When the Bastille fell on 14 July 1789, first its governor and then, shortly after, the mayor of Paris (prevot de marchands) were seized and gruesomely decapi­tated by the crowd, before their heads were paraded on pikes around the capital's streets.

For some historians, from Thomas Carlyle to more recent ‘chroniclers' like Simon Schama, these scenes of collective violence prefi­gured an inherently bloody course for the French Revolution.

regime.

But whereas the origins of popular violence have long sparked a heated debate, much less has been said about its transition into the years following the Revolution and into France's ‘revolutionary century'. For, from 1780 to 1880, a series of popular insurrections either succeeded in overthrowing the nation's established regime - in 1789, 1792, 1830, 1848 and 1870 - or failed to prevent what was resented as an elite retreat from revolutionary change - as in 1795, 1832,1851 and 1871. Not until the late 1870s was a durable democratic polity consolidated in the mass electoral politics of the Third Republic. The French Revolution of 1789-99 may have been the period most visibly marked by acts of collective violence, but these acts did not decline across the nineteenth century. Rather, their forms, expressions and targets shifted within a transforming political culture.

What, then, was different by 1880 in occurrences of popular violence, in what ways, and what remained the same? By closely examining several case studies of collective violence throughout the revolutionary century, this

i Cf. notably Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) and Jean-Clement Martin, Violence et revolution: essai sur la naissance d'un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are our own.

chapter explores the possibilities for reckoning with these questions of change and continuity, melding older interpretations with new modes of analysis.