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Historians of France have paid considerable attention
to various forms of collective violence ranging from religious rioting
to labor strikes. Their work usually relies heavily on the documents
generated during the repression of these incidents, but they rarely
make methods of repression central to their study of revolt. However,
examining the different methods used in response to large-scale
collective resistance helps to reveal some of the most profound
changes in cultural and political mentalités that took place
in France between the Wars of Religion and the Third Republic. Even
more than revealing these changes, such a study helps to explain
how they came about. Prevailing notions of public order and how
to preserve it were shaped and reshaped by repeated cycles of revolt
and repression throughout the three centuries from the Croquants
to the Commune.
Putting down a revolt meant using force. There
is never complete agreement about how much force is appropriate
in particular circumstances, but it is generally agreed that a certain
amount of force is necessary to preserve the social order. Thus,
political authorities might legitimately end a revolt by using force.
However, if the methods of repression are generally deemed excessive,
then it becomes a discredited use of force, or what I will henceforth
call domestic state violence. The difference between legitimate
use of force and domestic state violence is easily missed. For example,
legions of scholars think they are borrowing a brilliant Weberian
phrase when they speak of the state as the monopoly of violence
in society, but such a statement completely corrupts Weber’s
idea. In fact, Weber spoke of the state as "that agency in
society which has a monopoly of legitimate force." Violence
and the legitimate use of force are not interchangeable concepts,
they are intrinsically opposites, even if extrinsically indistinguishable.
It needs to be emphasized that despite appearances, the difference
between force and violence is not like beauty, in the eye of the
beholder, nor is it merely a matter of semantics. Let us deal with
each of these in turn.
Hannah Arendt’s statement, "Violence
can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate," captures
an essential aspect of violence, it is a quasi-moral concept generally
linked to assessing means in terms of ends. Therefore, to describe
the use of force as violence is to question its legitimacy in terms
of social harmony and public order. Nonetheless, even if described
as violence, the use of coercive force could still be justified
by the norms it seeks to establish. This is the attitude of revolutionaries.
They do not deny acting violently, in other words disrupting existing
social relationships through the use of force, but they justify
this violence as an indispensable means to build a more just social
order; that is, as necessary to lower the overall level of coercion
within society and thereby ultimately increase social harmony. It
quickly becomes apparent, however, that both those who revolt against
authority and those who repress such a revolt, seek to justify their
use of coercive force as counter-violence needed either to maintain,
restore, or increase social harmony. This leaves a conundrum of
subjectivity. Differences of opinion about the justness of a particular
social order compared to a potential alternative become the basis
for assessing the use of coercion. It becomes violence, and therefore
illegitimate, only in the eye of the beholder.
Under these conditions, describing a particular
use of force as violence essentially condemns it on moral grounds.
However, if we want to analyze various uses of coercive force without
taking a moral stance towards them, that is without condoning or
condemning them, we need a theory of violence which greatly reduces
the assessment of coercive force in terms of whether its end justifies
the means. The Italian legal philosopher Sergio Cotta has developed
such a theory. Cotta distinguishes between force and violence on
the basis of their structural characteristics. Both have a physical
dimension and disturb existing relationships, but unlike force,
violence is sudden, unpredictable, discontinuous, and disproportionate.
Nature offers a good example of this contrast. Although a lengthy
drought may damage crops more than a hail storm, only the storm
is violent. In human affairs, Cotta argues, an act of force only
becomes violence when it displays a lack of measure along one of
three axes, internal, external and purposive. Internal measure means
using force with regularity and precision in order to increase its
effectiveness. External measure means using force in accordance
with a social, moral, or legal norm. Finally, purposive measure
means using force to defend or establish a specific form of the
polity. (It should be stressed that purposive measure is not related
to an abstract end such as liberty, equality, or social justice,
but only to the socio-political system deemed capable of achieving
such an end.) Cotta further notes that an act of force may conform
to one or even two of these forms of measure and yet still be extremely
violent; only the presence of all three modalities prevents an act
of force from becoming violence and thus losing legitimacy. This
theory of violence provides a way of analyzing the use of force
to repress revolt without the moralistic tint that ends often cast
on means.
Cotta’s theory can help us both reduce the
level of our personal moral judgement and increase our sensitivity
to the moral judgements and discursive strategies of people who
witnessed a particular cycle of revolt and repression. Such an approach
then makes it possible to combine histoire évenementielle
and la longue durée in order to highlight secular changes
in ways of preventing coercive force from becoming state violence.
Furthermore, applying a theory that distinguishes between force
and violence to historical events demonstrates the power of violence
to destroy the consensus upon which political power is based. This
generates new efforts to produce power through consensus, both on
the part of the state (recreating measure) and on the part of society
(devising new concepts of a just social order). The history of France
from the first Croquant revolt of 1594 to the Paris Commune of 1871
demonstrates that repressing revolt had the greatest impact on attitudes
toward the existing polity when it took the form of domestic state
violence. Thus oscillations between measured coercive force and
domestic state violence divide these three centuries into six stages,
each of which had a distinctive combination of dominant social vision
and methods of repression.
* * * * *
The first of these six stages lasted from the
end of the Wars of Religion to about 1640, and could be called the
Croquants phase. During this period, the monarchy struggled to become
the senior partner in its relationship to all major powerholders
in French society. Because the monarchy could never quite count
on succeeding in this struggle, it was forced to negotiate methods
of repression with provincial elites who had independent sources
of power. This had the effect of generally keeping repression within
the bounds of measure and preventing it from becoming domestic state
violence. Thus, the sporadic Croquant revolts from 1594 to 1641
and royal responses to them shared several features. Although peasant
rebels often did extensive property damage, they killed very few
officials. The greatest loss of life came when royal troops clashed
with peasant units in open combat. Once armed resistance had been
broken militarily, a few leaders were put on trial and usually quickly
executed. After local elites had brought the situation under control,
a royal pardon followed. The Croquant revolt in the Périgord in
1637 illustrates this pattern. After several weeks of widespread
peasant mobilization, the Duc de la Valette confronted the rebels
at La Sauvetat where his force of 3,400 infantry and cavalry suffered
at least 200 casualties in their assault on the bourg, but
killed 1,000-1,500 Croquants in the process and then burnt 25 houses
with women and children still inside. La Valette later turned 40
rebel prisoners over to a magistrate and a procureur from
the Parlement of Bordeaux sent out to judge them "sovereignly"
in conjunction with various local courts. Even though other encounters
brought more prisoners, only four men were condemned to death, one
to the galleys, and one to banishment. A pardon drafted by agents
of the provincial governor and approved by Richelieu covered all
but 25 leaders, none of whom were ever caught. Despite the presence
of a few local notables among the rebel leaders, the provincial
nobility did not openly support the revolt against the crown. Although
they might have been slow to react, and therefore culpable in the
eyes of Richelieu, the scope of rebellion quickly convinced them
to oppose it and thereby uphold royal authority as well. This preserved
the province from extensive repression. Even though both the number
of casualties and soldiers’ excesses at La Sauvetat shocked
contemporaries, and constitute a lack of internal measure, the balance
of power between the social elite and monarchical authority helped
to limit the repression to a handful of executions and the billeting
of troops in towns which had not resisted the Croquant armies. Therefore,
in so far as was possible at the time, and that had its clear limits--troops
who have just engaged in sustained hand-to-hand combat are notoriously
difficult to restrain once a bloody victory has been won--the repression
of 1637 in the Périgord was measured, especially externally and
purposively. In this respect it was typical of most repressions
between 1594 and 1640 and reflected a socio-political order which
balanced strong vertical solidarities and an emerging absolutist
state.
