The Challenge of Cultural Anthropology
A second shortcoming lay in Tilly's quantitative focus on the causes and types of violent collective behaviour, which led him away from a sufficiently qualitative analysis of the cultural practice of violence.
Sporadic though they may have been, the striking instances of deliberate cruelty by rioting crowds in particular have since attracted closer study. In investigating the genealogy of mass democratic political culture in France, scholars have, in recent decades, highlighted the importance of close-knit communities of place, faith and family, and examined the specificities of violent acts.Cultural anthropology has especially informed this recent work. Seeking to nuance interpretations of food protests beyond subsistence motivations, such analyses have stressed the internal logic of crowd action by pointing to the symbolic rites of popular violence.11 Violence may have lingered daily in the streets of eighteenth-century Paris, for example, but this world of frequent ‘disorder' also held, in Arlette Farge's words, a ‘great desire for justice and order'. Urban crowds were governed by a sense of communal solidarity and mobilised within a local system of ‘customary rights and obligations'. These moral boundaries were dynamically ‘enforced' in quotidian acts; they limited crowd violence through a strong tradition of self-regulation.12
Understanding social tensions as more than simply direct expressions of material interests therefore reveals much about the communitarian nature of collective violence, with some of its most startling expressions across the revolutionary decades directed towards individuals who were known to their killers. In October 1790, for example, the villagers of Varaize in the department of Charente-Inferieure stabbed their mayor Latierce to death in the streets of Saint-Jean-d'Angely, a nearby town. Latierce was the manager of the Countess d'Amelot's local estates, and was caught between his interests
in preserving her seigneurial rights and the insistence of his village that the feudal regime had been destroyed in 1789.
It was later claimed that Latierce was held upright so that his neighbors could all have the opportunity to join in this violent act, as if to figuratively expel him from the community - not unlike the ‘symbolic extrusion beyond death' that Colin Lucas has argued for the post-mortem inflictions on corpses during the ‘White Terror' in 1795.[594]If common ties between perpetrators of violence and their victims help to account for the intensity of some cruel acts, however, personal familiarity was not always essential. An estranged awareness of prominent individuals, in fact, in many ways favoured the selective targeting of victims by popular anger. On 22 July 1789, a week after the fall of the Bastille, the royal officials Foulon de Doue and Berthier de Sauvigny were lynched and decapitated in Paris, just a few hours apart from each other. They were later exhibited on pikes: with hay stuffed in his gaping mouth, Foulon's floating head was brandished before Berthier. The brutality of these deaths reflected in part simmering undercurrents of rumour, conspiracy and fear, all common to popular revolt - whether in stirring Parisian panic over the ‘vanishing children' of the 1750s, sparking the rural disturbances during the Great Fear of summer 1789, or stimulating fears of a Prussian invasion that underlay the September Massacres in 1792.[595]
As rumour's underlying structure remained, then, its forms altered along with anxieties over conspiracy. The fervent level of hostility towards Foulon and Berthier, while underpinned by fears of armed forces outside Paris, derived particularly from the ‘famine plot persuasion' of eighteenth-century France. A recurrent popular reaction to subsistence crises in the ancien regime, this popular belief in conspiracy extended blame beyond market boundaries to moral ‘crime' - where dearth was ‘artificial', generated by rumour- sustained ‘plots' among notables - that were only remediable through price alterations.[596] Foulon was a wealthy former army official who had controversially replaced the popular finance minister Jacques Necker, whose dismissal only a few days earlier had sparked fierce protests until he was recalled on 19 July.[597] As the intendant of Paris, meanwhile, his son-in-law Berthier was responsible for provisioning.
His filial ties with Foulon were only compounded by the devastating harvest of 1788, which raised bread prices in July 1789 to a peak unseen since 1715.Moreover, Foulon had been particularly subject to vicious if apocryphal rumours of ‘boasting... of making the people eat [hay]’.[598] Similar contemptuous metaphors of ingestion had circulated previously. In 1725, for example, the Parisian lieutenant general of police, Ravot d’Ombreval, was suspected not only of hoarding grain, but also of having dismissively remarked, ‘Let them eat cabbage runts.’ During the ‘Flour War’ of 1775, a farmer in Signy- Signets likewise incensed other villagers by commenting that ‘the poor could no longer complain, because the grass was growing and they could eat that’.[599] That the motif of hay would dog Foulon from procession to posthumous torture could then hardly have been surprising - both men, accused of entanglement with ‘conspiracy of the court against Paris’, made for obvious victims.[600]
E. P. Thompson’s work on the ‘moral economy’ of early modern English crowds and Natalie Zemon Davis’s pioneering argument about the denominational divergences in ritualised violence during the French Wars of Religion have similarly helped to reshape new, cultural characterisations of later forms of violence.[601] The ‘War of the demoiselles’ makes for a pertinent example. Between 1829 and 1832 in Ariege, bands of men ‘armed and disguised as women’ sought to re-appropriate local forests in resistance against the Forest Code of 1827, perceived to have encroached upon the community’s rights to the shared resources of the woodlands. But if reliance on forest land for pasturing livestock lay at the heart of the peasants’ discontent, and if their disturbances reveal strong communal attitudes - both towards their environment and in their ability to mobilise collectively in retaliation against the state - these acts also bore the cultural imprint of past rites.
