French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 [Course Book ed.] 9781400820320

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Maps
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
1. The Regional Structure of Revolt
2. The Economic Foundations of Peasant Mobilization
3. The Social Geography of Revolt
4. Agrarian Depression and the Social Bases of Insurgency
5. Political Modernization and Insurgency
6. Building Underground
7. Sources of Montagnard Solidarity
8. The People’s Leadership
9. Patterns of Repression
10. The Dynamics of Armed Mobilizations
11. Collective Violence
12. The Triumph of Counterrevolution
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FRENCH PEASANTS IN REVOLT

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French Peasants in Revolt The Insurrection of I 85I

by TED W. MARGADAN1'

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

COPYRIGHT

© 1979

BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, GUILDFORD, SURREY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA WILL BE FOUND ON THE LAST PRINTED PAGE OF THIS BOOK

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY THE WHITNEY DARROW PUBLICATION RESERVE FUND OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN LINOTYPE JANSON

CLOTHBOUND EDITIONS OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS ARE PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER, AND BINDING MATERIALS ARE CHOSEN FOR STRENGTH AND DURABILITY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

To my Mother

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Contents

List of Maps

IX

L~~T~~

n

Abbreviations

XIll

Preface

xv

Introduction

XVll

I.

The Regional Structure of Revolt

2.

The Economic Foundations of Peasant Mobilization

3 40

3. The Social Geography of Revolt

61

4. Agrarian Depression and the Social Bases of Insurgency

79

5. Political Modernization and Insurgency

104

6. Building Underground

121

7. Sources of Montagnard Solidarity

138

8. The People's Leadership

162

9. Patterns of Repression

187

10.

The Dynamics of Armed Mobilizations

228

1 I.

Collective Violence

26 5

12.

The Triumph of Counterrevolution

302

Conclusion

33 6

Bibliography

345

Index

37 1

Vll

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List of Maps

I.

2.

Arrondissement of Beziers (Herault) Insurrection: December 3-5, 1851 Mobilizations by Department, December 1851

3. France by iDepartment, 185 I

4. Areas with Armed Mobilizations, December 185 I

5· Unarmed Demonstrations, December 185 I 6. Locations of Armed Clashes, December 185 I

7. Towns with Armed Mobilizations,

ix

Decemb(~r 185 I

9 22

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'List of Tables

1.1

Departments with Major Armed Mobilizations in December 185 I

I I

1.2 Departments with Minor Armed Mobilizations in December 1851

12

I. 3 Unarmed Protest in December 185 I

14

1.4

Communes with Large-Scale Armed Mobilizations

19

1.5 Types of Protest, by Administrative Role of Commune

2I

1.6 Armed Clashes with Gendarmes in 185 I

2I

1.7 Armed Clashes with Troops in 185 I

28

1.8 Communes with Municipal Revolutions

30

1.9

3.1

Manpower Links between Administrative Centers and Rural Communes

32

Farming Wealth, Cash Crops, and Revolt (Basses-Alpes)

66

3.2 Occupations of Twenty-Year-Old Men, 4.1

Canton of Clamecy

76

Ratios of Participation among Cultivators and Artisans in the Insurrection

92

4. 2 Ratios of Participation in the Revolt (Southeast)

98

4.3 Ratios of Participation among Day Laborers and

Owner-Farmers

100

5. I Geographical Distribution of Republican Voters in 1849 and Insurgents in 1851 (by Department)

115

5. 2 Collective Protest, 1848- 185 I, and Armed Resistanc~e

to the Coup D'Etat, by Commune 8.1 Montagnard Presidents and Chefs in Bourgs and Villages 8.2

12.1

12.2

I

18

169

Occupations of Montagnard Cadres (bourgs and villages)

