The 1579-1580 episode in Romans is a nearly perfect example of class struggle. A few others, most of which are not so clear cut, are to be found among various urban uprisings that occurred in the Provencal or Franco-Provencal speaking areas, in Aquitaine and other provinces from, from 1579 to 1720. Through their confraternities, craftsmen initially( in the preceding decade) took the side of the elite merchants and traders, jurists and town-dwelling landowners (against the tax exempt nobility). In Romans and a few other cases like Arles and Aix, there was also some group participation on the part of town-dwelling peasants. And what about the marginal elements, drifters, beggars, or lumpenproletariat? In Romans they accounted for a small percentage of the population, but played no part in the popular movement – although that was not always true of such revolts. Also missing were the lower-class women, a group which played a large and active role in the starvation riots of the next few centuries. A substantial number of Romans’ patrician ladies did figure in the elitist Carnival, but only as sex objects, admitting, admired, and desired.
Rene Pillorget’s study of Provence has statistically demonstrated that clashes between the upper and lower sections of an urban community are one of the more frequent forms of collective action. By 1579 Romans shared this common feature. What is more, the grievances formulated in the town’s protests are standard. Like the Florence Ciompi of 1378, Romans craftsmen took a lively interest in taxes and indirect levies, especially the municipal ones, and corporate debts, all instrumental in their oppression. There were no demands for wage increases per se, however; Pillorget, Castan, and Berce have shown that this holds true for all of the French Midi from 1570 to 1789. The Lyon’s printers’ strike in the sixteenth century was an isolated example, typical of a new and dynamic profession; it was many years before it found any imitators. In addition, the specific or cultural gravity of the journeymen, the craftsman groups wage-earning workers, seems to have been slight in comparison to that of the self-employed master craftsmen, who were in fact small businessmen. In the context of the craftsmen as a group, a wage protest would have been devoid of meaning, although strikes against indirect taxes were liberally indulged in, especially by master craftsmen.
If we look at the protestors’ demand for local power, we find a few concrete results. The neighborhood captains were removed sand replaced in a manner more to the people’s liking. The drapers, the butcher the shoemaker and other leaders of the urban league (against noble tax exemptions) regularly took part in town council meetings, of both the restricted and general councils. They had been admitted as “extraordinary-supernumerary” members after the February-March 1579 incidents (the league’s suppression of the outlaw Laprade), and there they remained until Mardi Gras 1580, the day of their death, flight, or arrest. Even so, the majority of Romans’ council members were guardians of the ultimately triumphant ancient regime “system”( enjoying similar tax exemptions as nobility or the prospect for such). Nor did the craftsmen infiltrate that to quartet, the consuls, or unseat Guerin from his judgeship-for-life. The Fronde-related Ormee protest in Bourdeaux in 1649, also involving many craftsmen, was more successful, taking over every important municipal function.
Finally, Roman’s urban micro-revolution approaches the British historian E.P. Thompson’s analysis of the origin of popular movements. He discusses a plebeian group of self-employed craftsmen and shopkeepers in England up to and including the 18th century. Journeymen and wage-earning workers played only a minor role within this group. Naturally an industrial, manufacturing town like Romans had a more important craftsman/ plebeian group than did Arles, a farming center where the main participants in the revolt were day laborers, peasants, and brawling nobles. Roman’s plebeians demanded a revision of the municipal norms relative to taxes, debts, and the composition of the town council. They wanted a return to more equitable norms, and they wanted the traditional community values upheld; the elite, and especially the judge, had violated them. Yet the Romans’s common folk did not come close to proposing new, egalitarian values. These were already in an embryonic state of development, but the ideologue formulating them was Jean de Bourg, the leader of Vienne’s bourgeoisie, not a craftsman. In fact, no one before Jean-Jacques Rousseau clearly defined the ideas of individual liberty and popular sovereignty; the philosopher courageously defended the common people of Geneva against that town’s lesser council, typically coopted and oligarchic. By 1600, however, Dauphine had already made certain efforts in that direction.