Investigating their‘symbolic dimension', Peter Sahlins has suggested, points to these guerillalike incidents as constituting a subversive, ‘festive rebellion'. The demoiselles, rather than killing their enemies, performed instead something of a charivari writ large; coloured by carnivalesque rites, their female garb arguably evoked the fertility of the lands they sought to recover. Thus folkloric tradition mingled with the violence of the men, not only as they pillaged local chateaux and intimidated the forest guards, but also in their sartorial inversion; in the way they sacralised the forest and respected its supernatural beliefs; and in the way local social and sexual hierarchies were preserved through dress and... 21
gesture.
As during the French Revolution, there were sporadic cases of communitarian violence towards well-known and hated individuals in later revolutionary crises, when an explosive coincidence of economic misery, expectation of radical change, government instability and the liberation of political life generated an escalation of division and conflict. On 12 November 1830, near Narbonne, long-standing friction over access to wooded hillsides culminated in the collective killing of a noble and his son.[602] [603] Early that day a brigade of gendarmes went to the estate of Gabriel Latreille at Gleon, on Gabriel's insistence, to make arrests of locals from Villeseque, a village 4 kilometres away, who were illegally grazing their livestock and cutting wood on his estate. There was an angry stand-off between, on the one side, Gabriel and his son Gonzague, six of their private forest-guards and the gendarmes, and, on the other, perhaps one hundred Villesequois armed with spades, meat-spits and rifles. The question of who fired first was to be hotly debated, but the wounding of one in the crowd provoked them into rushing the gendarmes, overwhelming them, and seizing their ammunition. As Gabriel and Gonzague attempted to flee through the trees, they were pursued by the villagers and shot dead.
The murders of the Latreilles were the climax of a half-century of open resentment and conflict between the inhabitants of Villeseque and the proprietors of the two large estates on the borders of the commune's land. The murders make more sense because here the rural people involved knew their victims, and only too well: the murders were the manifestation of extreme and longstanding hatreds, at least a half-century in the making. Here, to follow Tilly, news of the Revolution of 1830 in Paris had shifted the balance between contenders for power even at the village level, and permitted Villesequois to confront the Latreilles openly. Whether the violence was premeditated or spontaneous was never to be clear.
Forty years later, in August 1870, several hundred peasants from around the tiny village of Hautefaye, near Nontron in south-western France, systematically battered a young nobleman for two hours, then, as he was about to expire, burned him to death. In his comprehensive microhistory of the murder, Alain Corbin teased out the reasons why, for the noble, Hautefaye was the fateful place to be.[604] Part of his explanation was a web of historical factors. In this area north of the Dordogne, popular ideology was distinguished by a longstanding hatred of nobles (evident in the Grande Peur of 1789), mistrust of priests (manifest in a wave of rioting after rumours of a plot to reimpose the tithe in 1868) and resentment of urban republicans (news of the workers' insurrection in Paris in June 1848 had caused a panic in the area).
This distinctive ideology, combined with unprecedented prosperity under the Second Empire, had generated a fervent Bonapartism. The news of the imperial army's reverses during the Franco-Prussian War in August 1870 reached the drought-afflicted countryside at the same time as the anxious villagers from around Hautefaye were attending a fair and celebrating Napoleon Ill's national holiday (15 August). The young noble, Alain de Moneys, unknown to most of his assailants, was accused of shouting ‘Long live the Republic!', dubbed a ‘Prussian', and became a doomed symbol of accumulated hatreds and fears. Up to 800 locals participated in or looked on as the young nobleman was tortured for hours, then incinerated.
The incident at Hautefaye in 1870 shocked and deeply embarrassed the liberal republicans who came to power a few weeks later. For the murder occurred eighty years after the French Revolution and the presumed triumph of a new political culture based on citizenship, equality before the law, tolerance and popular sovereignty, running against their assumptions that the rural masses had shared in a linear progress of enlightenment. Corbin in turn used the incident at Hautefaye not only to probe the meanings of collective violence, but also to pose the relationship between the rise of liberal democracy and continuing examples of collective violence.