Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847-2008 (review)

The 1847 riots at Buzançais (Indre), in the Berry — la France profonde if it exists anywhere — were at the confluence of traditional grain riot and nineteenth-century class war, with post-Revolutionary political overtones sharpened by the July Monarchy's insistence on liberal economics and consequent intolerance of traditional protest (p. 31). Faced with a shortage, locals stopped wagons of grain bound for the mill (knowing the flour would then be sold elsewhere) and forced the authorities to ensure local sale of grain at the traditional price. Hatred of 'usurers' and of gouging employers inflamed the riots. One mill owner shot and killed a rioter, whereupon the mob set upon him and killed him. A show trial imposed harsh sentences; three rioters were guillotined.

These events caused a sensation at the time. A local newspaper financed by George Sand provided trial reports sympathetic to the rioters (p. 44). Alexis de Tocqueville presented the Academy's Prix de vertu to a maid who defended her mistress; he praised her as the model faithful retainer (p. 29). Marx mentioned the events in The Class Struggles (1850), Hugo in Les Misérables (1862), and Flaubert in L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). They were open to multiple interpretations. Forces of order at the time saw them as 'an uprising of the poor classes against the rich classes' (p. 34) and later as simple criminality. Supporters of the people saw them as a response to hunger and oppression. Bouton offers a deeply nuanced study, deftly deploying class, gender, and political analysis both on the events themselves and on their subsequent interpretations. The only weakness of the study derives from the paucity of accounts between the 1850s and the 1950s. The riots were largely forgotten for over a century and so Bouton cannot trace the evolution of a myth over time. Rather than confront this hiatus, she proceeds as if the myth persisted, covering the gaps by devoting excessive space to Jules Vallès's 1880 roman feuilleton of the events (published as a book only in 1919) and to a 1925 account in the monthly Lectures pour tous, both of limited diffusion and significance. But in the late twentieth century the story was resurrected to further wildly different aims. In 1956 France-Soir published a feuilleton in a bande dessinée series entitled 'Le Crime ne paie pas'; it depicted the rioters as bloodthirsty, primitive criminals. Here Bouton adroitly deploys political context and visual analysis, but fails to consider the links to modern tabloid strategies of fashioning reactionary populism, of which this seems a fascinating precursor. Bouton hits her stride again with insightful analyses of the events' modern historiography and especially of their role in local life and politics in the last twenty years: they were the subject of local histories, became a successful son et lumière, and even played a part in the 2002 municipal elections! On all this, as on the events themselves and their initial interpretations, too much cannot be said of the depth and insight of Bouton's analysis. This is a splendid book.