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Everyday Resistance: French Activism
in the 21st Century 1st ed. 2020 Edition

Bruno Frère
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Everyday Resistance
French Activism
in the 21st Century
Edited by
Bruno Frère
Marc Jacquemain
Everyday Resistance
Bruno Frère • Marc Jacquemain
Editors
Everyday Resistance
French Activism in the 21st Century
Editors
Bruno Frère Marc Jacquemain
FNRS, Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Liège University of Liège
Liège, Belgium Liège, Belgium
Based on a translation from the French language edition:

Résister au quotidien ? by Bruno Frère and Marc Jacquemain
Copyright © PRESSES DE LA FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES
POLITIQUES 2013
All Rights Reserved.
Translation by Josh Booth.
ISBN 978-3-030-18986-0 ISBN 978-3-030-18987-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Contents
1 Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? 1

Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère
2 Undocumented Families and Political Communities:

Parents Fighting Deportations 21
Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye
3 From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case-

Study of Gay Movements in Switzerland, Spain
and Belgium 45
Marta Roca i Escoda
4 Fighting for Poor People’s Rights in the French Welfare

State 75
Frédéric Viguier
5 The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic

Movements 97
Éric Dacheux
6 The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space

for Reconfiguring Struggles?117
Gaël Depoorter
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming

and Related Organisations145
Fabrice Ripoll
8 Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil

Disobedience Movement175
Manuel Cervera-Marzal and Bruno Frère
9 A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment

of Notre Dame Des Landes205
Sylvaine Bulle
10 “Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations

of the Solidarity Economy’s Libertarian Socialist
Grammar229
Bruno Frère
11 Is the “New Activism” Really New?263

Lilian Mathieu
12 Conclusion281
Bruno Frère and Marc Jacquemain
Index299
Notes on Contributors
Sylvaine Bulle is Professor of Sociology at the National School of Paris

Val de Seine. She is a member of Cresppa-LabTop (Centre de Recherche
de sociologie politique de Paris, Laboratoire Théorie du Politique), part
of the University of Paris 8 and Paris 10.
Manuel Cervera-Marzal has a PhD in political science. He is currently a
postdoctoral researcher at Aix-Marseille Université (DICE, UMR 7318,
LabexMed) and at the FNRS (University of Liège).
Éric Dacheux is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences
at Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) (Clermont Fd) where he founded
the research group “Communication and Solidarity” (EA 4647). He is
a member of the management committee of RIUESS (Interuniversity
Network of Social and Solidarity Economy Researchers) and supervises
doctoral theses on communication problems encountered by ESS actors.
Damien de Blic is Associate Professor in Political Science at University of
Paris 8 (Saint-Denis) and is affiliated to the Center for Sociological and
Political Research in Paris (CRESPPA-LabTop).
Gaël Depoorter has a PhD in sociology, and is a researcher at CURAPP-
ESS (UMR 7319) at Picardie Jules-Verne University (Amiens, France).
He is associated with GERiiCO at the University of Lille (France) where
he teaches in the Department of Information and Communication.
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Bruno Frère is FNRS senior research associate and Professor at the

University of Liège, Belgium, and at Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne, France.
He is the author or editor of, among other works, Epistémologie de la
Sociologie (with Marc Jacquemain, 2008), Le Nouvel Esprit Solidaire
(2009), Résister au Quotidien (with Marc Jacquemain, 2013), Le Tournant
de la Théorie Critique (2015) and Repenser l’émancipation (to be pub-
lished in 2020, with Jean-Louis Laville).
Marc Jacquemain is Professor of Sociology at the University of Liège,
Belgium. He is the author of La raison névrotique (2002) and Le sens du
juste (2005). He is co-editor of, among others, Epistémologie de la sociolo-
gie (with Bruno Frère, 2008), Résister au Quotidien (with Bruno Frère,
2013) and Engagements actuels, actualité des engagements (with Pascal
Delwit, 2010).
Claudette Lafaye is Associate Professor in Sociology at University of
Paris 8 (Saint-Denis), and is affiliated to the Laboratoire Architecture Ville
Urbanisme Environnement (LAVUE).
Lilian Mathieu is a sociologist. He is senior researcher in the CNRS
(National Center for Scientific Research) and a member of the Centre
Max Weber in the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon, France.
Fabrice Ripoll received his PhD in social geography from the University
of Caen (France) in 2005. He is Maître de conférences (associate profes-
sor) of social geography at the Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne University
(France) and at the Lab’URBA. He just obtained accreditation to super-
vise (doctoral) research (HDR).
Marta Roca i Escoda is a sociologist, and lecturer at the Institute for
Gender Studies of the University of Lausanne. After graduating in sociol-
ogy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, she wrote her PhD dis-
sertation in sociology at the University of Geneva, entitled “Mise en jeu et
mise en cause du droit dans le processus de reconnaissance des couples
homosexuels”. She is also an associate researcher at the Research Group
on Public Action (Free University of Brussels).
Frédéric Viguier is a sociologist and clinical associate professor at
the Institute of French Studies, New York University. His research inter-
ests focus on inequalities in France and the Francophone world, how they
are perceived and represented, and how they are addressed by social poli-
cies and policies of educational democratization.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Let a Thousand

Flowers Bloom?
Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère
The societies of Western Europe—“Old Europe”, as George W. Bush’s

Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, called it—have lived for three full
decades through what one might call a “crisis of social conflict”. That
doesn’t necessarily mean that the level of conflict has become lower—even
if the hypothesis seems true for a fraction of this period—but rather that
the conflict has become less structured and so less easy to grasp. In a
recent work on new critical thought, sociologist Razmig Keucheyan
(2014: 4) summarises the situation in a formula we can easily agree with:
“Today’s world resembles the one in which classical Marxism emerged. In
other respects, it is significantly different—above all, no doubt, in the
absence of a clearly identified ‘subject of emancipation’”.
In both its Marxist and social-democratic tendencies, the historic
workers’ movement drew on a considerable symbolic resource: a teleology
in which the proletariat, a special actor, had a “natural” calling to the
M. Jacquemain
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
e-mail: Marc.Jacquemain@ulg.ac.be
B. Frère (*)
FNRS, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
e-mail: bfrere@ulg.ac.be
© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. Frère, M. Jacquemain (eds.), Everyday Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_1
2 M. JACQUEMAIN AND B. FRÈRE
universal. Its emancipation was supposed to emancipate the whole of

humanity, and the question of what form the resultant classless society
would take could be left to future generations. To be sure, this teleology
posed significant problems. What should be done, for example, about the
desire for national emancipation, about the rejection of colonialism and
sexism? But it nonetheless provided a compass, a “red thread” which
allowed all forms of resistance to be linked at least on the level of the
imagined. This vision of the world has now lost its relevance because capi-
talism’s “displacements” have “defeated” the historic actor with universal
calling by denying it a clearly identifiable adversary (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2005 [1999]), leaving only a landscape strewn with injustices
that are deeply felt but difficult to identify and to denounce, and still
more difficult to link together. Institutions evade responsibility for and
refuse to describe the multiple injustices whose victims are the weak
(Boltanski 2011 [2009]). The weak then experience an “indignation”
without a target; they might even feel culpable if they accept that their lot
is inscribed in the nature of things, or in the world itself, to use Luc
Boltanski’s terminology again (2011 [2009]). Responsible for their own
fortune, they only get what they deserve.
But the injustices persist. Even when they become difficult to theorise,
even if reality tends to conceal itself, all the indicators point towards their
having worsened over the last three decades. During that time, the atten-
tion of political scientists and sociologists has been drawn increasingly to
situated and often monothematic practical demonstrations of resistance to
injustice. These forms of resistance were not all born yesterday, as Lilian
Mathieu and Bruno Frère observe in their chapters. Some of them have
even been around for several decades. But they all benefit from increased
visibility now that the “tide” of totalising and politicised social critique,
that of the historic workers’ movement, has been partially taken out of
circulation.
The social-scientific literature of the last 15 years has often described
these practical forms of resistance in terms of a transformation of engage-
ment (Ion et al. 2005; Jacquemain and Delwit 2010; Vassallo 2010; Tilly
and Wood 2013). The “total activism” that developed within the tradi-
tional workers’ movement was said to have been replaced by a “distanced”
engagement: activists now fought for a specific cause and for a given time;
they refused to “sacrifice themselves” for the cause; selfish and altruistic
motivations coexisted. This last point is, without doubt, one of the most
controversial: in the classical conception of commitment as defended, for
1 INTRODUCTION: LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM? 3
example, by Hirschman (1982), invoking personal, selfish, reasons for

commitment destroyed the value of even public engagement.1
But we cannot even be sure that these characteristics of contemporary
modes of activism are new (Kriesi 1995) or not (Pichardo 1997)—an old
question that is still actively debated (Peterson et al. 2015). There is no
doubt that, as Snow and Soule remind us, there are differences between,
for example, the cultural struggles of LGBTQ+ and ecological
movements—which want to secure procedural rights and protect life-
styles—and the “older movements” (trade unions, etc.)—which are ori-
ented towards labour and correcting distributional inequities (2010: 236).
This seems to be particularly true in the case of France, where some have
no hesitation in talking about “new citizenship” or “new associativeness”
in the public sphere—which differs dramatically from formalised struc-
tures such as parties and trade unions (Waters 2003: 147, 21). And this
kind of distinction even inspires the thoughts of critical philosophers
(Fraser and Honneth 2003). On the other hand, as Lilian Mathieu sug-
gests, some claimed novelties may consist more in an effect of “belief”, in
a displacement of the sociological gaze, than in a transformation of reality.
Besides, one can easily imagine that it is not just the social sciences that are
responsible for this displacement—that the activists themselves engage in
storytelling that foregrounds those forms of activism that are socially val-
ued at a given point in time. Thus, the existential difficulties linked to
activist engagement certainly afflicted the workers’ movement of the
1920s, just as they afflicted the activist movements of the 1960s, as auto-
biographical memoirs attest. But today they are without a doubt easier to
integrate explicitly into the canonical account of activist experience.
This is why the texts assembled here do not seek to address this ques-
tion of novelty. They present a sample of experiences all of which provide
evidence of forms of collective resistance to injustice in our cognitive2
(Moulier-Boutang 2011) and connectionist (Boltanski and Chiapello
2005 [1999]) capitalist societies. What these texts have in common is that
they all—to different degrees—privilege a pragmatic approach: they set
out to describe this resistance through actors’ concrete practices, recon-
structing the rules that these actors set themselves in order to decide on
the legitimacy of their own engagement. For pragmatic sociology, the
sociologist cannot claim to know the reasons for actors’ concrete practice
better than the actors themselves—and this is because the sociologist does
not necessarily have access to a privileged viewpoint. This work thus sees
itself as very different from a sociology that “unveils”, whose ambition is
to free hidden reality from domination so as to better combat it (Boltanski

