundred men and that we are allied. We make it hereby known to all the above-mentioned commons that they should gather on Sunday afternoon at the Cordelier monastery to consult with us as to how to impose order and proper regulations, and to do it without fault, for the benet and prot of the poor commons of this city of Lyon and for me, [signed] THE POOR [MAN].14
This remarkable document is more complex than a call for affordable grain. Its anonymous authors are angry and want to mobilize the community. They have an analysis: the problem is not dearth but selsh hoarding, without which there would be enough grain to go around. They also offer a solution not a distribution of grain or the regulation of prices as we might expect, but an implicit punishment of the usurers and crooks. They evoke the commune, the medieval ideal of a union of citizens for the common good, but it is little more than a rhetorical device. Perhaps their call for a popular rally at the Cordelier monastery of St Bonaventure can be taken as a plan for a real meeting: this was in fact a traditional meeting place for city affairs. More likely it was just a way of calling for insurrection. They could have launched a reform movement. They might have launched a legal appeal or tried to depose the city council. Instead, the manifesto hints that the target should be rich hoarders. Eleven days later, on the designated Sunday, 25 April, a mixed, disorderly crowd of up to a thousand men, women and children, mostly from the lower ranks, actually did gather in the square in front of the Cordeliers. They broke into the monastery, rang the tocsin for several hours and pillaged the premises. They broke doors and windows, smashing furniture, dishes and other things. The crowd then went next door to the house of Symphorien Champier, a distinguished doctor and humanist, whose possessions were also thoroughly pillaged. They attacked doors, windows, glass, chests, tables, wardrobes, and carried off books, papers, beds, linen and other furnishings. They went on to the nearby residence of Pierre Morin, a rich merchant, where they carried off a quantity of grain from the attic and emptied the wine cellar, drinking large quantities and dumping the rest in the street. Then on to the properties of Laurent du Cornal and the Gimbre brothers, and to the Hotel de Ville, where they threatened the keeper of the city archives. The governor of the city,
14 Archives municipales, Lyon, BB 47, cited by Guigue and Guigue, La Grande Rebeyne, 233.
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de Trivulce, a favourite of King Francis I, was red at and forced to ee to the safety of the Celestine convent. Finally everyone converged on the building where the city kept its weights and measures, the upstairs of which was the municipal granary, newly stocked by the city. Pillagers ripped open the bins and sent the grain pouring out into the street, where it was gathered up by onlookers and carted off in aprons, sacks and shirts. Why all this angry destruction that ts the grain riot paradigm poorly? A new thesis by Jean-Henri Etienney nally answers the question.15 This was political anger, retaliation for a year of treachery on the part of the merchant-speculator leaders who were known to have struck deals to prot from the export of grain. Champier, the noted humanist doctor, was on the city council and had recently advocated a tax on wine that was viewed as unfair to the poor. Du Cornal and the Gimbre brothers were grain speculators who had sold out the city by exporting Burgundian grain destined for Lyon. The Cordelier monastery was the favoured resting place for the tombs of the great families of the city. The abbey on the Ile Barbe was the storage place for grain speculators. Thus the riot was about grain, but, as the manifesto clearly stated, it was the mishandling and proteering that angered the populace. Several days later, perhaps because of admonitions by the consuls, or fears of recriminations, people from the crowd began turning in their booty. Over a hundred persons, including many women and children, testied before the consuls.16 Witnesses reported seeing Jean Muzi, apparently a former soldier, dressed in doublet and hose (some sort of uniform) leading his two sons and a band of followers from house to house. This band addressed Muzi as captain; he presided over the scene while they pillaged. ` When they had nished at the house of Jheronime Lievre, Muzi was heard to say, everything is done in there, lets go to Master Laurenss house where we will eat lots of pate.17 Antoine Poynot, vinegar maker, was attending a sermon at the hotel-Dieu when the tocsin was heard ringing. He reported that people had said to one another, it must be the commons setting out against the fat hoarders interesting evidence that the riot
15 Jean-Henri Etienney, Ordre et desordre dans une cite de la Renaissance: Lyon et le consulat lyonnais (vers 1520 . . . vers 1555) (Villeneuve dAscq, 2002). 16 Guigue and Guigue, La Grande Rebeyne, 26277. 17 Ibid., 27881.
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had been the subject of prior discussion in the streets. J. Boteront, a mason, reported that two days before the riot he and his friends had been discussing the placards posted around the city against Monsieur the governor and messieurs the justices and councillors, when another mason, Guillot Jardin, said that his brotherin-law had been involved in posting them. Louise, wife of a ribbon maker, brought in three pewter platters, a shroud, pieces of cloth, a silk collar and other items which she said had been thrown in her doorway by a person eeing down the street. All these descriptions tell us that the Grande Rebeine of Lyon was primarily about retribution and secondarily about access to grain. Someone was agitating and planning a protest. Some of the perpetrators, probably artisans, possibly masons, were literate and knew what was going on in other cities. A vindictive attack on the property of local leaders set the stage for a grain riot in which a broad range of people joined in emptying the municipal stocks. This focused, political, anger lay behind many of Frances riots, regardless of the immediate objective of the disturbance. Let us examine rapidly some other incidents. In Lyon in 1436 the imposition of aides and gabelles, from which the city believed itself to be exempt, caused several months of crisis. More than a thousand demonstrators attacked rst the tax-collection agents, then the city ofcials who had allowed this abuse to take place, and ultimately certain wealthy citizens who were perceived as not paying their fair share of city taxes. Houses were pillaged and several people were killed. In 1461 in Angers crowds rose up against the royal ofcers who were said to have brought commissions for illicit taxes. For three days they went from house to house where the ofcers were lodged and smashed everything with large clubs.18 In 1477 in Dijon the transfer of the citys allegiance from the duchy of Burgundy to Louis XI of France occasioned angry crowds of artisans and labourers, who murdered the president of the Parlement and pillaged the houses of three or four other notables, all accused of betraying the city by collaborating with
18 ` Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, MS fr. 16626, fos. 21521, 20614, ` ` 198205; Rene Fidou, Une revolte populaire a Lyon au XVe siecle: la Reybeyne de 1436, Cahiers dhistoire, iii (1958); Nicole Gonthier, Acteurs et temoins des Rebeynes ` lyonnaises a la n du Moyen Age, in Revolte et societe: actes du IV e colloque dhistoire au present, Paris, mai 1988, 2 vols. (Paris, 1989), ii; Andre Leguai, Emeutes et troubles ` dorigine scale pendant le regne de Louis XI, Le Moyen Age, lxxiii (1967), 4518.
