Bibliographical Essay

A particularly rich literature has flourished around the history of collective violence during the ‘revolutionary century', and the following titles represent only a small selection.

On crowd violence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, see Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Colin Lucas, ‘The Crowd and Politics from Ancien Regime to Revolution in France', Journal of Modern History 60.3 (1988), 421-57; William Beik, ‘The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution', Past & Present 197 (2007), 75-110; and George Rude's classic The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), whose materialist arguments were further developed in The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964) and Ideology and Popular Protest (New York: Pantheon, 1980), esp. chapters 3-4. More theoretically, see the useful overviews by Robert Holton, ‘The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method', Social History 3.2 (1978), 219-33, and, on the culturalist interpretations, Suzanne Desan, ‘Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E.

On the Revolution of 1789-99, two important reassessments of revolutionary violence and the relative peacefulness of Parisian crowds are, respectively, Jean-Clement Martin, Violence et Revolution: essai sur la naissance d'un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006) and Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787-1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The most thorough analysis of the September Massacres remains Pierre Caron, Les massacres de septembre (Paris: Maison du Livre Franpais, 1935), but see also Frederic Bluche, Septembre 1792: logiques d'un massacre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986) and, more recently, Come Simien, Les massacres de septembre 1792 à Lyon (Lyons: Editions Aleas, 2011) and D. M. G. Sutherland, ‘Justice and Murder: Massacres in the Provinces, Versailles, Meaux and Reims in 1792’, Past & Present 222 (2014), 129-62. Factional violence in the South is explored in Colin Lucas, ‘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: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 152-94; Stephen Clay, ‘Vengeance, Justice and the Reactions in the Revolutionary Midi’, French History 23.1 (2009), 22-46; and

D. M. G. Sutherland, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Recent useful surveys on collective violence between 1789 and 1799 can be found in Peter McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and David Andress (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Violent rural protest, including subsistence riots, is treated extensively in Louise Tilly, ‘The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2.1 (1971), 23-57; Yves-Marie Berce, Croquants et nu-pieds: les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1974); Jean Nicolas (ed.), Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVI-XIXe siècles. Actes du colloque de Paris 24-26 mai 1984 (Paris: Maloine, 1985); and Nicolas Bourguinat, Les grains du desordre: l'Etat face aux violences frumentaires dans la première moitie du XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions EHESS, 2002). Rural insurrections during the French Revolution have meanwhile been examined by Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: NLB, 1973); John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); and Anatoli Ado, Paysans en revolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789-1794 (Paris: Societe des Etudes Robespierristes, 1996).

On the insurrectionary crowd in later revolutions, see, chronologically, Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Pamela Pilbeam, ‘Popular Violence in Provincial France after the 1830 Revolution’, English Historical Review (1976), 278-97; John Merriman (ed.), 1830 in France (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Ted Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Cynthia Bouton, Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzanfais, 1847-2008 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

Finally, close interpretations of popular massacres across the century are numerous, including (amongst many others) Claudy Valin, Autopsie d'un massacre: les journees des 21 et 22 mars 1793 a La Rochelle (Saint-Jean-d'Angely: Editions Bordessoules, 1992); Rene Moulinas, Les massacres de la glaciere: enquete sur un crime impuni, Avignon 16-17 octobre 1791 (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 2003); and Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).