and Thévenot [1991] 2006; Frère and Laville forthcoming; Frère and
Jaster 2018). It also distances itself from a sociology that is too
“generalising”—a sociology that aims to sketch a universal model of activ-
ism today. Yet, the chapters collected here are united by a common
hypothesis: that committing to a cause implies a fundamental moral ability
to be outraged by injustice. But this ability can be deployed at very differ-
ent levels of generality. It is through the empirical analysis of practices and
justificatory discourses that we must uncover the logic of each of these
forms of resistance—the moral grammar of an indignation that although
effective may struggle, even refuse, to “rise to generality”, to acquire a
theoretical justification (Boltanski [2009] 2011).
The examples taken up in this book constitute a sample of practices
because they by no means include all instances of resistance to contempo-
rary injustice. Common to all of them is their focus on France or, more
accurately, the French-speaking world, following in the footsteps of exist-
ing well-known studies (Cerny 1982; Duyvendack 1995). Why focus on
France? Probably for the reasons highlighted by Waters (2003: 2):
France provides a particularly rich and fascinating setting in which to observe

social movements. This is after all a nation defined historically by mass popu-
lar uprising, whose values, principles and ideals have been fashioned by a
deep-seated revolutionary tradition. French culture was created through
dissent, through constant challenges to the status quo. From the Revolution
of 1789 and the Paris Commune of 1871 to the more recent events of May
1968 or the ‘big strikes’ of 1995, the course of French history has been
punctuated by moments of profound social and political upheaval. More
than with any other European country, conflict lies at the heart of French
political life and is woven into the very fabric of society, symbolising for
many the ideals of popular resistance, democratic change and the struggle
for justice.3
On the wide spectrum of social movements that can be classified as

belonging to the European “new left”—which demand global justice
while pointing to an almost stunning diversity of candidates for emancipa-
tion (Flesher Fominaya and Cox 2013)—those who were at the origin of
the alter-globalist movement in the 1990s and 2000s are today well known
and have captured the attention of all the specialists (Sommier and Fillieule
2013: 48). Thus, we no longer focus on droits devant or AC! (who fought
for the rights of the unemployed), ATTAC (the Association for the
Taxation of Financial Transactions) or José Bové’s confédération paysanne,
who were among the era’s central actors (Morena 2013). Even if the alter-
globalist tendency is no longer there to unify the movement, the fact
remains that in its margins—or a short time after its decline—forms of
struggle were born that are less well known and have less media presence.
But it is probably they who are aiming to keep the spirit of this “new left”
alive today. And it is them who we focus on in this collection.
Remaining within this geographical frame, which has no pretensions
towards universality, the examples described here clearly show both the
diversity of contemporary forms of left-wing engagement in France and
their vitality at very different scales. All these forms of engagement are
unfolding at a conjuncture which could be described, from a more macro-
sociological point of view, as a phase of “resilience”: even if it has really
become more difficult to think about, and a fortiori to organise, social
contestation during the last 30 years, the “black hole” of the 1980s—dur-
ing which the discourse of “triumphal” capitalism convinced even (and
sometimes primarily) those who lost most from it of its truth—has none-
theless come to a close.4
Even if the books’ chapters do not explicitly endorse this description of
the present, most of their authors seem to see in it a plausible outline of
the global context in which current forms of engagement are situated. With
the fundamental resource of a totalising narrative schema no longer at
their disposal, it is logical that these instances of resistance should do two
things: first, that they should look to concrete situations for resources; but
second, that they should once more pose themselves—but with noticeably
greater difficulty than in the past—the question of the “rise to general-
ity”5—the question of how to move towards a political demand for social
transformation.
Though the forms of resistance presented here may be diverse in terms
of their focus and their mode of organisation, it is nonetheless possible to
make connections that point towards potentially generalisable logics. By
beginning with these experiments studied in their particularity, it is possi-
ble to pose questions that concern all of them. Three points, in particular,
are worth mentioning, all of which seem even more striking than during
the zenith of anti-globalisation.
In the absence of an immediately available “horizon of expectations”,
how can indignation express itself and what role do the pressures of neces-
sity play? How can resistance arise from the brute experience of injustice
and to what extent does this experience constrain the form in which resis-
tance expresses itself?
How do these instances of resistance position themselves in relation to

institutions and in particular to the state? Is it a question of opposing the
established authorities, of adapting to them, of enrolling them as allies, or
some of all these things simultaneously? How can these problems be
resolved in the face of a state whose boundaries have become increas-
ingly elusive?
What resources can these forms of resistance mobilise in a period that
appears hostile to them? Are there some themes that lend themselves bet-
ter than others to transforming local resistance into global critique?
The Pressures of Necessity

The impact of necessity—and even of urgency—is a topic common to
most of the engagements described here. In their study of the Réseau
Éducation Sans Frontières (RESF, the Education Without Borders
Network), Claudette Lafaye and Damien de Blic (Chap. 2) show how
parents and teachers discover that the threat of expulsion has suddenly
disrupted the “everyday and unremarkable” worlds of students and their
parents. Here, moral indignation reaches its maximum; this moral register
is a powerful “boost” to a highly committed type of activism that consists
of regular support and presence. In the case of the RESF, it is easy to
imagine that “there is no room for asking questions”: a strong activist
response is almost inevitable because it is difficult to “pass by” something
that happens to someone who—because they belong to a “community”
(whether centred around the neighbourhood or schools)—is already com-
pletely endowed with the attributes of an individual. The example of the
RESF brings this logic of necessity—which involves a commitment that
almost “goes without saying”—into sharp focus. In this case, actors stick
closely to moral indignation and, if they move away from this indignation
(towards the more abstract register of the civic city, which questions the
legitimacy of current immigration policy), the activist response loses its
legitimacy. This allows the RESF’s activism to be locally effective; at this
scale, weak generalisation allows allies to be enrolled more easily (in par-
ticular civil servants, who would be much more reticent if confronted with
more militant language). But its critical potential is thereby diminished.
Though the RESF reveals the pressure of necessity particularly clearly,
this pressure is present in many other cases. The transformation of homo-
sexual activism under the pressure of the emergence of AIDS, described by
Marta Roca i Escoda (Chap. 3), provides a paradigmatic example of this.
Urgency forced homosexual associations to totally reorient themselves,

partly by re-centring themselves around serving the community (leaving to
one side the more radical critique of normalising society), and partly by
committing to a policy of active collaboration with the state to promote
information, support and prevention. While the epidemic took a heavy toll
on the homosexual community, this dramatic moment was also paradoxi-
cally the occasion of a real victory. Every piece of research conducted dur-
ing the last 30 years, in Europe as well as in the United States, has shown
the progressive “social normalisation” of homosexuality: homophobia has
of course not disappeared but it has ceased to be the dominant social norm.
In what seemed like a struggle for its survival, the homosexual commu-
nity—particularly in France and North America—gained a form of recogni-
tion, notably thanks to the construction of a “counter-expertise” which
impressed even the medical world (Collins and Pinch 2001). Although
driven by the pressure of the most extreme necessity, homosexual activism
thus achieved a particularly effective “rise to generality” by expanding the
frontiers of “common humanity”: in certain countries, in less than a life-
time, the state’s engagement with homosexuality transitioned from moral-
ising penalisation to the promotion of a vigorous anti-discrimination policy.6
The solidarity economy, addressed by Éric Dacheux and then Bruno
Frère (Chaps. 5 and 10), draws on the same idea of a fight for survival.
What neither André Gorz (2001: 205–214) nor Holloway (2010: 69–70)
seem to recognise when they criticise the solidarity economy is that it has
not arisen from the theories of authors who write about it but has emerged
from necessity pure and simple. The solidarity economy has emerged
because without it living conditions would seriously deteriorate. This
observation holds as much for self-managed cooperatives in Argentina as
it does for some local exchange services in France, as well as citizen bank-
ing schemes that have developed throughout the world. Perhaps it is true
that, as Marx’s Capital says, “the realm of freedom really begins only
when labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends. It lies
by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper” (Marx
1981 [1867]: 958–959). The realm of freedom really begins when the
rule of immediate physical needs comes to an end. But here and now these
needs are visible, and there is no other option but to fulfil them and to
take every step possible to “get by”.
These texts clearly show how activist engagement arises or transforms
itself under the impact of necessity: what can appear heroic in ordinary
contexts can become ordinary in heroic contexts.7 But at a more “banal”
level, necessity is omnipresent as a cause of engagement: it is, again, the

contact with profound poverty that allows Agir Tous pour la Dignité
(ATD) Quart Monde (All Act for Dignity Fourth World), studied by
Frédéric Viguier (Chap. 4), to demand that its members engage in a form
of activism that verges on asceticism. As Fabrice Ripoll explains (Chap. 7),
repeated food security crises provided the Associations pour le Maintain
de l’Agriculture Paysanne (AMAPs, Associations for the Protection of
Paysan Agriculture) with the social need that their survival depends on.
And it was the desire to take control of their own professional and techni-
cal environment that led programmers to establish the free software com-
munity, according to Gaël Depoorter (Chap. 6). All these movements’
critiques vary in their levels of reflexivity and radicalism; but remaining in
touch with a form of immediately recognisable “need” seems to be a cen-
tral element of the birth and longevity of the engagement they involve.
Certain “vital” experiences retain their ability to fuel indignation, even if
the transition from indignation to critique (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005
[1999]) has become more fragile for the reasons outlined above. To the
question of knowing “how is one to continue believing in the feasibility of
socialism, when the facts have brutally and repeatedly invalidated the
idea?” (Keucheyan 2014: 30), it becomes possible to respond: resistance is
possible without reaching the threshold of belief. For that reason this resis-
tance remains fragile, whether it is supported by different “horizons of
expectations” or unsupported by any such horizon. So it is difficult to
make it permanent. But the pressure of necessity constantly reactivates it.
An Ambiguous Relationship to the State

