Collective Violence, Contentious Politics, and Social Change

A Charles Tilly Reader

Ernesto Castañeda, Cathy Schneider, Ernesto Castañeda, Cathy Lisa Schneider, Cathy Schneider, Ernesto Castañeda, Cathy Lisa Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781612056708
• eBook ISBN: 9781351792776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Charles Tilly is among the most influential American sociologists of the last century. For the first time, his pathbreaking work on a wide array of topics is available in one comprehensive reader. This manageable and readable volume brings together many highlights of Tilly's large and important oeuvre, covering his contribution to the following areas: revolutions and social change; war, state making, and organized crime; democratization; durable inequality; political violence; migration, race, and ethnicity; narratives and explanations.

The book connects Tilly's work on large-scale social processes such as nation-building and war to his work on micro processes such as racial and gender discrimination. It includes selections from some of Tilly's earliest, influential, and out of print writings, including The Vendée; Coercion, Capital and European States; the classic "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime;" and his more recent and lesser-known work, including that on durable inequality, democracy, poverty, economic development, and migration. Together, the collection reveals Tilly's complex, compelling, and distinctive vision and helps place the contentious politics approach Tilly pioneered with Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam into broader context. The editors abridge key texts and, in their introductory essay, situate them within Tilly's larger opus and contemporary intellectual debates. The chapters serve as guideposts for those who wish to study his work in greater depth or use his methodology to examine the pressing issues of our time. Read together, they provide a road map of Tilly's work and his contribution to the fields of sociology, political science, history, and international studies. This book belongs in the classroom and in the library of social scientists, political analysts, cultural critics, and activists.

I Revolutions and Social Change

1 The Vendée

Charles Tilly

Preface to the Second Printing

In preparing the book which was to refute my earlier theses, I turned away from the common notion of a general and irreversible evolution from “backward” to “progressive” politics toward a more careful consideration of the political consequences of urbanization. Urbanization seemed relevant because cities clearly played different roles and had gone through different recent histories in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary sections of western France, and because so many of the collective conflicts in the region during the early Revolution pitted groups based in the country against groups based in the city.

Textile production plummeted in 1789 and 1790. Riots over supplies and prices constantly gnawed at local officials in the region, frequently toppled them, and probably drove them toward more stringent controls over both supplies and prices. Popular participation by riot had a political force of its own. Furthermore, the industrial artisans of town and country alike were acutely vulnerable to both unemployment and food shortages, and regularly struck out against suspected hoarders and profiteers. In fact, a great many incidents of the so-called Peasant Revolt of 1789 in the West turn out, on close inspection, to involve nuclei of rural or semiurban workers rather than peasants.

In addition to helping account for one of the critical events of the Revolution, I hoped to contribute to the sociologist’s understanding of large-scale changes in societies. There seemed to be two openings for such a contribution. The first was to show the advantages of first-hand work with historical materials in the verification or refinement of ideas sociologists have been applying to contemporary evidence or second-hand historical accounts. The second was to examine the relations between the way cities grew and the nature of other changes in the organization of communities in the case of western France, with the hope that some of the connections which showed up there might apply more generally. This meant addressing two audiences at once: people concerned with the French Revolution but unmoved by sociological problems, people concerned with contemporary social change but unmoved by eighteenth-century France.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1793 a great uprising in the West of France threatened the very life of the Revolution. Country people in adjacent sections of Poitou, Anjou, and Brittany seized staves, scythes, pitchforks, and muskets, then joined to attack the forces of the Republic. They remained masters of their territory for more than six months, and a threat to the authority of successive political regimes in the West for more than six years. We call the uprising of 1793 and its aftermath the War of the Vendée, the Vendée counterrevolution, or more simply, the Vendée.

