Download PDF | Michael T. Davis (eds.) - Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015).
309 Pages
Acknowledgements
This volume has been a long time in the making. By exploring a topic that has deep historical roots and contemporary relevance, this book was originally conceived as something of a sequel to a volume co-edited with Brett Bowden entitled Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (2008). I would like to thank Brett for his initial involvement in conceptualizing this book. I would also like to thank all of the contributors for their enormous forbearance and continued support as this project faced unforeseeable challenges that hindered its progress.
The first of these was the passing of Charles Tilly who agreed to contribute to the volume but most regrettably died in 2008 before being able to do so. More recently, another original contributor - Roger Wells — suffered a tragic fall that resulted in brain damage. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to include Roger’s essay in the volume. At Palgrave Macmillan, this book was originally under the wing of Ruth Ireland, before passing to Holly Tyler and now Jade Moulds. I would like to extend my gratitude to each of these editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their help and patience throughout the project.
Notes on Contributors
William Beik is Professor of Early Modern French Social and Institutional History at Emory University. He has written widely on French history, including Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (1985), which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association; Urban Protest in SeventeenthCentury France: The Culture of Retribution (1997), Louis XIV and Absolutism: A Brief Study with Documents (2000). He is the co-editor of the New Approaches to European History series published by Cambridge University Press. He is especially interested in aspects of the social and institutional history of sixteenthand seventeenth-centuries France, and one of his recent works is A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (2009).
John Bohstedt is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His forthcoming work is an essay entitled ‘The Politics of Food Riots in World History’. He is the author of two books: The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550-1850 (2010) and Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790-1810 (1983).
Cynthia A. Bouton is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. Her works include The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Regime France (1993) and Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzancais, 1847-2008 (2012). Her current research focuses on the circulation of basic foodstuffs in the Atlantic during the Age of Revolution.
Brett Bowden is Professor of History and Political Thought at the University of Western Sydney. He also holds visiting appointments at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. His recent major works include Civilization and War (2013); The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (2009), which was awarded the 2011 Norbert Elias Prize; and the four-volume edited collection, Civilization: Critical Concepts (2009).
Raphaél Canet is a professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. A sociologist and political scientist by training, he was educated in both France and Quebec. His research focuses primarily on forms of political action by crossing the study of collective representations, political institutions and social practices. Amongst his key works are The Global Justice Movement: Social Forums, Resistance and New Political Culture (2010); Crisis of the State, Societies’ Revenge (2006); The Neoliberal Regulation: Crisis or Adjustment? (2004); and The Nation in Debate: Between Modernity and Postmodernity (2003).
Michael T. Davis is a lecturer in the School of Humanities at Griffith University. His works include Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848 (2000); London Corresponding Society (2002); Newgate in Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Prison Literature in the Age of Revolution (ed. with I. McCalman and C. Parolin, 2005); Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (ed. with P. A. Pickering, 2008); Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism in Europe, 1605 to the Future (ed. with B. Bowden, 2008); and Liberty, Property and Politics (ed. with G. Pentland, 2015).
Jack Fruchtman, Jr is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Law and American Civilization at Maryland’s Towson University, United States. He has written, edited or annotated ten books. His work includes studies of the political thought of Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Reid, Helen Maria Williams and Thomas Hardy, as well as the Marquis de Condorcet and Jacques-Pierre Brissot. His most recent works include The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (2009) and the second edition of The Supreme Court: Rulings on American Government and Society (2014). He also serves as co-editor of the Pickering & Chatto series on The Enlightenment World.
Peter Hayes is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sunderland, UK. His research interests include political theory, ideology and social policy. His recent works include a co-edited book Taiwan’s Long Road to Democracy (2009), and articles in journals such as Pediatrics; The International Journal of Law; Policy and the Family; and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
Jeff Horn is Professor of History at Manhattan College. He has written or edited four books on the era of the French and Industrial Revolutions. His next monograph entitled Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650-1830 will be published in 2015.
