Preface

Summary

For me, the ideas in this book began to crystallize three decades ago. Looking at the history of popular contention in France from the 17th to the 20th centuries, I couldn't help noticing two related anomalies. First, although ordinary people found vigorously vital ways of making their voices heard in the midst of repressive regimes, they clung to the same few forms of collective expression and modified those forms only slowly. Seizure of high-priced food, assaults on tax collectors, and resistance to unjustified rent increases followed the same routines year after year during the 17th century, just as street demonstrations and mass meetings repeated themselves almost stereotypically during the 20th century. Given the richness and particularism of French popular culture, one might have expected an almost infinite variety of contentious performances.

Second, ordinary people never engaged in a wide variety of technically feasible ways of making collective claims that ordinary people elsewhere and in other times had readily employed. Those 17th-century French villagers did not strike, picket, or strip themselves naked in public protest. Nor did their 20th-century successors engage in suicide bombing, coups d'état, or ecstatic religious rituals. It occurred to me that in general participants in uprisings and local struggles followed available scripts, adapted those scripts, but only changed them bit by bit. A metaphor came readily to mind: like troupes of street musicians, those French people drew their claim-making performances from standardized, limited repertoires. I first published the idea in 1977.