The memory of the Vendée has never stopped inspiring histories in great volume and variety. In the minds of its many devotees it looms as large as the Civil War does in the United States. No doubt there is room in their enthusiasm, as well as in the technical literature of the Revolution as a whole, for new and more accurate general accounts of the Vendée. But this book says very little about what happened once the counterrevolution began. Instead, it fixes on the nature of eighteenth-century society in the West and on local developments between the coming of the Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of the counterrevolution in 1793.

I have reversed the usual recipe, one part background to ten parts military history, out of a triple interest: in the effects of modernization on rural areas, in the sources of resistance to the Revolution, and in the origins of the Vendée. These interests have much more to do with each other than is apparent at first glance. They keep overlapping, intertwining, melting into each other; when we come to that trenchant question, “Why the Vendée, and not somewhere else?” we shall find that they are indistinguishable. Because these concerns have brought the book into being, most of its pages deal with events and social arrangements before the great rebellion. Even here, however, it may be useful to begin with a review of the events that made Vendée memorable.

The Counterrevolution in Capsule

The counterrevolution known as the Vendée began in mid-March, 1793, breaking out almost simultaneously in several parts of the area between Nantes, La Rochelle, Poitiers, and Angers. Although observers were astonished at the rapidity, force, and apparent spontaneity of the uprising, it was the climax of four years of growing tension. As elsewhere, in the West the convocation of the Estates General, proclaimed late in 1788, caused great commotion. The establishment of Provincial Assemblies in 1787 had already helped form the nuclei of revolutionary parties; the local and regional meetings of 1789 crystallized the “bourgeois” and “noble” factions. Although the people of some of the West—especially the cities—received the Revolution quite eagerly, resistance to political change soon developed in the rural areas south of the Loire. The sale of church property caught the enthusiasm of only a few, and the Revolutionary reorganization of the church aroused widespread opposition. The parish clergy were soon uniformly opposed to the Revolution, and the great majority of their parishioners stood with them.

In 1791 and 1792, numerous local incidents—meetings, processions, even armed attacks—showed the growing restiveness of local feeling. Most of these fracases involved the priests named to replace those who had not accepted the church reforms, and almost all of them showed that the officials charged with local administration lacked the confidence and support of the rural population.

For many of their troubles, the administrators blamed the rebellious clergy. As a result, law was piled upon law to control the clergy, until the climax of August, 1792: the decree of immediate deportation of all priests who had refused the oath of submission. But with the deportation of a large portion of the nonconformist clergy and the disappearance of the rest into hiding, agitation only grew. The Revolutionary chiefs in the Vendée were talking fearfully of counterrevolution long before March, 1793. In fact, six months before then their fears were justified by a full-scale attack on Bressuire and Chitillon (in the department of Deux-Sevres), an attack foreshadowing the counterrevolution in both motives and personnel.

The great rebellion came in short order. The government’s call for 300,000 men to meet the menace on France’s frontiers caused bitter agitation in the Vendée. The publication of the call to arms in the first days of March, 1793, was the signal for armed demonstrations, rioting, disarmament of patriots, and the flight into the country of the young men eligible for service.

For the first few days of March, everything rumbled, but nothing exploded. Riots at Cholet on the 4th cost a few lives, without becoming open warfare. On the 11th, 12th, and 13th everything seemed to blow up at once. At St. Florent, Chanzeaux, Machecoul, and Challans, armed troops appeared to the ringing of the tocsin, shouting of war and vengeance. The rebellion soon found leaders, and rapidly swept the region.

It would be an exaggeration to say the rebels stormed and took towns in the first days of the rebellion: they swarmed over them unresisted. … By that time the rebel mass had not only a name (the Catholic, or Catholic and Royal, Army) but also a body of recognized leaders (Bonchamp, d’Elbée, Stofflet, many others).

There were three stages in the great war of 1793: 1) rebel expansion (until the end of June), 2) check and attrition (until mid-October), 3) flight (until year’s end). The dividing points are the defeats of the Vendeans at Nantes (29 June) and at Cholet (17 October).