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France.19 Examples multiply as we move forward in time. Confrontations between Protestants and Catholics provided new opportunities. In 1589 the rst president of the Parlement of Toulouse, Duranti, was murdered because he was perceived as a defender of Henri IIIs assassination of the duc de Guise. Durantis body was dragged through the streets, then hanged from the public gallows along with a portrait of the king and, some said, buried with it as well, and his mansion was pillaged. Rioters in Troyes in 1586 attacked local notables who were the nancial backers of a hated new tax.20 The seventeenth century saw many serious popular revolts which are too well known to detail here.21 For the eighteenth century the ndings of Jean Nicolas and his research team have shown that the range of possibilities was much broader than just subsistence riots. Of 8,528 incidents between 1661 and 1789, 39.1 per cent were over issues of taxation, 17.6 per cent over subsistence and 14.1 per cent against judicial or governmental agents.22 Of course these cases varied greatly in magnitude and importance, but many of them had retributive dimensions. To cite only one example, in 1737 in the village of Cereix-Saint-Joseph-de-Nay in the Auvergne, the town and the seigneur were engaged in an ongoing legal dispute over the revising of the terrier. When a process server and several guards approached the village with legal papers, they were met with shouts
19 There is some indication that there was agitation by Burgundian agents, although the behaviour of the crowd seems authentically popular. A. Voisin, La Mutemaque ` du 26 juin 1477: notes sur lopinion a Dijon au lendemain de la reunion, Annales de Bourgogne, vii (1935). 20 Dom Claude Devic and Dom J. Vaissete, Histoire generale de Languedoc, new edn, 15 vols. (Toulouse, 187689), xii, 43. See also Mark Greengrass, The Sainte Union in the Provinces: The Case of Toulouse, Sixteenth Century Jl, xiv (1983), 4835; Nicolas Dare, Memoires et livre de famille de Nicolas Dare, in Collection de documents inedits ` ` relatifs a la ville de Troyes et a la Champagne meridionale publies par la Societe academique de lAube, iii (Troyes, 1886). See the account in Beik, Urban Protest, 547. 21 The principal seventeenth-century studies are Pillorget, Les Mouvements insurrec tionnels de Provence; Madeleine Foisil, La Revolte des nu-pieds et les revoltes normandes de 1639 (Paris, 1970); Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in SeventeenthCentury France: The Parlement of Aix, 16291659 (Princeton, 1978); Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Two additional instances are the pancarte revolts in Poitiers in 1601 and Limoges in 1602: see S. Annette FinleyCroswhite, Henry IVand the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 15891610 (Cambridge, 1999), 14355. 22 Jean Nicolas, La Rebellion francaise: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 16611789 (Paris, 2002), 36. This is a magnicent study.
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of here come the sergeants from the chateau, everybody come, we must kill them! They took refuge in the inn while the angry villagers tried to break in the doors and windows, then they ed across a stream, beaten all over their bodies and pursued by the populace of both sexes. Also strikingly familiar in style was the rioting in Paris in 1750 over the kidnapping of children. Parisian crowds spoke belligerently, targeted the police and attacked bakers and grain markets. Arlette Farge notes that they also expressed disillusionment with the king.23 What was the nature of the violence that appears in all these protests? An example from a slightly different context suggests something of the intense moral indignation that led to retribution. Robert Muchembled cites an incident in 1477 in which an irate peasant near Hesdin confronted soldiers who were pillaging his village, saying that they hadnt left as much as a loaf of bread or a pate for them or their wives and children, and that they had even searched the bed of a woman who was recovering from childbirth and that the king had certainly not ordered that! This burst of righteous indignation might show us the emotions felt by rioters. Crowds were saying not just this is wrong but this is against the rules of proper government.24 The violence in these riots is hard to evaluate. These demonstrators undoubtedly had a tolerance of physical violence which we do not share. The stress and insecurity of a hard life played a role in shaping peoples emotional state and their perceptions of acceptable behaviour. The level of indifference to blood and physical assault must have been higher in an age when brawls, violent contests and even rapes by unmarried young men were tolerated, and the slaughtering of animals was a commonplace experience. Yves Castan notes that once a man had been insulted and had formally announced that he was going to restore his honour by making his adversarys life miserable, the community considered
23 Ibid., 176; Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution, trans. Claudia Mieville (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park, 1995), 10921; Steven L. Kaplan, The Paris Bread Riot of 1725, French Hist. Studies, xiv (1985); David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002), ch. 5. 24 Robert Muchembled, LInvention de lhomme moderne: sensibilite, murs et compor tements collectifs sous lAncien Regime (Paris, 1988), 18. For an eighteenth-century ` perspective, see Arlette Farge, La Vie fragile: violence, pouvoirs et solidarites a Paris au ` XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1986), 20118.
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it perfectly honourable to ambush the opponent, attack him with knives or clubs and bring along ones brothers and cousins to beat him up. At least in the Midi, public opinion perceived the insult as justication for the response and thought that if he had it coming to him there was no such thing as excessive force.25 This sensibility carried over to collective incidents. Scathing insults and vicious threats were the collective version of defence of personal space.26 In 1767 fty Burgundian villagers, men, women and young girls, attacked the tax-collection agents of the monks of the abbey of Cteaux, throwing rocks, brandishing farm implements and shouting there they are, the dogs; lets kill them and disembowel them with our pitchforks. In Arras in 1688 eight hundred people gathered in front of the ofce of tax sub-farmer Cottet, crying there he is! Knock his wind out, slit this thiefs throat! They pushed around his wife and clerks, smashed all his windows with rocks, tore down the panel displaying the royal insignia from the facade and ripped it into pieces, which they paraded triumphantly through the town for hours. In 1707 a village defending forest rights which belonged to an abbey met their agents with clubs, pitchforks and hatchets, shouting that they wanted nothing to do with justice, monks, or devils, and warning that the rst monk they encountered would have his balls cut off and posted on the gate of the abbey.27 These extravagant threats are noteworthy precisely because not a single one of them was carried out. The worst vows to mutilate, disembowel, or drag and dump, or to pillage or burn houses, smash possessions, tear up trees and crops, or kill animals, all served excellently as insults without needing to be realized. They were effective because they were designed to humiliate and degrade, and in a society that valued personal honour highly, insults humiliated just as successfully as concrete actions by treating the
25 Yves Castan, Honnetete et relations sociales en Languedoc (17151780) (Paris, 1974), 1825. Ofcial violence was also brutal: David Nicholls, The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation, Past and Present, no. 121 (Nov. 1988). The famous study by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1977), focuses on state violence but does not deal with the type of collective violence presented here. An important new study by Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006) offers extensive evidence of ritual mutilations and draggings in combats between nobles, raising further questions concerning the relationship between noble violence and popular violence. 26 Steven G. Reinhardt, Justice in the Sarladais, 17701790 (Baton Rouge, 1991), 161213. 27 Nicolas, La Rebellion francaise, 178, 70, 156, respectively.
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designated parties as if they were beggars, thieves and scoundrels or by evoking symbolic mutilation, lowering of status and debasement. This kind of insulting rhetoric was common in all revolts, but few of the threats were acted upon. In fact, many of the most dramatic episodes of popular cruelty may be exaggerations written up after the fact by unfriendly observers far removed from the action itself. For example, the details of the gruesome mutilation in Agen in 1635, which Le Roy Ladurie, Berce and I all featured in our studies of popular revolts, come solely from a journal kept for several generations by the Malebaysse family, with no indication of how much is hearsay or exaggeration.28 Violence was usually symbolic. Most of the real cruelty, when it occurred, was inicted on corpses, not on living persons. Threats drew their impact from the intensity of the hatred that lay behind them and from everyones awareness that they could be translated into action at any moment. Still, some violence was very real. When the crowd did actually capture someone considered deserving of their full fury, the effect could be devastating, and the violence sometimes followed standard ritual patterns. In 1675 Bordeaux experienced simmering popular rage over the imposition of new taxes on common items of consumption. On the day the collections were to begin, a virtual army of demonstrators pillaged the houses of two pewter merchants suspected of having betrayed the community by paying the new tax on pewter. Their principal victim was a man who was known to be an agent of the intendants sub-delegate. This man was beaten to death and then his mutilated corpse was dragged all through the city, from the popular neighbourhoods to the exclusive Chapeau Rouge district, on a symbolic itinerary past the doors of various hated ofcials. The crowd rained blows on the corpse on the doorstep of the intendant and then headed to the residence of Vivey, the mans alleged employer. Vivey, who was an afuent tresorier de France, had his townhouse sacked by the crowd, while the mutilated body of his employee was immolated inside Viveys private carriage in the courtyard of the demolished mansion.29 This crowd was more violent than the one that sacked houses in the Rebeine of Lyon, but the impulse to punish was
28 Beik, Urban Protest, 6371; Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, i, 5038; Berce, Histoire des Croquants, i, 3237. 29 Beik, Urban Protest, 14851.