Peter McPhee has published widely on the history of France 1780-1880, particularly on the social history of politics. His most recent book is Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2012). He was appointed to a personal chair in History in 1993 at the University of Melbourne, where he was also the University’s inaugural Provost from 2007 to 2009.
Tadzio Mueller is a political scientist, climate justice activist and translator living in Berlin, where he works as a research fellow for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He has co-edited Contours of Climate Justice, is a founding member of Turbulence: Ideas for Movement, and has published widely on green capitalism and the German ‘Energiewende’. His current research focuses on strategies of social transformation in social movements working on questions of climate justice and energy democracy.
Mark O’Brien is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Liverpool. He served as Research Director at the Centre for the Study of the Child, the Family and the Law at the University of Liverpool during which time he carried out evaluation research for a government initiative called the Children’s Fund. He has also carried out research into the experience of union activism for women activists. His works include When Adam Delved and Eve Span: A History of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (2004).
Laurent Pech is Professor of European Law and Head of the Law Department at Middlesex University, London. Prior to his appointment at Middlesex University, Laurent worked at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Aix-Marseille, Laurent specializes in EU public law and is the author of more than sixty scholarly publications on the subject.
Gordon Pentland is Reader in History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He has degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh, and his works include Radicalism, Reform and National Identity, 18201833 (2008); Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815-1820 (2011); and a large number of articles in journals including the Historical Journal; Journal of British Studies, Past & Present; and the Scottish Historical Review. He currently edits the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies.
Penny Roberts is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick and co-editor of the Oxford University Press journal French History. Her most recent works include Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars, c. 1560-1600 (2013) and as co-editor with Graeme Murdock and Andrew Spicer, Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (2012).
Nicholas Rogers is a distinguished research professor in the Department of History, York University, Toronto. He is the author of several books on British history, especially on different forms of popular contention. His most recent books are The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (2007) and Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain 1748-1753 (2012). He is currently completing a set of documents on naval impressment in Bristol, 1739-1815, for the Bristol Record Society.
Maura Stewart is Lecturer in French at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published on French presidential elections, France—EU relations, and political and media discourses. She has also provided analysis on related topics in her interviews with, and articles for, French and European media outlets. Her current book project examines how French presidential candidates have addressed the nation and Europe in their bids for the highest political office since 1988.
Sian Sullivan is Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University, and a co-investigator for the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value. Currently she is researching the production of ‘nature’ as ‘natural capital’ from an anthropological perspective that embraces different evaluative frameworks. She is the author of Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power (2000), as well as articles in varied academic journals. Recently she has authored policy reports on approaches to biodiversity conservation for the Third World Network and the Green House Think Tank, UK. See http://siansullivan.net for more information.
John Walter is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Essex. His research focuses on early modern British history, and his current project examines popular political culture during the English Revolution. His works include Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2006) and Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (ed. with S. Hindle and A. Shepard, 2013).
Chris Wrigley is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at Nottingham University. His books include David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (1976); Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour, 1918-1922 (1990); British Trade Unions since 1933 (2002); A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (2006); an edited three-volume History of British Industrial Relations (1982-1996); and the edited Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917-1920 (1993). He was president of the British Historical Association 1996-1999, a vice president of the Royal Historical Society 1997-2001 and chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 1997-2001, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of East Anglia, 1998.
Introduction: The Arc of Violence: Riots, Disturbances of the Peace, Public Protests and Crowd Actions in History
Jack Fruchtman, Jr
Disruptions of the peace and crowd action, public protests, mass demonstrations and mob violence have all attracted the attention of a variety of scholars from numerous disciplines: history, political science, sociology, psychology and even religion and philosophy. Riots and protests may have social or political or even financial goals, or they may not. Crowd actions may and perhaps often are peaceful affairs, but riots by nature cannot be so. Non-violent activities or passive resistance was a technique made most famous by Mohandas Gandhi, in striving to achieve an independent India, which came about in 1947. And of course in the United States, the Reverend Martin Luther King rejected the strategy during the following decade in an attempt to win desegregation in the American southland. But the essays in this volume look beyond non-violent crowd action and without exception drill-in on disturbing the peace through violent actions — in effect, on rioting.
