Eruptions of collective popular violence punctuated the entire earlymodern period of European history and assumed three chief forms.

Riots were characterised by localised violence, of limited duration, generally aimed at parochial issues like the high cost of necessities such as bread in local markets. In rebellions, local protests, often beginning as riots, merged with more general issues to affect more than one locale and to extend for more than a few days when protesters secured effective leadership, often by social elites.

Historians long have recognised that most early modern protesters did not seek ‘revolutionary' change in our sense of that word; they did not act proactively to erect a radically new or innovative order. Rather, reflecting the values of an essentially conservative society that respected tradition and justified established practices by their antiquity, most protesters rejected the effects on them of innovation in established economic, political or religious practices. Their violence was reactive and, since the early modern period was a time of extraordinary change, riots, rebellions and revolutions occurred with considerable frequency. While it is impossible to quantify precisely the number of such events due to problems of record survival or simply because many early modern states lacked even rudimentary police services to note officially every act of popular protest, there is a growing body of research to suggest their very common occurrence. For example, historians who have studied popular unrest throughout our period have identified a great wave of violent protest affecting all of Europe in the period from about 1580 to 1660, and this has prompted some to posit the existence of a distinct, seventeenth­century crisis in large part defined by rebellion and revolution.

Perhaps the most profound change overtaking Europe in the early modern period was the general, albeit irregular, growth of population that affected almost every aspect of European life. In economic terms, population growth created increasing pressure on all resources, none more so than in the realm of agriculture, driving price increases for land and its output. At the same time, an expanding revolution in farming techniques, in part reflected in enclosures of common lands by great landowners, forced many small-scale tenant farmers off the land while these same aristocratic and ecclesiastical landlords sought to keep up with rising costs by increasing rents and dues owed them by the remaining peasants working their lands. Additional increases in living costs resulted from the abandonment of traditional, paternalistic state regulation of the distribution and pricing of necessities, such as the wheat necessary to make bread.

States of every sort experienced great change politically, too. Early modern monarchies grew considerably in extent as their sovereigns completed a process of extending their rule over new territories that often were ethnically quite different from the rest of their realms. As a result, many monarchs ruled composite states with deep divisions that demanded judi­cious government.

City-states in Germany and Italy also experienced change. Externally threatened by the growing military might of European monarchs, they increased their military spending and the taxes to pay for security. Internally, often violent political strife arose as many city councils fell under the control of patrician oligarchies in the late medieval period and citizens demanded a restoration of their traditional voice in governance and taxation.

Finally, this was an age of religious change. While a deeply ingrained anti­Semitism persisted throughout Europe, Christian unity fractured in the sixteenth century into differing Catholic and Protestant expressions of reli­gious reform. Animosity between adherents of the old and new forms of Christian devotion occasioned almost two centuries of strife in the form of riots, rebellion and outright religious warfare.

In the responses of early modern Europeans to these changes we will discern in the examples that follow the origins and range of much of the collective violence of the age, but violence was only the last stage in an early modern repertoire of popular resistance that often started with individual action. As James C. Scott found, members of subordinate groups can practise a range of individual strategies of ‘every day resistance' to situations, rules or policies imposed on them from above that they find unacceptable or unfair.^[737] Individual actions like delaying tax payments, fleeing from military recruiters or emigration to escape feudal obligations are forms of opposition that could be employed when more confrontational expressions of resistance are imprac­tical.

Riots, Rebellions and Revolutions in Europe proposed by municipal councils. When called to the town hall for such ratifications, however, guild leaders might not only refuse to consent to council proposals, but they actually might occupy the seat of municipal government until they achieved satisfaction. News of this sort of ‘sit in' inevitably spread quickly, causing crowds to gather and pose a risk that the situation would descend into a riot.

