Patient safety -- Canada and France

Patient safety is a key issue in managing and assessing a regional or national health system. There are very sizable variations in patient safety statistics across hospitals, with significantly higher rates of infection and mortality in some institutions than others. Why is this? And what can be done in order to improve the safety performance of low-safety institutions, and to improve the overall safety performance of the hospital environment nationally?

Previous posts have made the point that safety is the net effect of a complex system within a hospital or chemical plant, including institutions, rules, practices, training, supervision, and day-to-day behavior by staff and supervisors (post, post). And experts on hospital safety agree that improvements in safety require careful analysis of patient processes in order to redesign processes so as to make infections, falls, improper medications, and unnecessary mortality less likely. Institutional design and workplace culture have to change if safety performance is to improve consistently and sustainably. (Here is a posting providing a bit more discussion of the institutions of a hospital; post.)

But here is an important question: what are the features of the social and legal environment that will make it most likely that hospital administrators will commit themselves to a thorough-going culture and management of safety? What incentives or constraints need to exist to offset the impulses of cost-cutting and status quo management that threaten to undermine patient safety? What will drive the institutional change in a health system that improving patient safety requires?

Several measures seem clear. One is state regulation of hospitals. This exists in every state; but the effectiveness of regulatory regimes varies widely across context. So understanding the dynamics of regulation and enforcement is a crucial step to improving hospital quality and patient safety. The oversight of rigorous hospital accreditation agencies is another important factor for improvement. For example, the Joint Commission accredits thousands of hospitals in the United States (web page) through dozens of accreditation and certification programs. Patient safety is the highest priority underlying Joint Commission standards of accreditation. So regulation and the formulation of standards are part of the answer. But a particularly important policy tool for improving safety performance is the mandatory collection and publication of safety statistics, so that potential patients can decide between hospitals on the basis of their safety performance. Publicity and transparency are crucial parts of good management behavior; and secrecy is a refuge of poor performance in areas of public concern such as safety, corruption, or rule-setting. (See an earlier post on the relationship between publicity and corruption.)

But here we have a little bit of a conundrum: achieving mandatory publication of safety statistics is politically difficult, because hospitals have a business interest in keeping these data private. So there was a lot of resistance to mandatory reporting of basic patient safety data in the US over the past twenty years. Fortunately, the public interest in having these data readily available has largely prevailed, and hospitals are now required to publish a broader and broader range of data on patient safety, including hospital-induced infection rates, ventilator-induced pneumonias, patient falls, and mortality rates. Here is a useful tool from USA Today that lets the public and the patient gather information about his/her hospital options and how these compare with other hospitals regionally and nationally. This is an effective accountability mechanism that inevitably drives hospitals towards better performance.

Canada has been very active in this area. Here is a website published by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The province requires hospitals to report a number of factors that are good indicators of patient safety: several kinds of hospital-born infections; central-line primary bloodstream infection and ventilator-associated pneumonia; surgical-site infection prevention activity; and hospital-standardized mortality ratio. The user can explore the site and find that there are in fact wide variations across hospitals in the province. This is likely to change patient choice; but it also serves as an instant guide for regulatory agencies and local hospital administrators as they attempt to focus attention on poor management practices and institutional arrangements. (It would be helpful for the purpose of comparison if the data could be easily downloaded into a spreadsheet.)

On first principles, it seems likely that any country that has a hospital system in which the safety performance of each hospital is kept secret will also show a wide distribution of patient safety outcomes across institutions, and will have an overall safety record that is much lower than it could be. This is because secrecy gives hospital administrators the ability to conceal the risks their institutions impose on patients through bad practices. So publicity and regular publication of patient safety information seems to be a necessary precondition to maintaining a high-safety hospital system.

But here is the crucial point: many countries continue to permit secrecy when it comes to hospital safety. In particular, this seems to be true in France. It seems that the French medical and hospital system continues to display a very high degree of secrecy and opacity when it comes to patient safety. In fact, anecdotal information about French hospitals suggests a wide range of levels of hospital-born infections in different hospitals. Hospital-born infections (infections nosocomiales) are an important and rising cause of patient illness and morbidity. And there are well-known practices and technologies that substantially reduce the incidence of these infections. But the implementation of these practices requires strong commitment and dedication at the unit level; and this degree of commitment is unlikely to occur in an environment of secrecy.

In fact, I have not been able to discover any of the tools that are now available for measuring patient safety in hospitals in North America in application to hospitals in France. But without this regular reporting, there is no mechanism through which institutions with bad safety performance can be "ratcheted" up into better practices and better safety outcomes. The impression that is given in the French medical system is that the doctors and the medical authorities are sacrosanct; patients are not expected to question their judgment, and the state appears not to require institutions to report and publish fundamental safety information. Patients have very little power and the media so far seem to have paid little attention to the issues of patient safety in French hospitals. This 2007 article in LePoint seems to be a first for France in that it provides quantitative rankings of a large number of hospitals in their treatment of a number of diseases. But it does not provide the kinds of safety information -- infections, falls, pneumonias -- that are core measures of patient safety.

There is a French state agency, OFFICE NATIONAL D'INDEMNISATION DES ACCIDENTS MÉDICAUX (ONIAM), that provides compensation to patients who can demonstrate that their injuries are the result of hospital-induced causes, including especially hospital-associated infections. But it appears that this agency is restricted to after-the-fact recognition of hospital errors rather than pro-active programs designed to reduce hospital errors. And here is a French government web site devoted to the issue of hospital infections. It announces a multi-pronged strategy for controlling the problem of infections nosocomiales, including the establishment of a national program of surveillance of the rates of these infections. So far, however, I have not been able to locate web resources that would provide hospital-level data about infection rates.

So I am offering a hypothesis that I would be very happy to find to be refuted: that the French medical establishment continues to be bureaucratically administered with very little public exposure of actual performance when it comes to patient safety. And without this system of publicity, it seems very likely that there are wide and tragic variations across French hospitals with regard to patient safety.

Are there French medical sociologists and public health researchers who are working on the issue of patient safety in French hospitals? Can good contemporary French sociologists like Céline Béraud, Baptiste Coulmont, and Philippe Masson offer some guidance on this topic (post)? If readers are aware of databases and patient safety research programs in France that are relevant to these topics, I would be very happy to hear about them.

Update: Baptiste Coulmont (blog) passes on this link to Réseau d'alerte d'investigations et de surveillance des infections nosocomia (RAISIN) within the Institut de veille sanitaire. The site provides research reports and regional assessments of nosocomia incidence. It does not appear to provide data at the level of the specific hospitals and medical centers. Baptiste refers also to work by Jean Peneff, a French medical sociologist and author of La France malade de ses médecins. Here is a link to a subsequent research report by Peneff. Thanks, Baptiste.

