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171 ch ap ter six Buzançais Rendered in History, Patrimony, and Sound and Light The most passionate history is the history of one’s home town. . . . Indeed , certain events have marked the history of France, such as the jacqueries of Buzançais in 1847. . . . To you, reader, I wish you an enriching visit to the history of Buzançais. —Mayor Régis Blanchet D uring the 1970s, several elements converged in new appropriations of the Buzançais story by such genres as scholarly history and works associated with la patrimoine (heritage preservation and promotion ) movement. These factors included the success of the “new history” (encompassing the Annales school, social history, and regional and local studies ) among professional historians; a long-standing passion for local history among amateur members of local sociétés savantes (who functioned as guardians of the local archives and patrimoine); and eagerness of municipalities to encourage local culture as a means to restore or maintain healthy communities and economies. Sometimes working together and sometimes at odds, these disparate invokers of the past cast into the limelight places and stories that traditional, national histories had ignored or relegated to the gloaming of la France profonde, where they had originated. Battles waged in the 1960s over the interpretation of popular revolts during the early modern and revolutionary eras now migrated into the study of the nineteenth century. Then the events of 1968 energized the study of past revolts as embodiments of resistance to forces of change, alienation, and exploitation.1 We have already seen how, between 1848 and the 1970s, political and economic discourse as well as the literary and visual arts had variously deployed the story of Buzançais to edify and entertain. Until the 1970s, only two serious works of local history had substantially explored the event: Eugène Hubert’s Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture 172 history of the canton of Buzançais in his 1908 multivolume work Le Bas Berry: Histoire et Archéologie du département de l’Indre and Marcel Bruneau’s history in honor of the centennial celebration of the Revolution of 1848, Aspects de la Révolution de 1848 dans l’Indre.2 Hubert largely reproduced the 1847 indictment and denounced the rioters as “drunken” workers thirsting to exact “vengeance against the bourgeois for selling their grain too dearly.” He concluded that the causes of the riot did not lurk in any previously existing conspiracy and explained that contemporaries had blamed “this criminal riot” on the “weakness of public authorities too slow to act and to quell at the outset the leaders of a crowd that let itself be blindly led to the greatest crimes.”3 Bruneau’s more sympathetic history introduced Buzançais to set a context for the Revolution of 1848. He noted that the “Indre did not escape the general economic crisis [of 1846–47]. One can cite the riot at Buzançais as an example of a jacquerie, of peasant misery—but worker misery would be more exact.” He reported only briefly the basic incidents of what he called “a story often told”: “a load of grain . . . stopped . . . by unemployed workers.” They continued by “pillag[ing] a mill and several individual houses.” “The movement demanded a ransom from several bourgeois. One of them defended himself. A leader was killed and his adversary was killed with the refinements of cruelty. There were thus two deaths. The prefect hurried to the scene and demonstrated an energetic attitude—the troops arrived. The Assize court quickly liquidated the affair with several sentences.”4 Buzançais served Bruneau as a microcosm of the economic crisis and suffering that lay at the root of the Revolution of 1848. The use of the passive voice avoided most issues of intent and responsibility. Neither Hubert nor Bruneau lingered long over Buzançais because their real subjects lay elsewhere. In the 1970s, however, historians turned to events like Buzançais with renewed interest and new questions. Given the late twentieth century’s historical concerns, neither an uncritical acceptance of the official narrative nor an explanation of the episode as “exceptional” would suffice. Buzan çais now attracted historians who sought to understand it by analyzing the structures of economic, social, and political relations that produced it. These historians pursued a broader, more innovative range of sources for answers and focused more on the people who protested than on those whom they confronted . Studying France “from the bottom up,” they focused on criminals and deviants...

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