Riots could differ in size from a crowd of a few dozen people shouting and throwing rocks to mobs of thousands causing considerable loss of life and extensive property damage, but essential to fomenting them and all other forms of collective violence was a generalised sense of grievance. Historians now understand that crowd members often were certain that they had justice on their side. Tax protesters often believed that the rising fiscal demands of the early modern state were not the work of the king but of corrupt ministers, and that the new taxes would end ‘if the king only knew'. Protesters saw them­selves as loyal subjects upholding the old order by defying new, unjust taxes.

Infused with a sense of grievance and a conviction of the justice of their cause, early modern people were drawn to riots and other forms of violent protest by a variety of factors. Common membership in a community or neighbourhood was one force drawing a person into group action. Although historians now know that seemingly interminable strife often divided even small early modern communities, an external threat against a community member could cause neighbours to close ranks for action. Thus, the arrival in a community of the military, often the most visible manifestation of the growing authority of central government, could prompt citizens to forget their differences and unite in the face of a common threat with several aspects. The mandatory billeting of soldiers could be a disaster for a community, both because of the expense and the often violent behaviour of troops. The military also sought to impress young men for long periods of service, and sometimes lent its force to the collection of taxes.

More than neighbourly relationships drew early modern Europeans to riotous assemblies, however. Kinship ties were evident, as another seventeenth-century

French example shows. On the list of 100 residents of Abjat and nearby hamlets in the Perigord province charged with riot, seventeen family names appear more than once, and five of them appear more than four times In addition, fifteen men were listed as the son or son-in-law of another individual on the list.

Shared occupational experience also drew protesters of both genders together. The unity of male guildsmen and traditions of corporate action underlay much popular protest in the Spanish Netherlands and Germany, and during the era of the Thirty Years War comradeship developed during military service was evident in the numerous former comrades-in-arms in the ranks of violent protesters. In addition, many women entered formerly male work spaces with proto-industrialisation in the form of domestic manufacturing for urban capitalists. Thus, in eighteenth-century England, large numbers of women worked at handlooms near Manchester and in Devonshire, and the workforce in some nail-making enterprises in the Black Country was more than half female. In such situations, similarities in male and female work experiences seem to have produced similar behaviour; numbers of women, like their male co-workers, joined in protests and sometimes even led them.

Historians also link certain gender-specific spaces of socialisation to acts of collective violence. No male space was more dangerous in this regard than the tavern, where the effects of alcohol might enflame tempers and lower inhibitions. Moreover, the keepers of these establishments were often more literate and better spoken than their customers, and many of them emerged as leaders of crowds. The violent potential of taverns was evident in a London riot of 10 July 1629 when a Fleet Street arrest emptied drinkers into the streets to confront the authorities in a riotous assembly that raised street barricades in much of the area.

Rioters and many persons engaged in other forms of collective violence also typically shared much in common socially. Contrary to their stereotype in early modern police records, historians have found that riots rarely reflected the blind rage of the lowest social orders, the people French officials labelled as ‘scum' (lie du people). Rather, the seminal work of George Rude demonstrated that it was possible for modern researchers to identify mem­bers of the crowd, and E. P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis and other historians have shown that crowd actions always had a purpose.^[739] Crowd members were usually people of limited resources who earned their livings as skilled or semi-skilled craftsmen, retail tradesmen or farmers of small agri­cultural holdings. These people were not wandering poor; they had fixed residences, could post bail if arrested, and often were literate enough to draft placards and read basic protest literature. But they were people with modest incomes who had something to lose. They could readily be reduced to dire straits by sudden increases in food prices, new or higher taxes, or, if they farmed, by enclosure of common lands on which they customarily had grazed their livestock. They also had sufficient experience with local govern­ment to resent new incursions of outside authority in their communities. Under-represented in crowd actions were the deeply disadvantaged, often rootless, poor who early modern police and government officials so feared. Some historians have ascribed the passivity of these individuals to physical weakness due to hunger, or to resignation bred by a culture of poverty, but Cynthia Bouton suggests another explanation in her study of eighteenth­century French food riots. Noting post-Reformation attitudes towards the poor in both Catholic and Protestant countries, she found that the poor were so marginalised, stigmatised and feared by their more comfortable neigh­bours that they were excluded from the communal, kinship and occupational bonds conducive to marshalling a crowd.^[740]