Chalmers Johnson’s observation about revolutions may easily pertain to riots: a non-violent revolution is a contradiction in terms, and so it is with riots. Defining the nature of this violence poses no easy task, as Johnson understood. For him, it has to be actions that are counter-intuitive at the moment, defying expectations of peace and stability, actions ‘that deliberately or unintentionally disorients the behaviour of others’.! Historically, riots have entailed crowds of people intent on wreaking havoc, usually for some purpose: what George Rudé has famously called ‘the crowd in history’, trying to achieve its goals — political, social, economic or all three. Rudé focused on what he termed ‘the “aggressive mob”, or the “hostile outburst” — such activities as strikes, riots, rebellions, insurrections, and revolutions’? But Rudé notwithstanding, there lies a crucial distinction. While the common denominator of ‘crowd’ and ‘mob’ is group movement, the radical difference is violence. A crowd can connote happy holiday shoppers; a mob will denote angry militants.?
Sometimes the rioters know one another, and sometimes they do not. When peasants are hungry or the crops have failed, riots may be in the form of food or bread riots. Or they may burn the manor house, kill the lord and perhaps his entire family and set fire to the crops. City and town dwellers, who are crushed by taxes, the denial of access to food or land or other heavy burdens like forced military conscription, may join together, often in organized ways, to attack town officials and wealthy merchants, even to the extent of burning their offices, official records and houses.’ Alternatively, the strife may result from religious conflict, as the Catholic-Huguenot struggle demonstrates in the Wars of Religion and their aftermath during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the Gordon Riots in 1780.5 When political goals are at stake, like an overthrow of a government, the people’s action will aim toward grand political, even social, transformation, with the downfall of an entire governmental regime to be replaced by a new one. The former examples constitute older forms of uprising, typically focused on attempts to improve daily life immediately. The latter are early-modern phenomena, dating from the seventeenth century, but more classically from the French Revolution in 1789, when the goal was to achieve social and political change on a monumental scale. It may involve the overthrow of monarchy and its replacement by a republic as occurred in France with the constitution of 1793 that Robespierre refused to allow to go into effect. Instead, the Reign of Terror began in earnest.® Or it may, in its twentieth-century form, entail the seizure of the economic means of production along with the end of the capitalist grip on social structure and its replacement with a communist dictatorship, as occurred in Russia in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution.
One thing is clear: these spectacles have been ubiquitous throughout history, displaying from ancient times to our own an arc of violence, resulting in riot, uprising and disruption of the peace. One single characteristic that encompasses all crowd action, public protest, whatever we call it, is that it poses a direct and immediate challenge to established authority. Law has no place; nor does peace. Monarchic or aristocratic decrees, parliamentary acts, judicial demands — none of these will have an impact on the crowd. Force must be used against force, even if it is only the threat of the use of force. Above all else, it signifies the collapse of the rule of law or the disregard of customary usage.
