Charles Tilly: The Contentious French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 13, 1987.
Traditional history is political history. Herodotus and Thucydides record popular customs, but they concentrate their attentions on the politikoi, the men of the polis—rulers or statesmen. But in the last two centuries, as democracy and its attendant egalitarianism have advanced in Western Europe and the Americas, historians have looked more carefully at ‘the commons.’ Jules Michelet, the great oratorical historian of the French Revolution, titled one of his books, simply, The People, and such later Frenchmen as Fernand Braudel and his followers have in many respects continued this populist emphasis.
Because the people do not rule directly in modern republics, and have not ruled at all in most previous regimes, democratic historians tend to shunt politics aside. Social and economic life concern them proportionately more. With Marx, some call politics superficial, ‘epiphenomenal,’ a thing determined by underlying socio-economic ‘forces.’
Charles Tilly refutes the Marxist or neo-Marxist view. His refutation is all the more convincing for its being inadvertent. Tilly gives every evidence of believing himself a neo-Marxist of some sort, but his scholarly diligence surpasses his apparent ideological assumptions, and corrects them.
He begins in the approved neo-Marxist style: “‘Sedition,’ ’emotion,’ ‘mutiny,’ ‘riot,’ and ‘disturbances’ are terms of disapproval, power-holders’ words.” He prefers “contention,” and indeed no sane person ever denied that the French are contentious. Tilly shows how the forms of popular contention in France changed with the economic concentration of power in capitalism and the political concentration of power in the modern state.
His “point of reference… differ[s] greatly from that of most political history.” He believes “that a new era has begun not when a new elite holds power or a new constitution appears, but when ordinary people begin contending for their interests in new ways.” Perhaps because it would be difficult to call attention to modern “statemaking,” as Tilly does, and then to relegate politics to the status of mere ‘superstructure,’ he avers that almost everything is political: “politics concerns power in all its guises.” (Thus do feminist neo-Marxists speak of ‘sexual politics’ and ‘the politics of the family,’ realms usually regarded as private.)
Tilly gives his study a useful specificity (Marxists say, ‘concreteness’) by attending to five diverse regions of France: Burgundy, Anjou, Paris and its suburbs, Languedoc, and Flanders. The largest portion of his book concerns the seventeenth century, but he carries his narrative into the 1980s.
Seventeenth-century France saw the consolidation of monarchic authority at the expense of what remained of the feudal aristocracy. Louis XIII and Louis XIV unified France by war: the combined pressures of foreign enemies, French military power, and domestic taxation, dissolved the independent authority of the aristocracy, fusing it to the central state. Before mid-century, peasant food riots (Tilly calls them “grain seizures”) often had the support of anti-royal aristocrats; after the Fronde, the aristocrats were co-opted and the peasants were on their own.
In this, Tilly shows, capitalism was royalism’s tool. To finance wars and to circumvent the aristocracy, the Crown deliberately promoted taxable commerce. French capitalism grew because the kings wanted it to. Truly, “waxing capitalism and growing state power walked hand in hand,” but more than that, politics led economics by the hand.
Rebellion did not disappear. It became “more plebeian.” “Class war was on the way.” In marking the transition from monarchy to the republic in the eighteenth century, Tilly slights Alexis de Tocqueville. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville likewise shows how absolute monarchy brought on republicanism, which then brought on Bonapartism, by centralizing political power and by replacing the rule of law and guidance by clergy with (not to put too fine a point on it) money. Tilly’s analysis suffers badly in contrast to Tocqueville’s, as the latter carefully measures political and intellectual currents along with social and economic ones. Tilly labors under the simplistic, Marxist dichotomy between material interests, which are “real,” and principles (“natural rights and reason”), which are said merely to “clothe” the “real” interests. Tocqueville commits no such crudities; as a real politician, he knew better.
Tilly observes that while monarchic state-building tended toward standardization in language, administration, laws, and forms of coercion, capitalism tended toward differentiation, with different geographic regions specializing in different products. This may partly explain why capitalism survived and indeed thrived after the 1789 revolution, while its progenitor, the Old Regime, died—this, despite the fact that capitalist management of food distribution caused at least as much resentment as royalist conscription and taxation.
Republicanism in one sense accelerated political centralization. “If there was any quintessentially revolutionary act in France as a whole, it was the seizure of power in municipalities by committees acting in the name of the nation,” committees linked to “a national network centered in Paris.” “No king ever built such a structure,” which included direction intrusion into local church prerogatives and strong, pervasive police powers. That it also included, after Bonaparte would again include, political representation of the people on all levels of government, is a fact our neo-Marxist historian prefers not to stress.
Popular contention changed with these political changes, but slowly, reactively. Not until 1848 did the old forms of contention—”grain seizures,” temporary occupation of privately-owned land, protests against tax collectors—finally give way entirely to rallies, strikes, and demonstrations. (That food riots declined because “capitalist agriculture” actually feeds more people than pre-capitalist agriculture does not find its way into Tilly’s account.) And while he rightly points to the decline in agricultural population, particularly in the twentieth century, Tilly neglects to say that this means his “ordinary people” are no longer ordinary, that commercial republicanism satisfies new types of “ordinary people,” that rallies, strikes, and demonstrations therefore rarely threaten the commercial republican regime itself, although they may help to topple a government. The heart of a neo-Marxist throbs softly to the beat of sentimental populism, to a half-imaginary past of agrarian virtue and hardy independence. Neo-Marxism amounts to the syncopation of revolutionary ardor with nostalgia.
Tilly’s egalitarianism animates his scholarship. This serves his readers well more often than not, as he uncovers and reports masses of illuminating information that might otherwise gather dust in regional archives. When that egalitarianism overwhelms his scholarship, he may unwittingly mislead those vulnerable to losing their way in data. Tilly denigrates the forms of ‘elite’ politics, and of political institutions generally, even as he uncovers the decisive effects of those forms. The French have been so contentious because they have contended over regimes, and such struggles are harder to settle by compromise than food shortages or even property rights. And in focusing so exclusively on popular contention, he obscures the success of commercial republicanism, the regime wherein “ordinary people” feel most at home, once they know its forms by experience.
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