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1 Introduction O n a beautiful bluebonnet Texas morning in March 2005, I received a telephone call from the mayor of Buzançais, a modest town of four thousand located deep in central France, three hours by train and bus south of Paris. “I understand from reading interviews you gave to local journalists that you’re writing a history of my town,” he said accusingly, “but you haven’t talked to me.” That, he said, wouldn’t do. He had things I needed to see and hear in order to tell the story as I should. The “story” told in this book began with a food riot in Buzançais on a bitter cold January day in 1847. The riot itself, provoked by the sight of grain passing through a town already suffering hunger, high prices, and unemployment and fearing worse to come, took the traditional form: interception of the shipment (entrave), invasion of granaries and mills, and forced resale of the grain at a “just price” set by the people, the whole fracas fired, fueled, and fanned by women. What started as a classic subsistence movement, however, triggered two days of rioting and class hostility punctuated by uncommon property damage. The son of a landowner shot and killed a protester; a crowd battered the shooter to death. Local authorities recoiled from the crowds and utterly failed to stem the riot’s tide. Disorder soon spread throughout the region. At the time, the Buzançais affair’s resonance with memories of past collective violence quickly made it a national cause célèbre, a notoriety that distinguished it from the more than three hundred other riots that erupted throughout France during the Europe-wide crisis years, 1846–47. The July Monarchy (1830–48) responded fiercely with military occupation, highly publicized trials , and unusually severe sentences (three guillotinings) designed to punish a rebellious populace and to discipline cowering local elites. The riot also focused polemics in the political press, facilitated factional critiques of the government , and contributed to the debates preceding the Revolution of 1848. Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture 2 Originally a local episode of horse-drawn carts, wind- and water-powered mills, cobblestone markets, pitchforks, blunderbusses, and guillotines, the Buzan çais affair has survived the decades and lives on as a national cultural artifact in the France of the TGV, atomic power stations, hypermarkets, Ariane space rockets, and Tazers. Continuing to draw attention over a century and a half, it kept reappearing in local and national political discourse, the press, literature, visual culture, popular and scholarly historical narratives, and local spectacle: in the 1860s, 1880, 1919, the interwar era, the 1950s, late 1970s–1980s, and from the mid-1990s to the present. With each retelling, key representations differed substantively in detail and meaning. During these moments, competing political cultures in France found the story of Buzançais a useful weapon in their ideological arsenal as they sought to define themselves and to enhance their relative positions with the French public. That the nature of its telling concerned the town’s mayor in the first decade of the twenty-first century, 160 years after the fact and in a France from which the food riot had long disappeared as a form of popular protest, validates the importance, not so much of the riot itself, but of the embedded issues that live on. Kept alive through the years in a variety of media and formats—court documents , newspaper stories, novels, illustrations, popular histories, newspaper comic strips, television drama, scholarly histories, popular magazines—the Buzan çais affair continues to draw attention in the twenty-first century through an annual sound-and-light spectacle presented in nearby fields to hundreds of spectators who come from near and far, by train, bus, and car. There, perched on bleachers and stools, locals and visitors alike witness the reenactment of the riot, followed by a dramatic adaptation of a 1990s historical novel based on the tumult and its aftermath. Studying these diverse subsequent representations of the riot, as well as the immediate responses to it, and locating them in their respective contexts show how each version fashioned a narrative, or story, about the episode that performed particular functions for its teller.1 The meanings that narrators derived from the episode, the media they chose to communicate these meanings, and the narrative choices they made, as well as their particular renderings, both reflected and participated in their respective eras. This frequent “return” to the Buzançais...

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