One incident from the American context clearly illustrates the power and disastrous consequences of crowd action. It also illustrates how and at what point the law fails completely. This was the galvanizing moment at Lexington, Massachusetts, on 19 April 1775, when shots were fired that left eight American militiamen dead and ten wounded. The British Crown and ministry demanded action in the colonies with the arrest and detention of the leaders of the rebellion. General Thomas Gage was the man in charge of British troops, a skilled and veteran officer who had cruelly put down uprisings in Scotland. He was certain the chances of the Americans achieving any of their goals were like a small hole allowing flour to run from its sack. When the colonists in the neighbouring town of Concord learned of his plans to subdue them by seizing their stocks of munitions and weapons, they quickly gathered in Lexington. There, Major John Pitcairn ordered his troops in six companies to fire on a crowd of some 70 American militiamen assembled on the village green in front of the meeting house. ‘Lay down your arms, you damned rebels and disperse!’ he is said to have shouted. ‘Damn you! Why don’t you lay down your arms?’ Another British officer joined in the shouting, ‘Damn them! We will have them.’ And when the Americans refused, the shots rang out.’ The law had expired in the sense that it died — lawlessness, violence and rebellion ensued.®
The activities at Lexington Green, and later in Concord where the British were routed by a crowd of American militiamen, leaving some 250 Redcoat casualties, was clearly crowd action. It was not a riot per se, but the term riot is fascinating because it carries so many meanings. Consider, for a moment, the meaning of the term riot. To determine that people are a ‘riot’ suggests a hilarious jokester or cut-up, who entertains others for their amusement. It also suggests a brilliant display of something, a bunch of flowers, for example, with their ‘riot of colour’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines riot this way as ‘unrestrained revelry, mirth, or noise’ or ‘an extravagant display of something’. In his 1768 unfinished memoir of his travels through France and Italy, Laurence Sterne expressed this meaning when he travelled in Bourbonnais, ‘the sweetest part of France’. The sights were extraordinary, he wrote, such that ‘there was nothing from which I had painted out for myself so joyous a riot of the affections, as in this journey in the vintage, through this part of France’.?
In Old English, the term had to do with wanton, loose or wasteful living; debauchery, dissipation, extravagance. Dr Johnson, in The Rambler, used it in this sense when he addressed ‘the luxury of vein imagination’. To understand the context, hear the entire passage:
There is nothing more fatal to aman whose business is to think, then to have learned the art of regaling his mind with those airy gratifications. Other vices or follies are restrained by fear, reformed by admonition, or rejected by the conviction which the comparison of our conduct with that of others, may in time produce. But this invisible riot of the mind, this secret prodigality of being, is secure from detection, and fearless from reproach. The dreamer returns to his apartments, shuts out the cares and interruptions of mankind, and abandons himself to his own fancy.!°
Many years later, James Mill, in his 1817 history of British India, went further when addressing the early life of Hyder Ali, a Muslim ruler who ‘proved the most formidable enemy whom [the English] had ever encountered in India’. His army won smashing victories over British forces in 1769 and 1780, but it was defeated in 1781 and Hyder died the following year. Mill reviewed his life and career and noted that Hyder, ‘till the age of twenty-seven, could be confined to no serious pursuit, but spent his life between the labours of the chase, and the pleasures of voluptuous indulgence and riot’.
The Oxford English Dictionary also tells us that the word riot initially had to do with disputation, ‘debate, dispute, quarrel’, which we definitely see when Wat Tyler behaved so dreadfully in front of the 14-year-old King Richard II at Smithfields. It was almost as if a difficult, disrespectful and naughty child was so recalcitrant and frustrating that his behaviour brings a mother nearly to tears and a father to an apoplectic state. Perez Zagorin describes the encounter this way: ‘Tyler took Richard’s hand and shook his arm, called him “brother”, and rinsed his mouth before the king “in a rude and villainous manner”. Then, after sending for a jug of ale and drinking down a great draught, he mounted his horse in the royal presence’. Speak of the demise of the rule of law, of the unbecoming behaviour of a commoner (and peasant, no less), and you have a picture of a riot in terms of disputatiousness and quarrel.’* Tyler was ‘rude’ (unlearned and ignorant) and ‘villainous’ (churlish and ill-bred). So, originally a negative class distinction also attached itself to ‘mob’. Indeed, the very word was a shortening of mobile vulgus, ‘vulgar’ or ‘low’ people in a destructive movement. Had Tyler lived at a later time, say in the eighteenth century, his insolence would have constituted treason, the penalty for which was death.’
