The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

186 Chapter Six

Serious problems arose in fitting so many new citizens into society.

Urban employment and food supplies did not automatically increase

to accommodate the newcomers. Economic cycles of boom and bust

put urban workers and hangers-on into serious jeopardy, for as the

mass of people and their mobility within the cities increased, older

methods of social control and poor relief, usually tied to parish organi­

zations, became completely inadequate.^3 In Strasbourg, for example,

where the officially enumerated population rose from 26,481 in 1697

to 49,948 in 1789, no less than 20 percent of the population was

indigent by the later date. The always precarious local balance be­

tween population and means of subsistence within the city had been

seriously upset.^4

Crowd action of the kind so decisive for the early course of the

French revolution became possible under these circumstances. Lon­

don had seen the like in the so-called Gordon riots (1780); and it may

have been more by accident than design that London crowds chose

to rally to a reactionary cause—opposition to Catholic emancipation

—rather than championing change in the existing legal order. That

was what happened in Paris in 1789, leading, within a few months,

to full-throated assault upon aristocrats and other enemies of the

people.^5

Yet however slender the stimuli that made London crowds reac­

tionary while Paris crowds became revolutionary, this divergence

turned out to be indicative of a persistent difference between French

and British reaction to the new problems that population growth and

urban expansion had created in the two countries. To put matters in a

nutshell: France exported armed men and created an empire over

much of Europe, whereas Great Britain exported goods as well as men

(armed and unarmed) and thereby contrived to establish a market-

supported system of power that proved more durable than anything

the French achieved, despite their many victories. No one planned

(New York, 1971), pp. 35–36; Jacques Godechot, La prise de la Bastille (Paris, 1965),
p. 75.

3. Oliven F. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford,

1974. provides a masterful overview.

4. Y. LeMoigne, “Population et subsistence à Strasbourg au XVIIIe siècle,” in
   M. Bouloiseau et al., Contributions à l’histoire démographique de la révolution française.
   Commission d’histoire économique et sociale de la révolution, no. 14 (Paris, 1962), pp.
   15, 44.


5. On the Gordon riots cf. Rudé, Paris and London, pp. 268–92. As Rude is at pains
   to point out, the London crowds attacked established figures—those who had advocated
   Catholic emancipation—rather than assaulting the poor Irish of London; hence the
   social character of the rioting was not so very different from that of revolutionary Paris.