Violence of the French Crowd

THE VIOLENCE OF THE FRENCHCROWD FROM CHARIVARI TO

REVOLUTION*

WhencommonpeopleprotestedinearlymodernFrance, theyem-ployed language and behaviour that strike us as violent and de-structive. Peasants, craftsmen, labourers, women, even childrenresorted tocollectiveviolence.Houseswere tornapart, authoritiesthreatened, scapegoats beaten and dragged through the streets.How are we to evaluate these actions? Any attempt requiresimaginative reconstruction of rioters’ intentions based on titbitsof information gleaned from many sources. In the best of cases wehave reports from several observers with differing points of view,permitting a sort of triangulation of the evidence. Occasionally wehave transcripts of the testimony of rioters in judicial interroga-tions,asrecordedbyunsympatheticscribes.Theonlywaytoarriveat the intentions of the demonstrators is to piece together cluesfrom their slogans, assertions and gestures, and combine themwith the logic suggested by a carefully reconstructed sequence ofevents. When common expressions or parallel tactics and targetsappear repeatedly in different times and in multiple revolts, confi-dence grows that there is a decipherable language involved.

Historians have followed divergent paths in dealing with thiskind of evidence. Some have made a sympathetic attempt to inter-pret the violence of the crowd as a crude but understandable wayof influencing decisions vital to the protesters’ survival. Excludedfrom active participation in political decisions that fundamentallyaffected their lives, and unable to devise any broader societal strat-egy for lack of perspective and information, so the argument goes,crowds drew on traditional cultural resources. They expressedtheir discontent through language and gestures borrowed fromcarnival rituals when the world was temporarily ‘turned upsidedown’ and from charivaris against neighbours. They perceived

* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Institute of HistoricalResearch, University of London (2003), at the James Vann Seminar of EmoryUniversity (2004) and at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry of Emory (2006). Iam grateful to the participants for their helpful comments, and especially to MillieBeik, John Cole, David Hunt, Judith Miller and Gyan Pandey for their suggestions.

Past and Present, no. 197 (Nov. 2007) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007

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their interests in traditional, stereotypical terms thatevokedmythsof a prior golden age or a ‘land of Cockaigne’.1 Other historianshave taken a much more sceptical view of this folkloric interpreta-tion and have focused instead on the primitive brutality of pop-ular protests, or the multiplicity of the motivations of members ofthe crowd, or their vulnerability to elite manipulation. Confronta-tions could be bloody and nasty. Authorities were beaten to death,bodies disembowelled, property ruthlessly smashed and ruined.Somecriticsdistinguishbetweendifferentkindsofcrowds, suchasthoseofbreadriots, taxriotsandriotsagainstmaraudingsoldiers.2

In the past a major debate raged over the degree of spontaneity inpopularprotests,withsomecriticsclaimingthat theywereautono-mous and others that they were instigated behind the scenes byupper-class leaders.3 Certain recent studies criticize the assump-tion that crowds had common purposes or argue that riots hadmultiple meanings not related to the class interests of thedemonstrators.4

When I was studying seventeenth-century urban protests, I wasstruck by one feature that was often left in the background bycommentators focusing on the objective of the protest.5 Groupsof relatively disenfranchised individuals from the middle to lowerranks of a local community, but lacking any formal institutionalidentity, would mobilize either spontaneously or after informalmeetings and discussions, to attack an abuse of power by those inauthority. I called such a movement an expression of the ‘cultureof 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 Cul-ture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysansde Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966), i, 405–14; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival inRomans, 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 Mousnier–Porchnev debate, see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Venality of Office andPopular Sedition in Seventeenth-Century France’, Past and Present, no. 37 (July1967).

4 John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The ColchesterPlunderers (Cambridge, 1999); David Martin Luebke, His Majesty’s Rebels: Com-munities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (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 ofRetribution (Cambridge, 1997).

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crowd’s desire to punish the authorities for abuse of power. Thisaspect was shared by riots with a variety of other objectives andtrajectories. The element of vengeance distinguishes the ‘cultureof retribution’ from E. P. Thompson’s concept of the ‘moral econ-omy of the crowd’ in that it highlights the desire to punish theaudacity or negligence of people who should have known better,whereas the moral economy emphasizes the crowd’s reimpositionof traditional norms and procedures.6 This popular impulse topunish was certainly primitive, but nevertheless it seemed to bepolitical in the sense that it was a commentary by protesters on thebehaviour of people of higher status who should have taken morecare in looking out for the needs of the lesser members of thecommunity. Like the ‘moral economy’, it was an expression ofmoral outrage. But what was distinctive in these French instanceswas the vindictive aspect. The riot was not simply an attempt tooppose a novelty or correct an abuse. It was a focused and verydynamic move to humiliate or harm the responsible parties.

Most of these riots were started by popular crowds. But therewas another kind of riot, which was organized or fomented by in-stigators who did not belong to the crowd of angry demonstrators.These ‘factional conflicts’ were urban movements led by identifi-able leaders, who put forth programmes and slogans and orga-nized public demonstrations. They tended to represent a group ofpeople rather than an issue. They had chiefs who were sociallyinfluential and their membership included a cross-section of localsociety. Sometimes they were loyal to a particular noble; some-times they were ‘syndicates’ organized to intervene legally againsttheactionsofthecitygovernment.Theycouldbegroupsmanoeuv-ring to take over control of a city from a rival faction in power.Factional movements are an essential part of the story becausethey looked spontaneous, but they were actually fomented.7

This essay is an attempt to follow the concept of the culture ofretribution forward and backward in time. I explore the role of theretributive impulse in other circumstances and other centuriesand examine the meaning of the violence in these early modern

6 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the EighteenthCentury’, in The Essential E. P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York, 2001).See alsoCynthiaA. Bouton,The FlourWar: Gender,Class andCommunity inLate AncienRegime French Society (University Park, 1993); Judith Miller, Mastering the Market: TheState and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1999).

7 Beik, Urban Protest, ch. 8.

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collective actions. Then I pose the question whether the well-known violence of the Revolution would look different if seenfrom the perspective of the long-standing traditions of popularprotest. I do not offer new research on the revolutionary crowd,but simply an inquiry into how the revolutionary crowd mesheswith the centuries-long experience of popular protest and whatthis might tell us about the Revolution itself. To cover this vastterrain, I juxtapose instances of many types from many times andplaces. I describe a few cases in detail and then mention manyothers briefly to bring out similarities. The point is to highlightelements they had in common, not to deny or ignore the manyways that riots differed in purpose and form.

I

A TRADITION OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN EARLY

MODERN FRANCE

Collective violence can be defined as social interaction involvingthreatened or real physical damage to persons or property, car-ried 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 ofthe broader category of collective action. It was generated in localcommunities that had some sort of social coherence and ongoingsociability, whether they be rural villages or neighbourhoods incities. It involved relatively focused action, limited in time anddirected at attacking people who were to be punished for activitiesof an official or public nature that were perceived as being corrupt.When crowds rallied to protest an abuse they often acted uponprior commonly held beliefs concerning the wrongness of thethreat they faced. Their behaviour could fall into patterns learnedfrom common talk or previous experience.

Let me elaborate by examining a specific case. It takes place inSisteron in Provence in 1618 upon the arrival of Francois Alby deBresc, a judge from the Chambre des Comptes of Aix, who wascoming to enforce court orders about the imposition of a newexcise tax. The tax had already caused a stir in other towns and

8 Definition adapted from Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence(Cambridge, 2003), 3–4. See also Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and CharlesTilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001).


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the city fathers of Sisteron had already launched several appealsagainst it.Thegeneral population had therefore hadample time togrumbleover this intrusionand to talkaboutwhat shouldbedone.Their righteous indignation over the injustice of the tax was bol-stered by the fact that the local authorities had themselves alreadyquestioned its legitimacy. Here is an account of what happenedwhen de Bresc appeared:

Men, women and children left their work in the fields and massed outsidetheSaunerieGate.Theyfollowedtheman,throwingrocks,utteringthreatsandlettingoutinsultingcatcalls.WhendeBrescandhispartyhadarrivedatthe inn where they were to stay, they were besieged by a great number ofpeople. Their horses were removed from the stable. The doors, walls andfloors of the building were smashed with hatchets and hammers. About9 p.m. just after the gentleman had escaped through a breach in the wallwith the aid of the consuls, he was seized by the people, thrown on theground, beaten with blows from rocks and clubs, dragged by his feetthrough the streets, had his clothes torn and ruined and his moneystolen. 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, apredictable but probably unintended consequence. This devel-opment transformed a rough attempt to intimidate tax agents intoa serious offence against the king’s sovereign justice. The localauthorities, who might well have sympathized with the movementto oppose the new tax, were now in a difficult spot. Their fellowcitizens expected them to support this movement, or at least turna blind eye, but the city council was responsible to higher author-ities for maintaining law and order. The consuls turned defensiveand began to denounce the rebellion, while sending assurances ofco-operation to the commissioners coming from the Parlementof Aix to investigate the situation. Feeling betrayed by their ownofficials, the angry protesters then turned their anger againstthem. They cornered the authorities and their elite supporters,viewed now as the enemy, in the city hall, and occupied the streetsand gates while angry citizens cried out ‘that if the commissionersentered the city they would kill them and everyone who aidedthem’.10

This episode contains the classic symptoms of the culture ofretribution. A community is inflamed by prior discussions aboutthe injustice of some new procedure. They watch fearfully for the

9 Archives departementales des Bouches-du-Rhone, Marseille, B 3287.10 Ibid. See also the analysis in Rene Pillorget, Les Mouvements insurrectionels de

Provence entre 1596 et 1715 (Paris, 1975), 284–300.