As for sovereignty, Romans was far less bold than Auriol, a Provence market village where in 1599, well before Rousseau, the common people requested that their councils be elected by popular vote. His would have meant a return to a custom and a town democracy that may have existed in the Middle Ages. It would have meant abolishing the principle of cooptation [that is, ‘to elect into a body by the votes of the existing members’], an almost universal practice in southern France of the late 16th century. It would have meant an end to the growth of the local oligarchy, a consequence of Renaissance expansion and the increasing power of the crown bureaucracy.
But Auriol was only a large village, mainly rural, not a real town like Romans, where the principle of cooptation was barely challenged. The town’s elite had been schooled in French, even Latin, and securely lorded it over the common people, who spoke an Occitan patois, with often no French at all. Roman’s protestors only minimally and temporarily encroached upon the near-stranglehold that the elite had had on municipal power since 1542.
Yet the protestors represented a potential danger to this elite, which partially explains the violence of the final counteroffensive. It was feared that Paumier would bring his peasant allies into town to attack the rich. Guerin’s subsequent repressive measures allayed such fears. They had not been unfounded: during a heated urban revolt in Aix in 1630, peasants from the surrounding villages invaded the town, mercilessly pillaging the homes of a few detested members of the town oligarchy.
Another obsession fueling Guerin’s deadly revenge on the protestors: he accused them of wanting to divide up the rich man’s properties, then their women, considered younger and more attractive than the poor man’s wives. His sexual fantasy was perhaps based on fact – gang rape was common in Renaissance streets and town hall registers. [*] As for the protestors’ wanting to divide up property, it was probably a libelous representation of Paumier and Robert-Brunat’s real intentions. As protest leaders go, they were reasonable men. It is likely, however, that Guerin’s charge corresponded to some of the less cool-headed rebels’ vague yet plasusible motivations and objectives. We encounter a trend towards divisions of property in Provence around 1609, in Rouergue about 1627, possibly in Vivarais in 1679. Such protests proclaimed their desire ‘to put all the rich in caves . . .divide up their property . . .The time has come for the earthen pot to break the brazen pot . . .’ Articulating such fantasies, however, was a far cry from carrying them out, and at least under the ancient regime, it never came to that. In Romans, as elsewhere, it was still only a nebulous vision, shared by a very few. Only the revolt of Munzer’s apocalyptic religious fanatics in 1535 went so far as to act on such impulses.
Romans’ common people did not, then, justify their grievances with apocalyptic reasoning, nor Protestant, biblical, or millenarian reasoning, as did the 16th century Anabaptists in Germany, the disciples of Thomas Munzer in 1524, or the Englishman Winstanley in 1650. Admittedly, urban craftsmen in lower Daupine were avid supporters of the Huguenot Reformation during the 1550s and 1560s, but almost all of them broke away after 1570. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew upset them, especially in Romans, where Guerin had Huguenot leaders stifled or eliminated; the survivors preferred to head for Geneva. And then the high-handedness of the nobles or the power-hungry or both, like Lesdiguieres, who made Dauphine’s Protestant movement into their own private affair, distressed many ordinary people. The extraordinarily interesting thing about the uprising was not a Protestant ideology – this was nonexistent or inactive as far as Roans was concerned – but its rich use of symbolic and folk codes underlying and justifying the hostilities, on both sides…
All things duly considered, the Dauphine phenomena in 15790-1580 is a sort of open-air museum of every form of social organization: “abstract collectives,” leagues, ruling and cooperative groups, associations, corporate groups- discovered between 1880 and 1930 by German jurists and sociologists. Their research is infinitely more varied than our contemporaries believe; we too often reduce this great tradition of scholarship to Marx and Weber alone. We cannot see the forest for those two tall trees. . .