In the various types of engagement we have before us, the relation to the
state (envisaged in its broadest sense as a public authority) is ambiguous,
to say the least. The state is by turns an adversary and a tutelary power,
depending on the circumstances, and sometimes both at the same time.
The example of the homosexual movement is, without doubt, the most
revealing in this regard. Immediately following the Second World War, the
state was in some sense “out of the picture”, doubtless because the idea of
homosexuality’s social normalisation seemed relatively inaccessible. The
movements that emerged consequently appeared more inward-looking;
they were less activist groups than “circles” of sociability within a com-
munity that saw itself as discreet. The conjuncture of the 1970s rendered
the prospect of normalisation more concrete. At this point, the most
conservative states (such as Francoist Spain) appeared as clear adversaries

through their preservation, and even their strengthening, of repressive
laws that were losing support among the general population. Finally, at
the start of the 1980s, AIDS came along and practically inverted the prob-
lematic, turning the homosexual movements into allies of a state pressured
into acting against the epidemic in a manner that was preventative as well
as curative. If, as seems to be the case, this (inevitable) alliance ended up
benefiting the homosexual movement—at the very least by drawing atten-
tion to the issue of homosexuality’s legal normalisation—this has not nec-
essarily been the case for other forms of resistance.
Thus, anti-poverty movements such as ATD Fourth World are described
by Frédéric Viguier as “an instrument for controlling the working classes”;
he describes the “cause of the poor” as constituting a space “much less
external to the state than it is normally represented as being”. The ques-
tion of who benefits from an alliance of this kind is much more problem-
atic here. By declaring that the transformation required depends on “work
on the self by the poor”, movements like ATD propagate what might in a
very general sense be called “the dominant ideology” of network capital-
ism, which extends demands for individual responsibility and “limitless
activation” even to its outsiders. The pressure of necessity fuels resistance
but, at the same time, it integrates this resistance into a type of global
social policy that sustains poverty. This is why, citing Bourdieu, Frédéric
Viguier refers to “the left hand of the state”, which may try to offer an
ultimate “safety net” but which does so by favouring aid over insurance,
thus relieving capitalism of any responsibility for the least productive part
of the workforce.
The relation to the state is therefore very problematic. For most activist
associations, no matter what their cause, it would be untenable to refuse
to collaborate with the authorities—but forming such an alliance comes at
a heavy cost because it hampers the development of critical thought. In
particular, these associations tend to block “civic” tests8 centred on the
model of making political demands in the public sphere, as demonstrated
by their hostility to the idea of occupying the banks of the Canal Saint-
Martin in Paris.
This refusal to “rise to political generality” is common to various forms
of resistance, including those that confront the power of the state head-
on: it is seen in both the solidarity economy and the RESF, whose activists
dismiss any critical reflection on immigration policy as this would in some
sense “pollute” their existential commitment to serve real flesh-and-blood
people. This raises the risk of a “Sisyphean effect”, whereby any partial
victories are achieved only at the price of refusing to interrogate sys-
temic effects.
This dilemma is not new. The entire history of the 20th century work-
ers’ movement can be read along the same lines: that of the dialectic
between the mobilising and demobilising effects of partial victories. The
workers’ movement at least proposed a theorisation of the state’s role.9
But this theorisation has become difficult today, while the state itself has
become evanescent: one the one hand, it ceaselessly reaffirms itself through
symbols and its repressive authority,10 but on the other, it constantly weak-
ens the distinction between the public and the private, borrowing its man-
agerial forms of control from capitalism. On the one hand, it reminds
actors of their “sovereignty”, while on the other, it partly incorporates
these social actors to make them into its subcontractors: the state thus
becomes, according to Zaki Laïdi’s neat formulation (2007), a “fractal
state” that must negotiate with parts of itself.
What results is really a “game with the rules” (Boltanski 2011 [2009]):
actors find themselves in a system full of blurred lines where the state
appears as much as an ally as it does as an adversary, and sometimes, as
mentioned before, both at the same time, depending on the circum-
stances. Perhaps this situation is impossible to clarify today in France given
the plasticity of institutions, which are both increasingly fragile and quick
to claim their “sovereign power” over the weakest actors. But this lack of
clarification appears, on the whole, as a weakness, liable to lead activist
engagements to a kind of recurrent impotence.11 Like Sisyphus pushing
his boulder, critique, in this case, must always be begun again.
A Capacity for Subversion?

Contrary to the engagements we have just been talking about (deporta-
tions, poverty, etc.), which have struggled to “rise to generality”, in other
cases a similar phenomenon has come to light that gives more reason for
optimism: forms of engagement that are not a priori anti-capitalist, even
behaviours that are not experienced a priori as forms of activist engage-
ment, can produce what we will call “non-intentional critical effects”.
We have in mind, first, the AMAPs analysed by Fabrice Ripoll. As his
chapter clearly shows, their success is partly due to the plurality of registers
of commitment they have mobilised. One can join an AMAP either
because of solidarity with rural communities or because of a more general
desire for an environmentally-friendly form of production. But also

because of motivations that are more easily accessible to “ordinary peo-
ple”, that is, a desire to eat food that conforms to one’s own dietary pref-
erences, whether this desire is generated by fear of certain foods
“contaminated” by chemicals (fertiliser and other pesticides), or by a taste
for certain flavours. “Moral and political” commitment can thus be mini-
mal, to begin with. This plurality of registers can of course serve to weaken
associations (e.g. when a minority of “activists” carry out collective tasks
for a majority of “consumers”). But it is also a strength that allows people
with commitments that are very different in nature and intensity to come
together. The “consumer” who primarily acts according to a “selfish”
logic (for their health or to save money) nonetheless provides support for
the group by increasing its critical mass. Thus, one can commit oneself
without really claiming to perform an act of commitment in the traditional
sense. The logic of the AMAPs acts as a “transmission mechanism”
between the initial investment and the collective result.
The same mechanism is at work, in an even more explicit way, in the
“free software community” analysed by Gaël Depoorter. The “founding
narrative” of Richard Stallman (Stallman and Williams 2010) appeals to an
“existential experience of frustration”: seeing yourself excluded from proj-
ects to which you yourself have contributed. The justification for free soft-
ware may rest on a critique of capitalism (the rejection of the private
appropriation of collective intellectual work), but this justification does
not a priori presuppose a higher level of critical engagement. It rests on
“an improbable hybrid of an academic ethos and primitive communism”
and above all involves itself in practical activity: the resolution of problems
and the sharing of knowledge. Christophe Lejeune (2009) has clearly
shown how “the spirit of engagement” among digital communities
invokes mutual technical support and not “abstract” critical distance with
regard to the internet’s commercialisation. This spirit is translated by the
imperative “Do it yourself!” It is particularly well illustrated by the use of
the term troll, a (dis)qualifier used to ridicule disputes judged nonessential
(not linked to the resolution of problems) in dedicated forums. On read-
ing these interactions, any taste for polemic—which is very common in
certain spheres of critical engagement—must be pushed aside in favour of
a “virtuous practical register pacified by a weaker level of reflexivity”.
By concretising this practical register, “viral” tools such as the GNU
General Public License enable these communities to mobilise resistance
even more robustly through the “transmission mechanism” effect
mentioned above in relation to the AMAPs: “All software using all or part
of a development protected by this licence must de facto apply its rules,
thus enabling the construction and permanence of an alternative praxis”.
Free software communities are at the heart of what Yann Moulier-
Boutang (2011) calls the “cognitive” productive mechanism of capitalism.
Without appearing to affect this mechanism, free software is thus a practice
with “high subversive potential” due to the very nature of its object. Moulier-
Boutang summarises the problem very simply:
At the very moment when the market seems to have consolidated its posi-
tion, historically eliminating socialism as an alternative to the production of
material goods outside the market, the quantity of goods, of information
and of knowledge which present all the characteristics of collective goods
becomes so significant that the basic justification of private appropriation
becomes increasingly acrobatic and largely inoperative.
This analysis seems to echo the Marxist idea that the development of the
“collective intellectual worker” will end up rendering the relations of capi-
talist production suboptimal.
Of course, this development is in no way necessary. Capitalism has amply
demonstrated its ability to incorporate critique and turn its weaknesses into
instruments of its own transformation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005
[1999]). But the fact remains that there is a decisive ongoing battle around
the private appropriation of the means of intellectual production—in particu-
lar, on the internet—and that, ten years after Moulier-Boutang was writing,
the struggle continues. The practice of free software thus contests the global
logic of capitalism almost “by default”—that is, without the need for a higher
level of reflexivity. Free software actors cannot be suspected of naivety: they
know very well the level at which the game is being played. But it is important
to note that they do not need to know this for the critique to be effective: Do it
yourself! is itself a radical questioning of capitalism because it weakens its hold
on a sector that is crucial to the future development of productive activity.
Saying this is not to promote the possibility of “bringing about the
revolution without knowing it”. Nonetheless, practices of resistance that
enjoy this privilege, which is usually reserved for capitalism itself, are
developing: we are seeing the emergence of a capacity for subverting capi-
talism through the simple effect of contagion. Even if we will not be able
to dispense with reflexive self-transformation within this process of trans-
formation, certain slopes will be easier to climb than others. Both the
AMAP and free software experiments give us examples of the relevance of
practices that in a sense “spontaneously” access a higher level of generality.
The Difficulties of “Practical Utopia”