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arrivalof an individual fromoutside thecommunitywho iscomingto institute the dreaded measure. This man and his task take onalmost mythical stature in the minds of the townspeople. His pres-ence is an intrusion which insults and threatens the communityby undermining a fundamental principle involving survival. Theimmediate impulse is tohumiliateandexpel thispersonificationofbad faith and ill will. Later the crowd turns against local citizens orcity officials 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 fierce collective sense of anger andbetrayal. Acouncillor from theParlementof Dole who confrontedsuch a crowd in 1668 described the participants’ disturbing mix-ture of deference and defiance:

They all received me with acclamations of ‘Vive le Roy’ . . . but at the sametime they were uttering threats against the traitors and against anyone whotried to prevent [the crowd] from killing them. One said, ‘let’s go andattack so-and-so’; another, ‘he will die only by my hand’; a third, ‘it’slong overdue’. All of them were breathing nothing but vengeance, and itwas no longer a matter of pillage but of killing.11

Note the focused rage of these rioters. They did not have theslightest thought of attacking this particular citizen, whom theyrespected, but at the same time they were expressing their con-tempt for particular guilty parties through the violence of theirlanguage. Their mood was shifting from pillage to murder.

These last examples illustrate a feature of my analysis. I havejuxtaposed a riot in Sisteron in 1618 with a riot in Dole in 1668because the Dole incident offers details that suggest what a crowdlike the one in Sisteron would have been saying and doing. Ofcourse there is no reason to connect the two incidents. In order tobe valid, this leap requires the assumption that French urbancrowds shared a broader common culture or that similar circum-stances produced similar results. These protests occurred overmany different issues in many different places, and their distribu-tion in time and space was uneven. It is well known that the period1600 to 1660 was notable for its tax rebellions, that the 1560s and1570s were filled with religious violence and that the eighteenthcentury was notable for its grain riots. There were reasons for

11 Jules Chifflet, Memoires, in Memoires et documents inedits pour servir a l’histoire de laFranche-Comte, vi (Besancon, 1868), 299. Thanks to Darryl Dee for pointing me tothis source.


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these differences of timing and location, but they do not concernus here. We need to focus on the forms of violence that weresimilar, not the circumstances that were different. I list someexamples, not in chronological order but where they fit in logicallyas an illustration of a type of behaviour which could be consideredto be political.

First, one better-documented example is worth exploring: theuprising in Lyon in 1529 called the ‘Grande Rebeine’.12 Like somany other popular disturbances, the Rebeine has been pre-sented by commentators as essentially a grain riot.13 This is un-derstandable. Ever since the summer of 1528 the city had facedan impending grain shortage. There had been a series of prelim-inary protests and incidents concerning grain prices throughoutthe autumn. During the riot the crowd stormed the municipalgranary and carried off sacks of grain. The next day they marchedout of the city and invested an abbey on the Ile Barbe where grainwas stored. They were finally dispersed by 120 armed men whohad been assembled by the city.

A grain riot it certainly was. But invoking this familiar termtends to neutralize the event by fitting it into a safe, predictablecategory. High prices, shortages, then rioting: these announce‘grain riot’ and set off expectations of a certain sequence ofevents. But let us look further. On 14 April 1529 a manifestoappeared on city walls:

Let it be known to all the people of the commons (commune) of the city ofLyon, especially those who wish to support the public good and repulsethe evil fury of the deceptive usurers: see how the scarcity of grain iscrushing us when we don’t deserve it, because of their attics full ofgrain, which they want to sell only when they are ready, which is notreasonable . . . Pretending to act fairly, our governors and councillors,who are usurers and crooks, are scalping us day by day, until you cansee before your very eyes a coming shortage of grain and other foodstuffs,which is vile and scandalous. Following the example of other cities, thewhole commons should intervene to make this thing right. Threshingwheat 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 Bibliothequehistorique du Lyonnais: memoires, notes et documents, 6 vols. (Lyon, 1886–8), i, 233–96,358–83, 417–39.

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 manquentde pain’: Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siecle: Lyon et sesmarchands, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971), ii, 771. For Francoise Bayard, ‘la premiere grandeemeute frumentaire eclate en 1529’: Francoise Bayard, Vivre a Lyon sous l’AncienRegime (Paris, 1997), 177.


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accursed usurers and to those who have grain reserves which drive up theprice. Know that we are from four to five hundred men and that we areallied. We make it hereby known to all the above-mentioned commonsthat they should gather on Sunday afternoon at the Cordelier monasteryto consult with us as to how to impose order and proper regulations, and todo it without fault, for the benefit and profit of the poor commons of thiscity of Lyon and for me, [signed] THE POOR [MAN].14

This remarkable document is more complex than a call for afford-able grain. Its anonymous authors are angry and want to mobilizethe community. They have an analysis: the problem is not dearthbut selfish hoarding, without which there would be enough grainto go around. They also offer a solution — not a distribution ofgrain or the regulation of prices aswemight expect, but an implicitpunishment of the ‘usurers’ and ‘crooks’. They evoke the ‘com-mune’, the medieval ideal of a union of citizens for the commongood, but it is little more than a rhetorical device. Perhaps theircall for a popular rally at the Cordelier monastery of St Bonaven-ture can be taken as a plan for a real meeting: this was in fact atraditional meeting place for city affairs. More likely it was justa way of calling for insurrection. They could have launched areform movement. They might have launched a legal appeal ortried to depose the city council. Instead, the manifesto hints thatthe 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 squarein front of the Cordeliers. They broke into the monastery, rangthe tocsin for several hours and pillaged the premises. They brokedoors and windows, smashing furniture, dishes and other things.The crowd then went next door to the house of SymphorienChampier, a distinguished doctor and humanist, whose posses-sions were also thoroughly pillaged. They attacked ‘doors, win-dows, glass, chests, tables, wardrobes, and carried off books,papers, beds, linen and other furnishings’. They went on to thenearby residence of Pierre Morin, a rich merchant, where theycarried off a quantity of grain from the attic and emptied thewine cellar, drinking large quantities and dumping the rest inthe street. Then on to the properties of Laurent du Cornal andthe Gimbre brothers, and to the Hotel de Ville, where they threat-ened the keeper of the city archives. The governor of the city,

14 Archives municipales, Lyon, BB 47, cited by Guigue and Guigue, ‘La GrandeRebeyne’, 233.


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deTrivulce, a favouriteofKingFrancis I,wasfiredat and forced toflee to the safety of the Celestine convent. Finally everyone con-verged on the building where the city kept its weights and mea-sures, the upstairs of which was the municipal granary, newlystocked by the city. Pillagers ripped open the bins and sent thegrain pouring out into the street, where it was gathered up byonlookers and carted off in aprons, sacks and shirts.

Why all this angry destruction that fits the grain riot paradigmpoorly? A new thesis by Jean-Henri Etienney finally answersthe question.15 This was political anger, retaliation for a year oftreacheryon thepartof themerchant-speculator leaderswhowereknown to have struck deals to profit from the export of grain.Champier, the noted humanist doctor, was on the city counciland had recently advocated a tax on wine that was viewed asunfair to the poor. Du Cornal and the Gimbre brothers weregrain speculators who had sold out the city by exporting Burgun-dian grain destined for Lyon. The Cordelier monastery was thefavoured resting place for the tombs of the great families of thecity. The abbey on the Ile Barbe was the storage place for grainspeculators. Thus the riot was about grain, but, as the manifestoclearly stated, it was the mishandling and profiteering thatangered the populace.

Several days later, perhaps because of admonitions by the con-suls, or fears of recriminations, people from the crowd beganturning in their booty. Over a hundred persons, including manywomen and children, testified before the consuls.16 Witnessesreported seeing Jean Muzi, apparently a former soldier, dressedin ‘doublet and hose’ (some sort of uniform) leading his two sonsand a band of followers from house to house. This band addressedMuzi as ‘captain’; he presided over the scene while they pillaged.When they had finished at the house of Jheronime Lievre, Muziwas heard to say, ‘everything is done in there, let’s go to MasterLaurens’s house where we will eat lots of pate’.17

Antoine Poynot, vinegar maker, was attending a sermon at thehotel-Dieu when the tocsin was heard ringing. He reported thatpeople had said to one another, ‘it must be the commons settingout against the fat hoarders’ — interesting evidence that the riot

15 Jean-Henri Etienney, Ordre et desordre dans une cite de la Renaissance: Lyon et leconsulat lyonnais (vers 1520 . . . vers 1555) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2002).