Although some historians posit that collective protests followed a general pattern, no early modern riot, whatever its cause, was completely typical. Forms of protest were learnt repertoires reflecting local social and cultural norms and thus varied over time and from place to place. Few riots, more­over, had a single cause. Nevertheless, historians identify a number of fundamental issues that provoked early modern riots, chief among them food supplies and agricultural enclosures.

Early modern Europeans justifiably feared dearth. Throughout much of our period food prices generally rose, driven by the pressure of a growing population on rather inelastic agricultural output. At the same time, harvest failures could create short-term elevation of the price of the bread that was the dietary mainstay for most Europeans, and sudden spikes in prices could reduce even normally prosperous artisans to dire poverty and sometimes starvation. Thus, dearth and rising prices for subsistence often provoked protest, and food riots were probably the most frequent type of collective violence in our period. Recognising this threat to public order, governments traditionally had taken certain steps to preserve the peace by attempting to manage the domestic trade in grain to assure its availability in local market­places and to regulate its price. Some states in times of dearth also provided relief. Geneva, Venice and many Dutch cities distributed supplies from municipal granaries, while the French monarchy bought emergency supplies of wheat from producers in the Baltic region. But if such state intervention was delayed, insufficient or not possible, a riot could erupt.

When they did occur, food riots reflected a popular consensus among crowd members as to the legitimate transport, milling, distribution and baking practices for their daily bread, and they were prepared to punish those whom they believed had violated those practices. Most importantly, in much of western Europe a ‘moral economy' of the crowd held that everyone deserved food at an affordable, ‘just price', while elsewhere, as in Bavaria, self-sufficiency in providing for one's family food needs from one's own farm, or Hausnotdurft, was an essential part of a man's personal honour. The frustration of such popular values led to frequent subsistence riots when crops failed, and in England and France, the eighteenth century seems to have been the golden age of the food riot. In England, population growth resumed after a stagnant seventeenth century to drive food prices higher, and the government was encouraging food exports that disrupted traditional markets. In France, too, population pressure on traditional agriculture led to price increases, but the most intense period of French food rioting occurred in the Flour War of 1775, when crop failures coincided with the government's freeing the grain trade of all regulation. The consequent rapid increase of bread prices provoked over 300 riots in a matter of weeks, and such riots, like their counterparts elsewhere, assumed several forms.

In the typical market riot, the crowd directed its attention to merchants suspected of hoarding grain in order to increase its price, or to bakers who were charging an elevated price for their bread or were selling an adulterated or undersized product at the usual price of a normal loaf. It also might turn on local granaries where quantities of grain might be stored. While crowd members pillaged markets, bakeries and granaries for their wares, they did not always carry away what they had seized. In an act that the French called taxation populaire, crowd members often sold the grain or bread at a price that they believed just and then turned the proceeds of their sales over to the merchants or bakers. These riots occurred most frequently in market towns providing for local needs, and they could result in loss of life because the crowd was prepared to exact retribution on those it blamed for subsistence problems.

A market riot that resulted in fatal violence erupted in Naples on 8 May 1585, when the city council mandated a reduction in the size of the city's standard loaf of bread. Since this reduction was not to be accompanied by a decrease in loaf prices, the municipal order in effect raised the price of bread. Popular anger centred on Giovan Vincenzo Storace, the sole member of the six-man council representing the common people and a person popu­larly believed to be speculating on grain prices. The crowd intercepted Storace as he was being carried through the city in a sedan chair, and as in many early modern riots, collective behaviour on this occasion drew heavily on the tropes of early modern popular culture to express disapproval of the official's behaviour. Crowd members seized the poles of his sedan chair and bore him backwards through the street in a raucous procession imitative of a skimmington ride as, all the while, the populace pelted Storace with various projectiles that eventually killed him. The crowd members then expressed their contempt for the dead man in their treatment of his corpse. They drew it face down through the streets, as some condemned men were conveyed to the gallows, and then enacted a butchery of the remains that replicated the ritualised animal butchery common at carnival time, cutting out Storace's internal organs and bearing them through the streets impaled on the tips of their weapons. Storace's earthly remains ended up tossed near the Spanish viceroy's residence to the rioters' cry of ‘Here is bad government!'

