Popular Violence in the French Revolution: Revolt, Retribution and the Slide to State Terror

Abstract

There can be few historical subjects so mythologized as the violence of crowds in the French Revolution. As recently as 2005, leading historians Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt were content to state bluntly that ‘popular violence defined the French Revolution’, and went on to note that such violence ‘pushed the Revolution forward, but … also threatened to dissolve it altogether in an acid wash of blood, political vengeance and anarchic disorder’.1 While Censer and Hunt, like other surveys of the historiography, are able to show clearly that historians have embraced competing collective visions of this threatening (or in the case of George Rude, politically conscious) mass, they do not consider the overall validity of such characterizations.2 While it may be true that mass political involvement in revolutionary events most easily took the form of protesting crowds, and while such a crowd always admits of the potential of violence, there is a long way from these basic facts to the attribution of political change to ‘popular violence’. As this chapter will argue, it is the structures and limitations of ‘popular violence’ which are the most interesting features of that phenomenon, and which connect it far more intricately than is usually recognized to the other much-mythologized component of the French Revolution, the state-directed violence of the Terror.