Schama's revolution

Quite a number of previous posts have focused on historical cognition: how does the historian conceptualize a complex bit of history? Let's reflect a bit on Simon Schama’s conceptualization of the history of the French Revolution in Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989). Schama is a highly original thinker when it comes to conceptualizing history -- witness his motif of landscapes as a way of thematizing swatches of European history (Landscape And Memory), or his crossing of history and fiction in Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations. So what is distinctive about his history of the French Revolution?

To begin, his history breaks radically from earlier approaches to the Revolution. Schama distances his account from both materialist accounts like that of Albert Soboul (The French Revolution 1787-1799) and more orthodox approaches such as that of de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the French Revolution). Schama doubts the reality of large, impersonal historical forces; he doubts the historical reality of the concept of great classes in society; and he focuses instead on the thoughts and actions, often barely rational, of the individuals great and small who contributed to the period. He puts several of these points very clearly in the introduction:

The ‘bourgeoisie’ said in the classic Marxist accounts to have been the authors and beneficiaries of the event have become social zombies, the product of historiographical obsessions rather than historical realities…. Continuities seem as marked as discontinuities. Nor does the Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand historical design, preordained by inexorable forces of social change. Instead it seems a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences (not least the summoning of the Estates-General itself). (xiv)

Schama resists the totalizing impulses of other narratives, the intellectual tendency to characterize the Revolution in the most general and comprehensive terms. For Schama, the grand locales (France, Paris, and the countryside) and great actors (monarchy, bourgeoisie, peasantry) are less important than the “local passion and interests” of the regions, provinces, and villages. The upshot of this preference is clear: rather than aggregating the events of the period into a single grand process of Revolution, Schama emphasizes the separateness and particularity of the component processes and local realities. In the extreme: France did not have a revolution, but instead the territory encompassed a number of parallel social and economic processes in different places, experienced differently by individuals in those places. (But of course this strategy of disaggregation can be applied at each lower level as well: instead of a "counter-revolution" in the Vendée, there were actions, church-burnings, massacres, and other kinds of organized violence in the various villages and towns of the region.)

It is also worth pointing out that the sorts of events that Schama pays attention in the book to are very different from those highlighted by Soboul and de Tocqueville. Schama focuses on things like commemorations, ceremonial elephants, public memories, and bits of architecture. It is the particular but revealing element or action that Schama finds most interesting. He pays attention to philosophy, theatre, the Comédie-Française, paintings, leaders (potted and sane), and extravagant events (the lofting of a balloon by Etienne Montgolfier to a crowd of 100,000 comes in for a few paragraphs). And he is uninterested in constructing a logical narrative according to which events A, B, and C are constitutive of the Revolution, and this event led to that event, which led in turn to the final event.

So Schama’s ontology consists of actors, cultural meanings, shifting circumstances, and contingent outcomes. He gives little attention to “structures,” organizations, and forces of history, and pays much more attention to the individuals whose states of mind and action constituted the period of violence and upheaval we refer to as the “French Revolution.” It is a sort of cultural commentary on the moments of the time period – rather than a sustained effort to make sense of it all, to provide an explanation in terms of causes, classes, or structures. In fact, the Revolution as an integrated event largely disappears from his account, in place of a congeries of happenings and productions.

The overall impression of this approach to historical analysis is that it amounts to a "deconstruction" of the Revolution in favor of a large number of interesting and contingent but inherently lesser processes and events. Schama dissolves the Revolution as a grand historical event, and uses the noun simply as a handy label in terms of which to refer to a heterogeneous and sometimes disparate and confusing series of processes.

It is a fair question to ask, what precisely does Schama's account allow us to do? What intellectual insights does the reader gain? What kind of historical question is it intended to answer?

Citizens certainly doesn't amount to an explanation of the events of the French Revolution, if by that we mean a narrative that identifies specific causes that brought about the outcome. In fact, it is hard to find examples of causal reasoning or causal attribution in the book at all. So causal explanation, based on discovery of large social structures and forces, is not the goal of the book.

Further, it doesn't seem to try to answer a question about the coherence of the period: "How did these events hang together?", since quite a bit of the narrative is intended to demonstrate precisely how incongruous were many of the various events, symbols, and actions. So the book isn't intended to let the reader say to himself or herself, "So that's what it was all about; that's the kind of thing the French Revolution was." The book certainly doesn't attempt to boil the Revolution down to a few simple formulas.

Somewhat more persuasive is the idea that perhaps it is intended as a work of cultural interpretation, more analogous to art criticism than to orderly, logical story-telling. Here the historian undertakes to locate a few specific moments and artifacts that bring to light some of the features of mentality of the participants within the tangled skein of actions. (This would bring it into a parallel with Darnton's history of the Great Cat Massacre -- interpretive ethnography of the moment rather than causal explanation of a large historical event (link).)

But finally, maybe the aim is more radical than any of these possibilities. Maybe Schama is interested most fundamentally in leading the reader to think very differently about the task of the historian and the content of historical knowledge. (This seems to be the goal of others of Schama's books -- for example, Dead Certainties with its pointed skepticism about fact-based narratives.) Maybe Schama's most basic point is ontological: there is no such thing as coherent, logical, orderly, causally structured human history. Instead, all there is, is a congregation of separate threads, processes, contingencies, actions, choices, ideologies, and freakish accidents that ultimately do not add up to a coherent whole.

Ontology of the French Revolution

How does the historian need to think as he or she formulates a discursive representation of a complex period of history? What assumptions does the historian make about the structures and entities that make up the social world? And what sorts of conceptual systems are needed in order to permit the historian to do his or her work of analysis, comparison, and explanation? These questions lead us to a philosophical version of the problem: what forms of ontology do historians employ in analyzing history?

Consider a concrete and familiar example of historical conceptualization: historians confronting the realities of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799. What are the historical entities to which historians need to refer in constructing a history of these events? Consider, to start, Albert Soboul’s construction of the making and carrying out of the French Revolution (A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799 and The French Revolution 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon).

Soboul begins his short history with a chronology of “principal events” – roughly 150 events from February 1787 to November 1789. He refers to happenings at a variety of levels of scale in this chronology, from actions by a small number of individuals to events encompassing hundreds of thousands over a dispersed geography. Here is a partial list:

Assembly of the Notables, Calonne dismissed, abortive reform of Parlements, “Day of the Tiles” in Grenoble, rural and urban unrest increases, riot in the Baubourg St.-Antoine, fall of the Bastille, The Great Fear, Assembly moves to Paris from Versailles, Church lands nationalized, mutiny and repression of garrison at Nancy, Louis XVI’s attempted flight from the country, foundation of the Feuillants Club, massacre of the Champ de Mars, mounting unrest caused by food prices, uprising at Paris overthrows the Monarchy, massacre of prisoners in Paris, execution of Louis XVI, murder of Marat ...