In a second form of food riot, called the entrave in France, crowds blocked roads or waterways to prevent the movement of grain out of their regions to major city markets offering higher prices for agricultural commodities. Often the crowd not only prevented the shipment of these goods, but also pillaged the supplies or sold them off in taxation populaire. This sort of crowd action seems to have developed as improvements of roads and waterways in our period facilitated the movement of bulk cargoes to major market or distribu­tion centres, and such violence was especially common along transport routes in the regions of major cities. Thus, in the 1630s and 1640s stoppages of grain shipments occurred in the Thames Valley and in regions supplying the London market, including Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex and Sussex. During the Flour War, entraves occurred along the chief rivers of the Paris basin, the Marne, the Oise and the Seine.

A third common form of food riot, constituting 64 per cent of the riots in the Flour War, occurred in areas of large-scale farming like those of the Paris basin. In these actions crowds sought to obtain the large quantities of grain stored at rural farms, mills, chateaux and sometimes religious communities.

Agricultural innovation also caused popular protest. Probably the most frequent cause of riots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was the enclosure of common lands in farming communities, usually by wealthy landowners. Enclosures deprived smallholders of their traditional rights to graze livestock on the commons and to gather wood, coal, peat and stone there. In many locales, like Sydenham in Kent, where 40 per cent of free­holders possessed only a cottage and a garden plot, economic survival rested on smallholders' access to common lands. Thus, the mere rumour of enclo­sures sparked appeals to landowners, threats, litigation and riots. In such riots, protesters destroyed fences and hedges, which symbolised enclosure, but the great danger of enclosure riots was that they could, with leadership, spread to become an outright rebellion. This happened in 1548 and 1549 in East Anglia when more substantial villagers, parish officers and clerics assumed the direction of rural crowds and forged them into armed forces in Kett's Rebellion, the greatest rebellion of the Tudor era. The rebels captured Norwich and were defeated only after a pitched battle with a royal army of more than 15,000 men in which they lost some 3,000 of their number.

Combinations of other factors sparked riots, too. In early modern Germany conflicts between citizens and town councils sometimes led to riots rooted in issues of taxation, religion and demands for a greater citizen voice in governance. This certainly was the case in Frankfurt am Main, where protests against practices in municipal government combined with anti­Semitism to produce the riots remembered as the Fettmilch Uprising in the early seventeenth century. One of Germany's largest cities, Frankfurt had a population of about 20,000 persons who in large majority were Lutheran. As was common in this period, Frankfurt's religious minorities faced discri­mination. The city excluded Calvinists and Catholics from privileges of citizenship, and the city's Jewish community, Germany's largest with some 2,000 members, was residentially confined to the ghetto in the Judengrasse (Jewish Street) and was statutorily excluded from both citizenship and guild membership. As an imperial free city, Frankfurt was an autonomous munici­pality under the direct authority of the Holy Roman Emperor in which local governance was in the hands of an elected city council that also exercised broad judicial power. As in a number of early modern German cities, that council increasingly had fallen under the control of a relatively small group of patrician families who manipulated elections to effectively exclude citizen merchants and guild masters from real political power. Indeed, Frankfurt, like many European cities, was run by a self-perpetuating oligarchy whose control of local governance and taxation was an increasingly contentious issue during the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and citizen unrest beginning in Frankfurt in 1612 at first assumed forms common in other cities.

