Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World ed. by Michael T. Davis (review)

Crowd Actions includes sixteen chapters moving from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Suffice it to say, this is a grab-bag. In his introduction, Jack Published by Oxford University Press 2016. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US. Fruchtman states that the volume leaves for the future "the major question" (10) of what unifies these episodes of crowd action. One is inclined, however, to think that whatever unifies such a vast sweep of historical phenomena, the real interest arises from the diversity and particularities presented by the contributors. The volume opens with Mark O'Brien's rousing call for readers to "never allow the memory and stories" (30) of the peasant rebellion of 1381 to fade. It concludes with a subtle chapter by Raphaël Canet, Laurent Pech, and Maura Stewart provocatively arguing that the urban riots of 2005 arose less from the failure of France's republican ideal than from the deeply held desire of young men of French Arab or African origin to fully share in its promise of socioeconomic integration. In between these chronological poles, a talented team of historians of France and Britain offers a wealth of historical analysis.

The first part of the collection focuses on riots from the Middle Ages to the Age of Revolutions. It includes three excellent survey chapters on early-modern protest in France, which broadly confirm the association of sixteenth-century rioting with religion, seventeenth-century with taxes, and eighteenth-century with grain. Penny Roberts carefully updates the debate concerning the brutal violence that marked sixteenth-century confessional conflict, ranging from the spontaneous to the highly organized, targeting individuals and congregations. William Beik surveys the seventeenth-century, concluding that while common people were not powerless—demonstrators were able to negotiate over grievances through protest—no reform program could withstand the power of the militarized state. Cynthia Bouton's chapter on food rioting takes us through to the French Revolution, in which the problem of market liberalization and subsistence, which had dogged the ancien régime, was intensified within the context of popular insurrection and war. For Britain, Nicholas Rogers and Michael Davis provide more focused essays, on the Gordon riots of 1780 and British radicals in the 1790s. In his detailed examination, Rogers qualifies George Rudé's claim that behind the cry of "No Popery" rioters harbored a deeper class-based social purpose, arguing that religion and not class was their central preoccupation. Most helpfully, Rogers situates the riots within the broader context of imperial crisis and the politics of war. As for the 1790s, Davis stresses radical artisans' desire to avoid association with "the mob," a label more appropriately fixed to loyalist Paine burnings and physical attacks on reformers. In two finely-crafted comparative chapters, John Bohstedt looks at the politics of provision in early-modern England and France, the Irish famine, and World War I, while Jeff Horn compares machine-breaking in Britain and France. Horn compellingly argues that whereas the repression of the British state rendered the laboring classes more powerless to arrest the development of capitalist innovation, French resistance, which was closely associated with revolutionary politics, served to alter elite behavior and thus retard French industrialization. Bohstedt most closely achieves the level of meaningful generalization called for in the introduction, by showing how "economic markets" are embedded in "political markets." He concludes that popular morality prevailed when "ruler and ruled inhabited the same moral universe," and particularly when popular protest was linked to "the state's needs for soldiers and subjects" (118–19).

War emerges as one of the volume's unifying themes, recurring as an enabling factor to collective action. Thus Gordon Pentland explores the effects mass military mobilization had on collective protest in postwar Britain (1815–20), including drilling led by ex-soldiers, the attempts of revolutionary...