Synonyms include violence, strife, disorder, tumult, especially on the part of the populace. Its earliest usage in these terms may be located in 1375 in the archdeacon of Aberdeen and Scottish poet John Barbour’s commemoration of Scotland’s independence from England. Barbour’s epic poem, The Bruce, recounts the virtuous military deeds of Robert the Bruce, who became King Robert I. As part of his strategy, Robert invaded England while King Edward of England was fighting in Ireland. He chose two lords along with 15,000 men to ride with him:
To England, there to burn and slay,
And far and wide such riot play
When they should hear the destruction done In England by their roving foe,
Should be so fearful and so woe
In case their children and their wives
Should fear to lose their lives
This meaning of ‘riot’ includes a second manifestation that draws us directly to the use of the term meaning a deliberate, often violent, uprising of several people, who intend to disturb the peace: more particularly, ‘a violent disturbance of the peace by an assembly or body of persons; an outbreak of active lawlessness or disorder among the populace’. This is a more contemporary sense of the term, even though it dates from 1390. It carries with it the sense that we are seeking, namely upheaval and disruption of everyday life by a few or many, often destructive of property and threatening of life and limb, if not utterly dangerous.}§
At common law, a violation of a breach of the peace occurred when three or more people gathered and three observers feared that violence may occur. In terms of statutory law, the British Parliament passed the Riot Act in 1715, which made it a crime for any 12 people to gather unlawfully to disturb the public peace. If the rioters refuse to obey a legitimate governmental authority’s demand to disperse, they were subject to be tried as felons. The familiar term, ‘to read them the riot act’, takes its meaning from this statute. When an official formally commanded the rioters to cease and desist, he in effect ‘read’ them a portion of the act.!°
The crowd in history, in Rudé’s terms, requires more of an explanation because the crowd may be unruly, even destructive, while it may also be inchoate and amorphous in the sense that it may spontaneously develop. On the other hand, there may also be leaders who organize the mob and direct its activities in ways that the leadership believes will ameliorate the problems (political, social, economic or some combination of them) they all face. So, from Spartacus, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and the Luddites, mobs and riots trace an arc to the twentieth century. One thinks of East Germany and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, Kent State in 1970, Northern Ireland of 1972, Los Angeles in 1992, Tiananmen Square in 1989, Iran after the elections in 2009 and many meetings of the Group of 20, or G20: all actions as boiling points of recent history. And the arc continues. In the spring of 2010, after several years of ongoing corrupt rule and imminent economic collapse, the poor of Thailand erupted into street demonstrations and protests that led to several deaths and scores of injuries. At the same time in Greece, crowds of people stormed into the streets of Athens when it became likely that the government would have to undertake enormous budget cuts to save the country from economic disintegration. When the G20 met in June 2010 in Toronto, protestors were out in force, burning police cruisers and demanding an end to the iron financial grip that the nations making up the 20 economic elite allegedly has on the rest of the world.”
Most violent of all were the riots during the late spring and early summer of 2010 in the obscure country of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.!* There, ethnic violence shuttered through the southern half of the country, leading to the destruction of the city of Osh and threatening to fragment the nation. Ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks fought and murdered each other, culminating in the mass exodus of an estimated 400,000 Uzbeks, which number only about 15 percent of the population, into neighbouring Uzbekistan. Earlier, in April 2010, a coup had led to the establishment of a weak provisional government, which was unable to stop the rioting, pillaging, burning and killing. Some reports asserted that the rioting was stimulated by the former leaders of the overthrown government in an effort to return to power. These reports claimed that hired thugs had committed atrocities against both the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek peoples to inflame ancient hatreds and suspicion. The provisional government asked the Russian government to send troops to restore order, but the request was refused. A referendum in late June 2010 on a new constitution overwhelmingly supported the provisional government in an attempt to bring peace and stability to the country when it passed by a large majority of votes.'”