This was not a static period, however, and the
monarchy’s bullying did more to disrupt the existing social
order than anything else. The rapid emergence of a fiscal-military
state brought heavy-handed and clumsy attempts to raise more taxes
and provoked the peasant revolts of the period. In addition, there
were times when repressing revolt clearly lacked measure, even in
the eyes of the elite. This is obvious whenever superior authorities
condemned the severity of subordinates. However, the use of royal
troops to disperse organized gatherings of armed peasants did not
in itself constitute domestic state violence, although it could
easily degenerate into that. Similarly, punishing rebels in a harsh
and exemplary manner, including torture, breaking on the wheel,
hanging, dismemberment and public display of body parts, life in
the galleys, or banishment, did not constitute domestic state violence
unless legal procedures were circumvented, judicial norms violated,
or the restoration of order compromised. All of these punishments
were common components of the French criminal justice system and
widely accepted in the early seventeenth century. In most cases
of serious crime, royal justice had supplanted private vengeance
and urban communities had come to accept the public executioner
as their collective instrument to preserve order. Local people who
gathered to watch breakings, hangings, burnings, or floggings expected
executioners to display considerable expertise. A botched job could
easily incite spectators to lynch the executioner for having failed
to apply justice on their behalf. Despite their obvious physicality,
the black legend of arbitrariness created by philosophes,
and the mix of morbid curiosity and horror such punishments provoke
today, these were carefully regulated and socially endorsed responses
deemed necessary to contain clear threats to social harmony. Therefore,
employing such means in the wake of an armed revolt was generally
expected.
The royal response to the Nu-Pieds revolt of 1639
marked the start of a new stage in the history of repression in
France. Between 1640 and 1675 the monarchy repeatedly resorted to
domestic state violence. This reflected its increased determination
to co-opt or coerce those with extensive social power in order to
integrate them into a more statist version of the traditional social
order. Raison d’état, family lineages, clientage networks,
venal office-holding, and bureaucratic oversight were all used in
the monarchy’s intense struggle to realign society. Whenever
royal authority was openly challenged, however, the monarchy responded
with more coercive force than it had the ability to control.
No one doubted that the revolt of the Nu-Pieds
seriously challenged royal authority. It broke out during wartime,
swept both the towns and countryside of lower Normandy, and was
at least tacitly supported by the provincial elite. Louis XIII quickly
announced the need for exemplary punishment and hoped that this
would help to avoid "extreme remedies." In fact the repression
shocked contemporaries. Weeks after these events, Corneille wrote
his play Cinna ou la Clémence d’Auguste implicitly condemning
the government’s severity. Pamphleteers and jurists alike described
the forms of repression as exceptional in the annals of French history.
Three things appear to have been excessive in the eyes of contemporaries.
First came an unprecedented military repression. Colonel Gassion
and 5,200 royal troops swept into the province and broke the back
of the rebellion in a pitched battle at Avranches. 300 rebels died
in the final assault and others drowned trying to flee. Gassion
then hanged a dozen prisoners and packed an equal number off to
the galleys. Following royal orders, he dispersed his troops across
the province and told them to live at local expense. The soldiers
promptly pillaged and raped with such abandon that courts martial
were needed to restore army discipline. Second came summary justice
conducted by royal agents sent to Normandy for the express purpose
of repression. As soon as Chancellor Séguier arrived at Rouen, he
condemned "verbally and militarily" five leaders to be
tortured, executed, pulled to pieces, and displayed at the gates
of the city. Similarly, the newly appointed intendant, La Potherie,
sentenced at least six men to death by simple ordonnance. Elsewhere
he and a team of fifteen conseillers d’état and maîtres des
requêtes either co-oped or supplanted the regular courts, including
the Parlement. In this manner, they condemned at least 11 men to
breaking on the wheel, 35 to hanging, 17 to the galleys, and 37
to banishment from Normandy for life (about half of these were in
absentia). Third came punishments meted out to the urban elites
of Caen and Rouen for failing to uphold royal authority. Not only
did they have to pay enormous back taxes, support the cost of quartering
troops throughout the winter, and suffer the humiliation of being
disarmed and deprived of their revenues for over a year, but a large
number of office holders were suspended and exiled from their places
of residence. This included all the office holders in the sovereign
courts, generality, and municipality of Rouen. That all of this
was deemed "extreme remedies" by contemporaries is made
clear by Chancellor Séguier himself. He refused to accept Louis
XIII’s offer of most of the royal domains in Normandy as a
reward for his tour of repression, saying that he "did not
want his name to continue serving as an excuse for such great destruction."
The repression of the Nu-Pieds revolt was domestic
state violence on a grand scale. It was significantly more severe
than the repression that had followed previous revolts, including
that of the Cascaveux at Aix in 1630 where several officers of the
sovereign courts and prominent bourgeois had provided leadership.
Dramatically increasing repression in this way reflected the monarchy’s
determination to have provincial elites uphold royal authority.
It was also a precursor to important innovations in repression.
The Nu-Pieds revolt coincided with an extension of the system of
intendants across the kingdom. At the same time, intendants were
given control of special armed brigades set up to force peasants
to pay their taxes. In 1643, the crown redefined tax rebellion as
treason, thus enabling intendants to commandeer royal courts and
personally prosecute both rebels and magistrates who condoned their
actions. This became a common feature of repressing tax rebellions,
especially when they reached epidemic proportions during the Fronde.
These five years of virtual civil war exposed
the difficulty of tying provincial power structures more closely
to the crown, but they did not fundamentally alter the methods for
achieving this. Nevertheless, the widespread collapse of royal authority
during the Fronde encouraged the crown to respond harshly to future
incidents of collective resistance. As a consequence, all of the
major revolts after the Fronde were repressed more severely than
those of the 1620s and 30s. Post-Fronde rebellions were no longer
characterized by open alliances between commoners and provincial
powerholders. In each of the rebellions from the Sabotiers of Sologne
in 1658 to the Camisards of the Cévennes in 1702-5, provincial elites
made common cause with royal authority against local rebellion.
