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

among groups of Americans and French in their countries and in public spaces in Paris. Likewise, the arrival of the American Legion for a parade down the ChampsElys ées three weeks after the Sacco-Vanzetti riots evoked some of the same polemics and fears, although Blower adeptly explains why the outcome was much calmer. Inserted between these two chapters is one devoted to the reactionary Prefect of Police Jean Chiappe, whose polarizing tenure (1927–34) provoked dissention between the left and the right and paved the path for the contentious decades leading to and following World War II. Cultural and political transnational history comes alive through Blower’s engaging presentation of facts and analysis, accompanied by extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Her rhetorical strategy of opposing arguments or viewpoints, drawn from primary and secondary sources, renders particularly cogent her final assessments, offered as section and chapter summaries. Blower, whose flowing prose is replete with precise, varied vocabulary and syntax, alternates concrete examples, regularly drawn from the writings of well-known personalities , with overarching paradigms of public sentiments and events. Although sometimes authenticating the romantic images of Paris in the Roaring 20s, Blower juxtaposes an era in which Americans may have arrived in the capital as innocents abroad, but who became inexorably more politically knowledgeable about the world. Gradually, Americans understood their own cultural values and the reciprocal influence of dramatic world events upon themselves and other global citizens. In the final chapter, “The Expatriates Reconsidered,” Blower follows American writers whose travels further afield led initially to enthusiasm for leftist, even communist, viewpoints, but eventually devolved into disillusion. Whereas these expatriates, often returning to Paris or setting out from the French capital, may have found a new voice by either isolating themselves or by trying to warn their compatriots, Blower points out that the 1950s brought a return to the nostalgia of the 1920s, selectively remembered by Hollywood. Rather than supporting the myth of American culture being a one-way street, Blower has demonstrated persuasively that “the making of American culture and influence has been a twoway street” (266), transported to Paris, leavened, and repatriated. Northwestern University (IL) Margot M. Steinhart BOUTON, CYNTHIA A. Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847– 2008. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8071-3686-7. Pp. 256. $39.95. With hindsight the facts of the matter seem clear-cut, and one wonders how anyone can contest what actually happened in Buzançais on that fateful, bitter cold January day in 1847 when a grain convoy, passing through this sleepy village in the Indre was commandeered by a motley crew of hungry peasants. Within hours an angry mob had invaded granaries and mills and forced resale of the grain at a just price set by the people. The mob violence cost several lives on both sides, and after the authorities had restored order, of course, there was hell to pay for the losers: after a speedy trial three insurgents were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine on market day in the town square. In this wellresearched and immensely readable cultural history, Cynthia Bouton focuses on 770 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 how the initial food riot of January 1847 was essentially retold in a variety of venues: in local and national political discourse, the press, literature, visual culture , popular and scholarly historical narratives, and local spectacle. Each retelling is a de facto interpretation, a reenactment, as it were, of the 1847 “primal” scene, which has lived on as event, as experience, and as myth, doing valuable cultural, social, and political work for more than a century and a half. Specifically , the author studies how four defining moments of the riot (the initial hijacking of the grain convoy, the fatal shooting of a rioter by a notable who was subsequently lynched, the leadership of women, and the inadequate responses of the authorities) have been represented over time in both words and pictures. In chapter 1 Bouton recounts the facts as we know them, but already the first renditions of the riot underscore the difficulties involved in understanding the past, which range from assigning guilt (“Who shoved whom when?”) to assessing long...