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similar. In Lyon they attacked the property of complicit authorities. In Bordeaux they carried out a more dramatic dragging of a man associated with the kings direct agents. This style of ritual punishment emerges most clearly during the religious conicts of the sixteenth century. Here a revolt with a different kind of religious objective nevertheless displays similar forms of behaviour. According to Natalie Davis and Barbara Diefendorf, crowds were acting to purify their communities of the pollution caused by the opposite faith. But Denis Crouzet has a more apocalyptic interpretation.30 Believing that we can only understand the motivations of crowds by deciphering the imaginaire or mental universe which was motivating them, he paints a vivid picture of the terrifying world-view of radical preachers and fanatical theologians who saw the Protestants as the very embodiment of lust, avarice and evil. The most dramatic example is the treatment of the body of Admiral Coligny, murdered by the duc de Guise on St Bartholomews Day in 1572. Left on the pavement, the corpse was paraded through the streets by children (probably a mixed crowd of youths), who tried to burn it, then dumped it in the river, where it seems to have stayed for several days. Some accounts say it was mutilated. According to another account,
the people were so enraged at the admiral that . . . they cut off his head, and the person who did it stuck it on the end of a sword and, mounting on horseback, carried it around the streets of Paris shouting loudly, here is the evil traitor who wanted to kill the king and ruin France and did so much damage to the city of Paris.31
Crouzet sees this attack through contemporary eyes as a miraculous act of God in which children, representing purity, were violently carrying out the divine will. Despite the apocalyptic setting, it is difcult to agree. Colignys offence, as indicated by the shouts quoted above, was treason and betrayal. The perpetrators may have seen themselves as agents of the Lord, but their behaviour does not signal this motivation.32
30 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Rites of Violence, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France; Barbara Diefendorf, Prologue to a Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris, 15571572, Amer. Hist. Rev., xc (1985); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525 vers 1610), 2 vols. (Seyssel, 1990). 31 Denis Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthelemy: un reve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris, 1994), 51524; quotation from the chevalier de Gomicourt at p. 522. 32 The account by Claude Haton states that the crowd proclaimed Colignys crimes to be that he was a scoundrel, a seditious person, a disturber of the public peace,
(cont. on p. 90)
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The strikingly similar rituals that recurred in 1617 when the crowd attacked the body of the murdered marechal dAncre (Concini), the deposed favourite of Marie de Medicis, conrm the impression that their anger was secular and their message punishment by humiliation.33 On that occasion several hundred rioters dug up the hastily buried body, dragged it around the streets, stopping at the traditional sites of executions, went through the motions of the ofcial form of public penance called amende honorable in front of the Bastille, where the popular prince of Conde had been incarcerated by Ancre, then dragged it back to the front of the marechals residence on the rue de Tournon, cut off its ears, nose and shameful parts, then burned it and threw the remains into the Seine. Ancre was hated for abusing his inu ence over the young king, ordering the arrest of Conde, and allegedly plotting to seize the throne. There was no religious issue. Yet the crowds behaviour was strikingly similar to that of the mutilators of Coligny forty-ve years earlier and the rebels of Bordeaux fty-eight years later. And this time the crowds ritual humiliation of Concini was celebrated in several hundred semiofcial printed pamphlets and a series of striking engravings portraying the steps of the bodys degradation.34 This was a deeply ingrained cultural practice that mimicked ofcial judicial practices. The fact that it was reproduced in published images suggests that ofcial sources at least sanctioned the degradation of Concini after the fact as a way of discrediting his supporters. It also shows that this brutal ritual was fully understood by more eminent people. But it is hard to imagine ofcials actually organizing the event, which appears to be an expression of popular justice.
(n. 32 cont.)
a conspirator against the king, [and a] predator of his country, and nally he was burned in a small re as a heretic and Huguenot. Belatedly the Paris Parlement ` condemned him as guilty of lese-majeste against God and king and sentenced him to be dragged through the streets and hanged, his property conscated and his principal residence razed to the ground. This sentence, apparently issued after the popular dragging, illustrates the degree to which spontaneous popular rioters mimicked ofcial justice and ofcial justice endorsed some instances of popular justice. Claude Haton, Memoires, ed. Felix Bourquelot, 2 vols. (Paris, 1862), i, 6801. 33 The former name of the marechal dAncre was Concino Concini. The parallels between the treatment of Ancre and Coligny were discussed in Orest Ranum, The French Ritual of Tyrannicide in the Late Sixteenth Century, Sixteenth Century Jl, xi (1980). 34 ` Helene Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire: lopinion publique sous Louis XIII (Paris, 2003), 32372.
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Factional movements were different in nature. To prevail in a closely knit community where there was no legitimate channel for opposition groups to make their case, an ambitious group needed to rally support among the general population. Clever leaders wooed the public by translating their message into a language of scapegoats and basic rights that would appeal to the common population. This was a co-option of the same language used by popular protesters. A dissident movement might begin by launching legal appeals against the rivals in power, but they generally ended up trying to bolster their public presence by taking direct action. An example was the protracted struggle against the bishop in Albi in the 1640s which was led by a faction of notables who felt left out. This group called themselves the directors. They put a laurel leaf in their hats, swore on a missal to remain united, and marched in the streets to the sound of violins, shouting liberty, long live Bages [the name of their leader] and the laurel leaf.35 Factional movements developed charisma. They had slogans and held festive events such as parades and banquets to woo public opinion. Unlike the serious, angry demeanour of retributive crowds, they mocked playfully, often using festive symbolism of a more abstract, learned nature. Factional movements also made a point of their closeness they swore oaths of loyalty, which they often referred to as a union in the manner of the Catholic Leagues of the sixteenth century, and they invoked collective terms like liberty and commune. This was an attempt to evoke the feeling of collective enthusiasm that was self-generating in a real popular revolt. If they took up arms, they displayed military-style organization, seizing key locations and challenging existing power centres or provoking armed confrontations with enemy groups. More typically they terrorized their enemies by leaving ominous marks on their doors, drawing up lists of undesirables or uttering direct threats. The goal was not to humiliate a particular offender as a retributive crowd would have done, but to expel, as a group, enemies belonging to the opposite party.36 Since these movements were often in opposition to the constituted authorities, they experienced a growing paranoia about their
35 36
` Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS fr. 18601, fos. 297300. Beik, Urban Protest, ch. 8.