16 Guigue and Guigue, ‘La Grande Rebeyne’, 262–77.17 Ibid., 278–81.


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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 friendshad been discussing ‘the placards posted around the city againstMonsieur the governor and messieurs the justices and council-lors’, when another mason, Guillot Jardin, said that his brother-in-law had been involved in posting them. Louise, wife of a ribbonmaker, brought in three pewter platters, a shroud, pieces of cloth,a silk collar and other items which she said had been thrown in herdoorway by a person fleeing down the street.

All these descriptions tell us that the Grande Rebeine of Lyonwas primarily about retribution and secondarily about access tograin. Someone was agitating and planning a protest. Some of theperpetrators, probably artisans, possibly masons, were literateand knew what was going on in other cities. A vindictive attackon the property of local leaders set the stage for a grain riot inwhich a broad range of people joined in emptying the municipalstocks. This focused, political, anger lay behind many of France’sriots, regardless of the immediate objective of the disturbance.

Let us examine rapidly some other incidents. In Lyon in 1436the imposition of aides and gabelles, from which the city believeditself to be exempt, caused several months of crisis. More than athousand demonstrators attacked first the tax-collection agents,then the city officials who had allowed this abuse to take place,and ultimately certain wealthy citizens who were perceived as notpaying their fair share of city taxes. Houses were pillaged andseveral people were killed. In 1461 in Angers crowds rose upagainst the royal officers who were said to have brought commis-sions for illicit taxes. For three days they went from house to housewhere the officers were lodged and smashed everything with largeclubs.18 In 1477 in Dijon the transfer of the city’s allegiance fromthe duchy of Burgundy to Louis XI of France occasioned angrycrowds of artisans and labourers, who murdered the presidentof the Parlement and pillaged the houses of three or four othernotables, all accused of betraying the city by collaborating with

18 Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, MS fr. 16626, fos. 215–21, 206–14,198–205; Rene Fidou, ‘Une revolte populaire a Lyon au XVe siecle: la Reybeyne de1436’, Cahiers d’histoire, iii (1958); Nicole Gonthier, ‘Acteurs et temoins des Rebeyneslyonnaises a la fin du Moyen Age’, in Revolte et societe: actes du IVe colloque d’histoire aupresent, Paris, mai 1988, 2 vols. (Paris, 1989), ii; Andre Leguai, ‘Emeutes et troublesd’origine fiscale pendant le regne de Louis XI’, Le Moyen Age, lxxiii (1967), 451–8.


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France.19 Examples multiply as we move forward in time.Confrontations between Protestants and Catholics providednew opportunities. In 1589 the first president of the Parlementof Toulouse, Duranti, was murdered because he was perceivedas a defender of Henri III’s assassination of the duc de Guise.Duranti’s body was dragged through the streets, then hangedfrom 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 thefinancial backers of a hated new tax.20 The seventeenth centurysaw many serious popular revolts which are too well known todetail here.21

For the eighteenth century the findings of Jean Nicolas and hisresearch team have shown that the range of possibilities was muchbroader than just subsistence riots. Of 8,528 incidents between1661 and 1789, 39.1 per cent were over issues of taxation, 17.6per cent over subsistence and 14.1 per cent against judicial orgovernmental agents.22 Of course these cases varied greatly inmagnitude and importance, but many of them had retributivedimensions. To cite only one example, in 1737 in the village ofCereix-Saint-Joseph-de-Nay in the Auvergne, the town and theseigneur were engaged in an ongoing legal dispute over the revis-ing of the terrier. When a process server and several guards ap-proached the village with legal papers, they were met with shouts

19 There is some indication that there was agitation by Burgundian agents, althoughthe behaviour of the crowd seems authentically popular. A. Voisin, ‘La ‘‘Mutemaque’’du 26 juin 1477: notes sur l’opinion a Dijon au lendemain de la reunion’, Annales deBourgogne, vii (1935).

20 Dom Claude Devic and Dom J. Vaissete, Histoire generale de Languedoc, new edn,15 vols. (Toulouse, 1876–89), xii, 43. See also Mark Greengrass, ‘The Sainte Union inthe Provinces: The Case of Toulouse’, Sixteenth Century Jl, xiv (1983), 483–5; NicolasDare, ‘Memoires et livre de famille de Nicolas Dare’, in Collection de documents ineditsrelatifs a la ville de Troyes et a la Champagne meridionale publies par la Societe academique del’Aube, iii (Troyes, 1886). See the account in Beik, Urban Protest, 54–7.

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 de1639 (Paris, 1970); Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-Century France: The Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton, 1978); Charles Tilly, TheContentious French (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Two additional instances are the pan-carte revolts in Poitiers in 1601 and Limoges in 1602: see S. Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IVand the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society,1589–1610 (Cambridge, 1999), 143–55.

22 Jean Nicolas, La Rebellion francaise: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale,1661–1789 (Paris, 2002), 36. This is a magnificent 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 angryvillagers tried to break in the doors and windows, then they fledacross a stream, ‘beaten all over their bodies’ and pursued by ‘thepopulace of both sexes’. Also strikingly familiar in style was therioting in Paris in 1750 over the kidnapping of children. Parisiancrowds spoke belligerently, targeted the police and attackedbakers and grain markets. Arlette Farge notes that they alsoexpressed disillusionment with the king.23

What was the nature of the violence that appears in all theseprotests? An example from a slightly different context suggestssomething of the intense moral indignation that led to retribution.Robert Muchembled cites an incident in 1477 in which an iratepeasant near Hesdin confronted soldiers who were pillaging hisvillage, saying ‘that they hadn’t left as much as a loaf of bread or apate for them or their wives and children, and that they had evensearched the bed of a woman who was recovering from childbirthand that the king had certainly not ordered that!’ This burst ofrighteous indignation might show us the emotions felt by rioters.Crowds were saying not just ‘this is wrong’ but ‘this is against therules of proper government’.24

The violence in these riots is hard to evaluate. These demon-strators undoubtedly had a tolerance of physical violence whichwe do not share. The stress and insecurity of a hard life played arole in shaping people’s emotional state and their perceptions ofacceptable behaviour. The level of indifference to blood and phys-ical assault must have been higher in an age when brawls, violentcontests 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 hadformally announced that he was going to restore his honour bymaking his adversary’s life miserable, the community considered

23 Ibid., 176; Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumorand 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), 109–21; Steven L. Kaplan, ‘TheParis Bread Riot of 1725’, French Hist. Studies, xiv (1985); David Garrioch, TheMaking of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002), ch. 5.

24 Robert Muchembled, L’Invention de l’homme moderne: sensibilite, mœurs et compor-tements collectifs sous l’Ancien Regime (Paris, 1988), 18. For an eighteenth-centuryperspective, see Arlette Farge, La Vie fragile: violence, pouvoirs et solidarites a Paris auXVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1986), 201–18.


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it perfectly honourable to ambush the opponent, attack him withknives or clubs and bring along one’s brothers and cousins to beathim up. At least in the Midi, public opinion perceived the insult asjustification for the response and thought that if ‘he had it comingto him’ there was no such thing as excessive force.25

This sensibility carried over to collective incidents. Scathing in-sults and vicious threats were the collective version of defence ofpersonal space.26 In 1767 fifty Burgundianvillagers, men, womenand young girls, attacked the tax-collection agents of the monks ofthe abbey of Cıteaux, throwing rocks, brandishing farm imple-ments and shouting ‘there they are, the dogs; let’s kill them anddisembowel them with our pitchforks’. In Arras in 1688 eighthundred people gathered in front of the office of tax sub-farmerCottet, crying ‘there he is! Knock his wind out, slit this thief’sthroat!’ They pushed around his wife and clerks, smashed all hiswindows with rocks, tore down the panel displaying the royalinsignia from the facade and ripped it into pieces, which theyparaded triumphantly through the town for hours. In 1707 a vil-lage defending forest rights which belonged to an abbey met theiragents with clubs, pitchforks and hatchets, shouting that theywanted nothing to do with ‘justice, monks, or devils’, and warningthat ‘the first monk they encountered would have his balls cut offand posted on the gate of the abbey’.27

These extravagant threats are noteworthy precisely becausenot a single one of them was carried out. The worst vows to muti-late, disembowel, or drag and dump, or to pillage or burn houses,smash possessions, tear up trees and crops, or kill animals, allserved excellently as insults without needing to be realized. Theywere effective because they were designed to humiliate and de-grade, and in a society that valued personal honour highly, insultshumiliated just as successfully as concrete actions by treating the

25 Yves Castan, Honnetete et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715–1780) (Paris,1974), 182–5. Official violence was also brutal: David Nicholls, ‘The Theatre ofMartyrdom in the French Reformation’, Past and Present, no. 121 (Nov. 1988). Thefamous 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 collectiveviolence presented here. An important new study by Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violencein Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006) offers extensive evidence of ritual mutilationsand draggings in combats between nobles, raising further questions concerning therelationship between noble violence and popular violence.