18 I

Occupations of Suspects in Rebel and Nonrebel Communes

3 15

Severity of Sanctions Imposed by the Mixed Commissions

320

xi

LIST OF TABLES 12.3

Number of Severe Sentences, Rebel versus Nonrebel Departments

12.4

Severity of Sentences, by Social Class

12.5

Severity of Sanctions, by Political Role of Suspects

XlI

321

326 328

Abbreviations

Archival citations AD Allier

Archives Departementales de l' Allier

ADA

Archives Departementales de l' Ardeche

A,D B-A

Archives Departementales des Basses-,Alpes

ADB-R

Archives Departementales des

ADC

Archives Departmentales du Cher

ADD

Archives Departmentales de la Drom(~

ADG

Archives Departementales du Gard

ADH

Archives .Departementales de l'Herault

ADJ

Archives Departementales du Jura

ADL-G

Archives Departementales de Lot-et-lGaronne

ADN

Archives Departementales de la Nievre

ADR

Archives Departementales du Rhone

ADS-L

Archives Departementales de

A,D Var

Archives Departementales du Var

ADV

Archives Departementales du Vaucluse

ADY

Archives Departmentales de l'Yonne

AG

Archives de la Guerre (Vincennes)

AN

Archives Nationales

ATML

Archives du Tribunal Militaire de Lyon (ADR)

CG Bedarieux

Conseil de Guerre judging suspects from Bedarieux, transcript published in Le .Messager du Midi, May 27 to June 15, 1852

CG Beziers

Conseil de Guerre judging suspects from Beziers, transcript published in Le Messager du Midi, Mar. 2I-30, 1852

CG Capestang

Conseil de Guerre judging suspects from Capestang, transcript published in Le Messager du Midi, Apr. 9-13, 1852 XU1

Bouch(~s-du-Rhone

Saone-(~t-Loire

ABBREVIATIONS

CG Clamecy

Conseil de Guerre judging suspects from Clamecy, archives in ADC Justice Militaire, 1851 (archives of the military commission in the Yonne, located in AG)

Other abbreviations arr.

arrondissement

CNSS

Congres National des Societes Savantes

CP

Commissaire de Police

cult.

cultivator

D.E.S.

Diplome d'Etudes Superieures

Ins.

Insurrection

Int.

Interrogation

J. P.

Justice de la Paix

MC

Mixed Commission of a department in 1852

M. Int.

Minister of the Interior

M. Justice M.War

Minister 0 f Justice Minister of War

P-G

Procureur-General

Proc.

Procureur

S-P

Sous-Prefet

s.s.

secret societies

Tern.

Testimony

xiv

Preface

This book is about a series of provincial uprisings against the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in ·December 185 I. Its dramatis personae resided in country towns and villages whose placid landscapes offer unexpected charms for the contemporary tourist. It is hard to imagine such communities at the forefront of an insurrection, and in my travels to the sites of nineteenth-century rebellions, 1. often encountered surprise among local people who had never heard of the armed revolts that swept their areas in 185 I. Only rarely did I visit a small town where the insurrection is still commemorated. A monument on the public square of Crest, in the Drome--"From the Resistance Fighters of I 944 to the Insurgents of 185 I "-comes closest to recalling this rebel heritage but, more commonly, the violent struggles of the Second Republic have been forgotten. My purpose in this book is to recover the meaning of the insurrection of 185 I for the history of modern France. I began my research over a decade ago, when Charles Tilly encouraged me to investigate peasant resistance to the coup d'etat in one or two departments. I chose the Drome and the Herault for my first research trip, aided by a fellowship from Harvard University. One rebel department led to another, and eventually I undertook research in thirteen departmental archives, assisted by research grants, fellowships, and sabbatical leav(~ from the University of California (UC), Davis. In expanding the scope of Iny research, I benefited greatly from Tilly's suggestions and from the advice of David Landes, my mentor at Harvard University.. They encouraged ~e to generalize from the specific events of 1:3 5 I to the broader movement of French society and politics in the nineteenth century. The result is a book of interest to historians and social scientists who may not have heard of the insurrection of 185 I, but who are intrigued by the problem of peasant revolts in developing societies. I have accumulated many other debts in preparing this book: to archivists and librarians in France who courteously guided me to relevant

sources; to historians who read and criticized portions of my manuscript; to friends and colleagues at UC Davis who supported my long endeavor; to the staff of the UC Davis Department of History who typed my manuscript; and to the editors and readers of Princeton University Press who helped me turn a lengthy manuscript into a readable book. I am especially grateful to John Merriman, Roger Price, Tony ]udt, Daniel Brower, and Dan Wick for reading and evaluating xv

PREFACE

portions of my manuscript; to Nora.' and Eve Timm for their help in the early stages of my research; to Bobbie Figy for typing and proofreading with great care the final version of the manuscript; to Julia Bastian, Arnold Bauer, Karen Gruetter, and Bill Hagen for their friendship all along the way; and to my wife, Joby, for her constant encouragement, sympathy, and love.