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perilous position and engaged in increasingly aggressive acts against potential traitors. Factional movements were part of the landscape in towns of any size.37 An instructive example is the reform movement that took place in 1514 in Agen. A group of notables was agitating against the existing city council, which was trying to raise taxes to repair the bridge over the Garonne. This opposition group held large public demonstrations and administered an oath in which the citizens swore to be loyal to the commune, by which they meant their own movement. On 2 July a thousand people gathered in the main square, clapping their hands and saying loudly where are those thieves of consuls who want to put novel taxes on grains, wines and other victuals? They seized the streets and took over a general assembly meeting, where they sat in the seats of the consuls and demanded to audit the books. Onlookers were heard to mutter, You thieves are trying to lay the gabelle on the people . . . where are these thieves of consuls? We will get them dead or alive; they will be hanged. This was violent language but it was not a popular revolt. No real violence was committed and no houses were pillaged.38 The very fact of mass meetings and sworn oaths demonstrates that this was not a spontaneous popular movement. A factional movement combined leadership by elite gures who understood the workings of government with a popular following of demonstrators attracted by more immediate, practical grievances. Popular crowds were political in the sense of attempting to inuence decision-making and setting limits to what the authorities could get away with, although they had no broader vision of reform because their anger was directed against an immediate abuse personied by particular individuals. Factional
37 They played a part in the urban revolutions of the 1380s and innumerable smaller municipal power struggles organized by prominent individuals. Pierre Bernadeau, bourgeois of La Rochelle, and his relatives seized the ramparts of La Rochelle in 1614 and invaded the houses of their two leading opponents in the night, dragging them out of their beds and expelling them from the city. Unlike popular rioters, these sorts of elite conspirators made no secret of their identity. Philippe Wolff, Les Luttes ` sociales dans les villes du Midi francais, XIIIeXVe siecles, Annales ESC, ii (1947); Kevin C. Robbins, The Social Mechanisms of Urban Revolt: A Case Study in Leadership in the 1614 Revolt at La Rochelle, French Hist. Studies, xix (1995). 38 Interrogation of Pierre de Gaillard in Andre Mateu, Les Revoltes populaires de la ` ` juridiction dAgen dans leur contexte socio-economique (These de doctorat de 3eme cycle, Universite de Toulouse, 1980), 161019. See also Georges Tholin, Proclama` tion de la commune a Agen en 1514, Annales du Midi, xiii (1901).
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movements, on the other hand, were plays for popularity and authority. It is in their camp that we nd parades, mummery, witty parodies of authorities, slogans, banners and symbols of membership. It appears, in fact, that, contrary to the claims of many classic studies, the presence of festive ritual was a clear sign that factional lobbying for popularity was taking place rather than autonomous protest from below. Almost every well-known case in which the crowd is supposed to be rebelling by using festive folklore comes from a source that is literary in origin, further removed from the action than the administrative documents describing popular riots. Such literary accounts are tinged with the paternalism of the educated observer who, on the one hand, believes in the simplicity of the common crowd and, on the other, relishes the local colour of the story. The oaths of solidarity that were sworn in Albi and Agen were replicated in similar movements in many places. They promoted a erce loyalty to a cause, and in tense situations a loyalty oath could be used as a litmus test for identifying traitors. In the Paris of 1589 the fact of being under siege and the feeling that subversion was close at hand led to a split community and induced paranoia on the part of the dissident government. The result was an atmosphere of terror. As contemporary Pierre de lEstoile put it, in Paris one was not allowed to appear as anything other than a leaguer; persons of wealth were in danger of losing their lives and their property and exposed to the movements of a furious, aroused populace constantly incited to blood and carnage by the monks and priests and preachers.39 Violent threats of tearing out hearts and cutting in pieces proliferated. Waves of organized repression swept the city. The Ormee rebellion in Bordeaux saw the recurrence of a similar phenomenon in 16523. Illegal meetings were held by large numbers of modest citizens who were incensed at the bad government of their city during the wars of the Fronde.40 They demanded accountability from city governmental bodies, and called
39 Quoted in Elie Barnavi and Robert Descimon, La Sainte Ligue, le juge, et la potence: lassassinat du president Brisson (15 novembre 1591) (Paris, 1985), 189. 40 ` Robert Descimon and Christian Jouhaud, De Paris a Bordeaux: pour qui court le peuple pendant la Fronde (1652), in Jean Nicolas (ed.), Mouvements populaires et e e ` conscience social, XVI XIX siecles: actes du Colloque de Paris, 2426 mai 1984 (Paris, 1985).
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on respectable citizens to band together under oath to bring about these reforms. Challenged by attacks from the Parlement and the municipal jurade, the Ormee organized parades and public banquets to win popular support. As tensions rose, it developed into a militant party, led by two extremists, a minor legal functionary and a lawyer. Lists of enemies began to circulate, including judges in the Parlement. Armed ormistes expelled fourteen dignitaries from the city by force while two thousand supporters wearing elm branches in their hats marched through the aristocratic quarter past the houses of the proscribed. The ormistes drew up a loyalty oath which was used to ush out enemies. A government spy, Jacques de Filhot, describes how he was brought before the leaders of the Ormee. They held a pistol to his head and struck him with their muskets. They also threatened to cut off his wifes nose, to hang everyone living on his street, and to burn his two houses to the ground. But, typically, none of these threats was carried out.41 II
COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN THE REVOLUTION
A look at the revolutionary crowd in the context of a longer early modern perspective suggests the need for some rethinking about the nature of popular politics. In the classic works by George Rude, the revolutionary crowd is seen as an advance over a more stereotypical, pre-revolutionary grain riot. Crowds only became politically aware during the Revolution itself, and only by following upper-class leads: it was through the parlements [in 17879] that the Paris menu peuple learned their rst political lessons, lessons which were still rudimentary and skin deep.42 He meant of course that the demonstrators had not yet arrived at the full consciousness of a revolutionary class. Albert Soboul made a similar argument about the mixed class position of the sans-culottes.43 These older experts have long been replaced by
41 ` ` LOrmee a Bordeaux dapres le journal inedit de J. de Filhot, ed. A. Communay (Bordeaux, 1887), 102, 109, 119. 42 George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 17301848 (New York, 1964), 93. 43 Among the most perceptive treatments of crowds in the Revolution are essays by Colin Lucas and Timothy Tackett. Colin Lucas: The Crowd and Politics between Ancien Regime and Revolution in France, Jl Mod. Hist., lx (1988); Talking about
(cont. on p. 95)
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revisionists and post-revisionists who are mesmerized by the ugliness of the revolutionary crowds. They emphasize an upsurge of elemental violence and vindictive cruelty in which the sansculottes were either expressing their inherent primitiveness or acting as dupes of revolutionary leaders. But in describing this violence revisionists too fall back on either the primitive view of pre-modern crowds or the folkloric view. Patrice Higonnet considers Old Regime riots to have been formulaic in both the modesty of their claims and in the ephemeral nature of their achievements. Lynn Hunt simply alludes to Carnival masks and local saints as traditional popular culture. Francois Furet attributes mass action and intense fear of betrayal to a revolutionary psychosis:
the action of the sans-culottes of 1793 is important not because it involved a popular social group . . . but because it expresses in its chemically pure form, as it were, such revolutionary notions of political action as obsession with treason and plot, the refusal to be represented, the will to punish, and so forth.44
But all over France people continued to protest, using their usual methods. The explosions of moral indignation directed at intrusive targets continued, even as protesters applied them to
(n. 43 cont.)
