1. The scandal trials, including the one summarized here, have been most thoroughly studied by Hans-Jurgen Lusebrink, in his Kriminalitat und Literatur im Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg-Verlag, 1982), and in “L'imaginaire social et ses focalisations en France et en Allemagne à la fin du XVIII siecle,”Revue Roumaine d'Histoire 22 (1983): 371-83.

2. Quoted in Lusebrink, “L'imaginaire social,” 375-76.

3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), 39. I am grateful to Mauro Calise for underscoring the importance of this passage.

4. Pathbreaking work on the barricades is in progress by Marc Traugott, who is investigating their evolution and changing functions. See his “Barricades as Repertoire: Continuities and Discontinuities Across 19th Century France” (paper presented to the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, October 1991). I am grateful to Traugott for his helpful comments on an earlier essay and for allowing me to refer here to his unpublished work.

5. Charles Tilly, in his “Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys or Social Movements,”Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (1983): 470, describes this “sacking routine” as common in the eighteenth century, observing that it was frequently used to punish (1) tavern or brothel keepers who cheated their customers or (2) public officials who had passed the bounds of legitimacy. Its use to punish a venal householder who had abused a servant appears to have been an innovation of the prerevolutionary period.

6. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Tilly's contributions to the field of collective action and social movements are so massive as to make them hard to summarize. For a brief bibliography, see Sewell, “Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference,”Politics & Society 18, no. 4 (1990): 527-52.

7. Tilly, Contentious French, 2. The concept was not new to his work. In his text, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), Tilly writes,

At any point in time, the repertoire of collective actions available to a population is surprisingly limited. Surprisingly, given the innumerable ways in which people could, in principle, deploy their resources in pursuit of common ends. Surprisingly, given the many ways real groups have pursued their own common ends at one time or another. (P. 151)

8. Charles Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758-1834” (paper presented to the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, October 31, 1991), 2.

9. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Review of Tilly's The Contentious French,”American Journal of Sociology 93 (1987): 1248.

10. Tilly, “Speaking Your Mind,” 463.

11. Ibid., 464, where Tilly's Figure 1 is summarized.

12. Ibid., 464-65.

13. Ibid., 465, where Tilly's Figure 2 is summarized.

14. In an earlier statement of his typology, Tilly had given the construct a substantive dimension. He saw the old repertoire dominated both by “competitive” forms (e.g., feuds, brawls between the youths of neighboring villages, battles between rival groups of artisans, and charivaris) and by “reactive” ones (“group efforts to reassert established claims when someone else challenges or violates them”—the “someone else” often being the national state). In contrast, since the middle of the nineteenth century, collective action has been dominated by “proactive” collective actions which “assert group claims which have not previously been exercised” (From Mobilization, 147). But the attempt to link the repertoire of contention theoretically to purposive categories like “competition,”“reaction,” and “proaction” was not really tenable—as Tilly soon discovered—for although a particular form of contention might first appear in connection with a particular kind of demand, there is no reason to expect that once it has been learned it will not be used for another purpose. The potential transferability of forms of collective action from one site or type of conflict and demand to others was an important but poorly specified implication of Tilly's concept of the repertoire, as I argue below.

15. The most definitive statement of his theoretical approach to social movements—on which much of the following discussion is based—is “Speaking Your Mind.” The definition is on p. 466.

16. Charles Tilly, “Social Movements and National Politics,” in Charles Bright and Susan Harding, eds., Statemaking and Social Movements (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 297-317.

17. The key source here is what has become known as “resource mobilization theory,” as represented most centrally in Mayer Zald and John McCarthy, eds., Social Movements in an Organizational Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), esp. chap. 7. But the distinction between movement and organization has been largely accepted by all the contemporary schools of social movement study.

18. Tilly, Contentious French, 2.

19. Sewell, “Collective Violence,” 547.

20. See Sewell's Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Also see his “Social Change and the Rise of Working-Class Politics in Nineteenth-Century Marseille,”Past and Present 65 (November 1974): 75-109.