Across the different experiences examined, one theme regularly recurs: the
difficulty of translating the transformational aims of those involved in acts
of “ordinary” resistance into a “coherent praxis”.
Thus, Manuel Cervera-Marzal and Bruno Frère (Chap. 8) provide a
detailed analysis of the relationships that arise in an activist collective based
on general civil disobedience, Les refuseurs. This group of around 50
members, which surrounds a “hard core” of around 20 people, organises
acts of disobedience on a wide range of themes. Its members are mostly
students or young activists with high cultural capital, but who have rela-
tively precarious lives.
On the basis of participant observation and discussion with the mem-
bers, Cervera-Marzal and Frère demonstrate the “omnipresence” of a
latent sexism that is translated in multiple different ways. To begin with,
there is what one could call a “differentiated reward” from activism: in a
way that is not made explicit, the women are regularly given “execution”
tasks and much less often the task of coming up with actions.
“Differentiated” reward thus doubly disadvantages them: the tasks are
materially less pleasant (cleaning, cooking and purchasing materials) but
are also the least symbolically rewarding. Thus it is the male members of
the group who take charge of “mediatising” the group’s actions, both
through contacts with the media and by publishing on social networks.
To this sharing of tasks, which is implicitly but clearly gendered, can be
added the domination of women in the group’s “discursive space”.
Cervera-Marzal and Frère thus use examples often not perceived by the
group (at least by the men) to show how speech is systematically unbal-
anced to the detriment of the women, who are either not heard or are
even “snubbed”. A female activist explained at length how she experiences
this “gendered” way of addressing women, who are subjected to palpably
harsher treatment than men.
These observations are not new: since the start of the 1970s, sexism has
been summarily denounced by the female members of revolutionary
groups and the issue has accompanied the success and then the decline of
these groups throughout history. The “resistance” of the 2010s is still
struggling to come to terms with this contradiction and, from this point
of view, it is firmly “ideologically embedded” in “mainstream” society.
Elsewhere, the “Zone à Défendre” (ZAD: ‘Zone to Defend’) studied
by Sylvaine Bulle (Chap. 9) is a success but struggles to accommodate very
different forms of “occupation”. The ZAD occupies the site of a proposed

airport at Notre Dame des Landes near Nantes in western France. Its
occupants might be divided into three principal groups: the few farmers
who were there from the beginning; the “activists”, young politicised
intellectuals who are often influenced by situationist ideas; to whom have
been added a number of young people who have radically broken with
their previous lives and are running away from the “normality” of capital-
ist work and consumption. The cohabitation of these three groups takes
place largely informally: though each agrees to the rejection of capitalism
and the need to “defend the zone”, no organisation has really come along
to “head” the occupation and give it a common strategy. The occupants
interviewed all stress the principle that “no-one can tell anyone else what
they should do”. For all the residents, the ZAD is both a place of retreat
and a place of attack: it is both a question of “fleeing” from capitalism and
fighting it, even if the predominant tendency differs from person to person.
More than just a “cause” in the classical sense, the Zone à Défendre is
thus an attempt to construct a practical or a real utopia (Wright 2010) that
provides a great deal of room for individual autonomy and for non-
institutionalised ways of resolving conflicts. In place of the model and the
constraints of a largely urban capitalism, the Zone substitutes the paradigm
of “inhabitation” in a way that cultivates and protects the place inhabited.
So has the ZAD been victorious in the end? At the time of writing, the
government of Emmanuel Macron has just announced the abandonment
of the airport project. It is not known what the “territory”—which has
been designated as such for decades—will become. Doubtless, the French
state would like to reassert its authority by evicting the occupants. But the
symbol remains strong.
Finally to the third aporia of “practical utopia”: the question of the
actors’ legitimacy. This is highlighted in Bruno Frère’s chapter on the soli-
darity economy (Chap. 10), “politics without politics”. The notion of
“representativeness” is always leaving by the door (since the political ethos
of new forms of resistance is a priori distrustful of delegation) only to re-
enter through the window: since as soon as someone speaks, they must
necessarily speak in the name of (a group, a cause, an association, etc.). The
dispute about legitimate representation is thus both inextinguishable and
insoluble, as was again experienced by activists of the still-born movement
Nuits Debout.12 How can all speak with the same voice when all voices
must be able to express themselves? How can several voices speak without
this resulting in an unproductive and unpleasant cacophony?
The accusations of “illegitimacy” levelled against each other by the

MES (Movement for the Solidarity Economy) and “Les Pénélopes” (a
group seeking to combine feminist solidarity economy initiatives) expose
the impasse: each contests the other’s pretension to legitimacy in the name
of symmetrical arguments drawn from the same political “grammar”.
This difficulty is linked, as Bruno Frère shows, to an inability to address
the issue of power head-on. One might thus ask whether this demon-
strates a problem with the very concept of “practical utopia”, whose two
terms are to some extent inherently antagonistic.
These three chapters clearly show that even though concrete resistance
to capitalism has not disappeared—far from it—perspectives on how to
leave capitalism behind remain extremely vague. Many characteristics are
shared by the “old” and the “new” social movements (we must insist on
the quotation marks) as Mathieu points out (Chap. 11). And this remains
true even when it comes to the difficulties they experience in concretely
defining the post-capitalist utopia that they aspire to.
Everyday Resistance?
If we take the utopian hopes (in the non-pejorative sense) historically
prompted by the workers’ movement as a reference, then the past three or
even four decades appear quite naturally as a period in which social critique
was defeated. Those whose intellectual and activist socialisation began in the
period that followed the post-May 1968 turmoil share the same experience
of a constantly reiterated disillusion. But the fact that it is difficult to iden-
tify critical thought that is both effective and “totalising” does not signify
that the page of activist engagement has been turned. To convince ourselves
of this, we must no doubt change our perspective and seek out less the
“grail” of a possible new utopia than daily forms of struggle against injustice.
Doubtless, not all paradigms in the social sciences are equally capable of
“changing our perspective” in this way. By bringing our attention to the
concrete experiments taking place today, as imperfect as they may be, and
to the immanent conditions of their legitimacy, the pragmatic approach in
sociology and political science shows that—at a globally unfavourable con-
juncture—there is resistance everywhere, all the time and in various differ-
ent forms; sometimes this resistance even achieves victories.
In sum, even if the notion of “everyday resistance” is not new (see e.g.
Scott 1987), it takes on a reconfigured meaning today. As it appears in the
different chapters of this book, it comes close to the definition given by
Stella Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013) in their impressive review of

the literature:
(1) Everyday resistance is a practice (not a certain consciousness, intent,

recognition or outcome; (2) It is historically entangled with (everyday)
power (not separated, dichotomous or independent); (3) Everyday resis-
tance needs to be understood as [just as] intersectional as the powers it
engages with (not one single power relation); and as a consequence (4) It is
heterogen[eous] and contingent due to changing contexts and situations
(not a universal strategy or coherent action form).
As these two authors also note, everyday resistance is not necessarily

explicitly conceptualised as resistance by the actors themselves. It may be
seen first of all as a “survival” or “emergency” practice. This is true of the
Education Without Borders Network and the AMAPs, as well as ATD
Quart Monde. Everyday resistance is thus really a practice before it is an
intention or a strategy. This is also how the free software community can
be defined. But whatever it is, resistance is always engaged in a relation
with “power” in one form or another—where “power” is understood in
Foucault’s sense as immanent and relational: power and resistance define
and are intertwined with each other. This is why resistance is really “inter-
sectional”: as Vinthagen and Johansson again stress, the criteria of domi-
nation are multiple and the same actors can occupy dominant or dominated
positions depending on the criterion chosen. The analysis of sexist prac-
tices within activist groups conducted by Manuel Cervera-Marzal and
Bruno Frère clearly illustrates this ambiguity of positions. And as a conse-
quence, everyday resistance is truly heterogeneous and contingent.
So again, we can only agree with Vinthagen and Johansson (2013):
Everyday resistance is a type of act available to all subaltern subjects, all the
time, in some form or another. But not all will resist. And even those who
do resist only do so sometimes and in relation to some system of domina-
tion, while they might utilize other positions of dominance available to
them. When they resist they will not always affect power; sometimes they
will even strengthen power or create new forms of power techniques.
All the texts presented here help us to better grasp the strengths and weak-
nesses of the forms of resistance at work—as well as their grips on the
reality of unremitting injustice. It is not a question of renouncing global
constructions, but of recalling that such constructions will not be able to
develop in empirical ignorance of effective forms of resistance: if it really is

life that determines consciousness, then theorisation can only be emergent
and the efficacy of local forms of resistance will clear the path towards less
dismal horizons of expectations.
This empirical work of identifying “grips” is more indispensable than
ever. It is the necessary condition for rearming an effective critique, that
is, a critique that dares to be radical but does not mistake its dreams for
realities.
Notes
1. Hirschman notably gives the example of the person who, during a war,
allows fugitives to pass to the free zone. He pointed out that it would make
no sense to justify their commitment by claiming both that they acted out
of patriotism and that their action also brought them financial gain.
2. In the sense that knowledge (distributed) becomes the principal means of
production, which, as Marx anticipated, makes the individual appropria-
tion of the means of production into a brake on the development of the
productive forces.
3. “Despite recent prophecies to the contrary, instances of protest continue
to occur with greater frequency and intensity in France than almost any-
where else. There are more demonstrations, strikes, occupations, marches
and petition movements in France today than in most other European
societies and conflict is widely accepted by French citizens as a normal,
almost banal, occurrence” (id.).
4. We should note that all these texts were written, for the most part, before
the 15th of May movement in Spain and its “aftershocks” in several
countries.
5. Following the tradition that has spread within pragmatic sociology, “rise to
generality” denotes the process whereby arguments are universalised,
through which actors seek to construct agreement or to extend their
alliances.
6. The example of Belgium illustrates this transition particularly well.
7. The inverse is obviously true, as all revolutionary experiences demonstrate.
8. By “civic test” we mean a confrontation with political authorities in the
public sphere (see Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] 2006).
9. Or, more precisely, several theorisations, since it was often on this question
that the movement was divided. These theorisations described the state as
either the dominant classes’ instrument of oppression or the expression of
the popular will (via universal suffrage)—or both.
10. In this respect, the “truth tests” spoken of by Luc Boltanski (2011 [2009])—
solemn and ritualised reaffirmations of the legitimacy of institutions, which are
tending to lose their influence—could experience a second youth as capital-
ism’s legitimacy weakens: the return to the foreground of the topic of “national
identity” in many European countries is evidence of this happening.
11. In the context of the United States, Nina Eliasoph’s very good book
(2010) can serve as a theoretical counterpoint to most of the experiences
presented here.
12. Nuits Debout was a major contestatory social movement that sprang up in
the outdoor public spaces of most big cities in France. It began on 31
March 2016 following a protest against the “loi travail”. This law aimed to
revise the Labour Code to give businesses greater room for manoeuvre in
recruiting and, above all, laying off workers. The movement quickly came
to involve groups working on many different kinds of issue and so a “con-
vergence of struggles” was suggested. Its focus consequently expanded to
the general contestation of political, cultural and economic institutions. In
the absence of any leader or spokesperson, Nuits Debout was organised
through self-managed thematic groups. Decisions were made by reaching
consensus during general assemblies, following the Ancient Greek model
of direct participatory democracy. The movement occasionally even
stretched beyond French borders, but it subsequently waned until its even-
tual demise in summer 2016—at least in its initial form of mass gatherings
and debates in public spaces (see Wikipedia). For more on Nuits Debout,
see Gaël Brustier, 2016, Nuit debout: que penser?, Paris: Le Cerf.
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CHAPTER 2
Undocumented Families and Political