Urban Popular Violence in 1789, in Alan Forrest and Peter Jones (eds.), Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution (Manchester, 1991); Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor, in Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 17941815 (Cambridge, 1983); Violence thermidorienne et societe traditionnelle: lexemple du Forez, Cahiers dhistoire, xxiv (1979). Timothy Tackett: Women and Men in ` Counterrevolution: The Sommieres Riot of 1791, Jl Mod. Hist., lix (1987); Collective Panics in the Early French Revolution, 17891791: A Comparative Perspective, French Hist., xvii (2003). The new edition of Donald Sutherlands French Revolution contains an impressive number of insights about provincial and popular issues: D. M. G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford, 2003). David Andress has produced several illuminating histories of the Revolution seen from a popular perspective, including The French Revolution and the People (London, 2004). Older works that remain important are Georges Lefebvre, Foules revolutionnaires, in his Etudes sur la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1954); and the monumental study by Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en lan II: mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793 9 thermidor an II (Paris, 1967). 44 Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 296; Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, new edn (Berkeley, 2004), 67; Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), 27. Simon Schama equates the atrocities of popular justice with lynchings, and fatal beatings and stabbings: Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), 623.
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different causes such as defending the community against religious change. In 1791 some women in the small town of ` Sommieres in Languedoc raised a ruckus during mass when unknown men whom they took to be agents of the government entered the church. Fearing that they might be coming to put pressure on local priests to swear the unpopular oath to the constitutional church, a large group of women, followed by men, chased a judge through town, pelting him with rocks until he managed to hide in a public building. Youre trying to destroy our religion, said one of the women; let them try, the bastards, well cut their throats. In Pont-sur-Yonne, the gendarmes who arrived in 1799 to enforce revolutionary calendar laws prohibiting work on the decadi had to face an angry collection of men, women and children who chased them away with words and a shower of stones and sticks, which fell on us like hail.45 Such incidents relied on traditional behaviour, but also displayed new dimensions. Take, for example, the events in La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, a country town about forty miles east of Paris on the edge of Champagne, in late July 1789 in the midst of the wave of peasant uprisings called the Great Fear.46 The director of the carriage service, who was evidently a local entrepreneur connected to the mail and transport services out of Paris, was publicly challenged in the street by citizens who asked why he was not wearing the revolutionary cockade and whether he was for the Third Estate. His insolent reply that only boors and idiots accepted such stupidities did not please the bystanders. Shortly after, an angry crowd armed with axes and pitchforks broke down the doors to his house and were on the verge of pillaging when he escaped out the rear, in the venerable tradition of many an earlier tax farmer. The crowds antagonism then turned to the postmaster, who was closely associated with the director. A crowd of 150 shop boys and day labourers (probably the proverbial children of earlier reports) dragooned a local judge into
45 Tackett, Women and Men in Counterrevolution, 687. Many similar attempts to restore the non-juring clergy are described in Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, 1990), 189. See also Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, 1986), 16577. 46 Letters published by Marc Bouloiseau in Revue historique de la Revolution francaise, xxxi (1960), 2047.
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performing an ofcial inspection of the mans house for hidden stocks of grain. They sold what little they found in the market at a low price and delivered the proceeds back to him. The forced search of the attics of the well-off was a standard demand of rioters through the centuries. Another grain riot! But suspicions lingered. Soon the postmaster was rumoured to have said that the people could live perfectly well on hay and kernels of alfalfa. There was cursing and blaspheming and people muttered that they should cut his head into pieces and parade his body around with a sheaf of straw in its place. He left town. The next day some of the protesters insisted that the mans wife serve up a meal for forty persons. Not daring to antagonize them, she set up a table in front of their house and laid it out with platters of salted meat, bread and twenty bottles of wine. When their bellies were full they conceded that she had ransomed the head of her husband but they still wanted to parade him through town with a sheaf of straw on his stomach and a necklace of alfalfa around his neck. Here again there is more to the event than just a grain riot. The pattern of violence was traditionally retributive: make extravagant threats; chase the enemy out of town; attack his house; demand compensation in the form of food and drink. But already in that rst July the demonstrators were using adherence to revolutionary symbolism (the cockade) as a new test of the loyalty of people who were already suspect by virtue of wealth or connections. Especially interesting is the nasty (but purely hypothetical) threat to decapitate the body and replace the head with straw, a characteristically rustic reminder of the terms with which the man had insulted the community.47 Offering lavish outdoor spreads of food and drink to the public was a traditional way of tying followers to a patron. These sorts of attacks on chateaux, feudal rights and noble prerogatives proliferated throughout the early years of the Revolution. Liberty trees planted, dovecotes demolished, privileged benches in churches shattered, crops belonging to seigneurs pulled up all these were expressions of traditional animosities translated into new language.48
47 The perpetrators may have been emulating the Parisian crowds murder of Foulon, whose head was paraded with straw in his mouth (see below). 48 For another good example of developing consciousness and organization, see David Hunt, The People and Pierre Dolivier: Popular Uprisings in the Seine-etOise Department (17911792), French Hist. Studies, xi (1979).
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A mixture of old and new can even be found in the storming of the Bastille. After the people had surged into the inner courtyard of the Bastille, their rst, and very traditional, impulse was to pillage: they entered the apartments, sacked everything, seized arms, threw the papers from the archives out of the windows, and pillaged everything.49 The removal of Commander de Launays surrendered forces from the fortress was carried out under a military escort. The account by one of the prisoners, Lieutenant de Flue, shows us what an angry crowd looked like:
The streets and houses and even the roofs were lled with an innumerable world of people who insulted and cursed me. Swords, bayonets and pistols were constantly thrust at my body. I didnt know which way I was going to perish but I was forever breathing my last breath. Those who had no weapons threw rocks at me; women ground their teeth and threatened me with their sts. Two of my soldiers had been assassinated behind me by the furious people . . . I nally arrived a hundred steps from the Hotel de Ville, amidst the general outcry that I should be hanged, when they brought in front of me a head stuck on a pike which they said belonged to M. de Launay.50
De Launay was believed to have given the order to re on the invaders. Jacques de Flesselles, the head of the Parisian provisional government, who was believed to have deceived the crowd when it was searching for arms, met a similar fate. This grotesque phenomenon of heads paraded ceremoniously on pikes, which, along with the guillotine, has been the very image of the Revolution in many peoples eyes, seems to have been entirely new. There are few known instances of heads paraded on pikes in earlier centuries. The heads of decapitated convicts were sometimes displayed at gallows or city gates by ofcial justice, and in a few cases heads on sticks were aunted as a sign of triumph over enemies. Hearts and livers were occasionally displayed. We have noted the alleged parading of Colignys head in 1572. But all these antecedents were exceptional and were designed to degrade and humiliate the victim.51
49 From the journal Les Revolutions de Paris, i, 17 July 1789, reproduced in Jacques Godechot, La Prise de la Bastille: 14 juillet 1789 (Paris, 1965), 413. 50 Quoted in Jules Flammermont, La Journee du 14 juillet 1789 (Paris, 1892), p. ccxxxix. 51 My request to the subscribers to H-France to help in locating other instances of heads on pikes before 1789 was not fruitful, despite the thoughtful replies of a number of historians. Matthew Vester provided an instance in 1571 in the back country of western Liguria, where a border feud between two towns led to militiamen from one impaling eight heads of rivals on spears and carrying them back to town mostly in order to win the rewards which had been promised. Jeff Horn recalled possible
(cont. on p. 99)
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The almost joyous parading of the heads of aristocrats in 1789 had a different effect. If we are to believe the account of Desnot, the unemployed cook who allegedly did the deed to de Launay, we can actually observe the transition from traditional retribution to revolutionary exaltation:
At that moment many persons refused to let de Launay go up the steps [to the Hotel de Ville]. Some said, we should cut off his head; others said, we should hang him [the traditional humiliation for a noble]; and still others said, we should attach him to the tail of a horse [i.e. a traditional dragging] . . . [De Launay is killed by blows and stabs from a bayonet] . . . People said, he is scum, a monster; he has betrayed us, he must be destroyed. When de Launay was dead, the people said: the Nation demands his head so that it can be displayed to the public so that they will not be ignorant of what has been done.52
This horror, which appeared on 14 July, the very day of symbolic liberation, seems to have made a tremendous impact on popular consciousness and became a recurrent motif of popular expression. A week later it was the turn of Bertier de Sauvigny, inten dant of Paris, and his father-in-law Foulon de Doue, both accused of contributing to the grain shortage. According to one account, Foulon, like the postmaster in La Ferte, had said that the people were made to eat hay. The crowd made his head on the pike kiss the head of his father-in-law at the Hotel de Ville.53 This aunting of heads as trophies seems to be an expression of a new kind of emotion. Against all odds and amidst great fears,
(n. 51 cont.)
