Welsh Journals

THE POLICE, THE REPRESSIVE AUTHORITIES AND THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS IN PARIS 'NO', says Professor Godechot,1 in the first word of the first sentence of the book, 'the Fall of the Bastille was not a flash of lightning in a clear sky.' The author returns lovingly to his 'cyclical' 'Atlantic' thesis, previously developed in his text-book, Les Revolutions, and even enlarges upon it, by introducing two 'cycles of violence' common to the whole of Europe: 1515 to 1660, and 1770 to 1800. In his anxiety to fit the Fall of the Bastille into his 'Eur-American' frame, he is driven to inflate the most ordinary grain riot into a sedition and to blow up some traditionalist window-breaking and clubbing into a mounting revolutionary ferment, embracing most of Western Europe and extending from the mid-seventies to the outbreak of the French Revolution, and, of course, beyond. It is not an entirely convincing thesis: nor need it detain us long. For one thing, for any given two decades of the eighteenth century, it would be possible, in France at least, to tot up quite an impressive score, by counting up examples of popular violence. At almost any time, contemporaries will tend to think of the period in which they are living as a particularly violent one. Equally, in his anxiety to produce an impressive balance-sheet of riot and disorder, with the figures rising sharply in the appropriate decades, the author fails to distinguish between traditionalist, predictable, semi-permissible, and generally harmless forms of disorder, and the much rarer 'sedition'. There was nothing revolutionary, nor even potentially dangerous, about the recurrent French market riot or rural arret of grain convoys-there was often a degree of tacit complicity between the rioters and the local magistrates; and such ancient forms of disorder were confined within the bounds of unwritten rules that both sides observed. Nor can the Gordon Riots be described as revolutionary, and they were certainly not directed towards une plus grande justice sociale. Even the 'flour war' of May 1775 followed a predictable pattern, fanning out of the traditional centres of riot-grain ports, locks, river valleys. The only novel thing about it was its extent: it spread to three provinces. 1 Jacques Godechot. La Prise de la Bastille: Trente Journies qui ont fait la France (Gallimard. Paris, 1965). pp. 435. 26f.