This led to more severe measures against insurgents. For example,
the Roure revolt of 1670 in the Vivarais was stamped out by an awesome
force of 4,500 troops, the kings’ musketeers, led by d’Artagnan
himself, bourgeois militia and a large number of Languedocian nobles.
Together the troops, militia and gentilshommes cut rebel units to
pieces, sacked Aubenas and Privas, and slaughtered fleeing peasants
before razing nearby villages. The intendant and a juge-mage from
Nîmes then conducted summary trials, sentencing 30 to death and
over 100 to the galleys while local towns had their ramparts dismantled.
Obviously local elites had little difficulty choosing which side
to be on once a popular insurrection broke out. However, the scope
of the repression appeared excessive, even to the bourgeois victims
of the original revolt. They claimed that those who carried out
the repression exaggerated their harshness in order to exaggerate
their triumph in the eyes of the Crown.
Such behavior indicates the absolutist monarchy’s
willingness to err on the side of excessive force following decades
of overt resistance to its increasing demands. However, when coercive
force degenerates into state violence it produces more alienation
than it overcomes. Those who excercise power effectively are well
aware of this dictum. Hence the attempt to regulate the use of force
ever more carefully. The Papier Timbré and Bonnets Rouges revolts
in Brittany in 1675, the last major anti-tax revolts of the ancien
régime, reveal how the level of repression had increased since
the 1630s as well as how the government now sought to regulate the
use of coercive force. Although Louvois, Secretary of State for
War, had a full-scale army of 6,000 troops land at Nantes, he made
sure it was supplied through the new system of étapes rather
than permit the indiscriminate havoc that would result from letting
it feed itself. When the troops entered Rennes in October, they
were only allowed to live at the expense of the inhabitants for
two weeks and then went on regular pay. Such precautions did not
eliminate all pillaging-- especially where soldiers carried out
authorized reprisals by hanging peasants from roadside trees--but
Brittany was spared the level of devastation inflicted elsewhere
in the period. The judicial punishment was also harsh but measured.
As usual, the province’s présidial courts tried rebels "prevotally
and without appeal," but less than ten were condemned to death
and none sent to the galleys. More spectacularly, Rennes was totally
disarmed, its Parlement transferred to Vannes, and an army of 10,000
troops quartered for the winter in Brittany. All the same, considering
the scale of revolt and the rebels’ capture of both the provincial
governor and the bishop of Saint-Malo, the methods and level of
repression fit the new expectations of the period, as the correspondence
of Mme de Sévigné indicates. In other words, since 1640, and especially
since the Fronde, the literate in French society had come to accept
that greater amounts of repression were needed to preserve the emerging
absolutist social order.
The logic of Louisquatorzian state violence reached
its reductio ad absurdum in the Camisards revolt of 1702-05
when excessive and uncontrolled measures of repression actually
increased and prolonged the revolt. When there was no longer a serious
domestic threat to the body politic, especially not from Protestants,
the government endorsed a plan to destroy 466 communities inhabited
by almost 20,000 people. As the regular troops of Marshal de Montrevel
criss-crossed the Cévennes shooting peasants and burning villages,
the intendant Bâville allowed local Catholic bands known as Florentins
and Cadets de la Croix to pillage and massacre with, as one royal
soldier wrote, "such an excess of cruelties that one can hardly
help but criticize and detest them." These measures provoked
fierce resistance and actually carried the Camisards to the apogee
of their power in early 1704. Three years of religious cleansing
culminated in the capture of fifty diehards in April 1705. As had
been the case numerous times before, Bâville sat with the présidial
court at Nîmes, sentencing two to be burned alive, four to be broken
on the wheel, and numerous others to hanging or life in the galleys.
The risk of further public disturbance was so great, however, that
the burnings and breakings had to be conducted under the guns of
the citadel and surrounded by royal regiments. Nothing better illustrates
the hostility that domestic state violence à la Louis XIV could
provoke from the local population.
* * * * *
After the period 1640 to 1675, which I’ve
called somewhat misleadingly the Louisquatorzian phase of repression,
came a century of first consolidating then defending the new absolutist
order. In order to overcome the alienation created by repeated recourse
to domestic state violence, the monarchy needed not only to regulate
the modes of repression as Louvois and Villars had tried to do,
but to combine social integration of the elites with measures to
prevent the populace from threatening the social order. Louis XIV’s
long reign realigned the social order and judicial structure according
to the needs of the state. Some episodes of repression, such as
the Grands Jours d’Auvergne (1665-6) were themselves dramatic
attempts to assert royal authority and restore order by dealing
harshly with abuses of power or laxity at lower levels of the legal
establishment. However, these never sought to remove the essential
link between social status and judicial power: venality of office.
The persistence of venal office-holding throughout the eighteenth
century gave life to the themistocracy, a neologism coined by Richard
Andrews in order to capture the inseparable combination of royal
courts, patrimonialism, vocational ethos, and rule of law that preserved
order in France until 1789.
This themistocracy provided the main source of
measure preventing the use of coercive force from becoming domestic
state violence. First, purposive measure: no other group did more
than magistrates to define theoretically and defend practically
the antithetical mix of corporative social order and absolutist
state. As Jean Domat, that great idealist of the absolutist polity,
put it, "authority without force would be despised and almost
useless, while force without legitimate authority would be mere
tyranny." Second, external measure: at the same time as major
tax revolts ended, the monarchy adopted the great Criminal Ordinance
of 1670. This increased the power of royal courts at the expense
of seigneurial courts, standardized criminal procedures, and left
judges largely free to pronounce the sentences they saw fit. Henceforth,
the themistocracy would parry threats to public order and, equally
importantly, prevent retributive justice from degenerating into
domestic state violence. Although the government often demanded
heavy sentences for eighteenth-century grain rioters, magistrates
usually did not oblige. For example, even though 548 people were
arrested in connection with the Flour War of May 1775, the greatest
disturbance of the pre-revolutionary period, only two received death
sentences. Finally, internal measure: as we have seen, using troops
to repress a revolt always posed a risk of excess. Building barracks,
perfecting the system of étapes, and increasing officer professionalism
helped to restrain the damage done by the sustained presence of
troops. Nonetheless, soldiers remained unpredictable in the face
of a crowd and so were used as little as possible. In fact, the
eighteenth century is littered with more refusals to use the army
for repressive purposes than occassions when it actually cracked
heads. Thus, the truly awful military and judicial repression meted
out at times of crisis during the reign of Louis XIV largely gave
way to measured responses in which punishment was selective, not
general, and exemplary, not corrective. Because the socio-political
order was no longer being aggressively realigned, the use of force
was less likely to degenerate into violence. In this way, the ancien
régime’s response to rioting came to resemble closely its
methods of controlling crime.