Citizens formed a committee to press on the council a list of demands, or Gravamina, to further open the council to non-patricians, eliminate corrup­tion, lower taxes and make government more transparent. Ominously, the Gravamina presented to the council also alleged that members of the local Jewish community engaged in usury at the expense of the Christian majority and enunciated a demand, often raised by early modern German guilds, that Jews should be expelled from Frankfurt. While in many other cities the citizens' committees reached compromises with municipal councils, pro­tracted negotiations between citizens and the Frankfurt council produced results unsatisfactory to the citizens. Finally, in May 1614 a crowd led by Vincenz Fettmilch, a pastry baker, seized the city hall, forced the council to leave the city and imposed a new council as Fettmilch declared himself the city's gubernator. This crowd action elicited a decree from the emperor demanding that citizens submit to imperial authority and, as imperial com­missioners sought to restore order on 22 August, a crowd of citizens invaded the Judengasse in a veritable pogrom which destroyed or plundered Jewish property, although the loss of life was slight. The next day, Fettmilch oversaw the expulsion of Frankfurt's Jews, an action that prompted the emperor to outlaw him and his associates. The revolt collapsed as Fettmilch and his henchmen were arrested, tried and finally executed in 1616, while other leaders of his movement were flogged and banished. The Frankfurt Jewish community then returned under imperial protection.

Small or large, however, such crowd actions posed threats to early modern political and social stability, and governments attempted to craft laws to deal with rioters. Thus, the French monarchy had begun to impose limits on assembly at least as early as the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth century forbade unlicensed assemblies of four or more persons because, as one legal scholar wrote, ‘they can expand to disturb religion, the tranquillity of the state, or that of the public'.^[741] In England common law tradition defined riot as any assembly of three or more persons with the potential to disturb the peace, and persons thus assembled were guilty of a misdemeanour offence. Only when those persons resorted to violence, however, did they become the felons whom all citizens had a duty to apprehend, but in 1715, facing unrest at the time of the Hanoverian succession, Parliament levied higher penalties on the mere act of assembling. The Riot Act defined as riot any assembly of twelve or more persons intent on violence against royal authority. Rioters rendered themselves guilty of a felony if they did not disperse within an hour of a magistrate publicly reading the act at the site of their assembly. Thus, the mere act of assembly, not the violence that might result from it, became the felony, while the legislation again required citizens to assist in suppression of riots and relieved them of any legal liability that they might incur in that act.

The provision in English law for citizen action against rioters suggests a problem faced by all early modern states. By the end of our period only France, with its rural police, the marechaussee, had anything remotely resem­bling a modern national police force; the only force available to early modern states generally was the army, an imperfect instrument for crowd control that was seldom available at short notice. Thus, when the Gordon Riots against parliamentary legislation reducing official discrimination against Catholics erupted on 2 June 1780, it took until 8 June for a sufficient number of troops to be assembled in London to begin the restoration of order. In the intervening period much of the capital was in the hands of a mob that inflicted consider­able damage on persons and property. But, once mobilised in the capital, the troops revealed another problem with their employment in crowd control; they were armed for combat and had no training in crowd control techni­ques. If the sight of their weaponry failed to intimidate rioters, the only recourse for troops was to open fire, as they did in London, killing an estimated 285 and wounding 173 others. While in the case of the Gordon Riots military force brought an end to the violence, significant numbers of civilian deaths always risked its escalation. Perhaps this is why early modern officials used deadly force sparingly to quell riots and rarely executed large numbers of rioters. Most riots simply ran their course in a few days, before troops could be assembled, and at most the authorities might execute a few ringleaders when the turmoil abated.