Rebel expansion was in fact fairly well contained after the first few weeks of the revolt. After that, it was basically a tale of capture, relinquishment, and recapture of cities along the borders of the Vendée, culminating in the taking of Saumur (9 June) and of Angers (12 June). The Vendeans did not occupy these cities; they took them, sacked them, organized shadowy provisional governments, then decamped. During all this period the Republican government was changing plans, placing and replacing generals, shouting treason, sending investigatory missions, generally failing to meet the rebellion firmly and directly.

The high command of the Catholic and Royal Army increased in organization and decreased in daring. The gradual encirclement and exhaustion of the Vendeans ended in their defeat at Cholet, which drove the despairing rebels into exile north of the Loire.

Then came flight: the hopes of the counterrevolution were broken, the armies shattered. In a blind drive up to Granville, “to meet the English,” the rebels—now an inchoate mass of men, women, children, carts, animals, household goods—entered and then left Laval, Mayenne, and Avranches. Turned away at Granville, the remaining fragments moved back toward the Loire. They were repulsed at Angers, but still were able to take La Flèche and then Le Mans. After trying to recross the Loire into their homeland, the remaining Vendeans were smashed at Savenay just before Christmas. That was the end of the great war.

It was not, however, the end of the Vendée. The remaining leaders patched together an army that troubled the Republicans for another year. This “second war” ended with an amnesty and the treaty of La Jaunais (February, 1795), but soon after, the leaders—spurred by promises of aid from émigrés and English—began again. Moving only from disaster to disaster, they were quieted definitively by March, 1796. Neither of these insurrections, nor any of those to follow, approached the first war in magnitude.

North of the Loire, the Vendée left more than a memory. About the time the rebel remnants were wandering in that neighborhood, late in 1793, Chouannerie began. The Chouans were guerrilla bands, aiming to harass the Republicans whenever and however possible. In its mood and its personnel, Chouannerie had a great deal in common with the more general warfare south of the Loire. But it was more varied in form, on a smaller scale; it flourished (unlike the great counterrevolution) in Brittany, Maine, Normandy, and northern Anjou.

The Traditional History of the Vendée

With such a splendid series of adventures, it is not surprising that there is a rich folklore and an abundant literature concerning the Vendée; Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Scott, Trollope, Michelet, Carlyle, and Taine all devoted melodramatic pages to its pageantry. It is not even surprising that scholars and laymen alike continue to argue their favorite heroes, battles, and causes. Yet the importance of the counterrevolution is not simply that it was colorful. It is an essential part of the history of the Revolution itself. In 1793, Bertrand Barère called it “the political fire consuming the heart of the nation” (Walter 1953:225).

Peasants opposed the Revolution. Why? The easiest answer is to stuff a standard mentality and a standard set of motives into the skulls of all the peasants of the region, preparing the mentality and motives mainly from general ideas of peasant character and the motives that could have opposed people to the Revolution (see Tilly 1963). The analyst’s attitude toward the Revolution as a whole is likely to govern his choice of appropriate motives.

The assumption of this procedure is that the counterrevolution was the result of the mental state of the peasantry at the point of rebellion, and that the causes one must look for are those influences or events which brought about that mental state. As evidence of the mental state, the historian may take the observations of witnesses and the statements of the rebels themselves. Tradition has called for the recognition of only a few possible “motives” for the counterrevolution: 1) royalism, 2) resistance to conscription, 3) support of religion (variously called “fidelity,” “fanaticism,” and “subservience”), 4) self-interest among the leaders, plus uncritical loyalty among the bulk of the rebels (see Bois 1960: 579–594). Each writer has made his choice among these “motives” or offered some combination of them.

There was no great delay in assigning causes to the counterrevolution. By the year III, Lequinio, a member of the Convention, was declaring:

The first causes of that disastrous war are known; 1. the ignorance, fanaticism and subservience of the country people; 2. the pride, wealth and perfidy of the former nobles; 3. the criminality and hypocrisy of the priests; 4. the weakness of the government administration, the special interests of the administrators and their illegal favors to their relatives, farmers and friends (Year III: 10–11).