... and so on through crowd violence, state action, military movements, rise and fall of revolutionary leaders, political factions, ideologies, and bloodshed.

Some of these items are events in a specific time and place enacted by a small group of people (mutiny, storming of the Bastille); others are regionally diffuse collections of such local actions (the Great Fear, for example); and others are actions of officials, leaders, and generals. So clearly Soboul’s historical ontology includes “events”, which perhaps we can define as “actions by individuals and groups, both large and small.” (This definition captures most but not all the items in Soboul’s chronology.)

What about social entities beyond the level of actions by individuals? Here are some of the sorts of higher-level structures to which Soboul refers in his account: the Revolution itself, as a thing that exists in history, has causes, and has a “nature”; but also a larger category within which the French Revolution is one instance – "revolution". He refers to earlier social orders (the seigneurial system and the privileged orders of feudal society); a new social order (liberal democracy, bourgeois economy); large historical structures such as feudalism and capitalism; and a specific category of revolution (bourgeois revolution). Several of these concepts fall in the general category of a “type of social and economic organization” – what Marx refers to as a “mode of production.” (Here is Soboul’s paraphrase of the idea of feudalism: “a concept of social and economic history, defined by a particular form of property ownership and by a system of production based on landed property, preceding the modern system of capitalist production” ((Soboul 1977) : 3).)

He refers to different forms of the social management of labor (corvée labor, slave labor). He refers to specific periods of governance in French history – for example, the Capetian monarchy; and he refers to a type of governance – the absolutist monarchy. He refers to classes – the bourgeoisie, the landlord class, the peasant class. It is apparent that Soboul’s historical ontology incorporates large stretches of Marx’s social theory of the structures that constitute society: forces and relations of production, property systems, modes of production, superstructures such as the state and the church.

There is also an ontology of social institutions in Soboul's writing about the Revolution. He refers to subordinate social organizations within existing society – the officer corps, the Church. He refers to economic and demographic processes – population increase, trends of price movements for grain. He refers to features of political consciousness on the part of various social actors – hopes, fears, revolutionary spontaneity (38). And he refers to political groups and clubs – the Girondins (“spokesmen of the commercial bourgeoisie”; 87), Montagnards and Jacobins (bourgeois but appealing to common people; 88), and Sans-Culottes (the organized representatives of the common people; 100).

So Soboul’s historical vocabulary is a rich one, in that he refers to historical things and structures at a variety of levels. We might paraphrase Soboul’s historical ontology in these terms: the French populace of the 1770s consisted of a geographically dispersed collection of persons enmeshed social, economic, and political structures. The circumstances of life and opportunity created for different people by these structures in turn defined them as “classes” with interests and motivations. Peasants, artisans, landowners, lawyers, and government officials had very different views of the social world, and their political behavior was accordingly different as well. The political struggles that constituted the turmoil of the years of revolution derived from contests over power among different groups of people, mobilized by different organizations with different social, economic, and political interests.

In other words, Soboul works with a “proto-theory” of what a society is, how it works, and how individuals are influenced in their ordinary conduct; within the context of this scheme, the task of the historian is to discover some of the specific features of those social relations and features of consciousness, and explain the small and large events that combined to bring about “the Revolution”.

Combining the results of a similar survey of a number of historians -- de Tocqueville, Soboul, Schama, Darnton, Cobb, Sewell, Tilly, and others -- we can arrive at something like an inventory of ontological concepts of the French Revolution – events, individuals, structures, mentalities, processes, conditions, patterns, and technologies. These categories of historical "things" encompass what begins to look like a comprehensive list of the types of entities to which historians refer when conceptualizing France's revolution. Or in other words: it is possible for us as readers of these historians to sketch out a large historical ontology, from which different historians borrow in varying proportions in their analysis of the events of the late eighteenth century in France.

What is Alsace?

It may seem like a strange question: What is Alsace? It is a region of France. It is a culturally and linguistically distinct population of 1.8 million people. Most visitors would observe that there is a distinctive Alsatian style in life, in architecture, and in culture. It possesses one great city (Strasbourg), many middle-sized cities (Hagenau, Wissembourg, Colmar), and hundreds of small villages. It is a beautiful collection of landscapes, villages, fields, forests, and vineyards. It is the homeland of Hansi and Marc Bloch. It is a region that has suffered acutely in warfare -- eastern Alsace was the site of most of the battles of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and it was the site of the final stages of the Battle of the Bulge and the German counteroffensive, Northwind, with intense tank fighting and destruction in dozens of villages. The sufferings of World War II are still remembered by the octagenarians. It is a border culture, with influences from Germany and France establishing aspects of culture and social attitudes over several centuries. And there is always choucroute, kougelhopf, and Kronenberg. In short, Alsace has a history and a set of traditions that set its people apart.

So from the point of view of travel-writing, the question has an easy answer. But the social reality is more complex and fluid. The social reality of Alsace today is highly heterogeneous, within and across villages, towns, and cities. And ongoing processes of nation-building and globalization raise the question of its cultural survival.

Take the issue of language. Stop into any grocery store or hospital in rural Alsace and you will find elderly people gossiping and talking in Alsatian. For many of these people Alsatian was their native language; for some it remained their only language. But the situation is different if you pause to watch boys playing ball in the public square; their chatter is in French -- or sometimes Arabic. So it is an open question whether the Alsatian language community will remain a vital one, or whether it will retreat into the archives. Current estimates indicate that fewer than 10 percent of children in Alsace are fluent in Alsatian. So the question arises, whether the language will reproduce itself into the the next several generations.

Or consider folkloric customs and cuisine -- the colorful costumes and dancing that are still very much a part of village festivals. How long will these customs survive in an age of mass-based entertainment and a homogenizing media culture? How are the customs transmitted across generations? How long can tarte flambée persist as an Alsatian specialty in the face of an onslaught by Pizza Hut?

And how about the distinctive modes of class relations that you find in Alsace -- the ways in which the local bourgeoisie dress and interact with each other, and how they relate to other social strata -- farmers, bus drivers, shop clerks? In what ways are these class relations distinct from those of Bourgogne? And how distinct are they from their counterparts in the United States?

More fundamentally, consider the range of contemporary social problems that Alsace faces, in both its cities and its villages: drug use, youth unemployment and disaffection, hooliganism, poorly assimilated immigrant communities. How will Strasbourg or Hagenau deal with these problems? And will "Alsace" remain? Or will the national strategies of social services, public policy, and legislation lead to a more socially uniform Alsace -- just a quaint set of historical markers on the autoroute?