Some riots, nonetheless, could grow into full-scale rebellions, and a key in that evolution seems to have been the emergence of leaders drawn from elite groups possessed of prestige, education or perhaps military training. Aristocrats with military training sometimes found in popular collective violence a means to an end, like blocking the growth of royal authority. Clergymen, too, sometimes emerged as leaders of rebellions because they lived close to their parishioners, understood their grievances and possessed the education necessary give voice to them. Local magistrates, like mayors and town councilmen, who also often possessed judicial powers, had to balance their attachment to local interests with their roles as representatives of the central government. Sometimes their local attachments proved greater than their loyalty to the Crown and they, too, led rebellions. As with riots, the number of these rebellions in our period is so great as to preclude treatment of all of them, but we can see all of these figures at work in two major rebellions.

The greatest popular uprising of our period prior to the French Revolution of 1789 erupted near the Swiss border in southern Germany in 1525 and spread to Franconia, Thuringia and the Rhineland. It was long referred to as the German Peasants' War but, noting that it also attracted townspeople and miners, Peter Blickle has suggested aptly that it really was a ‘revolt of the common man'.^[742] Hundreds of thousands of these common men took up arms for a variety of reasons, all rooted in the economic, political and religious changes that we have identified. The population was growing, and the livelihood of the common man attempting to support a family on increas­ingly limited agricultural resources was also under assault from seigneurial and political authority. Seigneurs, facing devaluation of cash dues from the peasantry over time, engaged in the enclosure of common lands that were essential for the stock grazing of peasant farmers and placed restrictions on commoners' logging and hunting rights at the same time that they were inventing new ways to extract resources from their tenants, like land transfer fees. To many this seemed to augur a ‘second serfdom' driven not only by lay lords but also by the clerical lordship of numerous Catholic religious estab­lishments. In an age in which reformed religious ideas were abroad in Germany, those establishments became the objects of extensive violence.

Amid these seigneurial problems, the early modern state began to invade the life of the common people with its taxation and officials. Taxes, which included special imposts to pay for the Turkish wars, grew tremendously all over the region in the early sixteenth century, and in Franconia the total tax burden on peasants, combined with dues to their lords, represented about one half of their annual income. At the same time, princes were supplanting customary law, which upheld the medieval concept that peasants had not only obligations to their lords but also rights to use common lands and enjoy protections by their lords, with Roman civil law that brought land into the personal ownership of the lord and admitted no peasant claims to it. All of these issues lay at the root of the so-called Bundschuh revolts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries before the Peasants' War broke out with local disturbances in February 1525.

Circumstances at first favoured the rebels. Both imperial forces and those of the Swabian League, which policed the German south-west, were in Italy fighting for control of the peninsula against the forces of Francis I of France. In addition, the rebels found leaders in imperial knights who also suffered at the hands of centralising princes, former soldiers, urban artisans and reformed preachers. Organised into communal military formations, their chief targets were castles and monasteries, wealthy urbanites and Jews in an outburst of the same anti-Semitism I described in the Frankfurt riots of the 1614. The rebels also found literate persons to draft their grievances, like the journeyman furrier Sebastian Lotzer and the academically trained, Zwinglian cleric Christoph Schappeler. The pamphlet they drafted, ‘The Twelve Articles: The Just and Fundamental Articles of all the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed', went through twenty printings, circulated widely, and gave the rebellion some unity of purpose. The authors couched the ‘Articles' in religious terms, proclaiming the ‘Christian justice' of their cause, its foundation in ‘God's Law', their desire to elect their own pastors who would preach the true gospel without interpretations imposed by man, and their willingness to accord their demands with Scripture; but at their core, they attacked many of the early modern developments I noted earlier. Thus, the rebels demanded an end to serfdom, free rights to the hunting and fishing that were aristocratic preroga­tives, restoration of common lands to the local community, and economic justice in the labour services, leases and dues peasants owed seigneurs.