The assertion that the causes of the counterrevolution are well known is among the most common introductions to its histories. Nevertheless, it is precisely on this question of motivation that the great debates on the Vendée have arisen.

The thesis of royalism has taken this form: the peasants were oppressed by the new regime and shocked by the abolition of the monarchy and the death of the king, so they revolted. As can well be imagined, only writers strongly identified with both the nobility and the counterrevolution have presented this theory in pure form.

What unites these various explanations of the Vendée is that they all claim to identify the motives, by and large, the conscious motives at that, of the participants in the rebellion of March, 1793. No doubt every reconstruction of historical events implies some propositions about human motives; no doubt part of the historian’s burden is to describe the motives of participants in crucial actions of the past. Yet it is possible to shift the emphasis. One may begin with questions about the organization and composition of the groups that supported the Revolution and the counterrevolution, about the relations among the principal segments of the population before and during the Revolution, about the connection between the rapid, drastic changes of Revolution and counterrevolution and the more general, more gradual social changes going on in eighteenth-century France. These questions occur naturally to a sociologist faced with an ebullient social movement. These questions have guided my inquiry into the origins of the Vendée.

A Sociological View

A concern with social organization calls for a comparative approach. We need a systematic comparison of the counterrevolutionary West with those sections of France that supported the Revolution. Such a comparison ought to include at least three elements: 1) most generally, the ways in which those major social changes which prepared France for revolution had affected the Vendée and the revolutionary segments of the country; 2) the major divisions of the population and the relations among them; 3) the organization, composition, and relations of the parts of the population that supported the Revolution, and those that resisted it. There is one more essential part of the analysis of the Vendée which does not require so direct a comparison: 4) the relationship between events before 1793 and the counterrevolutionary outbreak itself. These are the four problems one ought to solve in dealing with the Vendée.

This way of posing the problem of revolution and counterrevolution has a special virtue. It makes it easier to see the relevance for the Vendée of a great deal of sociological thinking on the nature of rural society and of social change.

Two lines of thinking about modern society form the frame of this analysis of the Vendée. The first concerns the set of broad social changes which has commonly accompanied the growth in size and influence of cities—the process of urbanization. The second deals with the organization of rural communities.

The growth of the size, number, and influence of cities is only one cluster in a set of changes that have occurred together in the growth of modern societies. I shall call the whole set of the changes “urbanization,” but not out of any conviction that the growth of cities causes all the rest.

A general view of urbanization serves very well in the analysis of the relationship between general features of the social organization of western France and the nature of its response to the Revolution. But it leaves out the means by which general social changes touch the individual. It is convenient to deal with this part of the analysis through a conception of community organization. The immense majority of the citizens of the West lived in rural, predominantly peasant, communities. I shall stress the divisions and relationships within the rural community, and the ways they varied from one type of community to another, from region to region, in western France.

This is precisely the point at which the two lines of analysis come together. Urbanization implies changes in community organization. The changes that will command our attention are ones that follow from the increased involvement of the members of rural communities in sets of activities, norms, and social relationships that reach beyond the limits of their own localities. For example, production for a national market, participation in politics, and exposure to mass communication seem to have crudely regular effects on the organization of rural communities.

One further question to which this path leads us is the nature of the changes in western France during the Revolution itself. Some of the most important changes—the centralization of governmental power, the increase in importance of the bourgeoisie, the redistribution of property, and so on—were in many respects accelerated continuations of the general process of urbanization. But they we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Credits
• Introduction
• PART I Revolutions and Social Change
• PART II State Making
• PART III Democracy
• PART IV Durable Inequality
• PART V Political Violence
• PART VI Migration, Race, and Ethnicity
• PART VII Narratives and Explanations
• Index