21. The Revolution, Sewell writes, “permanently transformed the way ordinary French men and women could conceptualize and act out their collective loyalties” (“Collective Violence,” 548).

22. Ibid., 533.

23. In a personal communication to the author, Sewell specifies this critique in more detail. He writes that “the real problem is not that the notion of the repertoire is innocent of cultural content but that Tilly's conception of culture is so anemic and so particularized that cultural shifts can never be recognized as driving forces in historical change.”

24. Sewell, “Collective Violence,” 540-45.

25. Ron Aminzade, in a personal communication, points out that both Tilly and Sewell pay insufficient attention to the Revolution of 1830 and to the period from 1830 to 1834 in France. He notes, “This is when the barricade first appears as an offensive tool; it is also when traditional forms from the old repertoire, like the serenade, charivari, and perhaps the petition, take on a new character.” Aminzado also points out that it was in this period that networks of publicists and movement organizers emerged, from the Society for the Rights of Man to various independent newspapers and educational organizations.

26. However, there is something of an injustice in his “cultural” critique of Tilly. Sewell claims that Tilly's work on the repertoire is innocent of cultural content. But what else can it mean to say, except that popular culture conditions collective action, that the ways in which people contend are based on their knowledge of how one can contend and on the expectations of others of how people should contend? But it is certainly fair to argue that Tilly has little to say about how such expectations are generated and diffused and about the cultural changes that made possible the changes in collective action he traces.

27. In a personal communication, Sewell specifies that he would

argue that the French Revolution was the preeminent transformative event in, but not the origination of, the epoch-making emergence of a public sphere. This cultural transformation, while interrelated in many ways with the rise of capitalism or state centralization, is nevertheless relatively autonomous, possessing its own distinctive logics, rhythms, and contradictions.

Sewell's emphasis on the emergence of a public sphere appears to be considerably broader than his earlier emphasis on the vocabulary of association.

28. See, in particular, John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), and Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

29. I am grateful to Charles Tilly for pointing this out to me from his files on Germany collected for Charles, Louise, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century: 1830-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

30. Tilly made the linkage in 1978 in his From Mobilization, 145-47. But it is not found in his theoretical article, “Speaking Your Mind.” An echo of it is found in his historical synthesis, “Statemaking and National Politics,” in Bright and Harding, ed. Statemaking and Social Movements, 297-317, where he describes pre-nineteenth-century uprisings and popular fervors as “defensive actions by groups which had long existed” (p. 303). But The Contentious French abandons this linkage, although Sewell insists it is still present in another form (“Collective Violence,” 529).

31. I have taken the term from my colleague, Benedict Anderson, who characterizes the spread of revolution from France and the Americas as the diffusion of models. See his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 80-81.

32. Marc Bloch, Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931), 175.

33. Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires,” 5, emphasis added.

34. This idea was already present in Tilly's From Mobilization when he posited that “a rigid-repertoire model describes a group which chooses familiar means unfailingly. To the extent that this model applies, we would expect innovation to be rare, and to occur through breaks and crises” (p. 155).

35. On earlier forms of the strike, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 1-16. On proletarianization, see Tilly, From Mobilization, 159-60.

36. Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires,” 6.

37. Tilly, “Speaking Your Mind,” 466.

38. In a personal communication, Ron Aminzade points out that

during the years from 1830-34 [in France], charivaris and serenades become political weapons. The former are used to chastise conservative deputies, who have returned from Paris, for their support for the regime's increasingly conservative policies and the latter, serenades, are routinely used to show support from republican deputies who have resisted the regime's drift to the right.

He concludes that “elements in the old repertoire also become more modular during the course of the nineteenth century as they are transformed, rather than simply displaced by the emergence of a new repertoire.” I am extremely grateful to Aminzade for this hypothesis, which is examined in my forthcoming Power in Movement, chap. 2.

