‘Bandits’ vs. A Civil Militia: What Protestors and Counter-Protestors in Ottawa can learn from the ‘Great Fear’ of July 1789

Rural unrest in the last weeks of July 1789 in Revolutionary France was fueled by rumours surrounding the King and his court at Versailles.  After the fall off the Bastille – a hated prison and symbol of the Ancien Régime – Louis XVI withdrew troops surrounding Paris, thus bowing to the National Assembly (and popular resistance).  His acquiescence was considered a signal that emboldened the King’s subjects who thought they could act on their own against enemies so considered.  Hungry and suspicious peasants took to burning manor houses, destroying in their wake the feudal registers that recorded tithes and dues owed to local lords.  However, peasants came to believe that aristocrats were uniting forces to attack peasants: it was this ‘Great Fear’ that never actually happened.  It was all rumour, but the result was that even more peasants took up arms to fight those believed serving the aristocracy.  As the following letter reveals, civil militia were eventually organized to counter these marauders and peasant ‘bandits’.

Letter from the Commissioners of the Estates of Dauphine to the Committee of Twelve (July 31, 1789)

Our province has been most violently agitated for the last several days; bourgeois militia have been formed in all the cities, towns, and villages because the fear of bandits has spread everywhere; the watch is carried out with care and all suspicious-looking persons are stopped.

An alliance from the side of the cultivated lands has spread a general terror throughout the province.  On Monday the 2th, a bandit no one knew came to announce to Aoste that the village of Morestel was being attacked and burned; at the same time, other bandits announced to Morestel that the village of Aoste was being looted and burned.  The warning drew closer and closer, and the alarm was rung in all the villages; fear seized every heart and it was rumored that twenty thousand troops entered Dauphiné from the side of Bugey.

A letter written from Monferra to the lord of Voiron, giving him news of the arrival of these supposed twenty thousand men, was carried village to village and on to Grenoble, arriving there at eleven o’clock at night; it was supposed that it was only a couple of bandits chased from around Lyon by the city’s troops, so it was possible to dispel the fright caused by this letter.  But because the same warning had been given in every vicinity, even in St. Marcellin, all the people of the countryside quickly armed themselves with guns, pitchforks, and scythes, and ran to where it had been announced that the troops were to enter.  Several couriers followed one another through the night to bring the same news to Grenoble.

The commission convened very early in the morning; the municipality of Grenoble joined them along with several notables, citizens, to deliberate on the means of defense against this supposed invasion; it was decided that it was necessary to create a state of preparedness and to beg the commander to obtain rifles; Mr. Dufort sadly agreed to allow arms to be placed in the people’s hands; the conditions according to which they promised to return  six thousand guns which caused this abusive project to fail.

Tuesday was calm enough, thanks to the precautions of the village watch, which had sounded the alarm in the night, to announce that it was a false alert.

On Wednesday morning, the courier brought the most deplorable news that he had seen the château of Montferra, whose portal had already been destroyed; the people of the château handed over the wine cellar to the arsonists, who contented themselves with burning a businessman’s house.

A troop of these bandits went to the château of Césarges, which they also wanted to burn; they were stopped by the same means used at Montferra; but they urged suspicion of the villagers of the plain, who were supposed to come to loot the following day; the event itself proved the truth of this advice; Césarges has been looted and stripped with the help of carts; everything was taken, right down to the hinges of the doors; there was money there that did not escape the thieves’ foraging; the inhabitants of the neighboring village were themselves accomplices to the looting, mingling with the bandits; only some papers were saved.

The châteaux of Loras and Belaceuil were pillaged or burned as well; that of M. de Meyrieu was ruined; the furniture was broken or carried away but the fear of setting the village on fire saved the building from flames.

In light of this horrible disorder, the Parlement proposed to the Commission on the 29^th to join with it … and to include some deputies from the municipality, to confer together on means to reestablish the public peace.…

Courier followed upon courier throughout the day of Thursday the 30^th to bring news of châteaux that had been burned or ruined; the list is immense….

All good citizens hastened to volunteer to stop the disorder.  The committee requested M. de Durfort’s troops; consequently one hundred men of the Swiss regiment set out on the night of 30-31, as well as a similar number of bourgeois militia taken from the grenadiers and chasseurs.  These two companies were considerably augmented by young nobles and by the best bourgeois, who were put in step under the orders of M. de Frimont, who commands the attachment….

Meanwhile, couriers have been dispatched to Vienne, Lyon, and Valence to bring troops of the artillery and to surround the bandits.

The city of Lyon, having taken the same precautions of those of Grenoble, sent two hundred bourgeois militia with troops in pursuit of these incendiary thieves; M. Reynaud, Major of Sonnenberg, in the detachment from Lyon, has just told M. de Durfort that thirteen of these bandits were killed, nineteen taken prisons; they were taken to the prisons of Lyon; the provost conducting their trial there; they will be executed there or a reliable guard of troops will escort them.  A consul of the community and residents of the area have been found among the convicts.[1]

 

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[1] Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo, eds. and trs., The French Revolution: A Document Collection (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 67, 68. Translated by Laura Mason. 

Remember smallpox? Vaccine mandates have been around for a while ...