Public disorder, riots and mob violence occur only when there is ‘crowd action’. Defining a crowd is subjective, but in 1715 an attempt was made when the Riot Act in England pinpointed the number of people at 12 as the minimum when the authorities could declare a gathering illegal. Often, however, that number has been as few as three individuals who join together in disorderly conduct. Often laws that prohibit ‘disturbing the peace’ indicate that a minimum of three people must be involved. Violations of these laws may occur when a law enforcement officer commands the three people to get off the street or if there is a legitimate threat that a firearm or other deadly weapon may be used (or even planned to be used). But then again, riots in history have always entailed far more than the Riot Act minimum of 12, much less three, individuals. The most familiar riots, mob violence or crowd actions are those involving the numerous social and political revolutions that have occurred throughout history, and they have all enjoyed thousands of people engaged in civil disorder. In the modern era, chief among these is the French Revolution, which culminated in the successful destruction of the entire social and political system of France ‘from below’: the action against the established order was undertaken by the people. Indeed, Martin Malia has outlined what he calls ‘a convenient list of “grand revolutions”’: England in 1540, America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917 and China in 1949,?°
The most famous iconic moment in early modern history took place on 14 July 1789, and it involved, unsurprisingly, crowd action. This was the storming of the Bastille, an imposing military fortress and prison on the northern edge of Paris, which had strategic importance because its guns protected one of the northern gates of the city, especially from a possible English invasion.”! Although it stood 73 feet high with eight round towers five feet thick, Robert turned it into a massive and frightening edifice.2? A few days before the 14 juillet, throngs of people, who had grown disgusted with the French regime and who fell under the spell of the heated speeches of revolutionaries like Camille Desmoulins, considered the prison a symbol of absolutism. Simon Schama tells us of Desmoulins’s mesmerizing rhetorical skills at the Palais Royal just two days before the Bastille was stormed by the mob. It is a moment often recounted in history textbooks when news of the dismissal of Louis XVI's reform-minded counsellor, Jacques Necker, had reached Paris: in mid-afternoon, ‘a crowd of six thousand or so milled about a young man, pale-faced and dark-eyed, his hair spilling freely onto his shoulders, shouting excitedly from one of the tables in front of a café’.?3 His fiery words embodied the frustrations and fears of the lower orders and middling sort.
With Necker out of office, soon all reformers, all partisans of liberty, were now threatened by an aristocratic plot to subdue them. Early on, he associated green, not red, with liberty and hope, and charged his huge audience, ‘To arms! To arms!’ overcoming the slight speech impediment that had inhibited his public speaking. ‘Take all of your green cockades, the colour of hope. Citizens, there is not a moment to be lost.... This evening all the German and Swiss battalions will come from the Champ-de-Mars to assassinate us!’?4 Call these words frenzied paranoia or unadulterated polemic, Desmoulins knew what he was doing. He knew how to move the crowd, and he also wanted to make a name for himself. He succeeded brilliantly on both fronts. Soon, the cockade was no longer green — it was red, and it, along with the bonnet rouge, became the symbolic colour of revolutionary liberation.”> The prison governor, fearing for his life, attempted to engage the crowd in negotiations, but the crowd would have none of it. They attacked the prison, overwhelmed the guards, a mere 24 disabled veterans and 30 Swiss guardsmen, and killed the governor whose head was paraded through the streets on a pike.”° Seven inmates, none of them political prisoners, were freed. Eighty-three of the rioters were killed, and 15 others later died of injuries.?’
Just days after, Desmoulins’s incendiary pamphlet, La France libre, appeared, urging more crowd action, more mob violence, more rioting, anything to bring down the ancien régime. ‘Listen, listen, from one end of the country to the other, from Paris and Lyon, Rouen and Bordeaux, Calais and Marseille, the same universal cry is heard....The nation has everywhere expressed its will. Everyone wants to be free. Yes, my dear fellow citizens, we will be free, and who can prevent it?’”8 The great historian of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre, concludes that ‘all classes of society were represented among’ this massive crowd (masters, journeymen and merchants), though ‘most were artisans from the [nearby] faubourg Saint-Antoine’.”? The key element here is that this was mob action, a riot in effect, that precipitated the French Revolution and eventually led to the execution of hundreds of aristocrats, including the king himself on 21 January 1793, and ultimately the infamous Reign of Terror of 1793-94.