The monarchy’s increased use of preventive
measures to preserve the social order led to the only major innovation
in repression to emerge in the last century before the French Revolution--the
expansion of the maréchaussée and the writ of its prévôtal
courts in order to cover rural rioters and the wandering poor. However,
at the end of the ancien régime, France averaged only one
rural policeman for every 7,000 inhabitants. Such a small force
only made a meaningful contribution to preserving public order because
so little was required of it in what remained a largely self-regulating
rural society. The maréchaussée’s contribution only
became substantial when coupled with its judicial arm, thirty-three
prévôtal courts which judged summarily and without appeal. The effectiveness
of this ‘booted justice’ lay in a combination of rarity
and severity. Conviction rates averaged only one-third of those
prosecuted, indicating a high standard of proof, but sentences were
often harsh: one-quarter of those convicted in the 1770s and 80s
were sentenced to death. About 30 of these 120 people were publicly
broken on the wheel every year. This offends modern sensibilities,
but prévôtal courts were carefully regulated, acted fairly and,
therefore, epitomized the regime’s effort "to be fair
to the innocent and utterly merciless to the guilty."
This system of criminal justice could only be
effective in a highly stable society. Although sudden outbursts
of widespread violence such as the Croquants, Nu-Pieds, Bonnet Rouges
and Camisards revolts were a fading memory, growing rootlessness
amongst the population indicated a general unraveling of the social
fabric. By the eve of the French Revolution, however, these courts
no longer seemed able to deter disorder and a creeping climate of
fear spread through French society. Rising fear suddenly became
panic. The assaults on chateaux and the fear of brigands exposed
the utter frailty of the late ancien régime’s machinery
of repression.
* * * * *
The early years of the French Revolution witnessed
a lot of violence, but little of it in the form of repression. John
Markoff has counted 4,700 insurrectionary events between June 1788
and June 1793, a large number of which took place after the Constitution
went into effect in October 1791. This speaks volumes about the
unwillingness and inability of both the monarchy and moderate revolutionaries
to use coercive force to restore order. Even after the themistocracy
had been replaced by elected judges, citizen-jurors, and a criminal
code based on punishing men’s minds rather than their bodies,
repression seemed difficult to contemplate. As Colin Lucas has argued,
the revolutionaries who filled the vacuum of power created by armed
insurrection and whose legitimacy rested on novel concepts of popular
sovereignty had a hard time defining the difference between acceptable
and unacceptable forms of popular violence. This left them bereft
of a theory of justice that could have effectively legitimated their
use of coercive force to defend the new regime. Without such a theory,
but bent on radical social change and defense of the fledgling republic,
national leaders drifted into accepting and even condoning essentially
unjustifiable forms of violence which only increased domestic opposition.
Paris Jacobins refused to prosecute septembriseurs and found
it ever easier to adopt sans-culottes solutions. As they
did, the Hydra of revolt grew new heads at Lyons, Marseille, Toulon
and Bordeaux. The National Convention’s imprimatur soon allowed
surveillance committees, exceptional tribunals and armées révolutionnaires
to proliferate across the country. This was "terror on a putting
out basis," as Richard Cobb called it, and for awhile it was
impossible to impose any forms of measure on the exercise of coercive
force.
The Terror then became a prolonged struggle to
bring these instruments of state violence under control while at
the same time waging a life or death struggle with counter-revolutionaries
and foreign enemies alike. In this respect, repression in the Vendée
replicated the actions of Bâville, Montrevel, and the Cadets de
la Croix ninety years before. Suppression of the Vendée and Federalist
revolts, together with widespread imprisonment without trial, and
the operations of over seventy military commissions and revolutionary
tribunals helped to make the Terror the haunting memory for nineteenth-century
Europeans that the Holocaust is today.
Robespierre did nothing to give all of this state
violence purposive measure--the reign of virtue was not a clearly
defined socio-political order. In fact his famous speech on 5 February
1794 was merely a revolutionary surenchère of Domat in which
virtue and terror stood in for authority and force in an embarrassing
attempt to put a metaphysical fig leaf over the domestic state violence
of the moment. When he tried to do something practical to restore
measure by purging those whose excesses discredited the regime,
it led directly to his downfall. Once the Thermidorians let the
politics of vengeance take over, they too lacked any theoretical
means capable of distinguishing between the legitimate use of force
to preserve the new democratic polity and the vigilante violence
which destroyed it. Excluding all those active in the Terror would
have eroded much needed support for the Republic, so the Thermidorians
turned to a new constitution and the rule of law to restore order
and repair the rift that the Terror had opened between state and
society.
The Directory marked the beginning of another
stage--the fifth by my schema--in the long history of French repression.
The regime’s basic premise was simple enough: democratic institutions
would shape the law, the law would control the exercise of coercive
force, and political liberty would be assured. With their eyes on
individual liberty, however, the Thermidorians neglected public
security. Six years of bloody revolution had rent the very fabric
of the polity and left the new regime with little power to stitch
it together again. Extremist factions on the Jacobin left and the
royalist right fought one another in towns and villages throughout
the country. Economic chaos, foreign war, Catholic hostility, and
widespread banditry exacerbated the pervasive political strife.
Under these conditions, the highly democratic criminal justice system,
with its elected judges and public prosecutors and its reliance
on the intimate conviction of citizen-jurors, failed to rise above
factionalism and apply the law fairly. Exasperated by the threat
resurgent royalism posed to the regime’s survival, the Directory
abandoned a strict adherence to the rule of law in favor of increasingly
authoritarian means of restoring public order. This major shift
began with the Fructidor coup d’état in September 1797 and
culminated in Bonaparte’s confirmation as First Consul for
Life in August 1802. Although it hesitated to abandon constitutionalism
altogether, the Directory believed it had to increase its use of
military means to end "France’s worst crime wave in modern
times." This new ‘liberal authoritarianism’ came
to depend heavily on the army to establish stability before relying
on the judiciary to maintain it--an approach borrowed from the Bourbons
and passed on to Bonaparte.
The years 1797-1802 have never been treated as
a single coherent period. Nonetheless, they were unified by a steady
march away from democracy and a mounting wave of repression. Even
more significantly, taken together these five years--and not the
Terror--constitute the pivotal period in three centuries
of repression in France. During these years, traditional methods
of repression were used on an unprecedented scale to restore order
in large areas of endemic lawlessness so that more modern methods
of surveillance, policing and control could assert their effectiveness
and maintain order thereafter. This ended the French Revolution.
It also created the basic features of the surveillance and security
state that dominated the nineteenth century.