39. Maier, From Resistance, 54.

40. Ibid., 54, 61.

41. Ibid., 74.

42. Quoted in ibid., 75.

43. Indeed, it was only to enforce a boycott that was succeeding elsewhere without violence that a coalition of merchants and publicists in Boston employed the older routine of destroying imported tea. See Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

44. Brewer, Sinews of War, 233.

45. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3, 53.

46. Ibid., 70-74.

47. Ibid., 74. In York, up to 40% of the adult males signed a petition for abolition (p. 74), and in Leeds, a meeting appealed to “the rough sons of lowest labour” (p. 75).

48. See Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), chap. 3, on the use of the mass petition by the Chartists. On the unsuccessful Kennington Common demonstration, see Raymond Postgate, The Story of a Year: 1848 (London: Cassell, 1955), 117.

49. See the discussion by Traugott in his “Barricades as Repertoire.” It is not clear how much use was made of barricades during the French Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm is of the opinion that they were never used at all. See his The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (New York: Dutton, 1964), 146.

50. Traugott, “Barricades,” 3.

51. Ibid., 8-9.

52. Ibid., 3.

53. For an inventory based largely on secondary sources, see Sidney Tarrow and Sarah Soule, “Acting Collectively, 1947-49: How the Repertoire of Collective Action Changed and Where It Happened” (paper presented at the 1991 Annual Conference of the Social Science History Association). The best such source remains Jacques Godechot, Les Révolutions de 1848 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971).

54. In a letter of April 21, 1848 to his librettist, Piave, quoted in Music and Revolution: Verdi (Open University, 1976), 42.

55. The letter bomb was, in fact, first used by the Israeli secret service against German scientists working in Egypt and later copied by Arab terrorists.

56. For a more extended treatment of movement organizations, see Bert Klandermans, ed., Social Movement Organizations, International Social Movement Research, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1989). The perspective outlined in these paragraphs is detailed and supported in my forthcoming Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Mass Politics in the Modern State, chap. 5.

57. On cycles of protest, see my Struggle, Politics and Reform: Collective Action, Social Movements and Cycles of Protest, Cornell University Western Societies Papers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chap. 3, and chap. 8 of my Power in Movement (forthcoming).

58. In my forthcoming Power in Movement, chaps. 3 and 4, I attempt a beginning of such an explanation.

59. This argument is most familiar from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. But also see Elizabeth Eisenstein's “Revolution and the Printed Word,” in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., Revolution in History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On this point, John Markoff writes, in response to an earlier version of this essay, that

by providing widely disseminated and vivid descriptions of forms of conflict, often more vividly depicted than the substance of grievances and almost always more vividly depicted than the organizational vehicles of contentious mobilization, print is probably a more significant vehicle for the diffusion of forms than of “substantive content” and much more significant than for organizational vehicles.

60. Brewer, Sinews of War, xxi.

61. See Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires.”

62. The trend continued through the 1830s, by which time Parliament had become the object of approximately 30% of the contentious gatherings uncovered by Tilly in his analysis of Southeast England between 1758 and 1834.

63. Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires,” 9.

64. Donald Read, The English Provinces, c. 1760-1960: A Study in Influence (New York: St. Martin, 1964), chap. 1.

65. Tilly, From Mobilization, 167.

66. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 76, cites the work of John Phillips, who found that “of four Parliamentary boroughs he studied between 1760 and 1800 the two most electorally active (Norwich and Maidstone) were the most petition prone.” John Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England: Plupers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 57-60.

67. David Snyder and Charles Tilly, “Hardship and Collective Violence in France: 1830-1960,”American Sociological Review 51:464-81.

68. Roderick Aya, Rethinking Revolutions and Collective Violence: Studies on Concept, Theory and Method (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1990).

69. Note that Sewell intends to publish a revised version of his article in book form.

Modular Collective Action and the Rise of the Social Movement: Why the French Revolution was Not Enough

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