26 Steven G. Reinhardt, Justice in the Sarladais, 1770–1790 (Baton Rouge, 1991),161–213.

27 Nicolas, La Rebellion francaise, 178, 70, 156, respectively.


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designated parties as if they were beggars, thieves and scoundrelsor by evoking symbolic mutilation, lowering of status and debase-ment. This kind of insulting rhetoric was common in all revolts,but few of the threats were acted upon. In fact, many of the mostdramaticepisodesofpopularcrueltymaybeexaggerationswrittenup after the fact by unfriendly observers far removed from theaction itself. For example, the details of the gruesome mutilationin Agen in 1635, which Le Roy Ladurie, Berce and I all featured inour studies of popular revolts, come solely from a journal keptfor several generations by the Malebaysse family, with no indi-cation of how much is hearsay or exaggeration.28 Violence wasusually symbolic. Most of the real cruelty, when it occurred, wasinflicted on corpses, not on living persons. Threats drew theirimpact from the intensity of the hatred that lay behind them andfrom everyone’s awareness that they could be translated intoaction at any moment.

Still, some violence was very real. When the crowd did actu-ally capture someone considered deserving of their full fury, theeffect could be devastating, and the violence sometimes followedstandard ritual patterns. In 1675 Bordeaux experienced simmer-ing popular rage over the imposition of new taxes on commonitems of consumption. On the day the collections were to begin,a virtual army of demonstrators pillaged the houses of two pewtermerchants suspected of having betrayed the community bypayingthe new tax on pewter. Their principal victim was a man who wasknown to be an agent of the intendant’s sub-delegate. This manwas beaten to death and then his mutilated corpse was dragged allthrough the city, from the popular neighbourhoods to the exclu-sive Chapeau Rouge district, on a symbolic itinerary past thedoors of various hated officials. The crowd rained blows onthe corpse on the doorstep of the intendant and then headed tothe residenceofVivey, theman’sallegedemployer.Vivey,whowasan affluent tresorier de France, had his townhouse sacked by thecrowd, while the mutilated body of his employee was immolatedinside Vivey’s private carriage in the courtyard of the demolishedmansion.29 This crowd was more violent than the one that sackedhouses in the Rebeine of Lyon, but the impulse to punish was

28 Beik, Urban Protest, 63–71; Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, i, 503–8;Berce, Histoire des Croquants, i, 323–7.

29 Beik, Urban Protest, 148–51.


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similar. In Lyon they attacked the property of complicit author-ities. In Bordeaux they carried out a more dramatic dragging of aman associated with the king’s direct agents.

This style of ritual punishment emerges most clearly during thereligious conflicts of the sixteenth century. Here a revolt with adifferent kind of religious objective nevertheless displays similarforms of behaviour. According to Natalie Davis and BarbaraDiefendorf, crowds were acting to purify their communities ofthe pollution caused by the opposite faith. But Denis Crouzethas a more apocalyptic interpretation.30 Believing that we canonly understand the motivations of crowds by deciphering the‘imaginaire’ or mental universe which was motivating them, hepaintsavividpictureof the terrifyingworld-viewof radicalpreach-ers and fanatical theologians who saw the Protestants as the veryembodiment of lust, avarice and evil. The most dramatic exampleis the treatment of the body of Admiral Coligny, murdered by theduc de Guise on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Left on the pave-ment, the corpse was paraded through the streets by children(probably a mixed crowd of youths), who tried to burn it, thendumped it in the river, where it seems to have stayed for severaldays. Some accounts say it was mutilated. According to anotheraccount,

the people were so enraged at the admiral that . . . they cut off his head, andthe person who did it stuck it on the end of a sword and, mounting onhorseback, carried it around the streets of Paris shouting loudly, ‘here isthe evil traitor who wanted to kill the king and ruin France and did somuch damage to the city of Paris’.31

Crouzet sees this attack through contemporary eyes as a miracu-lous act of God in which children, representing purity, were vio-lently carrying out the divine will. Despite the apocalyptic setting,it is difficult to agree. Coligny’s offence, as indicated by the shoutsquoted above, was treason and betrayal. The perpetrators mayhave seen themselves as agents of the Lord, but their behaviourdoes not signal this motivation.32

30 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence’, in her Society and Culture in EarlyModern France; Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Prologue to a Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris,1557–1572’, Amer. Hist. Rev., xc (1985); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: laviolence 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), 515–24; quotation from the chevalier de Gomicourt at p. 522.

32 The account by Claude Haton states that the crowd proclaimed Coligny’s crimesto 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 thecrowd attacked the body of the murdered marechal d’Ancre(Concini), the deposed favourite of Marie de Medicis, confirmthe impression that their angerwas secular and their message pun-ishment by humiliation.33 On that occasion several hundred riot-ers dug up the hastily buried body, dragged it around the streets,stopping at the traditional sites of executions, went through themotions of the official form of public penance called amendehonorable in front of the Bastille, where the popular prince ofConde had been incarcerated by Ancre, then dragged it back tothe front of the marechal’s residence on the rue de Tournon, cutoff its ears, nose and ‘shameful parts’, then burned it and threwthe remains into the Seine. Ancre was hated for abusing his influ-ence over the young king, ordering the arrest of Conde, andallegedly plotting to seize the throne. There was no religious issue.Yet the crowd’s behaviour was strikingly similar to that of themutilators of Coligny forty-five years earlier and the rebels ofBordeaux fifty-eight years later. And this time the crowd’s ritualhumiliation of Concini was celebrated in several hundred semi-official printed pamphlets and a series of striking engravings por-traying the steps of the body’s degradation.34 This was a deeplyingrained culturalpractice that mimickedofficial judicial practices.The fact that it was reproduced in published images suggests thatofficial sources at least sanctioned the degradation of Conciniafter the fact as a way of discrediting his supporters. It also showsthat this brutal ritual was fully understood by more eminentpeople. But it is hard to imagine officials actually organizing theevent, which appears to be an expression of popular justice.

(n. 32 cont.)

a conspirator against the king, [and a] predator of his country, and finally he wasburned in a small fire as a heretic and Huguenot’. Belatedly the Paris Parlementcondemned him as guilty of ‘lese-majeste against God and king’ and sentenced himto be dragged through the streets and hanged, his property confiscated and his prin-cipal residence razed to the ground. This sentence, apparently issued after the populardragging, illustrates the degree to which spontaneous popular rioters mimicked offi-cial justice and official justice endorsed some instances of popular justice. ClaudeHaton, Memoires, ed. Felix Bourquelot, 2 vols. (Paris, 1862), i, 680–1.

33 The former name of the marechal d’Ancre was Concino Concini. The parallelsbetween the treatment of Ancre and Coligny were discussed in Orest Ranum, ‘TheFrench Ritual of Tyrannicide in the Late Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Jl, xi(1980).

34 Helene Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire: l’opinion publique sous Louis XIII (Paris,2003), 323–72.


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Factional movements were different in nature. To prevail in aclosely knit community where there was no legitimate channelfor opposition groups to make their case, an ambitious groupneeded to rally support among the general population. Cleverleaders wooed the public by translating their message into a lan-guage of scapegoats and basic rights that would appeal to thecommon population. This was a co-option of the same languageused by popular protesters. A dissident movement might begin bylaunching legal appeals against the rivals in power, but they gen-erally ended up trying to bolster their public presence by takingdirect action. An example was the protracted struggle against thebishop in Albi in the 1640s which was led by a faction of notableswho felt left out. This group called themselves the ‘directors’.They put a laurel leaf in their hats, swore on a missal to remainunited, and marched in the streets to the sound of violins, shout-ing ‘liberty, long live Bages [the name of their leader] and thelaurel leaf’.35

Factional movements developed charisma. They had slogansand held festive events such as parades and banquets to woo pub-lic opinion. Unlike the serious, angry demeanour of retributivecrowds, they mocked playfully, often using festive symbolism of amore abstract, learned nature. Factional movements also madea point of their closeness — they swore oaths of loyalty, whichthey often referred to as a ‘union’ in the manner of the CatholicLeagues of the sixteenth century, and they invoked collectiveterms like ‘liberty’ and ‘commune’. This was an attempt toevoke the feeling of collective enthusiasm that was self-generatingin a real popular revolt. If they took up arms, they displayedmilitary-style organization, seizing key locations and challengingexisting power centres or provoking armed confrontations withenemy groups. More typically they terrorized their enemies byleaving ominous marks on their doors, drawing up lists of undesir-ables or uttering direct threats. The goal was not to humiliate aparticular offender as a retributive crowd would have done, but toexpel, as agroup,enemies belonging to the oppositeparty.36 Sincethese movements were often in opposition to the constitutedauthorities, they experienced a growing paranoia about their

35 Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS fr. 18601, fos. 297–300.36 Beik, Urban Protest, ch. 8.


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perilous position and engaged in increasingly aggressive actsagainst potential traitors.

Factional movements were part of the landscape in towns ofany size.37 An instructive example is the reform movement thattook place in 1514 in Agen. A group of notables was agitatingagainst the existing city council, which was trying to raise taxes torepair the bridge over the Garonne. This opposition group heldlarge public demonstrations and administered an oath in whichthe citizens swore to be loyal to the ‘commune’, by which theymeant their own movement. On 2 July ‘a thousand’ people gath-ered in the main square, ‘clapping their hands and saying loudly‘‘where are those thieves of consuls who want to put novel taxes ongrains, wines and other victuals?’’ ’ They seized the streets andtook over a general assembly meeting, where they sat in the seatsof the consuls and demanded to audit the books. Onlookers wereheard to mutter, ‘You thieves are trying to lay the gabelle on thepeople . . . where are these thieves of consuls? We will get themdead or alive; they will be hanged’. This was violent language butit was not a popular revolt. No real violence was committed andno houses were pillaged.38 The very fact of mass meetings andsworn oaths demonstrates that this was not a spontaneous popu-lar movement.