The peasant advantage in this struggle, however, was brief, as German forces returned from Italy in the spring of 1525 to defeat rebel armies, which had never transcended their communal origins to achieve complete unity. The suppression of the revolt was brutal, and estimates of rebel dead in battle and in the subsequent repression range as high as 100,000 persons. Surviving supporters of the revolt sustained large fines to provide restitution to eccle­siastical communities and aristocrats for the damages they incurred, and the authorities also attempted to disarm rebellious areas. Some individual aristo­crats did make limited concessions to their peasants, however, to avoid a second rebellion.

The growing fiscality of the early modern state most especially lay at the root of rebellions, and the experience of France provides no better example. Beginning in 1548, and extending over the next century and a half, a number

Riots, Rebellions and Revolutions in Europe of serious rebellions broke out against the new and increased taxes necessary to fight the major wars of the period and fund the growing institutions of central government. Perhaps the most serious of these was the revolt of the croquants (a derogatory term for a rustic person) of the Perigord in south­western France.

The Croquant revolt began to take shape in December 1636 when the government announced an extraordinary tax levy to buy grain for the French army assembling at Bayonne for an invasion of Spain. When the Crown soon added another extraordinary levy, which the royal intendant estimated meant a total 1636/7 local tax increase of one-third over the previous year's impost, the Perigord erupted in revolt. Tax agents came under attack as peasants took up arms, and on 10 May 1637 at least 30,000 well-armed peasants captured Bergerac, one of the main cities of the province. The actions of the Croquants from the first made it clear this was a revolt about taxes and not about radical social or economic change. The rebels never attacked the castles and manors of great landowners and, indeed, selected as their com­mander a local nobleman and career military officer, Antoine du Puy, Sieur de La Mothe-la-Foret. Although the majority of the Perigordin nobility rallied to neither side, we may assume that La Mothe-La-Foret and other aristocrats who followed the banner of revolt raised by the peasants did so either out of sympathy for their cause, or out of a misguided attempt to contain the movement by assuming leadership roles. Many of the men serving as sub­ordinates to La Mothe-la-Foret were improbable social revolutionaries; they seem to have been selected for their military experience or local prestige, and were not the sort of men who would have been expected to join the ranks of a revolt against the existing social and economic order. They included seven local noblemen, six judges, five attorneys, four priests, three merchants, two notaries and a physician. And, we can see the aims of the Croquants in surviving texts drafted by these notables in their ranks, some of which were addressed to the king. In these, they respectfully appealed for relief from the extraordinary fiscal demands made on them by officers of whose actions the king had to have been ignorant, and they requested punishment of those officials. They also appealed for the re-establishment of their traditional liberties, including restoration of normal taxation practices, which, they professed to believe, would usher in a new golden age.

Having captured Bergerac, La Mothe-La-Foret led the peasants down the Dordogne River valley in an attempt to capture the regional capital, Bordeaux. However, his peasant forces lacked artillery, and that deficiency prevented their capture of the next sizeable town downstream from Bergerac, Sainte-Foy.

As the Croquant forces then marched south into the Agenais and captured several towns, the governor of the region recalled troops from the Spanish front. These royal forces stormed rebel-held La Sauvetat on i June 1637, captured it in bloody street-to-street fighting which cost the lives of as many as 1,500 Croquants, and sacked the town. La Mothe-La-Foret then retreated to Bergerac, where he found his position untenable when royal forces arrived with artillery. Thus, the Croquants and their leaders dispersed, and La Mothe- La-Foret disappeared into the deep forests of the Perigord, never to be apprehended.

Royal authorities applied the stick and the carrot to the peasant population in the wake of the revolt. They were quick with exemplary punishments, executing a dozen leaders, banishing other Croquants or sentencing them to the galleys, and stationing troops in rebellious towns at the expense of the communities. But they also withdrew the extraordinary levy for the Bayonne army in a decree which suggested that royal officials, not the king, were chiefly responsible for the problems. Nevertheless, the region was hardly pacified; less formidable uprisings continued in neighbouring areas, some recalcitrant Croquants retreated to the forests to form bands of brigands, and ultimately other parts of the south-west rose up in significant rebellions. Yves-Marie Berce, the historian of seventeenth-century revolts in south­western France, suggested the cause of these continuing problems: ‘The revolt was not just an enterprise with its date, its reasons, its plans, it was a habit, a way of life, a permanent refusal of the fiscal grip'.^[743]

