The Art of Riot in England and America (review)

Ronald Paulson has written a book that documents England's and America's enduring fascination with the riot. A reader of this book must come away impressed with the sheer ubiquity of riots in Anglo-American history and culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Paulson does not frame his inquiry with a modernization thesis, whether liberal (riots are the people's attempt to assert popular sovereignty), conservative (riots are a problematic attack upon social order), or sociological (riots are a symptom of the modern urban crowd of strangers). Instead, Paulson begins with the crowds in James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 and William Hogarth's The March to Finchley, so as to open a discussion of the complex double-valance of the riot. On the one hand, riot involves noisy celebration and wild festivity that breaks with the everyday; on the other hand, in riot, the crowd's public demonstration against authority can intensify to the point of sedition. The virtue of this working definition of the riot is the way the first sense of riot as festivity very often carries the second as a potential within itself; and, conversely, the seditious riot, which might entail physical attacks upon officials, jails or banks, almost always incorporates the joyous release of a festival. In both riots there is a pivotal role for the crowd—the mobile vulgar—which can grow, expand, and, having "a mind of its own," become uncontrollable. Paulson notes that in England, the Riot Act of 1715, which was passed in the context of the Stuart rebellion of that year, helped to give a pointed political definition to the riot: if twelve or more persons are gathered, and the riot act is read to them, then, after one hour, the members of that gathering became liable to conviction for a capital crime. The last two clauses of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, written and adopted in 1789, might be read as a way to preempt the passing of such a law in the new republic "Congress shall make no law abridging. . . . the right of the people peaceable to assemble, and to petition for a redress of grievances."

What distinguishes The Art of Riot from earlier studies of riot is evident from its title: by the "art" of the riot, Paulson comprehends 1) the techniques of rioters and those who put down riots, 2) the riot viewed as a spectacle by those witnessing historical riots, and 3) the tropes, ideas, and iconography developed by the literary and visual arts to represent the riot. This comprehensive view of modern riot entails a critical narrative that carefully braids together fact and fiction. On the one hand, Paulson offers concise and authoritative accounts of actual riots of the long eighteenth century, the key riots becoming the Penlez riot (1749), the Wilkite Riot of St. George's Fields (1768), the Gordon Riots (1780), and the Peterloo Massacre (1819). These historical accounts anchor artistic practice in history and, reciprocally, Paulson's analysis of the art of the riot, that is, the aesthetic and affective effects developed for them by Hogarth, Rowlandson, Turner, Phiz, Cruikshank, and many others, deepens our understanding of historical riots. So, for example, throughout this book, Paulson gets us to see riot as a collaboration between rioters and the authorities they oppose, who may send police or troops, who may riot against the (supposed) rioters. These collaborations are deepened and extended by the way contemporary observers savor the spectacle of the riot and writers and visual artists render and memorialize them.

In The Art of Riot, Paulson thinks through the artists that he analyzes, and here the central figure is William Hogarth. Hogarth emerges as the central artist of the riot both as festivity and sedition. For Paulson, Hogarth's The March to Finchley (1750) expresses a response to riot that is both sympathetic with the sentiments and excesses of the festivity and realistic about the human frailties all too visible in the...