XVI

Introduction

The French Second Republic began in Paris and ended in the provinces. Its first heroes were workers in the nation's capital, whose street barricades brought ruin upon the monarchy in February 1848; its last defenders were peasants and artisans in two dozen departments of the center and south, whose armed columns tried to oppose Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'etat of December 2, 1851. The classic dialectic of modern French politics-urban revolutionaries versus rural conservatives-had somehow been reversed. In less than four years, the left-wing cause of a Democratic and Social Republic had gravitated from its Parisian epicenter to hundreds of small towns, bourgs, and villages on the periphery of the nation. When the president of the Republic overthrew the National Assembly, tens of thousands of men rebelled in the provinces, but less than 2,000 Republicans took arms in Paris. These provincial rebels proclaimed revolutionary commissions in over one hundred communes; they seized control of an entire department as well as a dozen arrondissement capitals; and thl~y clashed violently with troops or gendarmes in thirty different localities. Although the army quickly restored order, the government recognized the extent of the danger by arresting thousands of suspects in the rebel zones. Indeed, the insurrection of ,December 185 I was the most serious provincial uprising in nineteenth-century France, and it provoked the largest political purge outside Paris between the Terror andl CounterTerror of the 1790S and the Resistance movement of the Second World War. Despite the intriguing localization of Republican prot(~st in the provinces, resistance to the coup d'etat has generally been neglected by historians. As if to confirm E. H. Carr's observation that history is "inevitably a success story," the triumphant rise of Louis 'Napoleon, not the violent collapse of his Republican opponents, has been the central theme of most narrative accounts of mid-nineteenth-century France. 1 This bias toward the coup d'etat rather than the insurrection 1 Edward Hallet Carr, What Is History? (New York, Vintage Books, 197), p. 167. Until recently, American and English historians have been especially inclined to focus their attention exclusively on Louis :Napoleon's rise to power. Examples include Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 2nd edl. (Chicago, 1974), pp. 138-43; William L. Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 1832-1852 (New York, 1969), pp. 45 0 - 65; l.P.T. Bury, France, 181 4- 194° (London, 1949), 82-86; and Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. II, 1799.-1871 (London, 191), pp. 146-57. By contrast, see the recent syntheses by Philippe Vigier,

xvii

INTRODUCTION

has been favored by the assumption that Paris was the revolutionary center of France during the Second Republic. William L. Langer's concept of "urban revolutions" in 1848 is an especially influential statement of the view that authoritarian governments were endangered only by popular uprisings in the cities. 2 By implication, once military control over Paris had been restored in the civil war of June 1848, the threat of revolution was over. From the countryside would come only soldiers and votes for the counterrevolution. Thus, the populations of small towns and villages voted overwhelmingly for Louis Napoleon in December 1848, and they voted for him again by the millions when he held a plebiscite three weeks after the coup d'etat. From the dual perspective of military control over Paris and electoral control over the provinces, the insurrection seems baffling and irrelevant. One noted historian, Alfred Cobban, has dismissed the entire crisis as mere stagecraft for the coup d'etat. Louis Napoleon "had to begin with repression, not so much because the feeble resistance in Paris and a few minor movements in the provinces needed repressing, as because unless there were some repression there would hardly have seemed any reason 'for a coup d'etat."3 This interpretation of the revolt as a kind of "nonevent," fabricated in large part by Bonapartist administrators, is consistent with the fact that most districts of the nation remained calm in 185 I. Furthermore, where provincial opposition to