So really, the question posed here has two distinct parts, both very interesting. The first is historical: what were the rich pathways of culture formation through which Alsace came to be Alsace? How did this particular mix of values, attitudes, modes of behavior, language, and culture come together?

The second part of the question is forward-looking: where is Alsace going? Will it preserve its cultural distinctiveness and its language? Or will it become simply another interchangeable part of France and the world? How much staying power does a traditional culture have in the face of the impulses of nation-building, mass communication, and globalization of consumption that the contemporary world imposes?

These questions are interesting in consideration of Alsace. But they are even more interesting in the context of thinking about globalization itself. Is it possible for local and regional cultures to successfully negotiate the challenges of the twenty-first century in ways that permit the survival of their cultural uniqueness? Or is the global world of the future destined to look more like a very large shopping mall, with the same foods, clothes, and ethics everywhere?

The Franco-Prussian War

The rapid, bloody, and total defeat of the French army by the Prussian army in 1870-71 was an enormous and unexpected shock to France and to Europe. Since the Napoleonic Wars it was taken as given that France's armies were powerful, well-equipped, and well generaled. But the Prussian army quickly defeated French armies across eastern France, from Wissembourg to Sedan, with massive loss of life on the French side. And the collapse of the army was rapidly followed by the siege of Paris and the Paris uprising leading to the establishment of the Commune of Paris and eventually its bloody suppression. So this period of two years was a critical moment in France's history in the nineteenth century.

Michael Howard's 1961 history, Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871, is probably the most comprehensive book in English on the Franco-Prussian War. Here's how Howard expresses the the comprehensiveness and shocking totality of France's defeat:

The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well as an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat. (1)

So Howard's judgment of the causes of this massive military failure is ultimately technological and systemic. The technical changes to which he refers are familiar: the role that railroads could play in the logistics of nineteenth-century warfare (opportunities that needed to be recognized and incorporated into military plans and the design of operational systems); the advent of new infantry weapons (breech-loading rifles of greater range and speed of loading); and new advances in artillery. The Prussian army incorporated breech-loading rifles (the needle gun) as early as 1843; whereas the French (as well as the British and Austrian armies) retained the muzzle-loader until the 1860s. And the Prussian generals led major advances in artillery in the decades leading up to the Franco-Prussian war, with greater precision and fire power in their Krup guns.

Railroads played a key role in Prussia's mobilization and logistics. The Prussians were able to maintain coordination and organization of their rail system; whereas the French rail system quickly fell into disorder. Howard describes the military potential of railroads in these terms:

Speed of concentration was only one of the advantages which railways provided. They carried troops rapidly to the theatre of war; and they enabled them to arrive in good physical condition, not wearied and decimated by weeks of marching. Armies needed no longer to consist of hardened regular troops; reservists from civil life could be embodied in the force as well.... Further, the problem of supplying large forces in the field was simplified. (3)

The systemic part of Howard's diagnosis is a failure of government: a failure to coordinate ministries and the bureaucracy of the military in pushing forward the reforms that would lead to effective incorporation of new technological possibilities into the order of battle and mobilization. The Prussian army made intelligent use of the General Staff as a learning organization; the French had no comparable organization.

Military failure is perhaps best viewed as a single species of organizational failure more generally. Elliot Cohen and John Gooch offer a different analytical basis for trying to understand the military disaster of the Franco-Prussian War in Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War. Bad generals can cause military disasters; but Cohen and Gooch take the position that "human error" is an explanation we turn to too quickly when it comes to large failures. (Likewise, "pilot error" and "surgeon error" are too superficial in aviation and hospital failures.) Rather, it is important to look for the systemic and organizational causes of failure. They treat war as a complex organizational activity, and they attempt to discover the causes of military failures in a variety of kinds of organizational failure. They identify three basic kinds of failure: "failure to learn, failure to anticipate, and failure to adapt" (26). And when these kinds of failure compound in a single period, it is likely enough that the result will be catastrophic failure.

Cohen and Gooch offer a fascinating "matrix of failure", partitioning "command level" (from president down to operating units) and "critical task" (communication of warning, appropriate level of alert, coordination) (55); and they demonstrate how mistakes at various levels of command in the several critical tasks can cascade into "critical failures". The cases they analyze include the failure of American antisubmarine warfare, 1942; Israel Defense Forces on the Suez Front and the Golan Heights, 1973; the British at Gallipoli, 1915; the defeat of the American Eighth Army in Korea, 1950; and the French army and airforce, 1940.

It seems that the Cohen-Gooch framework can be usefully applied to the Franco-Prussian War. Each of the key failures occurred: failure to anticipate (especially, failure to anticipate the possible consequences of Prussia's rapid military modernization in the 1850s and 1860s; failure to anticipate the fatal consequences that would follow from the French declaration of war in July 1870); failure to learn (an almost total lack of ability on the part of the French general staff to make sense of the causes of defeat as they occurred in summer and fall 1870); and, most strikingly, a failure to adapt (essentially the same tactics were used at Sedan as had first been applied at Wissembourg; Howard, 204-08).

Emile Zola's treatment of the war, The Debacle: 1870-71, is not a piece of analytical history; instead, it is a brilliant novelist's best effort to capture the horror and hopelessness of the campaigning in the summer and fall of 1870 from the point of view of the peasant Jean Macquart. The confusion of endless marches in one direction and then the reverse; the misery of driving rain; the hunger of poorly provisioned campaigning; and the seemingly endless terror of artillery and rifle fire put the reader into the shoes of the foot soldier as he approaches his end. The novel presents a textured and grim picture of the confusion of the march and the terrors of the battlefield:

In Remilly there was a dreadful mix-up of men, horses, and vehicles jamming the street which zigzags down the hill to the Meuse. Half way down, in front of the church, some guns had got their wheels locked together and could not be moved in spite of much swearing and banging. At the bottom of the hill, where the Emmane roars down a fall, there was a huge queue of broken-down vans blocking the road, while an ever-growing wave of soldiers was struggling at the Croix de Malte inn (139-40)

And a description of fighting in Bazeilles:

Clearly the attack was going to be terrible. The fusillade from the meadows had died down. The Bavarians were masters of the little stream fringed with poplars and willows, and were now preparing for an assault on the houses defending the church square, and so their snipers had prudently drawn back. The sun shone in golden splendour on the great stretch of grassland, dotted with a few black patches, the bodies of killed soldiers. (190)

Lying on the ground, sheltering behind stones or taking advantage of the slightest projections, the men were firing all out, and along this wide, sunlit and empty street there was a hurricane of lead with streaks of smoke, like a hailstorm blown by a high wind. A young girl was seen running across the road in terror, but she was not hit. But then an old man, a yokel in a smock, was insisting on getting his horse into a stable, and he was struck in the forehead by a bullet with such force that it knocked him into the middle of the road. The roof of the church was blown in by a shell. (191)