Familiarity, however, does not connote exclusiveness. Nearly 175 years later, an uprising involving mass crowd action took place in a far different venue, but in circumstances that possess salient parallels: among accusations of tyranny and corruption came the longing and a consequent call to arms in a fight for liberty. It was Camille Desmoulins written into a mid-twentieth century American context. Berkeley, California, is the home of the flagship campus of the University of California, and in 1964, it was a hotbed of unrest, demanding free speech and soon shared student governance with the administration and end to military conscription, which was fuelling the Vietnam War.*° Though chartered in 1868, the Berkeley campus did not develop its international reputation until after World War II when it began to attract highly respected and well-published scholars like Clark Kerr in Economics and Charles Muscatine in English, Gleb Struve in Slavic Languages and Literature, Sheldon Wolin in Political Science, John Schaar in Philosophy and Nicholas Riasanovsky, Carl Schorske and Robert O. Paxton in History.?! The students followed. These included Mario Savio along with Bettina Aptheker, the best known spokesman for 1960s student radicalism, Jerry Rubin, and the irrepressible Abbie Hoffman, co-founders of the Youth International Party (the ‘Yippies’).*”
The Free Speech Movement unexpectedly began in the fall of 1964.°%° It was the Berkeley equivalent of a group of like-minded young radicals in the Palais Royal when Desmoulins jumped up on his café table and exhorted his audience to fight for freedom. In the United States, it was the height of the Cold War and just after the misguided anti-communist attacks of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who claimed he could detect the presence of Soviet influence throughout American life, including the United States Department of State and the White House. University officials, responding to the hysteria, decided to ban all advocacy political groups on campus with the exception of those directly related to the established political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Some students were highly charged activists, having just returned from the American South where they had participated during ‘Freedom Summer’ to exercise their right to vote: they were known collectively as the Freedom Riders, having travelled to Mississippi and other states by motor coach. The university rule was clearly an effort to stifle speech at a time when the faculty at all institutions of higher education was required to take loyalty oaths to demonstrate their patriotism and to prove they were not tools of international communism. The policy seemed to be ‘silence the students and get on with the business of the academy’: senior faculty will do research and publish their work with the assistance of brigades of graduate students as their research assistants and primary teaching faculty.
Like the Bastille, resistance met with militancy. In October of 1964, a nonBerkeley student set up a table to educate passersby about the voter registration effort over the previous summer. He did so in front of Sproul Hall, which was the administration building named for a former president of the university. When the university police asked him to leave, he refused.*4 He was then placed in a police car where he remained for the next 32 hours as students paraded around it. Mario Savio, ‘considerately barefoot’, got up on the car bonnet and ‘harangued the crowd’ about free speech. Within a few months, hundreds of students, both liberal and conservative, still dissatisfied with the administration’s recalcitrance to allow all political activity on campus, held numerous sit-ins in Sproul Hall. They demanded free speech for everyone on all issues, political or otherwise, or else: that is, or else they would see to it that no classes would be held. According to Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar, who were teaching there at the time, ‘the students’ major contention was that they should have the same political rights on campus that they enjoyed as citizens off the campus, and that determinations of the legality of off-campus actions should be reserved exclusively to the courts’, not to the university administration. They sang folk songs, often led by Joan Baez, and heard fiery speeches delivered by many people, but it was clear that their leading spokesman was Savio. Not all of those involved in the student uprising held radical political beliefs. As Lefebvre noted about the mixed classes who stormed the Bastille, so Wolin and Schaar noted the united front the students posed, from Barry Goldwater supporters — the Arizona Republican senator who was a candidate for the American presidency in 1964 — to socialists.*5