the government did exist, it had been exposed to severe repression before the coup d'etat. According to Howard C. Payne, an authority on administrative repression from 1849 to 1852, "The backbone of organized opposition [to the government] was broken before December 185 I by the concerted efforts of the administration."4 Even Philippe Vigier, a leading French scholar of the Republican movement in the provinces, has characterized the revolts as "pseudoresistance" by "pseudoinsurgents."5 In the limelight of history stands the victorious Second Empire, casting a heavy shadow over the defeated Republican rebels of December 1851. La Seconde Republique (Paris, 1967), pp. 69-118; Maurice Agulhon, 1848 ou l'apprentissage de 1« Republique (Paris, 1973), pp. 88-197; and Roger Price, "Introduction," in Price, ed., Revolution and Reaction (London, 1975), pp. 1-72. 2 Langer, "The Pattern of Urban Revolution in 1848," in Evelyn M. Acomb and Marvin L. Brown, Jr., eds., French Society and Culture since the Old Regime (New York, 1966), pp. 89-118. 3 Cobban, History, II, 15 6. 4 Payne, "Preparation of a Coup d'Etat: Administrative Centralization and Police Powers in France, 1849-1851," in Frederich J. Cox, et aI., Studies in Modern European History in Honor of Franklin Charles Palm (New York, 1956), p. 186. 5 Vigier, La Seconde Republique, p. 117.

xviii

INTRODUCTION

This general consensus is diametrically opposed to the assertions of Bonapartist and Republican writers during the 1850S and I 860s, but their views have seemed tendentious or superficial to subs~~quent historians. Bonapartists defended the coup d'etat as a decisive blow against "professional revolutionaries, anarchists of every sort, socialists, and especially secret societies."6 At the same time, they claim(~d that the insurrection was nothing but a Jacquerie, a savage peasant revolt. For De Maupas, Paris prefect of police during the crisis, "Robbf~ry, pillage, assasination, rape, arson, nothing was wanting to this mournful exhibition of the programme of 1852."7 According to Quentin-Bauchart, conseiller d'etat in the new regime, the rebels were motivated by "detestable greed" and they used the weapons of "pillage, fire, and murder."8 M. de la Gueronniere, an Imperial senator in the 1860s, wrote excitedly in 1853: "Bands of murderers went through the countryside, marched on the towns, invaded private houses, pillaged, burned, killed, everywhere spreading horror of abominable crimes which take us back to the worst days of barbarism. It was no longer the fanaticism so unhappily present in party struggles. It was cannibalism such that even the boldest imaginations could scarcely suppose."9 Filled ,vith hatred of the rich, organized into terrifying secret societies, and bereft of political ideas, these new barbarians lashed out blindly against the social order. Had they been able to time their outburst for election day in May 1852, they might well have wrecked the nation. Through his coup d'etat Louis Napoleon saved France from an impending disaster. To this feigned hysteria of the Bonapartists, whose "]~ed Scare" helped mobilize public support for the Empire., Republicans countered with a sober narrative of rebel efforts to defend the Constitution. Their spokesman was Eugene Tenot, a Parisian journalist whose history of the insurrection, La province en decembre 1851, was first published in 1865.10 In order to rehabilitate the Republicans and to de.nigrate the Bonapartists, Tenot emphasized the political objectives and military operations of the rebels, and he showed that they rarely attacked civilian lives or property. His careful reconstruction of the military clashes in each department only seemed to demonstrate, however, that 6 Quentin-Bauchart, Etudes et souvenirs sur la Deuxieme Republique et Ie Second Empire (1848-187°), ed. by his son (Paris, 19(1), I, 440-41. 7 De Maupas, The Story of the Coup d'Etat, trans. Albert D. Vandam (New York, 1884), p. 408. 8 Quentin-Bauchart, Etudes, I, 441. 9 M. de la Gueronniere, Biographies politiques, Napoleon III (Pa.ris, 1853, pp. 176-77. 10 I have used the 9th edition, which contains valuable appendices (Paris, 1868), and the 13th edition (Paris, 1869).