And here, the fateful trap of Sedan, where the larger part of the French army was annihilated:

The hundred thousand men and five hundred cannon of the French army were there packed together and hounded into this triangle. And when the King of Prussia turned westwards he saw another plain, that of Donchery, empty fields extending to Briancourt, Marancourt and Vrigne-aux-Bois, a waste of grey earth, powdery-looking under the blue sky, and when he turned to the east there was yet again, opposite the huddled French lines, an immense vista, a crowd of villages..... In all directions the land belonged to him, he could move at will the two hundred and fifty thousand men and the eight hundred guns of his armies, he could take in with one sweeping look their invading march. (197)

It is an interesting question to ask: to what extent do the skills of the novelist complement the theories of the social scientist and the narratives and analysis of the historian, in helping us to come to a better understanding of the reality of the historical moment? Is Zola's novel a genuine addition to our ability to make sense of this period in France's history? Or is it simply -- fiction?

Darnton's history

Twenty-five years ago, Robert Darnton offered a highly original perspective on historical understanding in his The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), and the book still warrants close attention. He proposes to bring an ethnographic perspective to bear on historical research, attempting to arrive at nuanced interpretation of the mentalities and worldviews of ordinary folk in early modern France. (Significantly, Darnton collaborated with Clifford Geertz at Princeton, and the influences seem to have run in both directions.)

Darnton attempts to tease out some of the distinguishing elements of French rural and urban culture—through folklore, through documented collective behavior, or through obscure documents authored by police inspectors and bourgeois observers. He is “realist” about mentalités; and he recognizes as well the plasticity and variability of mentalités over time, space, and group. (“I do not believe there is such a thing as a typical peasant or a representative bourgeois” (Darnton 1984 : 6).) And he is more interested in the singular revealing incident than in the large structural narrative of change; he demonstrates that careful historical interpretation of a single puzzling event can result in greater illumination about a historical period than from more sweeping descriptions and narratives.

Darnton does not accept the notion that “good” social history must be quantitative or highly “objective”—that is, neutral with respect to perspective. Rather, he sees the task of a cultural social historian as one of uncovering the threads of voice and action that permit us to reconstruct some dimensions of “French peasant worldview” and to see how startlingly different that worldview is from the modern view. Our distance from the French peasant is great—conceptually as well as materially. So the challenges of uncovering these features of agency and mentality based on very limited historical data are great.

In the title essay of the volume Darnton goes into a single incident in detail: the autobiographical account of Nicolas Contat, a printer’s apprentice (later journeyman), in which Contat describes an episode of cat killing by the apprentices and journeymen in the shop. Darnton relates the incident to its cultural and social context—the symbolic role that cats had in festivals in the countryside, contemporary attitudes towards violence to animals, the sexual innuendo represented by killing the mistress’s cat, the changing material relations between master and worker in the 18th century trades. Darnton offers a “thick description” of this incident, allowing the reader to come to a relatively full interpretation of the significance of the various elements of the story. At the same time, he sheds light on the background mentalité and social practices of workers and masters. So the essay is a paradigm of interpretative cultural history. Darnton describes his work in these terms:

It might simply be called cultural history; for it treats our own civilization in the same way that anthropologists study alien cultures. It is history in the ethnographic grain. … This book investigates ways of thinking in eighteenth-century France. It attempts to show not merely what people thought but how they thought—how they construed the world, invested it with meaning, and infused it with emotion. (Darnton 1984 : 3)

Darnton implicitly considers whether this incident should be considered an instance of class resistance—that is, whether we can see the germs of class struggle in this complex moment. And his general perspective is that such a reading would be reductionist and anachronistic. There is resistance in this incident; there is sharp hostility between shop workers and the master and his family; but the resistance and the resentment are thematized around more specific grievances and patterns than the class struggle story would suggest. (It may be that we could better relate Darnton’s reading of the incident to Scott’s “everyday forms of peasant resistance,” emphasizing as it does the role of humor and undetectable violence; see an earlier post on this subject.) The workers’ conduct in this incident is not aimed at overthrowing the master, but at imposing an episode of pain and celebrating a moment of riot.

The notion of reading runs through all the chapters, for Darnton suggests that one can read a ritual or a city just as one can read a folktale or a philosophic text. "The modes of exegisis may vary, but in each case one reads for meaning—the meaning inscribed by contemporaries in whatever survives of their vision of the world" (Darnton 1984 : 5).

The analysis of folk tales is just as rewarding. Darnton offers a content analysis of the folk tales collected by several generations of folklorists. He disputes the psychological interpretations offered by Fromm, Bettelheim, and others—most convincingly on the grounds that they fail to pay close enough attention to the narrative content and known historical context of the stories. Instead, Darnton offers an interpretation of the world and worldview of the peasant storytellers who invented and repeated these tales: the omnipresence of hunger, the hazards of life on the road, the burden of children in poor households, … He shows that there is great consistency in the narratives of these stories over many generations—and also there are national differences across German, French, and English versions of the stories.

Darnton’s work in this book is valuable for the philosophy of history in several ways.

• First, it exemplifies a different model of historical knowledge: not a series of events, not a cliometric analysis of society and class, but an interpretation of moments and mentalités in a fashion designed to shed light on the larger historical moment. It is an effort to make historical understanding “ethnographic.”
• Second, it possesses its own form of rigor and objectivity. The facts matter to the interpretations that Darnton offers—the facts of the multiple versions of folk stories, the facts of what we know about the changing circumstances in the printing trades, the facts of peasant hunger at several periods in the 17th and 18th centuries.
• Third, it has the potential for shedding deeper light on French popular action than we are likely to gain from a traditional “rational actor” or class-conflict approaches. The motives that Darnton discerns among the printers are sometimes goal-directed; but sometimes emotional, and sometimes related to the simple recklessness of young men in constraining circumstances.

Finally, Darnton's work here provides some specific insights into questions about the historical study of “mentalités” (post). Darnton shows that it is possible to make significant headway in the project of figuring out how distant and illiterate people thought about the world around them, the social relations in which they found themselves, the natural world, and much else. The documents available to us in the archives have a richness that speaks to these ways of thinking the world; it is therefore a valuable task for the historian to engage in piecing together the details of daily life and experience that the documents reveal and conceal.

(See an earlier post for a different aspect of Darnton's historiography -- an analysis of the reviews he has written over twenty-five years in the New York Review of Books.)