A factional movement combined leadership by elite figureswho understood the workings of government with a popular fol-lowing of demonstrators attracted by more immediate, practicalgrievances. Popular crowds were political in the sense of attempt-ing to influence decision-making and setting limits to whatthe authorities could get away with, although they had no broadervision of reform because their anger was directed against an im-mediate abuse personified by particular individuals. Factional

37 They played a part in the urban revolutions of the 1380s and innumerable smallermunicipal power struggles organized by prominent individuals. Pierre Bernadeau,bourgeois of La Rochelle, and his relatives seized the ramparts of La Rochelle in1614 and invaded the houses of their two leading opponents in the night, draggingthem out of their beds and expelling them from the city. Unlike popular rioters, thesesorts of elite conspirators made no secret of their identity. Philippe Wolff, ‘Les Luttessociales dans les villes du Midi francais, XIIIe–XVe siecles’, Annales ESC, ii (1947);Kevin C. Robbins, ‘The Social Mechanisms of Urban Revolt: A Case Study inLeadership 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 lajuridiction d’Agen dans leur contexte socio-economique’ (These de doctorat de 3emecycle, Universite de Toulouse, 1980), 1610–19. 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 andauthority. It is in their camp that we find parades, mummery,witty parodies of authorities, slogans, banners and symbols ofmembership.

It appears, in fact, that, contrary to the claims of many classicstudies, the presence of festive ritual was a clear sign that factionallobbying for popularity was taking place rather than autonomousprotest from below. Almost every well-known case in which thecrowd is supposed to be rebelling by using festive folklore comesfrom a source that is literary in origin, further removed from theaction than the administrative documents describing popularriots. Such literary accounts are tinged with the paternalism ofthe educated observer who, on the one hand, believes in the sim-plicity of the common crowd and, on the other, relishes the localcolour of the story.

The oaths of solidarity that were sworn in Albi and Agen werereplicated in similar movements in many places. They promoteda fierce loyalty to a cause, and in tense situations a loyalty oathcould be used as a litmus test for identifying traitors. In the Parisof 1589 the fact of being under siege and the feeling that subver-sion was close at hand led to a split community and induced para-noia on the part of the dissident government. The result was anatmosphere of terror. As contemporary Pierre de l’Estoile put it,‘in Paris one was not allowed to appear as anything other than aleaguer; persons of wealth were in danger of losing their lives andtheir property and exposed to the movements of a furious,aroused populace constantly incited to blood and carnage bythe monks and priests and preachers’.39 Violent threats of ‘tearingout hearts’ and ‘cutting in pieces’ proliferated. Waves of organ-ized repression swept the city.

The Ormee rebellion in Bordeaux saw the recurrence of a simi-lar phenomenon in 1652–3. Illegal meetings were held by largenumbers of modest citizens who were incensed at the bad gov-ernment of their city during the wars of the Fronde.40 They de-manded accountability from city governmental bodies, and called

39 Quoted in Elie Barnavi and Robert Descimon, La Sainte Ligue, le juge, et lapotence: l’assassinat du president Brisson (15 novembre 1591) (Paris, 1985), 189.

40 Robert Descimon and Christian Jouhaud, ‘De Paris a Bordeaux: pour qui court lepeuple pendant la Fronde (1652)’, in Jean Nicolas (ed.), Mouvements populaires etconscience social, XVIe–XIXe siecles: actes du Colloque de Paris, 24–26 mai 1984 (Paris,1985).


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on respectable citizens to band together under oath to bring aboutthese reforms. Challenged by attacks from the Parlement andthe municipal jurade, the Ormee organized parades and publicbanquets to win popular support. As tensions rose, it developedinto a militant party, led by two extremists, a minor legal func-tionary and a lawyer. Lists of ‘enemies’ began to circulate, includ-ing judges in the Parlement. Armed ormistes expelled fourteendignitaries from the city by force while two thousand supporterswearing elm branches in their hats marched through the aristo-cratic quarter past the houses of the proscribed. The ormistes drewup a loyalty oath which was used to flush out enemies. A govern-ment spy, Jacques de Filhot, describes how he was brought beforethe leaders of the Ormee. They held a pistol to his head and struckhim with their muskets. They also threatened to cut off his wife’snose, to hang everyone living on his street, and to burn his twohouses to the ground. But, typically, none of these threats wascarried out.41

II

COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN THE REVOLUTION

A look at the revolutionary crowd in the context of a longer earlymodern perspective suggests the need for some rethinking aboutthe nature of popular politics. In the classic works by GeorgeRude, the revolutionary crowd is seen as an advance over amore stereotypical, pre-revolutionary grain riot. Crowds onlybecame politically aware during the Revolution itself, and onlyby following upper-class leads: ‘it was through the parlements [in1787–9] that the Paris menu peuple learned their first politicallessons’, lessons which ‘were still rudimentary and skin deep’.42

He meant of course that the demonstrators had not yet arrivedat the full consciousness of a revolutionary class. Albert Soboulmade a similar argument about the mixed class position of thesans-culottes.43 These older experts have long been replaced by

41 L’Ormee a Bordeaux d’apres 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 andEngland, 1730–1848 (New York, 1964), 93.

43 Among the most perceptive treatments of crowds in the Revolution are essays byColin 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 ugli-ness of the revolutionary crowds. They emphasize an upsurge ofelemental violence and vindictive cruelty in which the sans-culottes were either expressing their inherent primitiveness oracting as dupes of revolutionary leaders. But in describing thisviolence revisionists too fall back on either the ‘primitive’ viewof pre-modern crowds or the ‘folkloric’ view. Patrice Higonnetconsiders Old Regime riots to have been ‘formulaic in both themodesty of their claims and in the ephemeral nature of theirachievements’. Lynn Hunt simply alludes to ‘Carnival masksand local saints’ as ‘traditional popular culture’. Francois Furetattributes mass action and intense fear of betrayal to a revolution-ary psychosis:

the action of the sans-culottes of 1793 is important not because it involveda ‘popular’ social group. . . but because it expresses in its chemically pureform, as it were, such revolutionary notions of political action as obsessionwith treason and plot, the refusal to be represented, the will to punish, andso forth.44

But all over France people continued to protest, using theirusual methods. The explosions of moral indignation directed atintrusive targets continued, even as protesters applied them to

(n. 43 cont.)

Urban Popular Violence in 1789’, in Alan Forrest and Peter Jones (eds.), ReshapingFrance: 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, 1794–1815(Cambridge, 1983); ‘Violence thermidorienne et societe traditionnelle: l’exempledu Forez’, Cahiers d’histoire, xxiv (1979). Timothy Tackett: ‘Women and Men inCounterrevolution: The Sommieres Riot of 1791’, Jl Mod. Hist., lix (1987);‘Collective Panics in the Early French Revolution, 1789–1791: A ComparativePerspective’, French Hist., xvii (2003). The new edition of Donald Sutherland’sFrench Revolution contains an impressive number of insights about provincial andpopular issues: D. M. G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Questfor a Civic Order (Oxford, 2003). David Andress has produced several illuminatinghistories of the Revolution seen from a popular perspective, including The FrenchRevolution and the People (London, 2004). Older works that remain important areGeorges Lefebvre, ‘Foules revolutionnaires’, in his Etudes sur la Revolution francaise(Paris, 1954); and the monumental study by Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiensen l’an II: mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793 – 9 thermidoran 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 FrenchRevolution, new edn (Berkeley, 2004), 67; Francois Furet, Interpreting the FrenchRevolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), 27. Simon Schama equatesthe ‘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 reli-gious change. In 1791 some women in the small town ofSommieres in Languedoc raised a ruckus during mass whenunknown men whom they took to be agents of the governmententered the church. Fearing that they might be coming to putpressure on local priests to swear the unpopular oath to the con-stitutional church, a large group of women, followed by men,chased a judge through town, pelting him with rocks until hemanaged to hide in a public building. ‘You’re trying to destroyour religion’, said one of the women; ‘let them try, the bastards,we’ll cut their throats’. In Pont-sur-Yonne, the gendarmes whoarrived in 1799 to enforce revolutionary calendar laws prohibitingwork on the decadi had to face an angry collection of men, womenand children who chased them away with ‘words and a shower ofstones and sticks, which fell on us like hail’.45

Such incidents relied on traditional behaviour, but also dis-played new dimensions. Take, for example, the events in LaFerte-sous-Jouarre, a country town about forty miles east ofParis on the edge of Champagne, in late July 1789 in the midstof the wave of peasant uprisings called the ‘Great Fear’.46 Thedirector of the carriage service, who was evidently a local entre-preneur connected to the mail and transport services out of Paris,was publicly challenged in the street by citizens who asked why hewas not wearing the revolutionary cockade and whether he wasfor the Third Estate. His insolent reply ‘that only boors and idiotsaccepted such stupidities’ did not please the bystanders. Shortlyafter, an angry crowd armed with axes and pitchforks broke downthe doors to his house and were on the verge of pillaging whenhe escaped out the rear, in the venerable tradition of many anearlier tax farmer. The crowd’s antagonism then turned to thepostmaster, who was closely associated with the director. A crowdof 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 torestore the non-juring clergy are described in Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred:Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, 1990), 189. See alsoTimothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, 1986), 165–77.