Communities: Parents Fighting Deportations
Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye
Since 2004, hundreds of local committees linked together in a vast

network—the Réseau Education Sans Frontières (Education Without
Borders Network or RESF)—have sprung up across France, most often
emerging out of schools. Between autumn 2005 and spring 2006, they
proliferated particularly quickly. In most cases, these local committees are
not formal organisations; in the absence of statutes, of membership, of
paid subscriptions, of elected presidents and of mandated representatives,
their structure is weak and their contours are infinitely variable. Each local
committee tenaciously demands the regularisation of the undocumented
families and young adults who have come to its attention. Less than a
decade after the hunger strikes of the undocumented migrants (the sans-
papiers) of Saint-Bernard (Siméant 1998; Blin 2005), and the mobilisa-
tions around those whose bid for legalisation was dismissed by Minister of
the Interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s regularisation bill,1 the question
of the sans-papiers has once again risen to public prominence.
Clearly, this re-emergence must be placed in the context of the hardening
of public policy concerning migrants since 2002 (Rodier and Terray
D. de Blic (*) • C. Lafaye

University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France
e-mail: lafaye@ehess.fr
© The Author(s) 2020 21

B. Frère, M. Jacquemain (eds.), Everyday Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_2
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the 24th they were in Lancaster. On the 28th they entered
Manchester, imposed a heavy requisition on the town, and were
joined by some bold spirits among the younger men. On the 1st of
December, Charles Edward entered Macclesfield. On the 4th that
young prince, with 7,000 men, entered Derby, and losing heart, left it
on the 6th, in retreat northward. On the 9th they were again in
Manchester. On Christmas day, they entered Glasgow;—‘a very
indifferent Christmas-box to the inhabitants,’ according to Ray; and
on the 30th of December, Carlisle, in which a rebel garrison was
stationed, surrendered at discretion to the young Duke of
Cumberland. Therewith ended the rebel invasion of England. This
succession of events greatly influenced the metropolis.
When the storm was threatening, and also when it burst,
clergymen in town, and probably in the country also, opened their
Bibles, questioning them as oracles, and interpreting the answers,
according to their respective temperaments. One good man, whose
eye fell upon the words of Jeremiah,—‘Evil appeareth out of the
North, and great destruction,’ proclaimed to his congregation that the
words had reference to the Pretender and his invasion of England.
This application of the text has been pronounced to be as absurd as
that of the ‘casting down of Mount Seir’ to the overthrow of the
French.
For what London was feeling and saying in this FEELING IN
eventful year, 1745, search must be made in the LONDON.
correspondence of the time. The letters of Walpole,
for instance, begin the year with the expression of a fear, if Marshal
Belleisle, who had been made a prisoner at Hanover, where he was
travelling without a passport, should be allowed to go at large, on his
word, in England, as it was reported he would be, that mischief
would come of it. ‘We could not have a worse inmate!
HOPES AND
So ambitious and intriguing a man, who was the FEARS.
author of this whole war, will be no bad general to
head the Jacobites on any insurrection.’ The marshal was, at first,
kept ‘magnificently close’ at Windsor, but as he cost the country
there 100l. a day, he was sent to Nottingham, to live there as he
pleased, and for the Jacobites to make what they could of him. For
the moment, the Duke of Beaufort was more dangerous than the
marshal. The duke was a declared, determined and an unwavering
Jacobite, and led the party against Court and Ministry. At the end of
April there was ‘nothing new.’ In May came the honourable
catastrophe of Fontenoy, and the dishonourable sarcastic song
made by Frederick, Prince of Wales, on his brother, the Duke of
Cumberland’s glorious failure. Alluding to the duke, Walpole writes,
‘All the letters are full of his humanity and bravery. He will be as
popular with the lower class of men as he has been for three or four
years with the low women. He will be the soldiers’ ‘Great Sir,’ as well
as theirs. I am really glad; it will be of great service to the family if
any one of them come to make a figure.’ Walpole saw the necessity
of having a hero opposed to the young Chevalier. One was sorely
needed. Belleisle must have enchanted the Jacobites by his publicly
asserting that this country was so ill-provided for defence, he would
engage, with five thousand scullions of the French army, to conquer
England. Walpole owned his fears. He was depressed by our
disasters in Flanders, the absence of the king from England, that of
ministers from London, ‘not five thousand men in the island, and not
above fourteen or fifteen ships at home. Allelujah!’
The Ministry released Belleisle, who went incog.
HORACE
about London, and was entertained at dinner by the WALPOLE’S
Duke of Newcastle at Claremont, and by the Duke of IDEAS.
Grafton at Hampton Court. Walpole compares the idle
gossip about the French coming over in the interest of the Pretender,
and the neglect of all defence, with the conduct of the Londoners on
a report that the plague was in the city. ‘Everybody went to the house
where it was, to see it!’ If Count Saxe, with ten thousand men, were
to come within a day’s march of London, ‘people will be hiring
windows at Charing Cross and Cheapside to see them pass by.’
Walpole, in truth, was as indifferent as he accused his
contemporaries of being. If anything happened to the ship, what was
that to him, he was only a passenger. He playfully described himself
as learning scraps from ‘Cato,’ in case of his having to depart in the
old, high, Roman fashion. Recollecting that he is writing on the
anniversary of the accession of the House of Brunswick, he tacks a
joyous P.S. to one of his letters, in the words, ‘Lord! ’tis the first of
August, 1745, a holiday that is going to be turned out of the
almanack!’ When the Government did begin to prepare for serious
contingencies, Walpole expressed his belief of their being about as
able to resist an invasion as to make one.
When the young Chevalier, stealing a march upon DIVISIONS IN
Cope, was approaching Edinburgh, Walpole wrote FAMILIES.
from London, that people there had nothing to
oppose, ‘scarcely fears.’ Lord Panmure, who had got his title through
the attainder of his elder brother, for the ’15 affair, and the Duke of
Athol, who owed his dukedom to the attainder of his elder brother,
the Marquis of Tullibardine (who was then with Prince Charles
Edward), for the same affair, left London, in order to raise forces in
Scotland for the defence of the Hanoverian succession. Panmure,
with other Scotch lords, raised a few men. Athol returned to London
to announce his inability to get together a force for such a purpose;
and when it was proposed to send the Duke of Argyle,
Maccullummore excused himself on the singular ground that there
was a Scotch Act of Parliament against arming without authority.
There was a scene in a London house that might furnish a subject to
a painter. The young Whig Duke of Gordon, at an interview with his
Jacobite uncle, told the latter that he must go down to Scotland and
arm his men. ‘They are in arms,’ was the reply. ‘You must lead them
against the rebels.’ ‘They will wait on the Prince of Wales,’ rejoined
the uncle, who alluded to the young Chevalier. The duke flew in a
passion, but the uncle pulled out a pistol, and said it was in vain to
dispute. As Walpole here drops the curtain over this scene, we may
suppose that the little domestic drama was carried no further.
As news reached town that the rebellion did not COURT AND
grow in the North, and that there was no rising in CITY.
England to help it, Walpole wrote, ‘Spirit seems to rise
in London.’ The king, or as Walpole calls him, ‘the person most
concerned,’ took events with heroic imperturbability, or stupid
indifference. Charles Edward had repealed the union between
England and Scotland. King George believed himself to be, and
likely to remain, King of Great Britain, as before. When ministers
proposed to him any measures with reference to the outbreak, his
Majesty only answered, ‘Pooh! don’t talk to me about that stuff!’ It is
not, therefore, to be wondered at that ministers did not summon
Parliament. They had nothing either to offer or to notify. The London
merchants, on the other hand, were zealous and liberal in opening
subscriptions for raising more troops.
In this time of uncertainty, if not trouble, the VARYING
professional patriot came to the surface in the person OPINIONS.
of Alderman Heathcote. At a City meeting, that sham
Jacobite proposed to supplant a loyal address to the king by a
demand for a redress of grievances; ‘but not one man seconded
him.’ Walpole, with all his affected indifference and pretence of
indifference on the part of the public, betrays the true temper of the
metropolis, when he says, ‘We have great hopes the Highlanders will
not follow him [Charles Edward] so far [into England], very few of
them could be persuaded the last time to go to Preston.’ And
something of the general uneasiness may be traced in Walpole’s
intimation to Montagu, of his dislike of becoming ‘a loyal sufferer in a
thread-bare coat, and shivering in an antechamber at Hanover, or
reduced to teach Latin and English to the young princes at
Copenhagen. Will you ever write to me in my garret at
Herrenhausen?’ With all this simulation of light-heartedness, Walpole
writes seriously enough, from Arlington Street, ‘Accounts from
Scotland vary perpetually, and at best are never very certain.... One
can’t tell what assurances of support they may have from the
Jacobites in England ... but nothing of the sort has yet appeared....
One can hardly believe that the English are more disaffected than
the Scotch, and among the latter no persons of property have joined
them.’ The temper of the Government is also described in a few
words: ‘Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the king
that it is an affair of no consequence; and, for the Duke of
Newcastle, he is glad when the rebels make any progress in order to
refute Lord Granville’s assertions.’ London was as delighted as
Walpole with the naval watch kept in the Channel, and with the spirit
of the English nobility adding, or promising to add, regiments to the
regular force, to which, however, they gave little or no additional
strength. He who had been laughing and calling others laughers,
confesses in September that his own apprehensions were not so
strong as they had been. ‘If we get over this I shall believe that we
never can be hurt, for we never can be more exposed to danger.
Whatever disaffection there is to the present family, it plainly does
not proceed from love to the other.’
This sense of security was seriously shaken when
LONDON WIT.
London got the news of the victory gained by Charles
Edward’s army near Preston Pans over General Cope. It was known
to ‘the Papists’ on Sunday, but the Government received no official
news till Tuesday! ‘The defeat,’ says Walpole, ‘frightens everybody
but those it rejoices.’ Then he, who had alternately laughed and
trembled, affected the philosopher, and pretended that he could
endure without emotion the ruin which he had foreseen. ‘I shall suffer
with fools, without having any malice to our enemies, who act
sensibly from principle and interest.’ When London found that no
advantage was taken of the victory by the victors, London and
Walpole resumed their good spirits. The latter referred to the
subjoined advertisement as a proof that there was more wit in
London than in all Scotland. ‘To all jolly Butchers.—My dear Hearts!
The Papists eat no meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, nor
during Lent! Your friend, John Steel.’ Such wit can hardly have
alarmed the Papists, but it may have had something to do with a
report which followed,—that they intended to rise and massacre their
enemies in London. It was taken seriously. All the Guards were
ordered out, and the Tower was closed at seven o’clock. When the
murrain among the cattle broke out, it was absurdly said that the
Papists had poisoned the pools! The Papists however did send
money contributions from London to Charles Edward. It is wonderful
that the highwaymen did not intercept the bearers, and make them
deliver.
When Parliament met in October, the attendance THE
was thin. The Pretender had threatened to confiscate PARLIAMENT.
the property of all Scotch members who should
attend, and to make it treason for English members to do so! Yet
there were Jacobites present, and they opposed the address as well
as the suspension of the Habeas Corpus. A proposal to enquire into
the causes of the progress of the Rebellion was shelved by a
majority of 194 to 112. Most of the former felt, it is said, ‘the
necessity of immediately putting an end to it, and that the fire should
be quenched before we should enquire who kindled or promoted it.’
There were many whose fears had been great because of the
greatness of the stake. These rejoiced when the Guards left London,
roaring as they marched from the parade that they would neither
give nor receive quarter. Walpole affirmed that the army adored the
duke who was to be their commander. On the other hand, ‘the
Calligulisms’ of the Prince of Wales brought on him a general
contempt. The working men were, almost without exception, loyal.
When there was an idea of the king going to the encampment at
Finchley, the weavers offered him a guard of a thousand men. It was
in the caricature of the march to Finchley that Hogarth exhibited the
baser side of his character. The wrath of the king at the painter’s
insult to the defenders of their country was well-founded. The
popular feeling was not with the artist. When the prisoners captured
in the ‘Soleil’ were brought to London, it was difficult to save them
from being cruelly handled. Among them was Mr.
THE
Radcliffe who had been condemned to death with his RADCLIFFES.
brother, Lord Derwentwater, in 1716, and Mr.
Radcliffe’s son, who was at first suspected of being Charles
Edward’s brother, Henry. This suspicion very nearly cost the young
captive his life, more than once, on the road. ‘He said that he had
heard of English mobs, but could not conceive they were so
dreadful; and wished he had been shot at the battle of Dettingen,