French sociology as a distinctive tradition

One might think that the globalization of intellectual life has led to the result of the "unification" of major scientific disciplines around one shared set of global assumptions about the discipline: what the major unsolved problems are, what the discipline should strive to achieve, what the products of knowledge ought to look like. From the outside, anyway, one imagines that there is just one "world physics," governed by roughly the same assumptions whether practiced in Berne, Chicago, London, Berlin, or Delhi. (I would find it very interesting to be corrected on this assumption, if any readers can support the idea that there are important differences in national traditions when it comes to high-energy physics or molecular biology.)

In the social sciences, though, this assumption of convergence and unification seems to be incorrect. Instead, it seems to be the case that there are durable national traditions in sociology, political science, and anthropology that are distinct in different national settings; and further, it seems that the fairly extensive amount of cross-fertilization that occurs through international conferences and publications hasn't in fact significantly undermined the durability of these distinct traditions.

A fairly obvious version of this observation arises when we contrast the ways that economic theory is pursued in the United States and India. American economists by and large take the methodological position of neoclassical assumptions about individual behavior, general equilibrium assumptions about systemic behavior, and the assumption of "mathematicization" as a model for how knowledge results ought to be formulated. (Examples might include Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu in the 1950s, and currently Greg Mankiw.) Indian economists, by contrast, seem as a group to be more interested in the human and social content of economic behavior and systems -- the effects that economic processes have on quality of life, the ways in which income and nutrition are related, and more generally, the social relations that correspond to the abstract equations of economic theory. (I'm thinking of scholars such as Partha Dasgupta (An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution) or Amartya Sen (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation) as exemplars of the latter perspective; here is Sen's biographical essay on the occasion of his receipt of the Nobel Prize.)

That's economics; similar observations might be made about political science and anthropology. Here I'd like to sketch out a fairly specific hypothesis: that French sociology forms a substantially distinct tradition of social thinking in the twentieth century, and that this tradition has remained largely intact in spite of the substantial amount of Franco-American interaction that has occurred in the social sciences and humanities. I don't mean to suggest that there are no important themes of convergence, shared issues, and some cross-fertilization between French and American sociology. But I am suggesting that French sociology has developed through French academic institutions and traditions since the 1920s; that departments and research institutes have maintained a degree of continuity in the topics and methods in use; and that these followed a path of development that was significantly different in timing, topics, and methods from the development of American sociology during the same time period. And in fact, when we look at some important recent works of French sociology, such as Didier Lapeyronnie's Ghetto urbain or Stephane Beaud's La France invisible, we get a distinct impression of researchers who have cultivated significantly different assumptions about the nature of sociology. Can we get more specific about this impression?

Making this sort of comparison requires that we compare the recent histories of the two traditions of sociological resesearch and theory. There are a couple of sources that provide some key signposts for the development of American sociology in the twentieth century. I particularly like two of Andrew Abbott's books: Chaos of Disciplines and Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred, a history of the Chicago school. (Martin Bulmer's The Chicago School of Sociology is another good source on the history of the Chicago school.) Another important and valuable contribution on the history of American sociology is Craig Calhoun's edited book, Sociology in America: A History. I think these books give a pretty good mid-level understanding of the intellectual and institutional steps through which American sociology developed over roughly a 75-year period.

For the French side, there are several recent books that can serve as a mid-level guide to the development of sociology as a social science in France. One is by Céline Béraud and Baptiste Coulmont (Les courants contemporains de la sociologie [Contemporary Currents in Sociology]). The other is by Philippe Masson (Faire de la sociologie: Les grandes enquêtes françaises [Doing sociology: the great French investigations]). Both books appear to be written for a readership that doesn't exist in the United States: advanced undergraduates needing a theoretically sophisticated introduction and guide to the evolution of the discipline of French sociology. And for my eye, both books do an admirable job of presenting the relevant sociological ideas clearly, rigorously, and with nuance. Neither is a research monograph; but neither book descends into over-simplification. So they serve as a good basis for getting an understanding of the geography of the evolution of the intellectual frameworks of sociology in France over the past seventy years.

There are several interesting features of the narrative that the two books offer. Most basic is periodization: they both begin with the post-war period in French sociology. Histories of American sociology generally start with the Chicago school in the 1920s and make the intellectual connections backwards to Tönnies, Simmel, Durkheim, Darwin, and Comte. But these books treat contemporary French sociology as finding its origin in studies of French society following World War II. Béraud and Coulmont write, "In 1945, at the end of the second world war, French sociology no longer existed. It had lost its intellectual force and energy. And the social context didn't really prepare the ground for its revitalization. It was necessary first to reconstruct France from the destruction of war." Masson makes a similar point, writing that "sociology (with its departments, research laboratories, curricula, reviews, etc.) wasn't constituted until relatively recently, during the end of the 1950s and the decade following." And, Béraud and Coulmont suggest, the pre-war tradition of Durkheim's sociology had exhausted itself; so reviving sociological research was not simply a matter of dusting off the ideas and methods of Durkheim and his followers in the 1920s and 1930s.

The choice of 1945, then, is meaningful; the authors appear to suggest that French sociology took a genuinely new beginning after World War II. Béraud and Coulmont break the story up into several major intellectual periods and meta-themes in roughly chronological order:

• "renewal of French sociology" (Marxism, labor sociology, American influence, empiricism, statistical methods); [Raymond Aron, Michel Crozier, George Gurvitch, and, transitionally, Pierre Bourdieu/Jean-Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers]
• "Thinking inequalities" (inequality, opportunity, domination, masculinity, segregation) [Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon, Eric Maurin];
• "Action and homo sociologicus" (habitus, strategy, situational sociology);[François Dubet, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon, Bernard Lahire]
• "History and sociology" (the role of comparative historical work in sociology); [Jean-Claude Passeron, Edgar Morin, Henri Mendras]
• "Individual and modernity" (individualization and the definition of modernity) [Raymond Boudon, François Dubet, Eric Maurin]
  

Influences and concepts from American social science come into the account in a few places -- for example, in the discussion of rationality and collective action theory (free riders, methodological individualism) and in the discussion of the influence of Goffman's sociology of interaction. (The sociology of German-born, British-based sociologist Norbert Elias is also credited with being a substantial influence.) But most commonly, the discourses described here, the debates and controversies that are described, are largely self-contained within the precincts of French sociological research.