46 Letters published by Marc Bouloiseau in Revue historique de la Revolution francaise,xxxi (1960), 204–7.


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performing an official inspection of the man’s house for hiddenstocks of grain. They sold what little they found in the market at alow price and delivered the proceeds back to him. The forcedsearch of the attics of the well-off was a standard demand ofrioters through the centuries. Another grain riot!

But suspicions lingered. Soon the postmaster was rumoured tohave said ‘that the people could live perfectly well on hay andkernels of alfalfa’. There was ‘cursing and blaspheming’ andpeople muttered that they should ‘cut his head into pieces andparade his body around with a sheaf of straw in its place’. He lefttown. The next day some of the protesters insisted that the man’swife serve up a meal for forty persons. Not daring to antagonizethem, she set up a table in front of their house and laid it out withplatters of salted meat, bread and twenty bottles of wine. ‘Whentheir bellies were full’ they conceded that ‘she had ransomed thehead of her husband but they still wanted to parade him throughtown with a sheaf of straw on his stomach and a necklace of alfalfaaround his neck’.

Here again there is more to the event than just a grain riot. Thepattern of violence was traditionally retributive: make extravagantthreats; chase the enemy out of town; attack his house; demandcompensation in the form of food and drink. But already in thatfirst July the demonstrators were using adherence to revolu-tionary symbolism (the cockade) as a new test of the loyalty ofpeople who were already suspect by virtue of wealth or connec-tions. Especially interesting is the nasty (but purely hypothetical)threat to decapitate the body and replace the head with straw, acharacteristically rustic reminder of the terms with which the manhad insulted the community.47 Offering lavish outdoor spreadsof food and drink to the public was a traditional way of tying fol-lowers to a patron. These sorts of attacks on chateaux, feudalrights and noble prerogatives proliferated throughout the earlyyears of the Revolution. Liberty trees planted, dovecotes demol-ished, privileged benches in churches shattered, crops belongingto seigneurs pulled up — all these were expressions of traditionalanimosities translated into new language.48

47 The perpetrators may have been emulating the Parisian crowd’s murder ofFoulon, whose head was paraded with straw in his mouth (see below).

48 For another good example of developing consciousness and organization, seeDavid Hunt, ‘The People and Pierre Dolivier: Popular Uprisings in the Seine-et-Oise Department (1791–1792)’, French Hist. Studies, xi (1979).


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A mixture of old and new can even be found in the storming ofthe Bastille. After ‘the people’ had surged into the inner courtyardof the Bastille, their first, and very traditional, impulse was topillage: ‘they entered the apartments, sacked everything, seizedarms, threw the papers from the archives out of the windows, andpillaged everything’.49 The removal of Commander de Launay’ssurrendered forces from the fortress was carried out under a mili-tary escort. The account by one of the prisoners, Lieutenant deFlue, shows us what an angry crowd looked like:

The streets and houses and even the roofs were filled with an innumerableworld of people who insulted and cursed me. Swords, bayonets and pistolswere constantly thrust at my body. I didn’t know which way I was going toperish but I was forever breathing my last breath. Those who had noweapons threw rocks at me; women ground their teeth and threatenedme with their fists. Two of my soldiers had been assassinated behind me bythe furious people . . . I finally arrived a hundred steps from the Hotel deVille, amidst the general outcry that I should be hanged, when theybrought in front of me a head stuck on a pike which they said belongedto M. de Launay.50

De Launay was believed to have given the order to fire on theinvaders. Jacques de Flesselles, the head of the Parisian provi-sional government, who was believed to have deceived thecrowd when it was searching for arms, met a similar fate.

This grotesque phenomenon of heads paraded ceremoniouslyon pikes, which, along with the guillotine, has been the very imageof the Revolution in many people’s eyes, seems to have been en-tirely new. There are few known instances of heads paraded onpikes in earlier centuries. The heads of decapitated convicts weresometimes displayed at gallows or city gates by official justice, andin a few cases heads on sticks were flaunted as a sign of triumphover enemies. Hearts and livers were occasionally displayed. Wehave noted the alleged parading of Coligny’s head in 1572. But allthese antecedents were exceptional and were designed to degradeand humiliate the victim.51

49 From the journal Les Revolutions de Paris, i, 17 July 1789, reproduced in JacquesGodechot, 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 ofheads on pikes before 1789 was not fruitful, despite the thoughtful replies of a numberof historians. Matthew Vester provided an instance in 1571 in the back country ofwestern Liguria, where a border feud between two towns led to militiamen from oneimpaling eight heads of rivals on spears and carrying them back to town ‘mostly inorder 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 1789had a different effect. If we are to believe the account of Desnot,the unemployed cook who allegedly did the deed to de Launay, wecan actually observe the transition from traditional retribution torevolutionary exaltation:

At that moment many persons refused to let de Launay go up the steps [tothe Hotel de Ville]. Some said, ‘we should cut off his head’; others said,‘we should hang him’ [the traditional humiliation for a noble]; and stillothers said, ‘we should attach him to the tail of a horse’ [i.e. a tradi-tional dragging] . . . [De Launay is killed by blows and stabs from abayonet] . . . People said, ‘he is scum, a monster; he has betrayed us, hemust be destroyed’. When de Launay was dead, the people said: ‘theNation demands his head so that it can be displayed to the public sothat they will not be ignorant of what has been done’.52

This horror, which appeared on 14 July, the very day of symbolicliberation, seems to have made a tremendous impact on popularconsciousness and became a recurrent motif of popular expres-sion. A week later it was the turn of Bertier de Sauvigny, inten-dant of Paris, and his father-in-law Foulon de Doue, both accusedof contributing to the grain shortage. According to one account,Foulon, like the postmaster in La Ferte, had said that ‘the peoplewere made to eat hay’. The crowd made his head on the pike kissthe head of his father-in-law at the Hotel de Ville.53

This flaunting of heads as trophies seems to be an expression ofa 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 kindenough to point me to the central essay by Regina Janes, ‘Beheadings’, Representations,xxxv (1991). Thanks also to Wolfgang Degenhardt, Elizabeth Marvick and AllanTulchin for their responses. But, while there was an age-old tradition of displayingthe heads of one’s enemies as a declaration of triumph over them, this custom was veryrare in early modern France. Regina Janes is closest in stressing the exuberance of thecrowd and noting that ‘when the rabble cut off the heads of the king’s officers, theyhave redefined themselves as the sovereign people’: ‘Beheadings’, 242. There werecomparable instances in other places, especially in Mediterranean Europe — forexample, the revolt of Masaniello in Naples in 1647, which saw the parading of theheads of the Caraffa brothers and later of the rebel Masaniello himself, along withdragging by children and mutilation: Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of EarlyModern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 201–3.

52 Flammermont, La Journee du 14 juillet 1789, p. ccxli. Desnot bragged of theexecution when testifying before commissioners at the Chatelet in 1792: Godechot,La Prise de la Bastille, 297–8. The last phrase is ambiguous: ‘sa tete, pour le montrer aupublic pour qu’il n’ignore pas ce qu’il a fait’. Does the second ‘il’ refer to ‘de Launay’ orto ‘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 withapprehension about the consequences to follow. This brazenmove celebrated the crowd’s newly discovered power and chal-lenged the hegemony of the usual authorities. To the artisanalcrowd the violence involved in cutting off heads was probablyno more disturbing than the traditional display of body partsafter famous executions. The shock or joy, depending on whichside one took, came from the realization that this act had beenperpetrated by the menu peuple, that it was being flaunted openly,and that the victims were centrally placed, powerful figures, notordinary agents or tax collectors. Everyone could see that thiswas a dramatic, revolutionary challenge to the existing order byordinary citizens.