 

Protest in Ottawa: Occupying Time on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ – and Canada’s Conservatives

The time has come to say what needs to be said on the ‘freedom convoy’ as the now week-long protest of anti-vaxxers in Ottawa continues.  I say: Enough.  And I ask: Is the Conservative Party of Canada not giving legitimacy to this aberrant form of populism? By mingling in the crowds, among them Andrew Scheer, former leader, and Pierre Poilievre (leader-in-waiting, who once drove me to the streets to protest against his so-called “Fair Elections Act” of 2014), the Party feeds the fringe.  Note the rhetoric: since the protest gained steam, Conservatives – notably the just jettisoned leader Erin O’Toole – have declared that “Canada is deeply divided” (thus echoing voices in America) and that “we must listen to all sides” (presumably that means, for example, the 10 percent unvaccinated in my province, British Columbia, where the convoy started).[1]  Thanks to the truckers’ protests now at Parliament Hill, residents of downtown Ottawa have been hearing the cacophony of blaring air horns for days and sleepless nights.  Given these noise violations, is this really a “peaceful” demonstration? Whose rights are being infringed upon, really?

Everyone in this free country has a right to protest.  But when equipped with transport rigs spouting diesel fumes in the nation's capital? Is this not the last hurrah of the chuck wagon mentality one finds in American westerns?  Is it a circling of the wagons against the rhetoric of postcolonialism? The Conservative Party seems to think that if truckers drape themselves with the Canadian flag that they must be “patriots”.  Never mind the presence of Confederate flags or the swastika. Apparently, this is only the fringe of the fringe, for whom excuses can be made, even by Canada’s so-called ‘National Newspaper’, the Globe and Mail in an editorial.  Never mind, as well, that the 10 million dollar crowdfunding donations through GoFundMe are at least in part derived from outside of Canada, including the United States, UK, Australia and Poland.  Indeed, Ottawa police have already spoken of a “significant element from the U.S. that has been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating.” Are Americans wrapping themselves up in the Canadian flag to escape detection as agents provocateurs?

On the other hand, our very own Conservative Party seems to emulate things American.  One commentator on CBC Radio’s The Current evoked the memory of Edmund Burke (everybody’s favourite conservative, even though he was a Whig – who crossed the floor), repeating the trope of how the Irish thinker attacked the French Revolution, but supported, to some degree, aspects of the American one, yet not war. (He also recognized the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier to Empire).[2] Clearly, Canada’s Conservative ‘movement’, such as it is, has forgotten its Loyalist pioneers, those faithful the Crown, who moved north of the border in droves in the wake of 1776.  Instead, Canadian anti-vaxxers and fellow Conservatives are today fighting for the American Revolution all over again.  Gone are the ‘organic’ Tories, figures like Benjamin Disraeli (whose surname speaks volumes), England’s Prime Minister when Sir John A. Macdonald established Canadian Confederation. Replaced by a populist stream, Harper’s mean-spirited tendencies towards a Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ (with its implicit appeal to modernist ‘mass’ man) have met up with the likes of “buck-a-beer” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who, wisely - for once - called this protest an “occupation”.  But some of Canada’s parliamentarians – and those in the media - have failed to stem the effects of pandering to the (mostly white) truck drivers who do not constitute the public interest by blocking Ottawa streets, intimidating or harassing pedestrians (masked or otherwise), forcing the closure of stores and shopping precincts, or defecating in snowbanks. 

That the protestors are white, as I mentioned, does not in - and of - itself constitute racism or racist behaviour (if your conscience can ignore the aforementioned activity which clearly is), but some Conservatives, by giving voice to this group, by uniting their political forces behind toxic anti-vax theology, only further distance the party from any thoughts of “diversity”.  They are not in any way broadening their electoral base towards the many in the middle.  Rather, they are only looking further to the Right, perhaps in a bid to squeeze out Maxime Bernier, former Conservative Party leadership contender, now the main force behind the People’s Party of Canada.  Diversity is actually a Romantic notion, and one finds it in the epigraph to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), where Wilhelm von Humboldt is quoted at the beginning of this famous Essay.[3]  The genius of Romanticism is that it allows for both Liberal and Conservative thought: diversity can be liberal and conservative in imagination.  Picture in your mind a garden of many different flowers, and you have, at once, a variety of species blended into an organic setting.  Is not bio-diversity also considered a matter of self-preservation?  If progress exists, is it not vested in diverging from mono-mania? By rejecting these thoughts, and by courting an uprooted populist sameness, the Conservative Party of Canada commits itself to the sidelines of political opposition in Canada for the coming decade.

News flash: the protesters no longer have access to their GoFundMe monies, which must be returned or donated elsewhere to a charity.  The moral of my story: no protest is above the law, even if some of the mainstream media – and political class (with no class) – endorse it, or parts thereof.  Members of the Conservative Party gave this thing legs: time for it, too, to face consequences.

 

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[1] In the City of Vancouver, according to Mayor Kennedy Stewart, 95 percent of the population is vaccinated.

[2] David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap: 2014), p. 243.

[3] The epigraph reads (from Spheres and Duties of Government): “The grand, leading principle towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges to the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”  See also the Introduction to J.S. Mill, On Liberty and other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. vii-xxvi.