The Directory’s campaign to restore order
in areas of endemic civil unrest was first militarized by putting
communes under state of siege. The monarchy had long used the state
of siege to quell resistance, such as at Dijon after the Lanturelu
riots in 1630 and at Paris during the Flour War of 1775. The Directory
preferred the state of siege to actual martial law because the former
transferred police powers to the local army commander and could
be maintained indefinitely, whereas the latter entrusted repression
to the less reliable National Guard and was quite temporary. Although
putting a town under state of siege deprived the inhabitants of
their constitutional rights, the generals argued that if it were
not used, the Constitution would be smothered in its cradle. The
Directory gradually came to accept this rationale and increasingly
used the state of siege to assert its authority over rebellious
communes, especially in 1799, when the Republic faced a powerful
foreign coalition, a major recrudescence of banditry, and several
large regional revolts. By the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire VIII,
40 % of the country was under the jurisdiction of generals able
to impose a state of siege wherever they saw fit to do so. As a
result over 200 communes experienced the state of siege including
Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, Brest, Nice, Geneva, Antwerp, Ghent and
more than a dozen department capitals.
Preventive policing by the army was usually not
deemed enough to punish open hostility from rural communities, so
the Republic resorted to the contrainte solidaire used by
the absolutist monarchy whenever military force had been needed
to repress tax revolt. Thus, putting a town under state of siege
was often accompanied by an application of the law of 2 October
1795 which required communities to compensate victims of violence
and property damage. Naturally, the troops sent to impose the state
of siege took care of collecting fines. Such methods of repression
ran roughshod over the revolutionary rhetoric of individualism.
However, this law was still being applied in the early years of
the July Monarchy.
The Republic also stepped up its repression after
the Fructidor coup by resorting to military justice to break the
back of brigandage and counter-revolution. This took two forms.
The resurrection of military commissions to judge returned émigrés
and the use of regular military courts to judge civilians accused
of banditry. The first measure was a revolutionary invention of
1792, virtual killing machines whose sole task was to identify and
promptly execute all émigrés and exiled clerics arrested back on
French soil. The Directory worked steadfastly to make these commissions
a precise instrument of terror directed against those whom the regime
considered its most implacable opponents--men who had opposed the
Revolution, left France, returned illegally, and refused to leave
again under penalty of death. I have identified 724 people tried
by more than two dozen of these military commissions; although the
majority were handed back to civilian authorities to confirm their
status, 288 were executed, 41 deported, and 16 imprisoned. This
included spies and chouan commanders as well as adolescent
boys and septuguenarian priests.
Even more important to the regime’s survival,
both in scope and consequences, was the late Republic’s use
of military justice to try civilians. In January 1798 the writ of
regular military courts was extended from military personnel and
rebels captured in flagrante delicto to civilians who committed
house burglary or armed robbery in groups of three or more. This
violation of the Republic’s basic principles of justice was
taken directly from the ancien régime’s ordonances on
prévôtal courts. Although the Directory sought to cushion the blow
to its legalistic legitimacy by adding an appeal procedure, civilians
who experienced military justice under the late Republic found it
rather nasty, brutish, and short. Using military courts to crack
down on the most serious crimes of violence produced dramatic results.
The military courts of the 8th and 22nd Military Divisions (headquarters
at Marseille and Tours respectively), condemned 110 to people to
death before the law expired in early 1800.
Two regular military courts were the sole instruments
of judicial repression after the large peasant revolt around Toulouse
in the autumn of 1799. Local forces had easily defeated the insurrection,
killing as many as 4,000 and imprisoning even more. However, the
Directory avoided further state violence by falling back on an old
notion of the difference between a small number of socially influential
leaders and the mass of misled peasants. This led to wholesale releases
and less than a hundred actual prosecutions.
Despite widespread use of the state of siege,
community fines, and military justice, a blaze of anti-republican
insurgency blurred the distinction between the end of one century
and the start of the next. Whole departments were gripped by fear.
The scope of chouannerie in Brittany and brigandage in the
Rhône Valley convinced Bonaparte that the new state apparatus would
only take root in areas of endemic unrest after the government had
tipped the balance of fear in its favor. To do this he created seven
flying columns of troops and attached a mobile military commission
to each. Again applying the pawl of exceptional military justice
to the ratchet wheel of repression produced deliberately terrifying
results. For example, during the four months that two such commissions
operated in the eight departments of Provence and Bas-Languedoc,
they tried 461 men and women for crimes of brigandage, 60 % of whom
were condemned to death. This does not include several dozen brigands
killed in skirmishes or while being transported to prisons. Regardless
of their effectiveness in curbing rural violence, flying columns
and military commissions could not be used long without discrediting
the new regime. Having such dreadful means at their disposal incited
army commanders to reckless terror. For example, the flying columns
under General Garnier in the Basses-Alpes became a byword for brutality.
Reports of systematic pillage and extortion got back to Paris and
inspired the Consulate to find a more controllable alternative.
Once again the late Republic looked to the ancien
régime for ways to conduct measured repression. In the spring
of 1801 the Consulate virtually resurrected prévôtal courts in twenty-six
departments of the west and south. Like their predecessors, these
Special Tribunals combined military and civilian judges, conducted
trials without juries and without appeal, tried crimes associated
with brigandage and counterfeiting, and even found themselves responsible
for crimes committed by whole sections of the underclass. Unlike
ancien régime courts, however, Special Tribunals held their
trials in public, provided the accused with defense lawyers, permitted
oral debate and relied on moral proof for conviction. Deputies who
had suffered through twelve years of upheaval saw merit in the monarchy’s
practice of using well-regulated exceptional justice to complement
the ordinary judicial system. Paradoxically this also preserved
the jury system, that revolutionary ‘palladium of liberty,’
for regular criminal courts. Though intended only as temporary courts,
Special Tribunals remained a permanent feature of the Napoleonic
judicial system. In their first six months, Special Tribunals judged
1200 people, over one third of whom faced death or long years in
the bagne for house breaking, armed robbery or collective
violence.
The paradox of consolidating the revolutionary
settlement using ancien régime methods of repression is apparent
in the way the army and exceptional justice supplanted democratic
institutions. The striking novelty, however, is the extent to which
each of these measures was revived within a more legalistic straight-jacket
designed to prevent coercive force from becoming obvious state violence.
Thus, the particular forms of repression used during the years 1797-1802
were the product of opposing factors. During these years,
a variety of domestic enemies used anything from local elections
to open treason, including political murder and corrupted juries,
to prevent the regime from taking root. This demanded the use of
force to defend the regime. However, the late Republic was also
struggling to overcome the radical loss of legitimacy republicanism
had suffered as a result of the Terror. As a fledgling democracy,
the late Republic had an especially acute need to build a social
consensus. This required a determined effort to impose measure on
the use of coercive force. Any signs of arbitrariness or excess
would only further erode the regime’s legitimacy. Therefore,
these two opposing factors generated forms of military and judicial
repression that reshaped old practices to fit the new cult of legal-rational
authority based on constitutionalism and the rule of law. This basic
framework for the repertoire of repression lasted as long as France
remained a society of notables.