In a recent discussion of ‘imaging the French Revolution’,Warren Roberts and Lynn Hunt focus squarely on the issueaddressed here. Examining three engravings showing the assas-sination of Bertier de Sauvigny and Foulon de Doue, they criticizeGeorge Rude’s rather benevolent view of the revolutionary crowdas made up of respectable citizens. The images, they argue, allowus to perceive the ‘exuberant’ cruelty of a crowd out of control and‘an almost Freudian ‘‘return of the repressed’’ vision of atavisticrevenge’. Quoting the horror expressed by chroniclers such asFrancois-Noel Babeuf and Restif de la Bretonne, they concludethat the artists creating the engravings capture the ‘fundamentalambivalence that many people must have felt about the crowd assomething not entirely rational . . . and yet a fact of revolutionarypolitics that simply could not be wished away’. Here we meet theessential question of context. It is not surprising that Babeuf andRestif, as educated, cultivated citizens, saw these acts as ‘barbar-ous’ and ‘worthy of cannibals’. These are enlightened men look-ing down on the populace below. But how did the people in thecrowd experience it? I see little evidence in the engravings of therepugnance that we feel. This parading of heads like puppets maynot have seemed that surprising to people in the streets. They mayhave been cheering, and the novelty may have been not the ugli-ness but the symbolic triumph of the ‘people’ over detested menof power — a combination of new revolutionary spirit and tradi-tional appetite for retribution.54

54 Online discussion by Warren Roberts and Lynn Hunt, cited in Jack Censer andLynn 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 Suth-erland put it, ‘within days, children were imitating the grand eventby parading the heads of feral cats they had killed on the ends ofsticks’.55 In the October Days the heads of two royal bodyguardskilled by the crowd at Versailles were carried on pikes trium-phantly back to Paris. Many heads were paraded in provincialcities in 1791 and 1792.56 Thus 14 July seems to represent a revo-lutionary watershed in popular ritual. This characteristic symbolof 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 protestsagainst a variety of abuses continued, in Paris and elsewhere.Sometimes they followed age-old patterns, sometimes they hadmore co-ordination and broader objectives. The many journeesorganized by consultation among section meetings which gener-ated marches on the Tuileries or sieges of the Assembly were nottraditional in our sense because they were planned politicaldemonstrations designed to influence national politics, notattempts to punish anyone. The uprisings of 12 Germinal and 1Prairial, Year III (1 April and 20 May 1795) are examples of oldforms put to new uses. They started with rumours that powerfulparties were conspiring to hoard grain in order to starve out themenu peuple. On 12 Germinal, crowds of women and childrengathered at bakeries, then marched on the Convention, invadingthe chamber, shouting for ‘Bread! Bread!’ Like early moderncrowds invading the meetings of town councils, they weredemanding governmental intervention, but this time the crowdwas demanding not retribution but a change of policy from anational body. On 1 Prairial, as the crowd was forcing its wayinto the Assembly’s chamber, somebody fired a shot thatwounded elected deputy Feraud, who was at the podium oppos-ing their entrance. Reacting impulsively, the crowd turned uponFeraud, finished 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 d’aout–septembre 1792 dans le departement del’Orne: etude critique’, Annales historiques de la Revolution Francaise, xi (1934),97–118, 212–32.


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passing it around among the massed demonstrators. BronislawBaczko notes that ‘the crowd seemed to behave in an almost car-nival manner’, and concludes that ‘the crowd incorporated theplan into its own ritual of violence and reduced it to a simplefragment of a ‘‘world upside down’’ ’.57 This is another exampleof oversimplification. Baczko collapses the purposefulness andretributive impulse demonstrated by the crowd into the tradi-tional stereotype that crowds were festive.

While the official Terror, that is the government run by theCommittee of Public Safety from 1792 to 1794, is not our con-cern here, we need to consider the broader implications of popu-lar revolutionary violence. Arno Mayer sees the atmosphere of theTerror as motivated by a combination of vengeance and fear andnotes that it ‘marked a resurgence of ancient rituals of avengingretribution’. Patrice Gueniffey dismisses the ‘collective and spon-taneous violence which was often of extreme cruelty’ because itwas ‘punctual and localized, having no goal other than itself’.Thus neither Mayer nor Gueniffey sees the crowd as anythingmore than a primitive, reactive force.58

In 1793 the Parisian atmosphere was permeated with the ex-uberant declarations of the sans-culottes, who demanded bread,price controls and vigilance against ‘aristocratic’ subversion. Re-thinking the classic analysis of Albert Soboul, William Sewellargues that these views of the so-called ‘sans-culottes’ constituteda coherent political culture in which a secular belief in the abun-dance of nature and the right of everyone to share its bounty wasinseparably linked to the conviction that conspirators were hoard-ing grain in a plot to overthrow the Republic. They repeatedlydenounced these enemies as greedy egoists, bloodsuckers, mon-sters who devoured the people, or vampires enriched with theblood of widows and orphans.59

57 Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans.Michael Petheran (Cambridge, 1994), 238–9.

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 laviolence revolutionnaire, 1789–1794 (Paris, 2000), 24. A parallel psychologicalapproach which hints that the popular vengeance was related to past calls for ven-geance and oaths of unity is Sophie Wahnich, ‘De l’economie emotive de la Terreur’,Annales HSS, lvii (2002), esp. 894, 907.

59 William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Sans-Culottes Rhetoric of Subsistence’, in KeithMichael Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern PoliticalCulture, iv, The Terror (Oxford, 1994).


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This conspiratorial vision pre-dated the Revolution. It was de-scended from what Steven Kaplan calls the ‘famine plot persua-sion’, namely the belief that the king was responsible for thesubsistence of his people and that shortages constituted proofthat he was a conspirator in league with middlemen and profit-eers.60 Sewell thus sees a connection between sans-culotte ideol-ogy and Old Regime practices, and Kaplan traces the antecedentsback to 1709.61 We can go back even further to the manifesto ofthe Grande Rebeine in 1529. Attacking middlemen as bloodsuck-ers was standard practice in early modern revolts. The hatedfinancier who extorted tax payments in the seventeenth centurywas 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 apure expression of artisanal culture, because it was appropriatedby Jacobin factions in their battle to prevail over one another. Ineffect, the Terror represented another example of elite leaderstrying to enlist and control popular followers by talking their lan-guage.63 The atmosphere of watchful suspicion and mutual re-crimination that prevailed during the Terror recalls Paris duringthe siege of 1593, or Bordeaux in the thralls of the Ormee.Given this long history of informed popular involvement it is nosurprise to find popular groups following events closely, discuss-ing among themselves who was responsible, and planning whatwas to be done. In this respect popular politicization was not new,although it was transformed by a completely different set ofconstitutional possibilities.

As for the national representatives who ran the Revolution, theywere as terrified of the wrath of the populace as their early modernurban predecessors had been. When distasteful crowd violencesaved the Revolution during journees such as the storming of theBastille or the march on Versailles, the same leaders began tomake excuses for the violence and to redefine 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, 624–5. The difference was that earlier protesters

had rarely questioned the goodwill of the monarch, whereas eighteenth-century pro-testers were starting to do exactly that.

63 Richard Cobb discusses popular violence and elite manipulation in a similarpassage: R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820(Oxford, 1970), 85–93.


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as the heroic expression of a virtuous people. Later, when theJacobins were in power and found themselves vulnerable to lessfriendly 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 theirchoice of counter-revolutionary targets.64 The revolutionarieswere, in effect, reinventing the experience of earlier factionalleaders who had to rally popular backing for a programme thatwould not automatically generate support from their grass-rootsfollowers, but they were wielding new ideological justifications.Their historical predecessors had mobilized a combination ofintimidation, festive jollity and slogan-making to bring out popu-lar demonstrators who otherwise had ideas of their own. TheJacobins tried the same. Mona Ozouf describes the enthusiasmthat swept the country in 1790 over the planning of local fetes dela federation and the sending of deputies to the national celebra-tion inParis.Theemphasiswason federation,or ‘comingtogether’,which was a national version of the old striving for union byrebel factions throughout the Old Regime. The new union wasa national union, creating bonds between people who had neverbefore seen each other. The federe deputies from provincial townswere sent on what amounted to secular pilgrimages to representtheir fellow citizens at the Paris festivities.65

Most Jacobin festivals, such as the famous one held in Paris on10 August 1793, were too austere to appeal to popular sensibil-ities, although they must have been awe-inspiring experiences.Some of the more rustic provincial celebrations captured betterthe older spirit. Representations mimicking the old order andcelebrating the new included women flogging statues of saints,priests dropping their robes to reveal sans-culotte attire under-neath, and nuns dancing the carmagnole.66 These reincarnationsof carnivalesque mockery were planned by official organizations,using the ancient style of comic parody to win the allegiance of thepopulation.

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 RevolutionaryFrance: Six Villages Compared, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2003), 143–62.

66 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 89.


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An important form of popular revolutionary involvement wasthe prison massacre, the classic instances being the 1792 Sep-tember Massacres in Paris and their counterparts in other prov-inces.67 This systematic murder of prison inmates by crowds ofvirtually anonymous bystanders waiting outside the tribunaldoors bears only a superficial resemblance even to the 1572 mas-sacres. On St Bartholomew’s Day crowds believed that the kinghad commanded the extirpation of Protestants, and they wentafter individual families who were reputed to belong to a particu-lar faith. One senses that at least they usually had their affiliationsright. In 1792 the victims were indiscriminately condemned byvirtue of the simple fact that they were incarcerated together andassociated with an imagined plot organized by aristocrats. Thekillings were improvised, immediate and brutal, carried out insideenclosed walls and not amidst the cheers of public crowds. How-ever justified some of the fears may have been, there was none ofthe sequence of grumbling, rallying, expelling that characterizeda retributive uprising. Furthermore, in September the perpetra-tors assumed a new active role of speaking for the nation as on-the-spot popular judges.

