Conclusion: Violence and Democracy

Finally, there is an important caveat to be stressed about the relationship between collective violence, protest and the history of democracy. Throughout the nineteenth century, according to Corbin, popular politics was predicated on an explosive mixture of new assumptions about popular sovereignty and a long tradition of collective cruelty - even cannibalism - dating back to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and beyond, and which had resurfaced during the September Massacres of 1792 and the decapitation of the deputy Feraud in 1795.^[628] The mutilation of the bodies of Gabriel and Gonzague Latreille might accordingly be read as the resurfacing of archaic, pre-democratic cultural forms - if only evidence could be found of such behaviour in the region, rather than in Paris.

Instead, as Tilly and Rude stressed, insurgent crowds tended towards verbal and symbolic violence - the use of threatening language, occasional destruction of property, and ritualistic action (‘repertoires') that channelled violence within cultural limits. This is precisely why the murder at Villeseque, like that at Hautefaye, was so deplorable to contemporaries. In 1870, Hautefaye stood out because, as Corbin points out, it was a rare vestige of spectacular brutality.^[629] To focus exclusively on the horror at such violence expressed by the nineteenth-century ame sensible is thus to under­play the relative isolation of these cases.

In Paris, too, far more common in actuality than the potent images of violent mobs were peaceful demonstrations, petitions, banquets and mass meetings. Micah Alpaugh has found that only 12 per cent of an estimated 750 protests by sans-culottes in 1789-95 resulted in physical violence.^[630] Indeed, apart from the September 1792 killings, the greatest losses of life in Paris over this ‘revolutionary century' - the Reveillon riots of 1789, the rue Transnonain in 1834, the coup d'etat of December 1851, and the repression of the Paris Commune in May 1871 - were the work of armed forces.

In this sense, Georges Lefebvre's elementary distinction between the revolutionary crowd as spontaneous gathering (agregat) and premeditated assembly (rassemblement) still provides us with a useful starting point to analyse popular violence.^[631] The relative infrequency of collective acts of extreme cruelty suggests that they tended to arise from the former rather than the latter, as with both the September Massacres and the Hautefaye murder, for instance. But for the crowds that set out from Paris to retrieve Foulon and Berthier, or for the market-women on the road to Versailles in October 1789, the outcome of murder - as opposed to justice - was hardly set in stone; or, at least, any retrospective speculation of their motives remains merely that.

Instead, they possessed different motives and intentions as heterogeneous groups, just as protesters do today. To focus unwaveringly on the violence of insurrectionary crowds during the revolutionary century, without paying attention to their wider aims and diverse tactics, is to erect a false dichotomy between such behaviour and democratic politics. Particularly when what is at stake seems to be the very survival of the social order, nowhere is the practice of popular sovereignty free of collective pressures - or, indeed, of violence itself.