instances in eighteenth-century Forez, Lorraine and Artois. Ronen Steinberg was kind enough to point me to the central essay by Regina Janes, Beheadings, Representations, xxxv (1991). Thanks also to Wolfgang Degenhardt, Elizabeth Marvick and Allan Tulchin for their responses. But, while there was an age-old tradition of displaying the heads of ones enemies as a declaration of triumph over them, this custom was very rare in early modern France. Regina Janes is closest in stressing the exuberance of the crowd and noting that when the rabble cut off the heads of the kings ofcers, they have redened themselves as the sovereign people: Beheadings, 242. There were comparable instances in other places, especially in Mediterranean Europe for example, the revolt of Masaniello in Naples in 1647, which saw the parading of the heads of the Caraffa brothers and later of the rebel Masaniello himself, along with dragging by children and mutilation: Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 2013. 52 Flammermont, La Journee du 14 juillet 1789, p. ccxli. Desnot bragged of the execution when testifying before commissioners at the Chatelet in 1792: Godechot, La Prise de la Bastille, 2978. The last phrase is ambiguous: sa tete, pour le montrer au public pour quil nignore pas ce quil a fait. Does the second il refer to de Launay or to le public? 53 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Bastille est prise: la Revolution francaise commence (Paris, 1988), 111.
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the crowd the people had won, but their joy was mixed with apprehension about the consequences to follow. This brazen move celebrated the crowds newly discovered power and challenged the hegemony of the usual authorities. To the artisanal crowd the violence involved in cutting off heads was probably no more disturbing than the traditional display of body parts after famous executions. The shock or joy, depending on which side one took, came from the realization that this act had been perpetrated by the menu peuple, that it was being aunted openly, and that the victims were centrally placed, powerful gures, not ordinary agents or tax collectors. Everyone could see that this was a dramatic, revolutionary challenge to the existing order by ordinary citizens. In a recent discussion of imaging the French Revolution, Warren Roberts and Lynn Hunt focus squarely on the issue addressed here. Examining three engravings showing the assas sination of Bertier de Sauvigny and Foulon de Doue, they criticize George Rudes rather benevolent view of the revolutionary crowd as made up of respectable citizens. The images, they argue, allow us to perceive the exuberant cruelty of a crowd out of control and an almost Freudian return of the repressed vision of atavistic revenge. Quoting the horror expressed by chroniclers such as Francois-Noel Babeuf and Restif de la Bretonne, they conclude that the artists creating the engravings capture the fundamental ambivalence that many people must have felt about the crowd as something not entirely rational . . . and yet a fact of revolutionary politics that simply could not be wished away. Here we meet the essential question of context. It is not surprising that Babeuf and Restif, as educated, cultivated citizens, saw these acts as barbarous and worthy of cannibals. These are enlightened men looking down on the populace below. But how did the people in the crowd experience it? I see little evidence in the engravings of the repugnance that we feel. This parading of heads like puppets may not have seemed that surprising to people in the streets. They may have been cheering, and the novelty may have been not the ugliness but the symbolic triumph of the people over detested men of power a combination of new revolutionary spirit and traditional appetite for retribution.54
54 Online discussion by Warren Roberts and Lynn Hunt, cited in Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary
(cont. on p. 101)
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This new ritual language was rapidly disseminated. As Sutherland put it, within days, children were imitating the grand event by parading the heads of feral cats they had killed on the ends of sticks.55 In the October Days the heads of two royal bodyguards killed by the crowd at Versailles were carried on pikes triumphantly back to Paris. Many heads were paraded in provincial cities in 1791 and 1792.56 Thus 14 July seems to represent a revolutionary watershed in popular ritual. This characteristic symbol of the Revolution was an expression of a new kind of liberation, not a throwback to barbaric ancient practices. Throughout the Revolution bread riots and local protests against a variety of abuses continued, in Paris and elsewhere. Sometimes they followed age-old patterns, sometimes they had more co-ordination and broader objectives. The many journees organized by consultation among section meetings which generated marches on the Tuileries or sieges of the Assembly were not traditional in our sense because they were planned political demonstrations designed to inuence national politics, not attempts to punish anyone. The uprisings of 12 Germinal and 1 Prairial, Year III (1 April and 20 May 1795) are examples of old forms put to new uses. They started with rumours that powerful parties were conspiring to hoard grain in order to starve out the menu peuple. On 12 Germinal, crowds of women and children gathered at bakeries, then marched on the Convention, invading the chamber, shouting for Bread! Bread! Like early modern crowds invading the meetings of town councils, they were demanding governmental intervention, but this time the crowd was demanding not retribution but a change of policy from a national body. On 1 Prairial, as the crowd was forcing its way into the Assemblys chamber, somebody red a shot that wounded elected deputy Feraud, who was at the podium opposing their entrance. Reacting impulsively, the crowd turned upon Feraud, nished him off and paraded his head on a pike, allegedly
(n. 54 cont.)
Crowd, Amer. Hist. Rev., cx (2005). Transcript at5http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/ imaging4. The images in question are nos. 2, 25 and 31. 55 Sutherland, French Revolution and Empire, 60. 56 Ibid., 77, 103, 140. See the gruesome cases of 6 September 1792 cited by Paul Nicolle, Les Meurtres politiques daoutseptembre 1792 dans le departement de lOrne: etude critique, Annales historiques de la Revolution Francaise, xi (1934), 97118, 21232.
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passing it around among the massed demonstrators. Bronislaw Baczko notes that the crowd seemed to behave in an almost carnival manner, and concludes that the crowd incorporated the plan into its own ritual of violence and reduced it to a simple fragment of a world upside down .57 This is another example of oversimplication. Baczko collapses the purposefulness and retributive impulse demonstrated by the crowd into the traditional stereotype that crowds were festive. While the ofcial Terror, that is the government run by the Committee of Public Safety from 1792 to 1794, is not our concern here, we need to consider the broader implications of popular revolutionary violence. Arno Mayer sees the atmosphere of the Terror as motivated by a combination of vengeance and fear and notes that it marked a resurgence of ancient rituals of avenging retribution. Patrice Gueniffey dismisses the collective and spontaneous violence which was often of extreme cruelty because it was punctual and localized, having no goal other than itself. Thus neither Mayer nor Gueniffey sees the crowd as anything more than a primitive, reactive force.58 In 1793 the Parisian atmosphere was permeated with the exuberant declarations of the sans-culottes, who demanded bread, price controls and vigilance against aristocratic subversion. Rethinking the classic analysis of Albert Soboul, William Sewell argues that these views of the so-called sans-culottes constituted a coherent political culture in which a secular belief in the abundance of nature and the right of everyone to share its bounty was inseparably linked to the conviction that conspirators were hoarding grain in a plot to overthrow the Republic. They repeatedly denounced these enemies as greedy egoists, bloodsuckers, monsters who devoured the people, or vampires enriched with the blood of widows and orphans.59
57 Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michael Petheran (Cambridge, 1994), 2389. 58 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, 2000), 179, 218; Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence revolutionnaire, 17891794 (Paris, 2000), 24. A parallel psychological approach which hints that the popular vengeance was related to past calls for ven geance and oaths of unity is Sophie Wahnich, De leconomie emotive de la Terreur, Annales HSS, lvii (2002), esp. 894, 907. 59 William H. Sewell Jr, The Sans-Culottes Rhetoric of Subsistence, in Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, iv, The Terror (Oxford, 1994).