The Carnival in Romans made ready use of the reynages (festively constituted mock realms of affectively differentiated and adversary groups). It was rooted in the parish and confraternity-related culture of the time. The notables and other leaders, great or small, plebeian or rich, wanted to epater les bourgois (to unsettle people). They pursued certain finalities, in some cases conservative or radical ones; they attained their goal by donating a modest sum of money or quantity of wax and becoming king for a few days during Carnival, Easter, or summer festivities, Catholic culture under the ancien regime was an admirable blend of sacred and profane, religious and burlesque. In the reynage it a created a social tool, allowing the lower classes to express themselves, their mockery, and sometimes their grievances. Plebeian political tendencies that were repressed during the rest of the year came to light during the festivities. A dangerous group subconscious found temporary outward structuring in the solemn and formalized institutions of the reynage. Here, we might say, Durkheim and Freud join hands: the reynage was a synthesis of the primitive and the civilized feast.
[*] Guerin’s account of the fateful evening before
the day of Mardi Gras declared it was the sight of the patricians’ Carnival
Queen- attired like a life size relic, so
sumptuously dressed that she was all a glitter, at the end of their
procession that sparked the a
‘premature’ attack by Paumier’s group.- those men had suddenly realized the
possibilities offered by the situation to pillage and plunder upper-class
ladies. This frightened the women already
in the ballroom and spread panic. This, in turn, caused the patrician’s
defense, then punitive, retaliation. They decided to put a stop to things once
and for all.
Was the judge completely in error in alleging that feminine panic primed the fighting? On the contrary, there was probably some truth in what he wrote. The young men of the lower classes in southern French towns were no angels (‘young’ meaning anywhere from the ages of sixteen to thirty-six). In various articles, Jacques Rossiaud has described the bands of young males, journeymen and apprentices, that wandered the darkened streets of the small cities in the lower Rhone basin; they literally ‘chased skirts’ and practiced gang rape. There were a great many of these juvenile delinquents, representing a large share of their age groups. They fell heir to the tradition –however diluted- of the 14th century’s raging charivaris; whenever there was a wedding, young and violent practical jokers broke into the church, ‘smashed crucifixes, insulted the priest, beat the newlyweds,’ then looted the couple’s new home. Sometimes the dragged the young couple down to the river for a dunking or took them to the local brothel as a finale to their nuptial festivities. Such brutish behavior, tamed but not really eliminated with the passage of time, did not mean the lower classes were entirely unromantic. Nonetheless, their good conduct did not even approach the more polished, tender, and ritualized courtly behavior that flourished among the young patricians of both sexes –members of the (mock) abbey of Maugouvert, the bourgeois milieu of Romans, Lyons, and elsewhere.. These institutions buzzed with sweet nothings, and the woman, lady, damsel, or ‘novice’ in the ‘abbey’ was an object of adoration rather than humiliation.
Enlightened attitudes toward women came and went, but the lower classes maintained the medieval tradition of male chauvinism and brutality toward the second sex. There is some excuse for them; the urban world they lived ibn was an frustrating one. Many young women married men twice their age, and were off limits to younger men. One might raise the objection that the frustrated young men could always have satisfied their instincts, for lack of a better solution, in various houses of prostitution: public brothels officially established by the town, or privately owned baths that had “beds everywhere, bathing facilities nowhere to be seen,” where plump girls boldly frolicked; there were also ‘small private bordellos kept by madams, “ or finally, the girls who were in business for themselves. However, these were but poor remedies at best and were challenged by an as yet quiescent puritanism, for in the late 16th century the Reformation and Counterreformation threatened the very existence of prostitution. Brothels were often shut down; then young plebeians’ aggressive instincts shifted toward the rich man’s wives or daughters, particularly when Carnival permitted an outburst of sexual joy or madness, culminating in Mardi Gras.