The similar massacres in 1795 are easier to understand as col-lective revenge for prior killings. Once the Jacobins of the Terrorhad been overthrown, the revolutionary government began jailingformer terrorists until they could be tried for their misdeeds.Angry citizens then went after them, either in the jail or duringtransport from one prison to another. In Lyon, Joseph-AntoineBoisset, envoy of the Convention, made a real effort to ensure fairtrials. But he was confronted with a situation where every daybands of young men seized and assassinated a prisoner or at-tacked the man’s property in the name of ‘popular justice’. On4 May 1795 this agitation reached a climax when large crowdsimpeded the trial of Etienne Bonnard, a former member of therevolutionary committee of Vaise, who was hated for his denun-ciations of others and who was expected to get off with too light asentence. Crowds of some 30,000 armed men broke into theprison 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 d’un mas-sacre (Paris, 1986). See also Brian Singer, ‘Violence in the French Revolution: Formsof Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion’, in Ferenc Feher (ed.), The French Revolution and theBirth of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990).


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Storming through the city, they attacked other prisons, settingone on fire, murdered over a hundred people, and threw thebodies into the Saone.68 Nobody before 1789 had ever attackeda prison simply to kill its occupants.

A variation on the revenge killing was the vendetta, whichtargeted particularly detested individuals.69 This phenomenon,often called the White Terror, shares similarities of cultural ex-pression and behaviour with the culture of retribution. Of interesthere are the smaller community-based movements. Small orga-nized groups were targeting neighbours and countrymen, notalien intruders. The victim’s crime was to have violated unwrittenrules of acceptable behaviour by condemning neighbours todeath. Certainly we can agree, with Colin Lucas, that ‘it is possi-ble to discern in a great deal of counter-Jacobin violence a dis-course upon Jacobinism couched in terms of the traditionalsociety’.70 Most attacks were aimed at individual offendersknown personally to the attackers. On such occasions the by-standers, often women, might carry out extensive mutilation ofthe victim’s body, which would be dragged and dumped in aditch, using the language of physical humiliation borrowed fromthe past. They recapitulated former community violence againstcitizen collaborators with evil outside forces. But the element ofpersonal revenge and political side-taking was different.

III

CONCLUSION

The ‘culture of retribution’ is a relatively loose concept encom-passing a range of activities from small attacks on offending offi-cials to highly ritualized draggings and hangings. Its merit is that ithighlights a predilection on the part of common people to inter-vene actively when basic values seemed threatened. These pro-testers cannot be forced into a particular ideological mould orhistorical model. They intervened directly in matters that canonly be called political to defend interests which were sometimes,by our standards, progressive, sometimes backward-looking and

68 Renee Fuoc, La Reaction thermidorienne a Lyon (1795) (Lyon, 1957), 122–36.69 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 prim-itives prone to brutality and violence, as pessimistic observerswould have it, because much of their violence was measured andsymbolic. Nor were they custom-bound dancers in a repetitiveballet of symbolic forms, as some more sympathetic studies sug-gest, because their tactics were politically informed and sensitiveto particular circumstances.

Festive ribaldry and carnival pageantry were unlikely to sig-nify social protest. Charmed as we may be by the prospect ofLanturelu marchers in Dijon, symbolic races between animalkingdoms in Romans, or battles of Carnival and Lent, we mustacknowledge that these activities were not usually vehicles forprotest of a political sort. Such celebrations were effective in pro-moting collective feelings of solidarity or attempts to reintegratean offender into the community, as in the practice of charivari, butthey rarely led to genuine popular protest. Most often in suchcases a group or party was attempting to rally support for itself.

The real protesters were tough observers, ordinary men andwomen poised to intervene belligerently when threatened by in-trusive forces whether progressive or backward-looking. If popu-lar politics is understood to occur, as Andy Wood would have it,‘when power is reasserted, extended, or challenged’, then muchof the time they were political actors whose impact and degree ofviolence was conditioned by circumstances.71 The problemsraised by Wood in assessing English grass-roots political interven-tions seem equally relevant here. We need more subtle distinc-tions between static rituals reinforcing existing power relationsand political interventions from below taking place in many dif-ferent contexts.

The culture of retribution was only one kind of intervention,possibly one that was distinctively French. For centuries twoimpulses seem to have characterized the behaviour of Frenchcrowds: outrage at fundamental injustices, and the insistence onexacting retribution for treasonous complicity with such injustice.These traits were translated into movements containing a dis-tinctive mixture of crude violence and moral purpose. They con-tinued to appear wherever there were community groups capableof 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 Woodnotes in a recent article, the power structure within whichcommon protesters operated limited their chances of success.Agency was limited by class.73

Violence and the threat of violence in the Old Regime belongedto a distinctive discourse that was still part of lived experience andthat still prevailed during the Revolution. On the one hand, vio-lent behaviour was nasty and real. Early modern people did nothave our scruples. On the other hand, their threats cannot betaken at face value because they belong to a forgotten discourseof honour and shame, and much of the violence was verbal, notphysical. Popular politics can be viewed in terms of levels of in-creasing sophistication. At the low end is a general alertness tolocal affairs affecting the well-being of ordinary inhabitants, com-bined with collective rallying to humiliate or expel anyone seen asthe purveyor of unjust innovations. Slightly more developed areattacks that turn against compatriots or local authorities who areseen as complicit with innovations that are threatening and whoare therefore considered traitors to the community. A higher stageof political involvement took the form of collective support for anorganized faction which seemed to advocate popular causes. Thisfaction might be just an expression of local rivalries or, ultimately,it might become a party promoting real issues. In a final stage localissues could become linked to broader causes through groupslike the Jacobin clubs, which provided connections betweenlocal rivalries and national movements. Collective action con-tinued on many levels, from expulsions of perceived intruders,to conflicts between factions, to formation of revolutionary andcounter-revolutionary clubs.

To contemplate the Revolution from an early modern perspec-tive is not to deny its dramatic, revolutionary break with thepast. The triumph of the revolutionary crowd, the displaying ofheads on pikes, the adaptation of violent practices to new circum-stances, the infusion of original symbols and ideological mes-sages into the motivations of crowds, the focus on the whole

72 For later examples, see Alain Corbin, Archaısme et modernite en Limousin auXIX e siecle, 1845–1880, new edn, 2 vols. (Limoges, 1998), i, 495–516. See alsoNicolas Bourguinat, Les Grains du desordre: l’Etat face aux violences frumentaires dansla premiere moitie du XIXe siecle (Paris, 2002).

73 Andy Wood, ‘Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in aYorkshire Valley, c.1596–1615’, Past and Present, no. 193 (Nov. 2006).


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nation rather than local interests, all these were new, as everyoneknows. But in assessing the violence it is worth remembering boththe brutality and the restraint of past episodes and the many waysthat common people intervened politically before the storming ofthe Bastille, and not just during grain riots. The same ongoingundercurrent of struggle between communities of stubborn indi-viduals determined to defend their basic rights and authoritieswho fended off this threat by adjusting their message to courtthe populace continued after 1789. On both sides of the revolu-tionary divide, crowd behaviour consisted of a combustible mix-ture of indignation, selective violence and belligerent talk. Manyof the Revolution’s features can be imagined in terms of pastpractice. Both the violence and the atmosphere of fear createdby the Committee of Public Safety had been experienced to alesser degree during urban factional contests.

The leaders of the Revolution were trying to change a world inwhich the population, in Paris and even more so in the many pro-vincial towns and villages, was tough and demanding; in whichcrowds of otherwise respectable citizens had delighted in blood-thirsty threats and anatomically specific declarations of inten-tions; in which dragging of bodies and mutilation of corpseswere easily taken in stride. They had their hands full, and theirfailings should not be blamed entirely on ideological stubborn-ness or the emptiness of revolutionary aspirations.

Meanwhile, the popular crowd had its own agenda. The dif-ference between earlier instances of collective action and the revo-lutionary instances lay in the new meaning which revolutionaryparticipants attributed to the exercise of violence. Its purpose hadchanged from ritual humiliation of scapegoats who were stand-insfor a particular abuse, to the political elimination of rivals viewedas traitors to a national cause. Before and during the Revolution,protesting crowds adapted their protests to the prevailing con-ditions and took up new slogans as times changed, but theycontinued to defend their immediate interests whether theiropponent was the opposite confession, the lord, the tax collector,the king or the Jacobin club. What they learned in the Revolu-tion that was new was that systems could be changed, and localissues — and local feuds — could be fought in terms of broaderideological issues.

Elite leaders also organized factional movements by invokingpopular concerns and tapping into the energy derived from


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popular rage in order to mobilize support for their claims topower. The Terror was new, but it too was built upon long-standing urban traditions of factions forming around leadersand stereotyping their opponents, while embracing symbols ofmembership and trying to inculcate solidarity by oaths of unityeven as they expelled or persecuted the other side. Nobody wouldargue that the leaders of the Year II were the same as the Parisianligueurs,74 or the ormistes of Bordeaux. But their fear of rivals, theirtactics of intimidation and their play for popular support are lesssurprising if we remember the many factional conflicts of the past.The Revolution was indeed revolutionary, but its factional rivalriesand popular interventions were grounded in practices that hadendured for centuries.

Emory University William Beik

74 The reference is to the control of Paris by the so-called Paris Sixteen in 1591–4.


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Documents

Violence of the French Crowd