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This conspiratorial vision pre-dated the Revolution. It was descended from what Steven Kaplan calls the famine plot persuasion, namely the belief that the king was responsible for the subsistence of his people and that shortages constituted proof that he was a conspirator in league with middlemen and proteers.60 Sewell thus sees a connection between sans-culotte ideology and Old Regime practices, and Kaplan traces the antecedents back to 1709.61 We can go back even further to the manifesto of the Grande Rebeine in 1529. Attacking middlemen as bloodsuckers was standard practice in early modern revolts. The hated nancier who extorted tax payments in the seventeenth century was considered somewhere between a wild beast and a heretic and his tax was seen as blood sucked by vampires or cannibals.62 But, as Sewell notes, the rhetoric of the sans-culottes was not a pure expression of artisanal culture, because it was appropriated by Jacobin factions in their battle to prevail over one another. In effect, the Terror represented another example of elite leaders trying to enlist and control popular followers by talking their language.63 The atmosphere of watchful suspicion and mutual recrimination that prevailed during the Terror recalls Paris during the siege of 1593, or Bordeaux in the thralls of the Ormee. Given this long history of informed popular involvement it is no surprise to nd popular groups following events closely, discussing among themselves who was responsible, and planning what was to be done. In this respect popular politicization was not new, although it was transformed by a completely different set of constitutional possibilities. As for the national representatives who ran the Revolution, they were as terried of the wrath of the populace as their early modern urban predecessors had been. When distasteful crowd violence saved the Revolution during journees such as the storming of the Bastille or the march on Versailles, the same leaders began to make excuses for the violence and to redene crowd behaviour
60 Steven L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., lxxii, pt 3, Philadelphia, 1982). 61 Ibid., n. 320. 62 Berce, Histoire des Croquants, 6245. The difference was that earlier protesters had rarely questioned the goodwill of the monarch, whereas eighteenth-century protesters were starting to do exactly that. 63 Richard Cobb discusses popular violence and elite manipulation in a similar passage: R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 17891820 (Oxford, 1970), 8593.
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as the heroic expression of a virtuous people. Later, when the Jacobins were in power and found themselves vulnerable to less friendly crowd interventions, they began to argue that, after all, the Paris crowd did not represent the whole people, and that good crowds were recognizable by the correctness of their choice of counter-revolutionary targets.64 The revolutionaries were, in effect, reinventing the experience of earlier factional leaders who had to rally popular backing for a programme that would not automatically generate support from their grass-roots followers, but they were wielding new ideological justications. Their historical predecessors had mobilized a combination of intimidation, festive jollity and slogan-making to bring out popular demonstrators who otherwise had ideas of their own. The Jacobins tried the same. Mona Ozouf describes the enthusiasm that swept the country in 1790 over the planning of local fetes de la federation and the sending of deputies to the national celebra tion in Paris. The emphasis was on federation, or coming together, which was a national version of the old striving for union by rebel factions throughout the Old Regime. The new union was a national union, creating bonds between people who had never before seen each other. The federe deputies from provincial towns were sent on what amounted to secular pilgrimages to represent their fellow citizens at the Paris festivities.65 Most Jacobin festivals, such as the famous one held in Paris on 10 August 1793, were too austere to appeal to popular sensibilities, although they must have been awe-inspiring experiences. Some of the more rustic provincial celebrations captured better the older spirit. Representations mimicking the old order and celebrating the new included women ogging statues of saints, priests dropping their robes to reveal sans-culotte attire underneath, and nuns dancing the carmagnole.66 These reincarnations of carnivalesque mockery were planned by ofcial organizations, using the ancient style of comic parody to win the allegiance of the population.
64 Colin Lucas, Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror, in Baker (ed.), French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, iv. 65 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 86; Peter Jones, Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared, 17601820 (Cambridge, 2003), 14362. 66 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 89.
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An important form of popular revolutionary involvement was the prison massacre, the classic instances being the 1792 September Massacres in Paris and their counterparts in other provinces.67 This systematic murder of prison inmates by crowds of virtually anonymous bystanders waiting outside the tribunal doors bears only a supercial resemblance even to the 1572 massacres. On St Bartholomews Day crowds believed that the king had commanded the extirpation of Protestants, and they went after individual families who were reputed to belong to a particular faith. One senses that at least they usually had their afliations right. In 1792 the victims were indiscriminately condemned by virtue of the simple fact that they were incarcerated together and associated with an imagined plot organized by aristocrats. The killings were improvised, immediate and brutal, carried out inside enclosed walls and not amidst the cheers of public crowds. However justied some of the fears may have been, there was none of the sequence of grumbling, rallying, expelling that characterized a retributive uprising. Furthermore, in September the perpetrators assumed a new active role of speaking for the nation as onthe-spot popular judges. The similar massacres in 1795 are easier to understand as collective revenge for prior killings. Once the Jacobins of the Terror had been overthrown, the revolutionary government began jailing former terrorists until they could be tried for their misdeeds. Angry citizens then went after them, either in the jail or during transport from one prison to another. In Lyon, Joseph-Antoine Boisset, envoy of the Convention, made a real effort to ensure fair trials. But he was confronted with a situation where every day bands of young men seized and assassinated a prisoner or attacked the mans property in the name of popular justice. On 4 May 1795 this agitation reached a climax when large crowds impeded the trial of Etienne Bonnard, a former member of the revolutionary committee of Vaise, who was hated for his denunciations of others and who was expected to get off with too light a sentence. Crowds of some 30,000 armed men broke into the prison and murdered a number of former Jacobin supporters.
67 See the classic analysis by Pierre Caron, Les Massacres de Septembre (Paris, 1935); and the critical modern study by Frederic Bluche, Septembre 1792: logiques dun massacre (Paris, 1986). See also Brian Singer, Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion, in Ferenc Feher (ed.), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990).
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Storming through the city, they attacked other prisons, setting one on re, murdered over a hundred people, and threw the bodies into the Saone.68 Nobody before 1789 had ever attacked a prison simply to kill its occupants. A variation on the revenge killing was the vendetta, which targeted particularly detested individuals.69 This phenomenon, often called the White Terror, shares similarities of cultural expression and behaviour with the culture of retribution. Of interest here are the smaller community-based movements. Small organized groups were targeting neighbours and countrymen, not alien intruders. The victims crime was to have violated unwritten rules of acceptable behaviour by condemning neighbours to death. Certainly we can agree, with Colin Lucas, that it is possible to discern in a great deal of counter-Jacobin violence a discourse upon Jacobinism couched in terms of the traditional society.70 Most attacks were aimed at individual offenders known personally to the attackers. On such occasions the bystanders, often women, might carry out extensive mutilation of the victims body, which would be dragged and dumped in a ditch, using the language of physical humiliation borrowed from the past. They recapitulated former community violence against citizen collaborators with evil outside forces. But the element of personal revenge and political side-taking was different.