* * * * *
Many of the repressive techniques that enabled
Bonaparte to consolidate his power were echoed in the nineteenth
century down to the Third Republic. Leaving aside the more quotidian
responses to food riots, strikes, and resistance to conscription,
five waves of repression stand out--1816-18, 1832, 1848, 1851-52,
and 1871. Despite their diversity, however, they should be seen
as essentially improvisations on the repressive melody composed
during the years 1797-1802. In every case, this melody is clearly
heard in the various forms of measure imposed on the use of force.
The improvisations were the product of clashing ideologies, itself
a nineteenth century variation on the theme of competing social
visions.
Take the various forms of exceptional justice,
for example. In 1816-18, the Restoration Monarchy merely renamed
Napoleon’s Special Tribunals what they had always been, Provostial
Courts, and then combined prévôtal justice with enforcement of Décazes’
anti-sedition laws. Although one-third of the 2,280 cases judged
by the Provostial Courts dealt with either serious threats to public
order or political opposition to the new regime, only 28 cases,
or slightly over 1 %, involved politically motivated collective
violence. So little obvious need for this exceptional justice demonstrated
the effectiveness of the state apparatus inherited from Napoleon.
Later regimes had much the same experience. Under
the July Monarchy, only the simultaneous conspiracy of the duchesse
de Berry and the Parisian insurrection of June 1832 inspired the
defenders of the bourgeois order to resort to exceptional justice.
Employing the state of siege--as was done in four departments of
the west for a year and in Paris for three weeks--automatically
authorized military courts to judge civilian insurrectionnaries.
However, the Tribunal de Cassation annulled the first judgements
in Paris as contraventions of the Constitutional Charter of 1830.
Nonetheless, this combination was again deployed in June 1848 when
the National Assembly put the capital under state of siege and the
army and garde mobile brutally cleared the streets, killing
at least 2,000 people. Setting aside the Tribunal de Cassation’s
earlier ruling by restoring the link between the state of siege
and military justice allowed four military commissions to decide
the fate of over 11,000 prisoners, 255 of whom were handed over
to military courts as leaders or instigators of insurrection. They
also improvised on the Directory and Consulate’s deportations
of political opponents and the detritus of brigand bands, by sentencing
3357 to transportation. The savagery of the fighting, the summary
executions during combat, and the recourse to military justice afterwards,
testify to the nation-wide fear of working class insurgency. Riding
roughshod over constitutionalism was not new and merely confirmed
this as domestic state violence in all but purposive measure--it
was after all conducted in defense of a basically conservative vision
of the social order. As had been demonstrated fifty years earlier,
a republican regime could earn more support for repression than
for republicanism per se.
The methods of repression used to end the Second
Republic were much the same as those which accompanied the end of
the First Republic, albeit the scale was enormously greater in 1851-52.
Widespread insurrection provoked the formation of flying columns
authorized to shoot fugitives and summarily execute armed rebels.
Thirty-two departments were put under a state of siege which again
activated exceptional military justice. However, the military commissions
set up to function like those of 1848 proved too blunt an instrument
for the political needs of the day. Therefore, the infamous Mixed
Commissions were created, combining the prefect, public prosecutor,
and commanding general. In a mere six weeks they dealt with a staggering
26,884 cases in eighty-two departments. Mixed Commissions passed
sentence on political opponents of the regime--many of whom had
not even taken part in the insurrection--but sent those accused
of purely criminal offenses before other courts. Significantly,
civilians accused of murder were once again tried by regular military
courts. As the historian of this repression has written, "The
sheer numbers involved ... the kangaroo court procedures (defense
attorneys were never present at a hearing, no witnesses were heard,
and the defendant himself was physically absent from the "court"
room), the total disregard for civil or criminal law in determining
guilt or innocence ... and the severity of the sentences imposed--all
indicate ... that the new wave or repression was an extremist measure."
The repressions of 1797-1802 and 1851-52 were both brutal, authoritarian
responses to violence inspired by rural resistance to the state,
political mobilization along ideological lines, and economic grievances.
Nonetheless, the Directory and Consulate had mainly constructed
their repression on the basis of criminal categories whereas Louis
Napoleon’s repression was decidedly political.
The alliance of rural notables and urban bourgeois
once again let their fears of socialist revolution lead to more
domestic state violence in 1871. Repressing the Commune with a full-scale,
slow-moving military assault and a massive recourse to military
justice was the reductio ad absurdumof ‘liberal authoritarianism.’
Much of the appalling slaughter of the semaine sanglante
was carried out "systematically and coldly" because army
officers were given virtual carte blanche when dealing with
suspected rebels. Senior officers hastily assembled over twenty
military tribunals, some regular, some irregular, none operating
according to the law, but all covered by a simulacre of legalism.
The attendant firing squads and the practice of shooting communards
captured with arms in hand account for most of the estimated 17,000
to 20,000 people the army killed in six days. Retributive military
justice again followed. Twenty-six regular military courts, the
same as those used to try civilians in 1798-1800, took three years
to prosecute over 13,000 suspected insurgents; only 23 were executed,
but 4,500 were deported to New Caledonia and 6,000 sentenced to
prison or hard labour. As with the Camisards and the Vendée, repressing
the Commune led to a breakdown of measure because a massive realignment
of the social order exaggerated the threat, real though it was,
to the recently founded regime. Equally, each time force escaped
contemporary forms of measure and deteriorated into domestic state
violence, the dangers of increasing the monopoly of legitimate force
in society became more horrifyingly obvious.
* * * * *
This phenomenon of increasingly concentrated force
producing ever more destructive outbreaks of domestic state violence
was paradoxically part of the civilizing process as analyzed by
Norbert Elias. He has observed that the expropriation of private
vengeance by the criminal justice system facilitated the concentration
of armed force for the purpose of waging war. This storing up of
physical force in the police and army, institutions beyond the control
of ordinary citizens, tended to insulate the use of force from moral
calculation and led in the twentieth century to bouts of cruelty
and extermination on a mass scale even where patterns of civility
had been most developed. But using Cotta’s theory to distinguish
between force and violence over three centuries of French history
helps us to see how the civilizing process and the concomitant concentration
of the potential for violence had consequences which Elias and others
have ignored. As we have seen, when a regime passed from measured
force to domestic state violence, it usually did so not so much
to restore order as to consolidate a realignment of the polity.
Such periods are generally described in terms of the enhanced power
of the state. However, they should also be seen as times when new
ways of resisting and restricting the exercise of state power were
elaborated. As pointed out earlier, recourse to domestic state violence
alienates society and requires a regime to find new ways of generating
consensus. In other words, purposive measure is recreated. For example,
after the drive to absolutism, or the louisquatorzian phase (1640-75)
venality of office provided a mechanism to allow the themistocracy
to limit the exercise of coercive force and protect the social order
at the same time. After the Terror, the society of notables and
various forms of male suffrage were combined to cement the new order.