where he had been engaged. The father, whom they call Lord
Derwentwater, said, on entering the Tower, that he had never
expected to arrive there alive. For the young man, he must only be
treated as a French captive; for the father it is sufficient to produce
him at the Old Bailey, and prove that he is the individual person
condemned for the last Rebellion; and so to Tyburn.’ Walpole
reflected the general feeling of the metropolis which had been kept
so long in a state of suspense, sometimes concealing it under
indifference, at others not caring to conceal its own fears.
Noblemen’s servants were not rendered particularly cheerful in
October, by a report that they were to be made to serve as soldiers,
receiving their pay both as warriors and flunkeys. The soldiery were
so ill off, that civilians bestirred themselves for their relief. The
Quakers contributed ten thousand woollen waistcoats to keep them
warm. The Corporation of London gave them as many blankets and
watchcoats. King George, when everything else had been provided,
paid for their shoes out of his privy purse!
There was a desire to bring the matter to a THE LONDON
conclusion as cheaply as possible. The ‘Craftsman’ JACOBITES.
recommended that the Pretender should be ‘cut off,’ if
that end could be compassed. A hope was expressed that the nation
would not be taxed for encountering a ‘ragged, hungry rabble of
Yahoos of Scotch Highlanders,’ with the cost of an expedition
against an Alexander. There would be no use, it was said, in
constructing an apparatus fit for hunting a lion,—for the catching of a
rat. The rats were, nevertheless, troublesome, if not formidable. The
London Jacobites were ostentatiously ecstatic when news reached
town of the defeat of Cope. King George’s proclamation had ordered
an observation of silence on public affairs. When the removal of
notorious Papists from the city had been contemplated, ‘What will
you get,’ loudly asked the Jacobites of the Romish Church, ‘by
driving us ten miles out of town? We shall then form a camp, and
you will find us a much more formidable body than we now appear to
be while dispersed among you.’ Remove the Papists! why, the Duke
of Newcastle had shown so little disposition that way, that his French
cook still ruled supreme in the kitchen of his mansion in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields! There were others like the duke; and, what trust could be
placed in a militia formed out of servants of noblemen whose lackeys
went to mass in the private chapels of the Ambassadors? Yet,
something must be done. It was in vain that proclamations, signed
‘James III.’ and ‘Charles Edward,’ were burnt at the Royal Exchange,
by the common hangman, in presence of the sheriffs. New
documents were circulated as widely as ever. If they were not cried
in the street, there were other ways of bringing them before the
public. In the dusk of the evening, a baker would rest with his basket,
or a street porter with his burthen, against a wall. Inside the basket,
as inside the porter’s burthen, there was a little boy who had all the
necessary contrivances to enable him to paste a Jacobite paper on
the wall. In the morning, London was found to be covered with
treasonable documents, and for some time, magistrates were driven
almost mad in trying to account for the appearance of papers which
seemed to have got on the walls by inexplicable and undiscoverable
means.
On Sunday, October 6th, half of riotous London THE
followed the Foot Guards to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and VENETIAN
applauded them as they entered the old abandoned AMBASSADOR
play-house, which was converted by them into a .
barrack. A couple of days later all uproarious London was on the
river, or in the streets, to witness the grand entry of the Venetian
Ambassador. His Excellency and suite came in state barges from
Greenwich to the Tower, and he passed in greater state still of coach
and cavalry, from the Tower to his noble residence in Thrift Street,
Soho, as Frith Street was once called. The greetings which
welcomed him on the part of those who hailed in his person an ally
of King George, were as nothing compared with the unceasing
thunder of hurrah-ing which saluted him as he rode, next day, in
greatest state of all, to have audience of the sovereign. When his
wife, as soon as she was installed in her house, in Soho, gave a
masquerade which made everybody forget the perils of the time,
there may have been people who distrusted her Popish principles,
but no one doubted her taste, or objected to her politics.
Yet was there every now and then a cry of alarm. MONARCH
Messengers had seized a waggon load of cutlasses, AND
and they were slow to believe that the weapons were MINISTERS.
not ordered by Pope and Pretender for the slaughter
of Church-and-King men. They proved to have come to London in
due course of trade. Persons who believed, nevertheless, in the
existence of a conspiracy were gratified by the seizure of some Irish
priests who indulged in the utterance of seditious words in public
places. Zealots, of Jacobite proclivities, even had the assurance to
contradict loyal preachers in their own pulpits, but afterwards found
themselves in durance for their boldness. One day, Sir Robert
Ladbroke astounded the Duke of Newcastle by rushing in to his
office and announcing that he had had anonymous warning to leave
his house, as Jacobite insurgents meant on a certain night to set fire
to the city. Everywhere guards were doubled, and there was much
fear. The king showed none. He stood for a couple of hours on the
terrace at St. James’s, overlooking the park, to witness the
manœuvres and the ‘march past’ of six regiments of trained bands,
and he had an air as if he and danger were strangers. Moreover the
Londoners were in a fever of delight with the other king,—the king of
the city. On Lord Mayor’s day, Sir Richard Hoare was resolved that if
he was to be the last Protestant Lord Mayor of London, people
should remember him. On October 29th (old Lord Mayor’s day), he
went from Guildhall to the Court of Exchequer, in the grandest coach
ever seen, and he was accompanied by ‘a large body of associated
gentlemen out of Fleet Street, completely clothed,’ as one, indeed,
might expect they would be!
From the ‘Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury, NEWS IN
his Family and Friends,’ it is to be gathered that the PRIVATE
Londoners were kept in ignorance of Sir John Cope’s LETTERS.
defeat, till private letters arrived by which the whole
disgrace was revealed. Lord Shaftesbury writes that Pitt’s respectful
motion to advise the king to recall the troops (chiefly cavalry) from
Flanders, and use them in suppressing the rebellion, was lost, or
‘eluded,’ by putting the previous question—ayes 136, noes 148; in
which division young Horace Walpole was in the minority, and old
Horace Walpole on the other side; ‘not a Tory on either side
speaking. I leave you to reflect on this proceeding, though I think a
very little reflection will suffice.’ People who had letters from the
north ran with them from house to house, some, even, to St.
James’s, to impart their contents, and small regard was had to any of
the newspapers. But individuals could be as untrustworthy as the
papers. Old Lord Aylesbury was conspicuous as a ‘terror-raiser.’ He
says ‘the Papists poisoned his grandfather, and made a fool of his
father, and that he believed all the Jacobites would turn to Popery
very easily, if it was to prevail.’ The old lord was to be seen daily
going to Court, ‘to show his public attachment to the Revolution of
1688.’
With respect to the king reviewing the Trainbands
THE LONDON
from the garden wall of St. James’s, recorded in a TRAINBANDS.
preceding page, Lord Shaftesbury writes, Oct. 26th,
1745: ‘This morning the Trainbands were reviewed by his Majesty.
By what I saw of them myself, I can venture to affirm that,
notwithstanding their deficiency in smartness, from want of an
uniform, which may possibly expose them to the ridicule of some of
our very fine gentlemen, they would make an honourable and
effective stand, if needful, for their religion and liberties. They are
really, upon the whole, good troops.’ The Rev. William Harris gives a
fuller account of the same incident to his brother: ‘I was to-day
accidentally in St. James’s Park, when the City Militia were reviewed
by the King, who stood on the terrace in his own garden, attended by
the Duke, Lord Stair, Dukes of Dorset, Newcastle, Bolton, and
several others of the nobility. It was a most tedious affair, I make no
doubt, to his Majesty; for the London men made but a shabby
appearance, and there could be no great entertainment in seeing
them. Their officers were well enough, and to these, as they made
their salute, passing by under the terrace, his Majesty returned
everyone the compliment by pulling off his hat. There were no less
than six regiments, and I suppose it might be near two hours before
they all had gone in review before his Majesty.’
Conflicting reports flew about, but the SCENES AT
discouragement was not very profound, and the COURT.
birthday drawing-room, on the 30th of October, was
as gay and brilliant as if there were no rebellion afoot. The reverend
writer of the letter quoted above was present, and he describes to
Mrs. Harris the silks of the princesses, the brocades and damasks of
the ladies, and the blaze of Lady Cardigan, who excelled as to
jewels, having on a magnificent solitaire, and her stomacher all over
diamonds. There, too, fluttered the Prince of Wales in light blue
velvet and silver; the Duke of Cumberland strolled about with a little
more gold lace than usual on his scarlet uniform; and Lord Kildare
outdid all other fine and loyal gentlemen present, ‘in a light blue silk
coat, embroidered all over with gold and silver, in a very curious
manner, turned up with white satin, embroidered as the other; the
waistcoat the same as his sleeves.’ But the grandest and quaintest
figure there was the Venetian ambassadress, who had gone in state
from Frith Street, Soho, to the intense delight of the ‘mob.’ This lady
‘drew most people’s attention by somewhat of singularity both in her
air and dress, which was pink, all flounced from top to bottom, with
fringe of silver interspersed. She looks extremely young, has the
French sort of behaviour, and was much taken notice of and spoke
to by all the Royal Family in the Circle.’ The most soberly-dressed
man there was the king himself. He wore a deep blue cloth coat and
waistcoat trimmed with silver, and was as good humoured and
gracious as if Johnny Cope was carrying all before him in the north.
The regiments which arrived in London, in
THE KING’S
November, from Fontenoy, kept the metropolis in SPEECH TO
some commotion, till they were pushed forward, after THE GUARDS.
brief rest, to the midland counties. While they were
receiving tents and arms at the Tower, the Duke of Cumberland had
his headquarters at St. James’s, whence orders were issued (says
Mr. Maclachlan—‘Order Book of the Duke of Cumberland’) of the
most minute character and detail.
The king has been accused of indifference to passing events, and
of having only reluctantly allowed the Duke of Cumberland, who
served so nobly with him at Dettingen, to command the army against
the young Chevalier. Perhaps, what seemed indifference was
confidence in the result. There is evidence, however, that he was not
without anxiety at this critical juncture. In Hamilton’s ‘History of the
Grenadier Guards,’ there is the following description of a scene at St.
James’s, quoted from Wraxall. The incident described is said to have
occurred at the military levee held by the king, previous to the
Guards marching to the north: ‘When the officers of the Guards were
assembled, the king is said to have addressed them as follows:
“Gentlemen, you cannot be ignorant of the present precarious
situation of our country, and though I have had so many recent
instances of your exertions, the necessities of the times and the
knowledge I have of your hearts, induce me to demand your service
again; so all of you that are willing to meet the rebels hold up your
right hand; all those who may, from particular reasons, find it
inconvenient, hold up your left.” In an instant, all the right hands in
the room were held up, which so affected the king, that in attempting
to thank the company, his feelings overpowered him; he burst into
tears and retired.’
While this scene was being acted at St. James’s, ASPECTS OF
Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, then residing in Dover SOCIETY.
Street, wrote to Dr. Freind: ‘People of the greatest
rank here have been endeavouring to make the utmost advantage of
the unhappy state of their country, and have sold the assistance it
was their duty to give. Self-interest has taken such firm possession
of every breast, that not any threatening calamity can banish it in the
smallest instance. There is no view of the affair more melancholy
than this.... Everything is turned to a job, and money given for the
general good is converted too much to private uses.... There were
some exceptions. Almost all our nobility,’ she writes, ‘are gone to the
army, so that many of the great families are in tears, and indeed it
makes the town appear melancholy and dismal.’ There were
exceptions in this case. ‘Let it be said, to the honour of our sex, there
are no dramas, no operas, and plays are unfrequented; and there is
not a woman in England, except Lady Brown, that has a song or
tune in her head; but indeed her ladyship is very unhappy at the
suspension of operas.’ On the night this letter was written, Mrs.
Clive’s Portia, at Drury Lane, was unattractive, in spite of her
imitations of eminent lawyers, in the trial scene; and Mrs. Pritchard’s
Lappet was equally unavailing to bring the public to witness ‘The
Miser,’ at Covent Garden. But Rich’s three nights of the ‘Beggars’
Opera,’ for the benefit of the patriotic fund, produced happy results.
From Mrs. Cibber down to the candle-snuffers, all sacrificed their pay
with alacrity.
As correct news of the condition of London in the FRENCH
latter half of the year, it was stated in the French NEWS OF
papers that insurrectionary undertakings prevailed; LONDON.
that the principal shops were closed; that suspected
peers were under arrest; that an attempt had been made to murder
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that the Tower had been captured
by a Jacobite mob, who had liberated nearly three hundred
prisoners! Every quidnunc in Paris turned to the article ‘London’ in
the ‘Gazette de France,’ to read with avidity of the closing of great
firms, the breaking of the chief banks, and the bewilderment of the
