Political Protest and Collective Violence: Models of Transition
Developments in insurrectionary violence were gradual and regionally varied as the mass of France's population underwent a ‘politicisation', understanding particular grievances within wider national structures and contexts.
As with the broader issue of violence, historians disagree about when this particular change occurred, searching for a seemingly illusory moment of transition. Michel Vovelle has seen the French Revolution as the moment of unprecedented popular participation in national politics, while Maurice Agulhon and many others have identified a mass political ‘apprenticeship' during the Second Republic. For Eugen Weber, this was a process that only began after 1880 in regions south of the Loire. Sudhir Hazareesingh, in contrast, has emphasised the importance of the Second Empire, usually dismissed as an authoritarian hiatus in the democratic, republican narrative.[583]Yet, in each revolutionary crisis, forms of collective violence reflected the changing society of which they were a product. Building on the insights of Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, Charles Tilly in particular saw in the history of rebellion in nineteenth-century France the paradigmatic example of the interrelationship of changes in the nature of the state, society and protest.[584]
Tilly's vast quantitative surveys demonstrated two key theses. First, violent protest was endemic rather than confined to the months of spectacular revolutionary upheaval (there were more such protests in 1832 than in 1830, for instance) and was to be understood as an expression of conflict between ‘contenders' for power, including the centralising state. Second, the changing forms of protest were a reflection of wider changes in economic and political structures. As mechanisation of manufacturing became more widespread, for example, so machine-breaking became a common reaction, jostling with older forms of protest such as collective price-fixing (taxation populaire) during grain shortages.[585]
By the 1850s, both subsistence rioting and machine-smashing - which had also underpinned key elements of popular ideology in the first half of the century - had effectively disappeared.
Tilly has argued that the years of the Second Republic (1848-51) were the time of critical transition in the forms in which political power was contested, the changing ‘repertoires' of protest. The great wave of subsistence protests in 1846-7 and the explosion of forest invasions, occupation and destruction of private property, and anti-tax rebellions in 1848 were to be the last great outbreak - at least on a large scale - of forms of protest described by Tilly as ‘reactive' or ‘defensive' responses to state centralisation and capitalist economic structures. From 1848 they were juxtaposed with a remarkable proliferation of demonstrations, mass electoral rallies, ‘associational' political activity and coordinated insurrectional activity epitomised in secret societies and resistance to Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1851: collective action he described as ‘proactive' or ‘national'.[586]Fundamental to these changes in the nature and orientation of protest were transformations in urban and rural society. In Tilly's words, the decades before and after 1845:
spanned the country's first great surge of industrial expansion and urban growth. They included the knitting together of the nation by railroad and telegraph. They contained the advent of universal manhood suffrage, the emergence of political parties, and the formation of trade unions... It was a time of profound political transformations. The nature of collective violence changed in step with those transformations.[587]
Tilly's model, which became more nuanced over time, is compelling and profoundly influential. One weakness, however, is in his comparatively brief treatment of the decade of the Revolution of 1789. Rather than being an intense period of ‘reactive' violence, as Tilly suggested, the Revolution actually initiated an extraordinary range of ‘proactive' conflict. The evidence is overwhelming in the light of the new state structures, political associations and revolutionary political culture.
To be sure, there were thousands of episodes of food rioting, forest invasions and land seizures, but these were mixed with nationwide ‘associational' activity in political societies, especially Jacobin clubs, national elections, petition campaigns and even strikes. Nationally, there were perhaps 6,000 Jacobin clubs and popular societies created in 1793-4, short-lived though many of them were.[588] At times, the distinction between ‘reactive' and ‘proactive' protest seems arbitrary at best: the most sweeping collective action of the decade - the ‘Grande Peur' ofJuly- August 1789 - was both a defensive reaction by rural communities in preparation against anticipated attacks by vengeful nobles and then a revolutionary attack on the seigneurial system when those attacks failed to eventuate.[589]Strikes, usually understood as the paradigmatic form of protest in industrial societies, were far more common in the eighteenth century than historians have assumed. For example, while the Le Chapelier law ofJune 1791 was chiefly directed at ‘coalitions' of Parisian wage-earners, it was also aimed at the waves of strikes by large bands of harvesters working on the commercial wheat-farms in the Paris basin. These often violent strikes, or ‘bacchanals', occurred at times when harvests were plentiful and labour was in strong demand, as in the summer of 1791, during which the administrators of Aisne had to outlaw strikes of up to 700 harvesters on farms around Chateau- Thierry. At the height of the ‘Terror' of 1793-4, the district authorities of Montpellier complained that ‘the workers involved in agricultural labour form themselves into groups [se coalisent], threaten, aggress and force the landowner to pay a day's labour at a rate far above that fixed by the law'. In Heudicourt and other communes of the department of Somme, labourers confronted farmers, some holding placards reading: ‘Unity is strength - to the harvester of good will - to harvest at that price - republicans have had enough. All citizens will come at two o'clock for a festival... to dance around the tree of fraternity.'[590] For these reasons, it could be argued that the great turning point in the forms of collective protest was 1789, not 1848, or that the decades 1789-1860 as a whole were the period of transition.[591] [592] [593]