Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847-2008 by Cynthia A. Bouton (review)

The revolt in Buzançais of January 1847 began as a traditional grain riot; townspeople, squeezed by unemployment and high prices, were provoked by the sight of a grain convoy passing through the town. The riot escalated into three days of violence, culminating in the brutal stabbing and bludgeoning death of a property owner who had shot and killed one of the protestors. The waning July Monarchy mounted a serious repression, including a major trial and three death sentences. The event, its just-price origins an unwelcome anachronism in the era of liberal economics, resonated powerfully with the French public and contributed to the sense of unease that preceded the 1848 revolution. The Buzançais uprising seemed to be more, or to stand for more, than it was; for that reason, the event has been periodically re-told in a variety of media, including a contemporary re-enactment in the town itself.

As Bouton notes, the event does not have immediate name recognition among the general public. Instead, the story has popped up from time to time, resuscitated for political, and often commercial, purposes. Bouton, author of The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society (Philadelphia, 1993)—an examination of a series of politicized grain riots—returns to the intersection of hunger and authority in her new book; this time, however, she examines the event and the works of imagination that the Buzançais riot inspired, discussing along the way the publishing and newspaper industries.

The re-tellings of the event generally seem to have fallen into two broad narrative trajectories, two examples of which suffice. Jules Vallès' novel, Les Blouses—first serialized in 1880—portrayed the event as a struggle in the ongoing battle against social injustice. The visual images of Mario Simon in the re-published version of 1919 (reproduced in Bouton's book) highlighted the archetypal character of the Old Woman, who both inspired the crowd and attempted to restrain it from mindlessness (she also seems reminiscent of the title character in the 1926 Soviet film Mother, directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin). In direct contrast was a 1956 illustrated series, "Le Jacquerie de Buzançais," which ran for nineteen days in the newspaper France-Soir (as part of a series suggestively titled "Crime Doesn't Pay"). Its chief character was Baptiste Bienvenu, a sinister, axe-wielding worker; among its images was a graphic portrayal of the pitchfork murder of the man of property. The story in this case served to examine issues of law, order, and social stability. Bouton speculates that France-Soir's circulation-boosting serial resonated with the post-World War II anxieties—high prices and hoarding, combined with rapid modernization—that had also created the lower-middle-class phenomenon of Poujadism.

Bouton, in this illuminating and well-researched study of the "interplay of popular culture and collective memory" is not so much focused on the event per se—though she covers it ably, too—than on its longevity and plasticity in politics and art (5); to each era, its own Buzançais.