Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution (review)

Originating as a study of the White Terror of 1795 in the small town of Aubagne, this book raises important general issues about the relationship between popular violence, democratic politics, and criminal justice during the French Revolution. It does so by situating the local history of Aubagne within a larger regional framework of revolutionary politics centered on Marseille and other cities in Provence. The argument of the book is that Jacobinism in this part of France fostered a violent form of democratic politics that transformed factional disputes into a deadly cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance. Just as lynchings of anti-Jacobins in 1791/92 foreshadowed prison massacres and lynchings of Jacobins in 1795, so did both factions invoke democratic rhetoric to justify popular mobilizations and extraordinary justice in 1793/94. After the Convention abandoned Terror as an official policy, its representatives on Mission to Marseille relied in vain on regular criminal tribunals to redress the injustices committed by Jacobin militants before and during the Terror. The paralysis of normal justice, which characterized the entire period from 1789 to 1795 in Provence, helps to explain the wave of anti-Jacobin violence perpetrated by murder gangs in 1795.

Sutherland has done extensive archival research for this book, which is nearly always based on primary sources. Aubagne is featured in the first section of the book, which presents systematic evidence about the economic and social basis of factionalism in Aubagne (Chapter 1) and a detailed narrative of local struggles for power in this town from 1789 to 1792 (Chapter 2). Social historians will be impressed by Sutherland’s use of census and tax records to prove that Jacobins at Aubagne drew much of their support from poor farmers and craftsmen, while more prosperous segments of the population, including most of the elite, supported the anti-Jacobin faction. Other historians have emphasized patron–client relationships that cut across class lines in the factionalism prevalent in Provence; Sutherland finds tantalizing evidence that factionalism inside the town of Aubagne was based more on neighborhood networks of sociability, perhaps linked to rival confraternities, than on class antagonisms. Nonetheless, the most distinctive feature of Jacobinism at Aubagne was its successful mobilization of the rural section of the commune.

Political historians will find equally persuasive Sutherland’s analysis of how Jacobinism emerged in Aubagne as a popular movement for local tax reform. Led by cultivators who resided outside the town, as well as by townspeople of middling income and social position, this movement brought Jacobins into municipal office in November 1791, albeit via elections contested by the losers. Sutherland might have placed more emphasis on the tactics of the anti-Jacobin faction, which included denunciations and arrests as early as March 1789. These tactics paralleled those used by adversaries of local patriots throughout Provence in the spring of 1789.

This struggle for power was especially intense in Marseille, as Sutherland shows in Chapter 3. In shifting his focus to “Aubagne’s Universe” in this chapter, Sutherland opens up the issue of Jacobin violence, setting the stage for a dramatic narrative in Chapter 4 about lynchings perpetrated by crowds against anti-Jacobins in numerous localities of Provence. Sutherland highlights the regional context for two lynchings that took place at Aubagne in September 1792. Against this background of popular violence, often with the complicity of Jacobin officials who neglected to investigate the murders, Sutherland describes in Chapter 5 the struggle during the spring of 1793 between Jacobins and anti- Jacobins at Aubagne and then at Marseille, where section assemblies responded to Jacobin extremists by closing down the club, replacing the Jacobin municipality, and defying the Convention in an insurrectionary movement that Jacobins denounced as “federalism.” Sutherland makes the important analytical point in Chapter 6, about federalism at Marseille as well as Aubagne, that the federalists resembled the Jacobins not only in their rhetoric of popular sovereignty, as other historians have emphasized...