Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (review)

William Beik revisits rebellious seventeenth-century France, a territory historians as diverse as Boris Porchnev, Roland Mousnier, Yves-Marie Bercé, René Pillorget and Robert Muchembled began to travel many decades ago and inspired others to explore as well. Yet, despite the heavy traffic, Beik does not retread the same analytical paths. Indeed, he makes important contributions to our understanding of public disorder in several ways.

Beik intensively analyses disturbances in some twenty provincial cities from the 1590s to the early reign of Louis XIV. From this urban persepective, he highlights complex political (in its broadest meanings as a “dialogue about power”) tensions that reveal class conflict as well as social solidarity, civic factionalism as well as civic loyalty. Although Beik claims his interest lies most in the protesters themselves (p. 13), he also examines the structure of, the weaknesses within, and the exercise of public authority. Protesters succeeded or failed in large part because they understood urban power structures and could exploit them to their advantage.

He eschews the usual methods of classifying collective disturbances by the specific type of behavior or target (such as anti-fiscal revolts, food riots, or religious riots, for example) because, he argues, such an approach can over-simplify causation and overlook both the complexity and fundamental similarity in collective behavior. Instead, he sorts them, starting with the “most simple”—those that focused on particular grievances—and ending with the most complex and sophisticated. For example, he begins with a “competitive exchange of insults that turned violent” in Amiens in 1689 (p. 30) and a grain riot in Bordeaux in 1643 (p. 37). More complex disorders include the planned 1630 revolt of the Lanturelus in Dijon that erupted over the imposition of a new fiscal-administrative structure (the élections) and ended up mobilizing a wide group of the common people who expressed broader social grievances (pp. 126–33). Among the most sophisticated revolts, Beik recounts a factional struggle for power that ultimately mobilized popular supporters in Béziers in 1646 (pp. 175–78), the Loricard movement of 1652 in Angers that involved princely leadership (pp. 207–17), and, finally, the Ormée revolt of 1652 in Bordeaux (pp. 219–49). He argues that his strategy facilitates his search for a common culture.

Thus, Beik’s real contribution is his thesis that public disorders of the seventeenth century shared a common “culture of retribution”, “regardless of whether they were occasioned by grain shortages, tax excesses, troop lodgings, or other perceived offenses against appropriate traditional procedures”(p. 51). Protesters demanded punishment of those they believed had “betrayed” their idea of the proper management of their city. Beik argues that even the most complex and sophisticated distrubances of the century were rooted in indignation over rights neglected or defied and accompanying demands for retribution. Although magistrates often found themselves targets of popular wrath, they, other local notables and even princely leaders shared in this common culture, and Beik finds echoes in their language. He insists that urban demonstrators rooted their outrage in a sense of “rights” that demanded “the implementation of practical measures to resolve immediate problems”(p. 253). They actively sought to punish wrong-doing with humiliating insult where possible and dramatic violence against property and persons where necessary. Indeed, Beik argues, rioters targeted persons “because abstract forces were always personified in the seventeenth century” (p. 250).

Beik finds most of his evidence for this common culture of retribution in the repertory of protesters’ behavior, a repertory that included a potentially escalating scale of responses familiar to historians of the period. These ranged from insult and hyperbole to completely destroying property and literally eviscerating enemies. Rioters mimicked repressive strategies of authorities, drew upon military traditions of banners and tocsins, and angrily acted out carnavalesque inversions. Their protests were “punitive as well as corrective” (p. 256). Collective action became possible because protesters could mobilize diverse communities located in the various networks of...