Abstract
France is an ideal place to study protest because there was so much of it. In the seventeenth century, during the period of so-called royal absolutism, there were no threats to constituted authority as serious as the English uprising of 1381, the 1525 German Peasants’ War or the outbreak of revolution in 1789. No coalitions of elite and popular forces ever successfully overthrew the government as they did in the English Revolution or the Dutch Revolt. Nevertheless, France’s numerous protests, riots, rebellions and everyday instances of resistance, provide a virtual laboratory to study the range of possibilities for political violence in a premodern European society.1
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Notes
A different version of this essay appears in William Beik, A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 237–54.
Major studies are Yves-Marie Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France, trans. Amanda Whitmore (Ithaca, 1990),
which is an abridged translation of Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des Croquants: Étude des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Paris, 1974);
René Pillorget, Les mouvements insurrectionnels de Provence entre 1596 et 1715 (Paris, 1975);
Jean Nicolas, La Rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661–1789 (Paris, 2002);
Charles Tilly, The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle (Cambridge, MA, 1986);
William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997).
These incidents are described in Archives départementales de l’Aude BB5, 16 September 1648; Pillorget, Insurrections, pp. 156, 243–45; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966), I: p. 504; Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, p. 319;
Yves-Marie Bercé, Fête et révolte (Paris, 1975), p. 60; Tilly Contentious French, p. 88.
Boris Porchnev, Les Soulèvements populaires en France de 1622 à 1648 (Paris, 1975);
Roland Mousnier, ‘Recherches sur les soulèvements populaires en France avant la Fronde’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 5 (1958), pp. 81–113.
Jean Lemoine, La Révolte dite du Papier Timbré ou des Bonnets Rouges en Bretagne en 1675 (Paris, 1898), pp. 194–200.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979).
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© 2015 William Beik
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Beik, W. (2015). Protest and Rebellion in Seventeenth-Century France. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_4
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