Philippe Masson offers a different basis for surveying pretty much the same series of developments within French sociology. He picks out a number of important topics and researchers for detailed treatment: Georges Gurvitch, Georges Friedmann, Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, Louis-Joseph Lebret, Alaine Touraine, Michel Crozier, Edgar Morin, Henri Mendras, Raymonde Moulin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, François Dubet, Bruno Latour, Steve Wooglar, Jean Peneff. Topics he highlights include urban sociology, sociology of labor, the study of inequality, the study of the professions, the influence of "constructivism", the study of urban youth, and the sociology of science and technology. Masson notes the influence of American sociology at a number of points (82), including the influence of Talcott Parsons. And he also describes a significant French interest in the American Chicago school of sociology and the approaches of "ethnomethodology". Once again, though, at least in my reading, it seems to me that the narrative that Philippe Masson provides is one that captures a fairly autonomous national tradition of sociological thinking -- with occasional but limited influences from developments in sociology in the United States.

This is a start on the question at hand. Both these books seem to document what might be called in the sociology of science a largely independent research tradition constituting French sociology since World War II. (This impression of independence could probably be tested by a citation analysis.) This tradition defined its own problems for research; debated and pursued a variety of methods of investigation; and formulated some fairly specific ideas about what a finished sociological analysis ought to look like. And it seems to have resulted in a current sociological enterprise that differs in significant ways from current American or British sociology.

What is needed next is a good analytical account of how French sociology differs from American sociology in terms of (a) the topic areas that are identified as most important for investigation, (b) the methods that are regarded as most reliable and scientifically justified (statistical, qualitative, comparative, participant-observer, ...); and (c) the assumptions that exist about what form sociological knowledge should take (deductive theories, narratives of particular social processes, statistical tables, ...).

Transnational protest movements

We've seen a fairly large increase in the occurrence of large international protest movements in the past thirty years. The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s drew a substantial following across Europe and to some extent North America. (Historian E. P. Thompson played a significant leadership role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; see for example PROTEST AND SURVIVE.) Anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, and Davos drew substantial support from international organizations and participants. Major anti-war protests occurred in numerous European cities after the onset of the US-led war on Iraq. And now protests in London against the G20 meeting and in Strasbourg against NATO have drawn supporters and groups around Europe (post). (Here is a current account of the Strasbourg protests in the Dernieres nouvelles d'Alsace.)

These movements are riveting in a number of ways, from the point of view of sociology and international politics. We can ask questions at every edge of the phenomena:

Power and influence. How effective are mass demonstrations at achieving their declared goals? Do mass demonstrations influence government and multinational policies in the direction intended by the organizers and followers? For that matter -- how much of an influence can a large demonstration in Rome have on a subsequent effort to mobilize over a similar issue in New York? What is the role of mass media in the timing, pace, and public impact of large demonstrations?

Mobilization. What processes of mobilization and organization are at work in these specific periods of mass mobilization? To what extent do modern transnational protests embody a significant degree of common purpose and political identity? (Here's a recent post on the difficulty of defining a group mentality.) What organizations have the most influence in determining the strategy and tactics of the mass political actions that are called for? What networks of leaders and counter-politicians can be discerned in the period of mobilization leading up to the mass event? What is the nature of the networks that exist within the various communities of interest -- environmentalists, anti-war activists, anti-globalization activists? What sorts of issues have proven most potent in mobilizing significant numbers of adherents and organizations from different countries? What motivates followers to heed the call and bring themselves to London or Strasbourg? What is the combination of commitment, identity, and adventure that results in involvement?

Internal politics. What factors internal to a movement -- whether environmentalist, anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-nuclear -- lead to cohesion and dissension within the movement? What factors lead to the occasional outbreaks of violence between protesters and police? (See an earlier post on this question.) Is violence a deliberate tactic on either side -- militants or forces of order? What role do organizations such as anarchist groups and other radical, rejectionist groups play within the broader movement? Is it possible for small groups of rejectionists to "hijack" the large demonstration for their own purposes?

These questions overlap several distinct areas of research: resource mobilization theory, social movements, international relations theory, and comparative politics. (This is a point that McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow make in Dynamics of Contention: there is much to be gained by studying these contentious movements across the traditional areas of study.) And the questions are probably further complicated by the availability of internet-based forms of communication and mobilization.

Sidney Tarrow has turned his attention to international protest movements as a particularly interesting form of "contentious politics." His 2005 book, The New Transnational Activism, treats international protests and their movements from the point of view of the Tilly-McAdam-Tarrow framework of theory and analysis of contentious politics. Here are a few framing assumptions from the introduction:

Students of domestic movements long ago determined that collective action cannot be traced to grievances or social cleavages, even vast ones like those connected to globalization. Acting collectively requires activists to marshal resources, become aware of and seize opportunities, frame their demands in ways that enable them to join with others, and identify common targets. If these thresholds constitute barriers in domestic politics, they are even higher when people mobilize across borders. Globalization is not sufficient to explain when people will engage in collective action and when they will not.

Nor does combating globalization automatically give rise to "global social movements." For Charles Tilly, a "social movement" is "a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities" that uses a well-hewn contentious repertoire on the part of people who proclaim themselves to be worthy, unified, numerous, and committed.

For one thing, forming transnational social movements is not easy. Sustaining collective action across borders on the part of people who seldom see one another and who lack embedded relations of trust is difficult. For another, repertoires of contention grow out of and are lodged in local and national contexts. Even more difficult is developing a common collective identity among people from different cultural backgrounds whose governments are not inclined to encourage them to do so.

Tarrow's central hypothesis about transnational protest movements comes back to the core idea of "opportunity structures." International organizations and networks have created a new set of opportunities for transgressive groups who have an interest in challenging the status quo.

Tarrow identifies several important types of sources of evidence and theory for his current work: international political economy, anthropologists and students of public opinion, specific studies of international protest events, studies of transnational networks and institutions, and theorists of the idea of "global civil society." He explicitly locates the book as falling squarely within the research program established in Dynamics of Contention; his goal is to make use of this ontology of social mechanisms and processes to provide a sociology of transnational protest.

What I'm eager to see is some of the concrete empirical work that this approach suggests: specific empirical studies of the networks, organizations, and dynamic processes through which major transnational protests have unfolded in the past decade or so. It would seem that some important new tools helpful for such study are now much more readily available -- essentially, using the internet to track organizations, announcements, and efforts at mobilization. Tarrow provides some of this research -- for example, in his summary of research on the networks and localism of participants in the "Battle of Seattle". But this level of analysis seems to be where the action needs to be at this point in the study of transnational social movements. But Tarrow is certainly right in thinking that this subject area is important, and it is one that follows very logically from the framework of analysis of social contention developed by himself, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly in the earlier Dynamics of Contention.

Social control of crowds

There is a pretty high level of social protest taking place in France today. Strikes and demonstrations are taking place in many cities, involving students, faculty, workers, and other ordinary people. (Here is a recent news roundup dated March 19, 2009, on strikes, demonstrations, and manifs in the past month or so, and here is a BBC report on a round of large strikes in January.) The demands largely have to do with the current economic crisis, unemployment, changes in the social security system, and proposed reforms to higher education. French people are demanding specific changes from the government, and the government does not seem to want to compromise.