Periods replete with domestic state violence also
led to new ways of ensuring that coercive force had external and
internal measure alike. Given that external measure became increasingly
defined by law and internal measure by bureaucratic forms of control,
it is appropriate to combine them using Weber’s notion of legal-rational
authority. Thus, just as civility meant new standards of personal
self-control, the development of legal-rational authority reflected
the polity acquiring a new form of self-control; that is, it became
the principal mechanism for ensuring that the increasingly concentrated
potential for violence remained only a monopoly of legitimate force
in society. The years 1797-1802 constituted the pivotal phase
of this process because this was when so many methods of repression
developed under different regimes from emergent absolutism to the
Terror were revived, only now wrapped tightly in the restraints
of legal-rational authority. This combination then persisted down
to the Third Republic without substantial changes other than the
sheer growth in the potential for domestic state violence. But,
as Alfred Cobban astutely remarked long ago, "Leviathan lives
and moves before our eyes, all the more dangerous because in infancy
he was called liberty."
Endnotes (not referenced within the
text)
1. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, 1991), p. 78.
2. Why Violence? A Philosophical Interpretation,
translated by Giovanni Gullace (Gainsville, Fl., 1985).
3. We have a problem here: if the use of force
is sanctioned by law, applied in an efficient manner, and designed
to uphold an exploitative and coercive socio-economic order, then
such a use of force would seem to lack legitimacy. If it lacks legitimacy,
then it would appear to deserve to be called violence. However,
this is in the eye of the beholder. As far as the historian is concerned
what matters is to recognize that if a particular socio-political
order used force within the three modes of measure, calling it violence
is taking a moral position vis-à-vis that socio-political order.
One presumes that historians should seek to avoid this just as anthropologists
do. However, should they feel otherwise, they should be obliged
to critique the injustices of the socio-political order itself,
not the use of force to preserve it. This requires a recognition
that all socio-political orders must use force to preserve themselves.
Any other position is hopelessly utopian. Lest it be forgotten,
this still leaves plenty of scope to criticize the ways in which
force is deployed, whether the specific polity is deemed wicked
or not.
4. This account comes mainly from Yves-Marie Bercé,
Histoire des croquants. Étude des soulèvements populaires au
XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Paris, 1974), pp.
403-54.
5. Robin Briggs found a way out of the Porchnev/Mousnier
debate by emphasizing the precarious position of local elites when
caught between popular revolt and royal authority and concluded:
"If vertical solidarities were crucial in starting many revolts,
horizontal divisions generally played the vital role in controlling
and ending them." Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social
Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989), p. 168.
6. Porchnev, Soulèvements, gives an exaggerated
account of the repression in this period by relying on the correspondence
of those who sought to reassure the government of their loyalty
by claiming to act with severity. For example, he paraphrases a
letter from Richelieu to Louis XIII claiming that La Valette had
killed 14,000 rebels at Eymet (which should read La Sauvetat, the
next village over, and seems to have one zero too many). p. 80
7. In October 1595, for example, the Maréchal
de Matignon rebuked the marquis de Pisani for raising local forces
to suppress peasant formations around Agen. Apparently Pisani’s
expedition was inspired by the false notion that these gatherings
sought the liberties of Swiss cantons when in fact they had more
to do with defending the countryside against the military depredations
and fiscal innovations of the final Wars of Religion. A fulsome
royal pardon recognized the just motives of the peasant assemblies
and blamed Pisani’s action as an affront to the king’s
authority (Bercé, Croquants, pp. 257-93).
8. For a thorough introduction to these issues,
see Robert Muchembled, Le Temps des supplices: De l’obéissance
sous les rois absolus, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992).
9. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering.
Executions and the Evolution of Repression: from a Preindustrial
Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984), 17-109
passim; Thomas W. Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival and the
State in English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First Modern
Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone
(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305-55; Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of
Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans.
Elisabeth Neu, (Oxford and Cambridge, 1990).
10. Madeleine Foisil, La Révolte des Nu-Pieds
et les révoltes normandes de 1639 (Paris, 1970), p. 285.
11. Boris Porchnev, Les Soulèvements populaires
en France de 1623 à 1648 (Paris, 1963), pp. 473-92.
12. Foisil, Nu-Pieds, p. 301.
13. René Pillorget, Les Mouvements insurrectionnels
de Provence entre 1596 et 1715 (Paris, 1975), pp. 313-54 and
Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-Century
France (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 150-81.
14. Richard Bonney, Political Change in France
under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624-1661 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 214-37;
L. Jarry, La Guerre des sabotiers de Sologne et les assemblées
de la noblesse, 1653-1660, (Orléans, 1880), p. 36.
15. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 146.
16. After 1200 crack troops crushed the Lustucru
revolt of 1661 in the Boulonnais, the Duc d’Elbeuf hanged four
prisoners on the spot. Later, judges appointed by maître des requêtes
Machault tried and sentenced five rebel leaders. In addition, 363
prisoners captured en flagrant délit were marched to the
galleys at Toulon without a trial. Pierre Héliot, "La Guerre
dite de Lustucru et les privilèges du Boulonnais," Revue
du Nord 21 (1935): 265-318.
17. Gérard Sabatier, "De la révolte de Roure
(1670) aux Masques armés (1783): la mutation du phénomène contestataire
en Vivarais." Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale.
Colloque de l’Université de Paris VII-C.N.R.S, Paris, 24-6
mai 1984. (Paris, 1985); William Beik, Absolutism and Society
in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy
in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), p. 326-7.
18. These were both the last anti-tax revolts
of the seventeenth century and a precursor to the anti-seigneurialism
of the eighteenth century: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "Révoltes
et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788," Annales:
E.S.C., 29 (1975): 6-22.
19. Yves Garlan and Claude Nières, Les Révoltes
bretonnes de 1675: Papier Timbré et Bonnets Rouges (Paris, 1975);
James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern
Brittany (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 259-70.
20. Quoted in W. Gregory Monahan, "Heroes
or Thieves: Catholic Vigilantes in the War of the Camisards"
presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the Western Society
for French History, Charlotte, N.C., October 30-November 2,
1996.
21. Henri Bosc, La Guerre des Cévennes, 1702-1710
, 6 vols. (Montpellier, 1985-1993), III: 245. Although the vigorous
military repression continued under Marshal de Villars, as did the
steady stream of rebels sentenced to death or the galleys, he also
struggled to reduce the atrocities committed in the name of the
King by having a few Catholic militia leaders tried and executed.
Once most of the leaders of both the black and the white Camisards
had been eliminated, Villars granted an ‘amnesty’ to Protestants
who turned in their weapons and agreed either to worship entirely
in private or to accept cash and a military escort out of the kingdom.
22. Émile G. Léonard, L’Armée et ses problèmes
au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1958), pp.
55-80; Lilian Crété, Les Camisards (Paris, 1992).