University officials seemed uncertain about how to respond. Roger Rapaport and Lawrence Kirschbaum, two journalists who were highly sympathetic to the 1960s student radical movement, having participated themselves in it at the University of Michigan, noted that the chancellor of the institution, Roger Heyns, was so inept that ‘in the process of disciplining over 400 students,’ he ‘radicalized thousands’.*¢ As at the Bastille, negotiations were attempted, and, as there, they failed. Unlike 1789, however, no one was killed in Berkeley. On 2 December 1964, during another seizure of Sproul, 600 students were arrested and sent to jail on the authority of the Alameda County district attorney, Edwin Meese, III, who later became the American Attorney General during the Reagan presidency. The university came to a complete halt when the graduate students went on strike. As Wolin and Schaar recalled, ‘the students had fulfilled their vow; the machine was stopped’.°’
The Free Speech Movement set off five years of student unrest at Berkeley, from 1964 until 1969. Some things were achieved. The ban on speech eventually ended in mid-December of 1964, so students now openly advocated the causes that provoked them like their opposition to the Vietnam War. Protest demonstrations began the very next year with the creation of the Vietnam Day Committee, led by Rubin and Hoffman. Once the war ended in 1975, students returned to the classrooms and faculty to the library, archives or laboratories. Administrators were safe behind their closed-door offices. Some 14 years later, in 1980, in one late afternoon, I wandered through the campus while at a conference with Martin Malia, my former academic advisor in the History department. I saw some leaflets flying around in Sproul Plaza in the wind along with abandoned tables and chairs. I asked him what had occurred that day. He laconically answered, ‘This is just some debris left from an earlier demonstration of some sort. No one showed up’. The student revolution, if that was what it was, had by then fizzled. The Free Speech Movement was rarely talked about, and the Vietnam War was no longer a divisive issue.*8
The essays in this volume address the arc of violence in riot, public protest, crowd action and disturbances of the peace from the fourteenth century to the present. The role of the crowd that marks history throughout the world is examined through the lens of Britain and France during this broad chronological period. Some events recounted here are familiar, others more obscure. Each demonstrates the prevalence throughout human history of attempts by ordinary people to restore lost forms of social and political organization or, alternatively, to create the conditions for a new social and political order. While so many of these actions were unsuccessful in that permanent change did not result, the one uniting conclusion of these essays is that the people who were involved in them were never powerless. They successfully caused the unrest and turmoil that they set out to inspire. In some cases, many people died, and property destroyed. At other times, just the mere threat of violence was enough to motivate the authorities to begin to make changes. The universal interest, the very goal, of those engaged in these movements was to bring about improved living conditions and conditions of life - a goal so many people continue to seek well into the twenty-first century.
This volume also poses one major question for future scholarship: does a unifying principle join these episodes of crowd action together? The earliest examples of protest and rebellion examined here occurred when fourteenthcentury England was primarily rural and the population was scattered throughout numerous villages and hamlets. The 1381 peasant uprising resulted from a variety of causes: the plague and theological contentions as well as fear, hunger and taxation policies. Only later did the insurgents reach London. In the next century, the Fronde in France, a series of uprisings led by the nobility against the king, ended with increased royal authority: here, much of the action took place in Paris. It was not, however, a modern insurrection equal to the events at the end of the eighteenth century. A definable transformation in the settings and roots of public protest and riot occurred during the 1780 Gordon Riots in London and the French Revolution just nine years later in Paris. Now, more than ever, cities predominated as centres of action. The most discernible change from 1381 to 1780 was that the city and its urban inhabitants became the fundamental elements of insurrection, even when insurgents moved to the countryside to extend the fighting to the rural areas. These remarkable essays display this change, but they also make clear that each incident possessed its own nuances and set of causes. The challenge they pose to future historians is for them to develop a general theory of riot, public protest and insurrection. In that way, our understanding of how, why, where and perhaps when these affairs occur and evolve will become heightened and enriched.
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