III
CONCLUSION
The culture of retribution is a relatively loose concept encompassing a range of activities from small attacks on offending ofcials to highly ritualized draggings and hangings. Its merit is that it highlights a predilection on the part of common people to intervene actively when basic values seemed threatened. These protesters cannot be forced into a particular ideological mould or historical model. They intervened directly in matters that can only be called political to defend interests which were sometimes, by our standards, progressive, sometimes backward-looking and
68 69
` Renee Fuoc, La Reaction thermidorienne a Lyon (1795) (Lyon, 1957), 12236. My argument is based on that of Lucas in the articles cited. 70 Lucas, Themes in Southern Violence, 181.
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conservative. The people of early modern France were not primitives prone to brutality and violence, as pessimistic observers would have it, because much of their violence was measured and symbolic. Nor were they custom-bound dancers in a repetitive ballet of symbolic forms, as some more sympathetic studies suggest, because their tactics were politically informed and sensitive to particular circumstances. Festive ribaldry and carnival pageantry were unlikely to signify social protest. Charmed as we may be by the prospect of Lanturelu marchers in Dijon, symbolic races between animal kingdoms in Romans, or battles of Carnival and Lent, we must acknowledge that these activities were not usually vehicles for protest of a political sort. Such celebrations were effective in promoting collective feelings of solidarity or attempts to reintegrate an offender into the community, as in the practice of charivari, but they rarely led to genuine popular protest. Most often in such cases a group or party was attempting to rally support for itself. The real protesters were tough observers, ordinary men and women poised to intervene belligerently when threatened by intrusive forces whether progressive or backward-looking. If popular politics is understood to occur, as Andy Wood would have it, when power is reasserted, extended, or challenged, then much of the time they were political actors whose impact and degree of violence was conditioned by circumstances.71 The problems raised by Wood in assessing English grass-roots political interventions seem equally relevant here. We need more subtle distinctions between static rituals reinforcing existing power relations and political interventions from below taking place in many different contexts. The culture of retribution was only one kind of intervention, possibly one that was distinctively French. For centuries two impulses seem to have characterized the behaviour of French crowds: outrage at fundamental injustices, and the insistence on exacting retribution for treasonous complicity with such injustice. These traits were translated into movements containing a distinctive mixture of crude violence and moral purpose. They continued to appear wherever there were community groups capable of generating them and where repressive forces were not
71
Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, 16.
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developed enough to stop them.72 At the same time, as Wood notes in a recent article, the power structure within which common protesters operated limited their chances of success. Agency was limited by class.73 Violence and the threat of violence in the Old Regime belonged to a distinctive discourse that was still part of lived experience and that still prevailed during the Revolution. On the one hand, violent behaviour was nasty and real. Early modern people did not have our scruples. On the other hand, their threats cannot be taken at face value because they belong to a forgotten discourse of honour and shame, and much of the violence was verbal, not physical. Popular politics can be viewed in terms of levels of increasing sophistication. At the low end is a general alertness to local affairs affecting the well-being of ordinary inhabitants, combined with collective rallying to humiliate or expel anyone seen as the purveyor of unjust innovations. Slightly more developed are attacks that turn against compatriots or local authorities who are seen as complicit with innovations that are threatening and who are therefore considered traitors to the community. A higher stage of political involvement took the form of collective support for an organized faction which seemed to advocate popular causes. This faction might be just an expression of local rivalries or, ultimately, it might become a party promoting real issues. In a nal stage local issues could become linked to broader causes through groups like the Jacobin clubs, which provided connections between local rivalries and national movements. Collective action continued on many levels, from expulsions of perceived intruders, to conicts between factions, to formation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary clubs. To contemplate the Revolution from an early modern perspective is not to deny its dramatic, revolutionary break with the past. The triumph of the revolutionary crowd, the displaying of heads on pikes, the adaptation of violent practices to new circumstances, the infusion of original symbols and ideological messages into the motivations of crowds, the focus on the whole
72 For later examples, see Alain Corbin, Archasme et modernite en Limousin au ` XIX e siecle, 18451880, new edn, 2 vols. (Limoges, 1998), i, 495516. See also Nicolas Bourguinat, Les Grains du desordre: lEtat face aux violences frumentaires dans ` ` la premiere moitie du XIX e siecle (Paris, 2002). 73 Andy Wood, Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley, c.15961615, Past and Present, no. 193 (Nov. 2006).
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nation rather than local interests, all these were new, as everyone knows. But in assessing the violence it is worth remembering both the brutality and the restraint of past episodes and the many ways that common people intervened politically before the storming of the Bastille, and not just during grain riots. The same ongoing undercurrent of struggle between communities of stubborn individuals determined to defend their basic rights and authorities who fended off this threat by adjusting their message to court the populace continued after 1789. On both sides of the revolutionary divide, crowd behaviour consisted of a combustible mixture of indignation, selective violence and belligerent talk. Many of the Revolutions features can be imagined in terms of past practice. Both the violence and the atmosphere of fear created by the Committee of Public Safety had been experienced to a lesser degree during urban factional contests. The leaders of the Revolution were trying to change a world in which the population, in Paris and even more so in the many provincial towns and villages, was tough and demanding; in which crowds of otherwise respectable citizens had delighted in bloodthirsty threats and anatomically specic declarations of intentions; in which dragging of bodies and mutilation of corpses were easily taken in stride. They had their hands full, and their failings should not be blamed entirely on ideological stubbornness or the emptiness of revolutionary aspirations. Meanwhile, the popular crowd had its own agenda. The difference between earlier instances of collective action and the revolutionary instances lay in the new meaning which revolutionary participants attributed to the exercise of violence. Its purpose had changed from ritual humiliation of scapegoats who were stand-ins for a particular abuse, to the political elimination of rivals viewed as traitors to a national cause. Before and during the Revolution, protesting crowds adapted their protests to the prevailing conditions and took up new slogans as times changed, but they continued to defend their immediate interests whether their opponent was the opposite confession, the lord, the tax collector, the king or the Jacobin club. What they learned in the Revolution that was new was that systems could be changed, and local issues and local feuds could be fought in terms of broader ideological issues. Elite leaders also organized factional movements by invoking popular concerns and tapping into the energy derived from
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popular rage in order to mobilize support for their claims to power. The Terror was new, but it too was built upon longstanding urban traditions of factions forming around leaders and stereotyping their opponents, while embracing symbols of membership and trying to inculcate solidarity by oaths of unity even as they expelled or persecuted the other side. Nobody would argue that the leaders of the Year II were the same as the Parisian ligueurs,74 or the ormistes of Bordeaux. But their fear of rivals, their tactics of intimidation and their play for popular support are less surprising if we remember the many factional conicts of the past. The Revolution was indeed revolutionary, but its factional rivalries and popular interventions were grounded in practices that had endured for centuries. Emory University William Beik
74
The reference is to the control of Paris by the so-called Paris Sixteen in 15914.

Violence of The French Crowd

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THE VIOLENCE OF THE FRENCH CROWD FROM CHARIVARI TO REVOLUTION*

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PAST AND PRESENT

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