Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847-2008

CHAPTER FOUR: Popular Publishing between the Wars

91 ch ap ter f our Popular Publishing between the Wars The question of expensive bread and grain are [again] today on the agenda. This is not the first time that such a threat of dearth has occurred in France. —Pierre Bouchardon, “La Jacquerie de Buzançais” S oon after World War I, two new narratives appeared, in 1919 and 1925, respectively, an era by which living memory of 1847 had died out. Each narrative presents a dramatically different version—textually but also, for the first time, visually—of the Buzançais affair. In 1919, a Paris publisher, Edouard-Joseph, produced the first book version of Vallès, Les Blouses, and engaged Mario Simon to illustrate it.1 In 1925, the Librairie Hachette’s monthly popular magazine Les Lectures pour tous: Revue universelle et populaire illustrée included in its section “Récits historiques” a two-part history of the Buzançais riots.2 The author, Pierre Bouchardon, and illustrator, B. Leclercq, offered a different twist both textually and visually. This chapter looks at the historical context for each narrative and the particular character of each version. It explores the contributions that visual images made, compares the images, and speculates about how they reflected and contributed to French culture and politics in the interwar years. buzançais, 1919 The year 1919 proved a turbulent one. While the Paris Peace Conference dragged on from January to June, the world did not stand still. France itself, exhausted from four years of war, witnessed the resurgence of anarchism, the acquittal of Socialist leader Jean Jaurès’s killer, continued support for the Socialist Party and the affiliated labor union, the Confédération générale du tra- Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture 92 vail (CGT), mounting labor unrest, several serious threats of a general strike, and anti-immigrant violence—all combined with the general horror at recent losses and devastation.3 Moreover, the twentieth century had witnessed a renewal of food riots,4 some with revolutionary potential, as in 1917 Russia. The wartime Union sacrée French government, formed to encourage cohesion against the enemy, had never eliminated the tensions fracturing France in 1914, but it had, at least for a while, muted them in the interests of the common good and encouraged a subsequent memory of a “national sentiment” of unity.5 Even before the war ended, however, conflict reemerged to challenge the myth of unity. Specifically, the subsistence issue continued to prove explosive in France. During the war, conscription and casualties had siphoned off most adult peasant males, as hundreds of deserted villages testified; agricultural productivity had consequently declined.6 Everyone suffered; yet persistently rising prices made many urban consumers feel that farmers benefited, perhaps excessively, from the demand for food for the civilian and military populations.7 The resentment had some basis in experience. Because agricultural prices had remained high throughout the war and inflation benefited debtors most, many rural proprietors had in fact managed to pay off debts, buy more land, and enjoy a higher standard of living.8 Although wages rose, they failed—at least until 1916—to keep pace with prices. Middle-class consumers—such as those in the liberal professions, civil servants, and those living on rentes and other incomes hurt by inflation— found their standards of living threatened, even after the armistice. During this period, the newspapers reported daily on the vie chère (the high cost of living).9 On several occasions, the French government intervened to fix and then freeze grain prices (in 1915 and 1918) and to impose rationing in many towns. After 22 January 1918, Clemenceau’s government even compelled the heretofore privileged city of Paris to undergo bread rationing even more stringent (300 grams versus 600 grams daily) than that long in effect in many other cities in France.10 After February 1918, the French government pursued an increasingly aggressive policy of economic controls.11 Despite these measures, however, the government “remained loyal to the values of liberalism” in principle and “had only reluctantly, and in an ad hoc manner, taken the most urgent measures.”12 At the time of the armistice, prices had reached two and a half times their level in 1913.13 The exchange value of the franc continued to fall.14 93 Popular Publishing between the Wars The suffering wrought by the war had not ended with the armistice in November 1918...