king on his reaching the capital from Hanover. The ‘Gazette’ had no
doubt of the crowning of James Stuart in Westminster Abbey during
the Christmas holidays; and, perhaps, hoped for the appearance of
‘the Elector of Hanover’ on Tower Hill!
On Friday, the 5th December 1745, it is undeniable ANXIETY AND
that London was shaken into terror and consternation CONFIDENCE.
by the news of the arrival of Charles Edward on the
Wednesday at Derby. It was long remembered as ‘Black Friday.’
‘Many of the inhabitants,’ says the Chevalier de Johnstone, in his
‘Memoirs of the Rebellion,’ ‘fled to the country with their most
precious effects, and all the shops were shut. People thronged to the
Bank to get payment of its notes; and it only escaped bankruptcy by
a stratagem. Payment was not indeed refused; but as they who
came first were entitled to priority of payment, the bank took care to
be continually surrounded by agents with notes, who were paid in
sixpences in order to gain time. Those agents went out at one door
with the specie they had received, and brought it back by another; so
that the bonâ fide holders of notes could never get near enough to
present them, and the bank by this artifice preserved its credit, and
literally faced its creditors.’
This, of course, was imaginary. The metropolis recovered its
tranquility. The king, on his side, regained his equanimity. At a levee,
held in December, his Majesty and Lord Derby disputed pretty loudly
as to the numbers of the rebels. ‘Sir,’ said Lord Derby, who had just
arrived from Lancashire, whoever tells you the rebels are fewer than
10,000 deceives you;’ which was, as Mr. Harris writes, thought to be
a pretty strong expression for his Lordship to use to the king. At a
court held a day or two later, Sir Harry Liddel, just from the north,
was asked by his Majesty what Sir Harry held the rebel force to be?
He answered about 7,000, to which estimate the king seemed to
assent; but this did not prevent the whole Court and City from falling
into the utmost panic again before the end of December. The
alternation of hope and fear however passed suddenly into
confidence, when, as the year ended, news reached the London
coffee-houses that young Cumberland was likely to turn the tide of
rebel success. Carlisle was evidently on the point of surrendering,
and this important event took place at the close of the year 1745.
Down to that close, traitors were as closely looked for in London
as rebels were now pursued in their retreat. Whether through
delicacy or ignorance, the style in which a successful ‘take’ of traitors
was made was comically mysterious. For example, in this month of
December, the papers announced that ‘A Musician who resided
some years in London as a foreign Nobleman, and an Irish
Comedian who has acted five years on the English Stage, were
committed to the Marshalsea for High Treason.’
In this eventful year, Jacobite Johnson was quietly JOHNSON
engaged on his Dictionary. Aloof from the fray, he AND LORD
could not forbear flinging a stone on an ex-Jacobite GOWER.
who had ratted. When he came to the word
‘renegade,’ he remembered Lord Gower’s abandonment of the old
Jacobite interest, for place at Court; and his prejudice prompted him
to make Lord Gower infamous for ever, by adding his name to the
vocabulary of slang. ‘When I came to the word renegade,’ he said to
Boswell, ‘after telling that it meant “one who deserts to the enemy; a
revolter,” I added, “sometimes we say a Gower.” Thus it went to the
press; but the printer had more wit than I, and struck it out.’ Another
distinguished man was looking on events with an indifference which
seems affectation. ‘I expect no good news,’ writes
BOLINGBROKE.
Bolingbroke to Marchmont, in September, ‘and am
therefore contented to have none. I wait with much resignation to
know to what Lion’s paw we are to fall.’
CHAPTER VI.
(1746.)
n the first day of the year 1746, the parole given at the
Duke of Cumberland’s headquarters, at Carlisle, was
‘London.’ He well knew the joy the metropolis would
soon receive. Part of the general orders then issued
was thus expressed: ‘The Rebels that have or shall be
taken, either concealed or attempting their escape, or in any ways
evading the Capitulation, to be immediately put in Irons, in order to
be hanged.’ After publishing this order, the duke, leaving Hawley to
cross the border in pursuit of the young Chevalier, returned to
London. There was great fear of a French invasion; and the duke
was to have the command of a southern army to repel it. The
invaders were expected in Suffolk, and the Jacobites hoped that the
expectation would be realised. They often reported it as an
established fact. Fielding’s Jacobite squire in ‘Tom Jones’ is made to
exclaim to the landlord of the inn at Upton: ‘All’s our own, boy! ten
thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Suffolk. Old England for
ever! Ten thousand French, my brave lad! I am going to tap away
directly!’
Carlisle being recaptured, London breathed again,
WAR
and considered its past perils and future prospects. CRITICISM.
The fire-side critics of the war concluded, as the Earl
of Shaftesbury did with his friends in London, ‘that eminus, we
exceeded the ancients, but cominus we fell below them; and this
was the result of our having, it was said, learnt the art of war from
the Spaniards. We never used bayonets in our service till after the
battle of Steinkirk, in King William’s time. Now the Highlanders by
their way of attacking (new to our troops) make a quick impression
and throw our men into confusion. This I imagine to be the principal
reason of the Highlanders gaining such repeated advantages.’
Walpole wrote from Arlington Street: ‘With many other glories, the
English courage seems gone too.’ Yet the old spirit was not extinct.
When the Ministry tried to prevent Mr. Conway going as aide-de-
camp with the Duke of Cumberland, on the ground of his being in
Parliament, the duke informed the young soldier of the fact. ‘He burst
into tears,’ says Walpole, ‘and protested that nothing should hinder
his going—and he is gone.’
Without being uneasy at the idea of invasion the
BREAKING AN
Government took precautions in case of emergency. OFFICER.
It was announced that at the firing of seven guns at
the Tower, answered by the same number in St. James’s Park,
soldiers and officers should repair to previously named places of
rendez-vous. No crowds were allowed to assemble. A race between
two pairs of chairmen, carrying their chairs, round the Park, having
caused a large mob to gather within hail of the palace, was stopped
in mid career by a file of musqueteers, who drove competitors and
spectators into the neighbouring streets. When the park was pretty
well cleared, Captain Stradwick was brought out and ‘broke,’ for
desertion. Why he was not shot, as the king said he deserved to be,
was owing to some influence which seemed to be stronger than the
king himself. Perhaps, as a consequence, the common rank and file
who had deserted were allowed their lives, but at dear cost. They got
a thousand lashes, administered half at a time, in Hyde Park; and on
the off days the mob were regaled with the sight of soldiers getting
their five hundred stripes for speaking evil of his Majesty in their
drink.
Meanwhile, the river one day suddenly swarmed REBEL
with galleys, which picked up numbers of ‘useful PRISONERS.
fellows to serve the king.’ Even the City taverns were
broken into, and there similar seizure was made, but not without
occasional mortal frays, in which there was much promiscuous
shooting, and a forcible carrying off of other ‘useful fellows,’ who
were hurried on board tenders, and thence sent to sea. There was
hardly time for sympathy. A few women in the streets and by the
river side filled the air with shrieks and clamour, but they were not
much heeded. London became full of expectancy of the renewal of
an old and a rare spectacle. The Carlisle prisoners were on their
road to town. There were nearly four hundred of them, including
about threescore officers. Those who were able to march were tied
in couples, and two dragoons had charge of ten prisoners, one
leading them by a rope from his saddle, the other ‘driving them up.’
The captured officers were mounted, but their arms and legs were
tied. Batches of other captive men were sent by sea; some seem to
have been exceptionally treated. The papers announced the arrival
of ‘six coaches and six,’ filled with rebel prisoners, under an escort of
horse and foot. The London gaols were emptied of felons, who were
transferred to distant prisons, in order to ‘accommodate’ the captives
till they were otherwise disposed of. But the most important arrival
was that of the hero himself. The Duke of Cumberland, fresh from
Carlisle, reached London on a dark January morning, at seven
o’clock. Much was made of his having passed only ‘one night in bed,’
in that now easy day’s journey. The duke came with modesty and
great becomingness. Shortly after reaching St. James’s he went
straight to the little Chapel Royal. At the subsequent usual Sunday
drawing-room, there was brilliancy with the utmost gaiety, such as
had not been witnessed for many a year. After a few days the duke
returned northward, departing with the same modesty that had
marked his arrival. He left at one in the morning, but even at that
ghostly hour, and in that inclement season, he was done honour to
by a crowd which he could scarcely penetrate, whose torches were
flashed to their brightest, and whose voices were pitched to the
loudest, as their last ‘God speed!’ The temper of London may be
seen in one of Walpole’s letters, in which he alludes to the too great
favour which had been always shown towards Scotland since the
last rebellion; and he expresses a hope that the duke will make an
end of it.
In the meantime, old rancour against the Jacobites
LONDON
was embittered by the publication of various MOBS.
‘provocating pamphlets;’ and the month came to a
conclusion with the preachings of the 30th of January, and the
comments made on the sermons next day. Bishop Mawson, of
Chichester, preached before the Lords at St. Peter’s, Westminster;
Dr. Rutherford before the Commons at St. Margaret’s; while a
reverend gentleman, who is variously called ‘Pursack’ and
‘Persover,’ aroused the echoes of St. Paul’s in the ears of the Lord
Mayor and Aldermen. Finally, an anonymous poet swept the lyre in
laudation of the duke. How he made the chords ring may be
gathered from a single line:—
Blast, gracious God, th’ assassins’ hell-bred scheme!
The London mob, on the Whig side of politics, cannot be said to
have been more civilised than the same mob of thirty years earlier.
One of its favourite sights was to see Jacobite prisoners brought into
London. The captives were invariably ill-used; but there was a much
more humane feeling manifested for such of them as might end their
career by the axe or the halter. One day in February upwards of forty
officers (including a French colonel of Engineers and four
Frenchmen of lower grade) were brought into London in four
waggons and a coach. The more dignified vehicle carried the French
colonel. They were guarded by a strongly-armed escort. Some were
taken to the New Prison in Southwark, some to Newgate. The
French colonel in the coach, and his four countrymen in a cart, were
driven to the Marshalsea. ‘They were very rudely treated by the
populace,’ say the newspapers, ‘who pelted them with dirt, and
showed all other marks of abhorrence of their black designs.’
Foreigners were just then looked upon with great suspicion. Two
servants of the Portuguese and Sardinian envoys,
AMBASSADORS
respectively, having let their tongues wag too saucily ’ CHAPELS.
at a tavern, under the shield, as they thought, of
ambassadorial protection, had been seized by the constables and
clapped into irons. The envoys demanded their release; and much
correspondence ensued between the Home Office and the envoys. It
was settled that the legation could not shelter an offender against the
law, even though the offender were a fellow-countryman of the
legate. Some attempt was made to compel the foreign
representatives to abstain from employing Popish priests of English
birth in the chapels annexed to the ambassadors’ private residences.
The answer was reasonable enough. As their Excellencies could
bring no foreign priests of the Romish Church with them, they were
obliged to employ English ecclesiastics who were priests of that
Church, in the chapels of the respective embassies. These were the
only ‘mass houses’ to which English Papists, it was said, could
resort, and the Whigs denounced them as the smithies where red
hot conspiracy was beaten into shape between foreign hammers and
a British anvil.
London Whig temper was irritated in another
THE HAVOC
direction. There was not only a reckless assertion of OF WAR.
Jacobitism on the part of the prisoners from the north,
but there was abundance of sympathy manifested for them.
Moreover, full permission was given to the practical application of
this sympathy. Jacobite visitors poured into the prisons, and the
captives ate, drank, and were merry with them, regardless of what
the morrow might bring. Many of the prisoners had pockets well
furnished with gold; and where this was wanting it was supplied by
Jacobite outsiders. Scarcely a day passed without waggoners or
porters depositing in the first lodge hampers of the richest wines and
of the finest delicacies. The warders rejoiced, for they took toll of all;
and the prison chaplains had some idea that this good time was the
beginning of the Millennium.
On the other hand, there was much more misery in the loyal than
in the Jacobite army. The Londoners saw nothing for the
encouragement of loyalty in such a sight as the landing at the Tower
wharf of some of the troops that had been with Cope at Preston
Pans. ‘The poor men,’ say all the papers, ‘were in a most miserable
shocking condition. Some without arms or legs, others their noses
cut off and their eyes put out; besides being hacked and mauled in
many parts of their bodies, after a most terrible and cruel manner.’
This ‘atrocity’ was forgotten in the news that roused London in April.
The course of war in Scotland, from the beginning FLYING
of the year to the 16th of April, was in this wise. On REPORTS.
the 17th of January Hawley was defeated at Falkirk.
On the 30th, the Duke of Cumberland arrived in Edinburgh. March
14th, news came that the Highland army had taken Fort Augustus
and had blown up Fort George. The Ladies Seaforth and Mackintosh
headed two rebel clans on the hills; but their husbands were with the
duke’s army! About the same time old Lord Lovat stimulated the

