Poaching: crime and protest from the eighteenth to the twentieth century

Poaching: crime and protest from the eighteenth to the twentieth century 1789 was a golden age for poachers. By the summer and autumn of that year, there was no one both able and willing to prevent a holocaust of game. In Provence, 'every rusty gun' could be heard hard at work.1 This Revolutionary slaughter was a joyful and anarchic indulgence in an almost universal pleasure. Before and after the Revolution, hunting game was for many Frenchmen more than simply an enjoyable leisure pursuit or a vital supplement to family food supplies: it was a compulsion. Even in normal times it was an inescapable reality of life,2 but the breakdown of authority in the Revolution gave the French population a unique opportunity. In the Ilede -France around Paris, near Poissy, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Corbeil, Pontoise, Fontainebleau and Compiegne, the forests, which had long been the hunting preserve of the King under the control of the Capitaineries, were invaded by hunting parties reported to be one to three hundred strong.3 As one pamphlet ironically observed, Parisians who in July had devoted themselves to the heroic defence of liberty, in August turned to a total war on rabbits and hares.4 Peasants, so long prevented by seigneurial rights from protecting their crops from the depredations of game, could finally retaliate. The killing and injuring of a few guards were seen as just revenge for centuries of feudal oppression. The restrictions on hunting which had been one of many grievances before the Revolution did not disappear with the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century. Instead, once the Revolutionary period was over, the laws were altered in form and rationale while poaching practices slowly adapted to the new circumstances. Monopoly rights based on feudal law, which limited hunting to monarchs and those with seigneurial authority, were replaced by property rights which gave the ownership of 1 Arthur Young, Travels in France, London, 1890, p. 256: 30 August 1789. 2 'Le gout pour cet exercice est une realite contre laquelle on lutteroit en vain': Mathieu de Bombasle, Des Abus de la chasse (nd), Archives Nationales (AN), 03,1017. 3 Correspondence, AN, 01, 1034,1036. 4 Ibid., Sujets de plaintes des habitants de la campagne, oufureur des lievres lapins. P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 242 L Cameron wild animals to those on whose lands they were found. The legalrightto hunt could be obtained for the price of a licence, but such licences were not cheap and poaching continued. The bourgeoisie, as the main beneficiaries of the shift, enforced the new laws more vigorously than most of their feudal predecessors had done the old. Until 1789, then, the right to hunt was essentially a feudal privilege restricted to the seigneurs. Hunting in royal forests, the grounds of the Capitaineries, was even more restricted as a special royal permit was required. Enforcement of the hunting laws, however, had littie bearing on the formation of a m o d e m state which historians have discerned in other eighteenth-century developments. The spasmodic disarmaments carried out by the provincial marechaussee—the mounted countryside police—and the more systematic but equally ineffective attempts by the Company of the Voyages et Chasses du Roy to disarm notorious poaching villages, have little to do with the growth of m o d e m state conventions.5 In the nineteenth century, poaching as it had been practised a century earlier rapidly acquired mythic qualities. By 1869, the recentiy formed Societe Centrale des Chasseurs was lamenting the passing of an age when poachers had shot in order to eat and guards had applauded their expertise: 'That was the golden age of both poaching and hunting.'6 The archetypical poacher-turned-gamekeeper dates from the ancien rigime. Lucien Labruyerre, caught red-handed on 22 December 1768, was imprisoned in Bicetre by order of the comte de Clermont. H e earned release and the job of gamekeeper which he coveted by revealing, in his Ruses du braconnagej everything he knew about poaching and the tricks poachers used. In his revelations, which werefirstpublished in 1844 to coincide with the passage of critical new laws...