This outburst is what the young ‘abbey’s’ tried as best they could to discipline, to channel into courtly behavior, the feminine reign of pseudo-kingdoms, and also into flirtation paving the way to marriage (the object of the Mardi Gras ball). Despite such control valves, lapses were always a possibility, especially during periods of popular revolt. If there was a panic among the patrician ladies at the Partridge ball and the damsels in the queen’s entourage in the street, it was not entirely feigned, nor was it unjustified; the Capon men probably planned to take a few liberties- fondling, pinching, and so forth – perhaps eve rape some women. The women’s panic was not, however, what produced the patrician’s conspiracy; Guerin had arranged that well in advance of lundi gras (knives, swords and pikes had been sharpen, blunderbusses primed). But it did hasten the execution of the plans, which had probably been set for later, say Mardi Gras at six in the morning, if we assume that Guerin’s report attributes the judge’s own intentions to his adversaries, the members of the Capon Kingdom.
Was the judge completely in error in alleging that feminine panic primed the fighting? On the contrary, there was probably some truth in what he wrote. The young men of the lower classes in southern French towns were no angels (‘young’ meaning anywhere from the ages of sixteen to thirty-six). In various articles, Jacques Rossiaud has described the bands of young males, journeymen and apprentices, that wandered the darkened streets of the small cities in the lower Rhone basin; they literally ‘chased skirts’ and practiced gang rape. There were a great many of these juvenile delinquents, representing a large share of their age groups. They fell heir to the tradition –however diluted- of the 14th century’s raging charivaris; whenever there was a wedding, young and violent practical jokers broke into the church, ‘smashed crucifixes, insulted the priest, beat the newlyweds,’ then looted the couple’s new home. Sometimes the dragged the young couple down to the river for a dunking or took them to the local brothel as a finale to their nuptial festivities. Such brutish behavior, tamed but not really eliminated with the passage of time, did not mean the lower classes were entirely unromantic. Nonetheless, their good conduct did not even approach the more polished, tender, and ritualized courtly behavior that flourished among the young patricians of both sexes –members of the (mock) abbey of Maugouvert, the bourgeois milieu of Romans, Lyons, and elsewhere.. These institutions buzzed with sweet nothings, and the woman, lady, damsel, or ‘novice’ in the ‘abbey’ was an object of adoration rather than humiliation.
Enlightened attitudes toward women came and went, but the lower classes maintained the medieval tradition of male chauvinism and brutality toward the second sex. There is some excuse for them; the urban world they lived ibn was an frustrating one. Many young women married men twice their age, and were off limits to younger men. One might raise the objection that the frustrated young men could always have satisfied their instincts, for lack of a better solution, in various houses of prostitution: public brothels officially established by the town, or privately owned baths that had “beds everywhere, bathing facilities nowhere to be seen,” where plump girls boldly frolicked; there were also ‘small private bordellos kept by madams, “ or finally, the girls who were in business for themselves. However, these were but poor remedies at best and were challenged by an as yet quiescent puritanism, for in the late 16th century the Reformation and Counterreformation threatened the very existence of prostitution. Brothels were often shut down; then young plebeians’ aggressive instincts shifted toward the rich man’s wives or daughters, particularly when Carnival permitted an outburst of sexual joy or madness, culminating in Mardi Gras.
This outburst is what the young ‘abbey’s’ tried as best they could to discipline, to channel into courtly behavior, the feminine reign of pseudo-kingdoms, and also into flirtation paving the way to marriage (the object of the Mardi Gras ball). Despite such control valves, lapses were always a possibility, especially during periods of popular revolt. If there was a panic among the patrician ladies at the Partridge ball and the damsels in the queen’s entourage in the street, it was not entirely feigned, nor was it unjustified; the Capon men probably planned to take a few liberties- fondling, pinching, and so forth – perhaps eve rape some women. The women’s panic was not, however, what produced the patrician’s conspiracy; Guerin had arranged that well in advance of lundi gras (knives, swords and pikes had been sharpen, blunderbusses primed). But it did hasten the execution of the plans, which had probably been set for later, say Mardi Gras at six in the morning, if we assume that Guerin’s report attributes the judge’s own intentions to his adversaries, the members of the Capon Kingdom.
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