23. Arlette Lebigre, Les Grands Jours d’Auvergne:
désordres et répression au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1976). The execution
of powerful nobles and the razing of several chateaux, as well as
an extensive clean up of violent crime, only added to the spectacular
reckoning with the regional instruments of justice.
24. Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime
Paris, 1735-1789, vol. 1, The System of Criminal Justice
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 55-278.
25. From Le Droit Public (Paris, 1697)
and excerpted in Willian F. Church, ed., The Impact of Absolutism
in France: National Experience under Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis
XIV (New York, 1969), p.79.
26. e.g. To the dismay of Controller-General Laverdy,
the putative leaders of a massive grain riot at Troyes in 1768 received
"a stunningly mild provisional sentence which could lead to
the release of all the prisoners in three months" (Steven Kaplan,
Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV
(The Hague, 1976), i. 219).
27. Bouton, Flour War, pp . 99-103, deals
with repression of grain riots and points out the contrasting and
rare harshness of repression after a grain riot at Tours the previous
year which ended in three executions and two terms of nine years
in the galleys. She also provided a preliminary report on her current
research on grain rioting in a paper entitled, "Food Riots,
Relief, and Repression in France, 1709-1847" presented at the
Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference,
March 1996.
28. John Batt, "Royal Authority, the Army
and the Maintenance of Public Order in France at the End of the
Ancien Régime" (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading,
1985), pp. 100-186.
29. Ibid., pp. 173-4.
30. In a study of Provence, René Pillorget found
an average of only 1.5 serious incidents of collective violence
a year during the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774), but an average
of 2.5 such incidents in the years 1774-1787, that is, even before
the immediate pre-revolutionary crisis ("Les Problèmes du maintien
de l’ordre public en France entre 1774 et 1789" L’Information
historique 39 (1977): 114-19). The subject of increased fear
due to social dislocation is now thoroughly investigated. In addition
to Schwartz, Policing the Poor and Adams, Bureaucrats
and Beggars, both cited above, see Olwen Hufton, The Poor
of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (Oxford, 1974) and Colin
Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in
the Montpellier Region, 1740-1815 (Cambridge, 1982).
31. "Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy:
The Countryside and the French Revolution," American Historical
Review (1995): 360-86.
32. The revolutionaries at Tulle paralyzed judicial
repression of the peasant disturbances in the Corrèze in early 1790
by denouncing to the National Assembly efforts to have the local
prévôtal court pursue the insurgents. "Ainsi, dès février 1790,
la justification de la répression ne suscite pas l’unanimité;
la justice prévôtale, dès mars 1790, perd les moyens de faire appliquer
ses verdicts. Un vent de peur sociale se lève." Jean Boutier,
Campagnes en émoi: Révoltes et Révolution en Bas-Limousin, 1789-1800
(Paris, 1987), p. 95.
33. "Revolutionary Violence, the People,
and the Terror" in K.M. Baker, ed., The French Revolution
and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4, The Terror
(Oxford, 1994), pp. 57-79.
34. Gordon Wright, Between the Guillotine and
Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France (Oxford,
1983), p. 34.
35. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the following
material on the years 1797-1802 is based on my own archival research.
For detailed references, see Howard G. Brown, "From Organic
Society to Security State: The War on Brigandage in France, 1797-1802"
forthcoming in the Journal of Modern History (1997).
36. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 14; Vladimir S. Ljublinski, La Guerre
des farines, (Paris,1979), p. 143.
37. The 10 July 1791 law that created the state
of siege was remarkably well suited to this purpose even though
the Constituent Assembly had no reason to believe that its legislation
creating the state of siege would be so used; legislation on martial
law already existed and was invoked a week later by Lafayette as
a prelude to the Champs de Mars massacre. Similarly, the Convention
used a proclamation of martial law, not a state of siege, to suppress
the journées of 1-4 Prairial III.
38. Jacques Godechot, La Révolution française
dans le midi toulousain (Paris, 1986), pp. 279-302.
39. Each department had a single Provostial Court
consisting of one senior army officer and five civilian judges.
They heard a total of 2,280 cases, two thirds of which were for
ordinary common law offenses. The other third consisted of 237 cases
of seditious speech, writing, or displays of the tricolor and 481
cases of armed rebellion, seditious assembly, murder or attempted
murder by armed groups. Thus only one in five cases pertained to
serious threats to public order, and only 28 of these were clearly
motivated (Daniel P. Resnick, The White Terror and Political
Reaction After Waterloo (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 83-99.
For a closer look at the activities of specific courts, see Henri
Ramet, "Les Cours prévôtales dans le ressort de la Cour d’appel
de Toulouse (1816-1818)" Recueil de l’Académie de législation,
8 (1929): 1-41; and André Paillet, "Les Cours prévotales (1816-1818)"
Revue des deux mondes 81 (1911): 123-49.
40. Jean Vidalenc, "Les Troubles de l’ouest
au début de la Monarchie de Juillet" 88e Congrès des sociétés
savantes. Section d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1963),
pp. 331-66; Garrot, Maintien de l’ordre, pp. 426, 437-9.
41. Georges Carrot, Le Maintien de l’order
en France depuis la fin de l’ancien régime jusqu’à 1968
(Toulouse, 1984), II: 500-1.
42. This point is made most forcefully by Roger
Price, The French Second Republic: A Social History (London,
1971), pp. 187-92.
43. These military commissions consisted of three
army officers and sat from 19 December to 17 January. Those charged
with murder or pillage were to be tried militarily; other rebels
were to be deported; and those acquitted were freed. For an unusual
vision from above see Thomas R. Forstenzer, French Provincial
Police and the Fall of the Second Republic: Social Fear and Counterrevolution
(Princeton, 1981) and for two fine visions from below, see Ted W.
Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: the Insurrection of 1851
(Princeton, 1979) and John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic:
The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France 1848-1851
(New Haven, 1978).
44. Thus the Mixed Commissions tried four categories
of people considered politically undesirable by the regime, i) those
who had taken up arms against the coup d’état, ii) members
of Montagnard societies, iii) socially dangerous elements of the
population, and iv) political rivals of conservative notables. On
27 March 1852 a decree ended extraordinary powers by lifting the
state of siege and dissolving the Mixed Commissions. In addition
to Forstenzer, Margadant and Marriman, see Vincent Wright, "The
coup d’état of December 1851: Repression and the Limits to
Repression," in Roger Price, ed., Revolution and Reaction:
1848 and the Second French Republic (London, 1975): 303-333.
45. Forstenzer, Provincial Police, p. 226.
46. Robert Tombs, The War Against Paris 1871
(Cambridge, 1981), p. 171.
47. In addition to Tombs, see Roger V. Gould,
Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris
from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995), pp. 161-5, 213-18.
48. Norbert Elias, "Violence and Civilization:
the State Monopoly of Physical Violence and Its Infringement,"
in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State. New European
Perspectives (London and New York, 1988).
49. In Search of Humanity (New York, 1960),
p. 193.
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