In addition to riots and rebellions, a number of major revolutions broke out in Europe in our period; no major state was immune from them and religious radicalism was a major cause of the challenge to monarchical ‘tyranny': the coming to power of the Catholic League in France in 1588 and the Republic in England in 1649 ushered in brief experiments with ideas of popular sovereignty. But perhaps no state was more powerfully impacted by revolution than the Spanish monarchy. As the product of the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, no monarchy better epitomised the ethnically composite state of the era. By 1580 the Catholic monarchs, through marriage and inheritance, ruled the territories of Spain and Portugal as well as Sardinia, Sicily, the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan in Italy, the Franche-Comte (today part of Burgundy in eastern France), and the provinces of the Netherlands that comprise the territories of

Riots, Rebellions and Revolutions in Europe twenty-first-century Belgium, Luxembourg and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In many of these territories the monarchs of Spain, almost constantly at war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and therefore in need of ever greater revenues from their diverse subjects, confronted a number of revolutions. They were the result, once again, of diverse issues, including religious and ethnic divisions, traditions of self-government chal­lenged by a centralising monarchy, harvest failures and a rising tax burden. Thus, in a revolution beginning in 1562, the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands asserted their de facto independence from Spain by 1581. Portugal, which had passed by inheritance to the Spanish monarchy in 1580, reasserted its independence in a revolution in 1640. And the Italian territories proved especially troublesome; Sicily revolted in 1516-17, Naples in 1547, and both rose up in revolution in 1647. Royal forces quickly crushed the Sicilian revolt of 1647, but that in Naples engulfed a large part of southern Italy and produced the declaration of an independent republic before the Spanish crown restored control in 1648. But the unrest that most threatened the Spanish monarchy lay within its Iberian borders.

The inhabitants of the principality of Catalonia, a portion of the old crown lands of Aragon, were linguistically and culturally quite different from the largely Castilian officialdom of the Spanish monarchy. Moreover, the Catalans possessed a tradition of autonomy in their constitutions, which limited the authority of the monarch and to which each new monarch had to swear obedience. There also was a representative body, the Corts, which had to approve taxes. All this obstructed the plans of the king's chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, to get Catalonia to contribute more revenue to the monarchy's war effort against neighbouring France in the Thirty Years War. Nevertheless, Olivares forged ahead with his plans in 1640 despite the severe drought from which the Catalans were suffering, and he ordered the billeting of troops in the principality. Such a threat could prompt locals to forget their differences, and when a royal official arrived in Santa Coloma de Farners to execute billeting orders, residents closed ranks. Local leaders quickly emerged as a nobleman provided a small supply of firearms to citizens. A local priest directed organisation of the resistance, and a riot broke out on 30 April that drove the Crown's representative and his servants to seek refuge in an inn that rioters surrounded and burned, killing all but one of the servants. This riot set off a cycle of popular attacks on troops through­out Catalonia and military retribution by burning villages. Indeed, by early June 1640 Barcelona descended into riots that took the life of the viceroy himself and marked the beginning of a full-scale revolution extending from

1640 to 1652 in which the Catalans sought independence from the Spanish monarchy with the aid of France.

The greatest revolution of our period, of course, was the French Revolution of 1789. At its outset, its adherents drew on the extensive reper­toire of early modern acts of collective violence, displaying ‘the same ges­tures, the same behaviours, the same marches, counter marches and ritualised violence' as those of rioters and rebels three centuries earlier.^[744] But what commenced with traditional expressions of collective violence soon became something quite new as the rebels of 1789 aspired not to regain a past golden age, but to create a new society, economy and government. Thus, the last revolution of our period was the first modern revolution.