XIX

INTRODUCTION

the entire movement had been doomed from the start. If the insurrection of 1851 had been prolonged and bloody, it might have attained the kind of historical significance reserved for such spectacular though futile civil wars as the Vendee. Instead, resistance nearly always ceased as soon as troops arrived, if not before. Insofar as the major criterion for interpreting resistance to the coup d'etat is its military efficacy, then the entire episode deserves little if any attention. Indeed, Tenor's book, which went through at least thirteen editions before the end of the Second Empire, was quietly forgotten during the Third Republic, and it still awaits its first reprinting in the twentieth century. In recent years three historiographical trends have encouraged a new appraisal of the insurrection: analytical studies of social protest movements in Western Europe from 1750 to 1850; comprehensive investigations of particular regions of France during the Second Republic; and cultural studies of peasant life styles and forms of protest in preindustrial France. To begin with, the pioneering research of Eric J. Hobsbawm, George Rude, Albert Soboul, E. P. Thompson, and Charles Tilly has shown that popular violence-"the crowd in history"-can be interpreted as a response to social change. 11 These scholars generally share the view that expanding markets in agriculture and manufacturing generated acute social tensions in the European countryside during the age of the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Specific forms of crowd protest-the food riot, the tax revolt, the destruction of machines, even the political uprising-reveal the determination of peasants, agricultural laborers, and rural artisans to defend their traditional way of life against the intrusion of capitalist exchange relationships, an urban social system, and a centralized state. From this perspective, protest movements have social significance regardless of whether they change the course of political history. By extension, insurgency in 1851 may have been a major event in French social history, despite its political failure. Soboul has made precisely this inference by linking the peasant rebels of December to an earlier wave of rural disorder in 1848; and Tilly has pursued this logic by relating the decline of rural industry in 11 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1959); Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing (New York, 1968); Rude, The Crowd in History, 173°-1848 (New York, 1964); Soboul, Paysans, sans-culottes et Jacobins (Paris, 1966); Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966); Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 50 (1971),76"136; Tilly, The Vendee (New York, 1967); Tilly, "The Changing Place of Collective Violence," in Melvin Richter, ed., Essays in Theory and History (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 139-64; and Tilly, "How Protest Modernized in France, 1845-1855," in W. Aydelotte, et aI., The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton, 197 2 ), pp. 192-255.

xx

INTRODUCTION

mid-nineteenth-century France to the heavy participation of rural artisans in resistance to the coup d'etat. 12 Meanwhile, detailed regional histories have brought into focus the socioeconomic, cultural, and political backgrounds of the insurrection. Thus, Philippe Vigier's doctoral dissertation on the "Alpine region" during the Second Republic interprets peasant radicalization as a consequence of agrarian depression and indebtedness. Vigier also presents evidence that Republican "secret societies" organized the insurrection in this region of southeastern France.13 In a multivolume social history of the Var from the Old Regime to 1851, Maurice Agulhon shows how the social structure and cultural traditions of that Proven~al department facilitated the diffusion of Republican ideals after the Revolution of 1848. He analyzes the insurrection as an interpla)T of traditional economic grievances and modernizing cultural influences within a political context of state repression and organized dissent. 14 Roger Price has synthesized the work of Vigier, Agulhon, and several other regional historians in his recently published The French Second Republic. 15 He identifies three factors that seem to have characterized the areas which resisted the coup d'etat: economic distress, urban communications with the countryside, and secret societies. Motivated by social grievances and led by urban conspirators, the rural insurgents of 185 I protested against the rich and the privileged. Theirs was essent1ially a social revolt. 16 The cultural dimension of peasant protest has received further attention recently from Alain Corbin, Eugen Weber, and '~{ves-Marie Berce. These historians agree that economic backwardness and cultural isolation characterized widespread areas of rural :France for m,uch of the nineteenth century. Poverty and illiteracy fostered primitiv(~ emotions 12 Soboul, Paysans, pp. 3°7-5°; Tilly, "The Changing Place of Collective Violence," pp. 160-62. 18 Vigier, La Seconde Republique dans la region alpine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1

EASTERN VAUCLUSE .........

\)CENTRAL

CENTRAL

,

~

300 KM

Mt

SOUTHERN BASSES ALPES

•

;;>

~ESTERN VAR~C~NTRAL VAR

HERAULT~

Map S. Unarmed Demonstrations, December I8S I

• ROUEN

• ELBEUF • CHARTRES

• BAR- SI AUBE .ftYJNTARGIS • ORLEANS .BLENEAU • ANGERS

.CHAlI LLON-S/SEI HE

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