We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
As France's Old Regime was dissolving in the 1780s, a wave of violence spread across the country. Jean-Clément Martin puts this dramatically: from the autumn of 1788 to the spring of 1789, at least 289 émeutes occurred (Martin 2006: 52). He writes,
People living in the countryside intercept grain convoys, distribute the owners’ stocks, and if challenged, stand up to the bailiffs and gendarmes, brandishing cudgels. In the urban market places, merchants are thrashed by the consumers who are suffering from the blockades of the food convoys. Women often play a leading role in this unrest. The whole country is beset with fear, with rumors…with terrors and plots. (ibid.)
Was this the onset of a “revolution”? The term originally came from the revolution of the planets and in the eighteenth century came to be used for natural disasters, such as the great earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755. And the forms of contention that Martin describes drew upon a well-known repertoire of collective action forms (Tilly 1986, 1995a, 1995b), including grain seizures, the burning down of houses, attacks on elites, charivaris, and a number of other familiar routines. But once the Old Regime began to dissolve, these multiple, and largely traditional, forms of contention were subsumed under a new and broader language: the language of revolution. Martin describes this crucial point:
The French people's conviction that they have made the revolution explains why the positive aspects of the word obscure the multiple forms of violence that accompany it, since these are perceived as merely secondary, without any real significance. (2006: 67)
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