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Everyday Resistance French Activism in The 21St Century 1St Ed 2020 Edition Bruno Frere Full Chapter

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Everyday Resistance: French Activism

in the 21st Century 1st ed. 2020 Edition

Based on a translation from the French language edition:

ISBN 978-3-030-18986-0 ISBN 978-3-030-18987-7 (eBook)

1 Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? 1

2 Undocumented Families and Political Communities:

3 From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case-­

4 Fighting for Poor People’s Rights in the French Welfare

5 The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic

6 The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space

7 Associations for the Preservation of Small-­Scale Farming

8 Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil

9 A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment

10 “Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations

11 Is the “New Activism” Really New?263

Sylvaine Bulle is Professor of Sociology at the National School of Paris

Bruno Frère is FNRS senior research associate and Professor at the

Introduction: Let a Thousand

Marc Jacquemain and Bruno Frère

The societies of Western Europe—“Old Europe”, as George W. Bush’s

© The Author(s) 2020 1

universal. Its emancipation was supposed to emancipate the whole of

example, by Hirschman (1982), invoking personal, selfish, reasons for

to free hidden reality from domination so as to better combat it (Boltanski

France provides a particularly rich and fascinating setting in which to observe

On the wide spectrum of social movements that can be classified as

How do these instances of resistance position themselves in relation to

The Pressures of Necessity

Urgency forced homosexual associations to totally reorient themselves,

level, necessity is omnipresent as a cause of engagement: it is, again, the

An Ambiguous Relationship to the State

conservative states (such as Francoist Spain) appeared as clear adversaries

A Capacity for Subversion?

desire for an environmentally-friendly form of production. But also

The Difficulties of “Practical Utopia”

different forms of “occupation”. The ZAD occupies the site of a proposed

The accusations of “illegitimacy” levelled against each other by the

Stella Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013) in their impressive review of

(1) Everyday resistance is a practice (not a certain consciousness, intent,

As these two authors also note, everyday resistance is not necessarily

develop in empirical ignorance of effective forms of resistance: if it really is

Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition? London: Verso.

Undocumented Families and Political

Damien de Blic and Claudette Lafaye

Since 2004, hundreds of local committees linked together in a vast

D. de Blic (*) • C. Lafaye

© The Author(s) 2020 21

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1 Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? 1

2 Undocumented Families and Political Communities:

3 From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case-

4 Fighting for Poor People’s Rights in the French Welfare

5 The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic

6 The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space

7 Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming

8 Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil

9 A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment

10 “Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations

11 Is the “New Activism” Really New?263