These collective actions carry out a tradition of public protest in French political culture that goes back at least a century and a half (Charles Tilly, The Contentious French). And few politicians in France will have overlooked the fact that public protests have sometimes developed into even more confrontational forms of collective action and conflict -- in 1968, for example, and in the banlieue in 2005. So the current round of protests and mass demonstrations has a significance in French political history that raises the possibility of even more intense civil conflict in the next twelve months.

What is to prevent the possibility that large organized demonstrations and strikes may develop into more violent conflicts between the population and the state in the future? How can the state ensure that large-scale peaceful protest -- a basic democratic right -- doesn't turn into episodic rioting and civil unrest when political stalemate emerges or when economic and social conditions worsen?

The question is a pressing one, because very large demonstrations and protests are volatile and unpredictable. When there are tens of thousands of participants and a range of leading organizations in a large demonstration, it is possible for the actions of the crowd to develop in ways that were not intended or anticipated. A peaceful march down a central boulevard can proceed from beginning to end with a great deal of internal discipline, with organizations maintaining ranks and preserving order. Many of the photos of manifs in French cities are distinguished by the prominent signs and banners the protesters carry announcing the organizations they represent -- labor unions, student organizations, faculty groups. And these banners themselves are an indication of organization and discipline. So large, peaceful protests can be organized and carried out successfully.

But the same march can also degenerate into skirmishing and street fighting involving small groups of activists and police. A small splinter group of violent protesters may break away from the march to engage in acts of violence against property -- burning cars, smashing shop windows. And these acts may spread by contagion to other parts of the crowd. Or a group of activists may deliberately confront the police with stones or bottles, with the goal of provoking violent reaction and an escalation of conflict. (This appears to have happened repeatedly in Athens a few months ago, and it was an anarchist tactic in the anti-globalization protests that took place in many cities a few years ago.) Or a group of police may engage in a demonstration of power intended to intimidate the crowd, leading to police violence against members of the crowd; again, this violence may spread to other locations. Even an unfortunate accident can lead to an outburst of violence -- a frightened driver losing control of his car and injuring a group of demonstrators, for example, can lead to panic and escalation. And any of these small outbreaks of violence can spread through the larger crowd, leading to an uncontrollable spasm of action and reaction.

So how can the authorities in a democracy develop strategies for ensuring that peaceful protests avoid violent escalation? I suppose the most direct strategy is to consider the demands themselves and evaluate whether they legitimately call for changes of policy that ought to be enacted. Compromise over the central issues leading to mass protest presumably has some effect on the likelihood of violence and disorder. If the people are convinced that the government is acting unjustly, the government ought to at least consider whether there is some legitimacy in these complaints.

A second strategy is more tactical. Recognizing that protest is likely to occur, it makes sense for the authorities to work with the organizers and their organizations to arrive at agreements about the scope and nature of the protest. The route, location, duration, and other conditions of the protest can be negotiated. And the authorities are well advised to attempt to gain the support of the organizers in an agreement to maintain internal discipline within the demonstration -- to win the agreement of the organizations themselves to attempt to suppress possible outbursts of violence by minority elements within the crowd.

A third strategy involves, of course, policing. The authorities have both the ability and the obligation to use police powers to ensure public order. And this means that they need to plan intelligently for the disposition and behavior of police forces to contain possible violent outbursts. But the use of police force is a delicate political art. Heavy-handed, intimidating policing seems to be as likely to provoke violence as to suppress it. Police behavior that depends upon the conspicuous threat of force likewise is likely to be provocative -- a double line of police with truncheons and riot gear, with face shields providing a disturbing anonymity, is likely to provoke fear and aggression in the crowd that it confronts. And, of course, police behavior that crosses the line to overt acts of brutality is almost certain to provoke violent response, as news of police violence spreads through the crowd. But it is also possible to err on the side of insufficient police presence; forces that can be quickly overwhelmed create the situation of a sudden escalation of violence by a crowd that has suddenly realized that there is no barrier to further violent actions.

It would seem that the ideal prescription for a policing strategy is something like this: enough police force in the vicinity to respond quickly and decisively to acts of violence by members of the crowd; positioning of police forces in fairly inconspicuous locations so their presence is not itself a provocation; and well-trained police forces who can be trusted to refrain from unnecessary violence against protesters. (The "police riot" in Chicago in 1968 plainly led to rapid escalation of violence in that situation.)

What makes this question so complicated is the fact that it involves social actions, conflicts, and relationships at many levels: the basic conflict between organized groups with explicit demands and the state with its interest in enforcing its policies; the limited degree of control that protest organizers have over the behavior of followers; the fact that smaller groups and organizations within the protest movement may have goals that are more radical than those of the main organizations; the fact that the authorities have only limited control over the forces at their command; and the fact that there may not be acceptable compromises that successfully resolve the conflict between protesters and the state. These factors make the behavior of the crowd somewhat unpredictable, and they introduce major sources of contingency into the way in which a particular day of protest and season of dissent play out.

Bringing the discussion back to France in 2009, there seem to be several large possibilities for the coming year. The government may decide that it needs to adjust some of its policies in order to reduce the level of popular dissent and unrest; it needs to reach a social compromise. The government may hold firm but the dissenting organizations may grow fatigued or discouraged -- so that the current round of protest and strikes subsides. Both sides may hold firm but an equilibrium level of protest and response may be reached, with neither side escalating to a higher level of civil conflict and violence. Or, finally, both the government and the protest movement may hold firm and protests may spiral upward into greater levels of social conflict, with riots and violent protests ensuing. More and more force may be exerted through police repression, and this may lead to more widespread and more aggressive demonstrations in the following weeks. And, of course, all of these scenarios are likely to have consequences for electoral outcomes in the coming several years.

eighteen forty-eight

The revolutions of 1848 were the stage upon which the "spectre haunting Europe" danced. Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Alexandre Herzen, Alexis de Tocqueville, and numerous other critical observers of Europe's trajectory looked at 1848 as a moment of continent-wide social and political revolution. Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution is a very interesting effort to synthesize the movements and events of the year in a specific attempt to try to assess the degree to which events in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Milan, and dozens of other European cities hang together as a "year of revolution." It's worth reading -- even for those for whom the history is pretty familiar.

One reason that the book is so interesting is that the period itself is fascinating -- the events, the social movements and causes, the mechanisms through which social contention spread and intensified, and the personalities who were drawn into engagement and commentary. The three men pictured above -- Tocqueville, Herzen, and Bakunin -- are only a sliver of the powerful and enduring personalities who played important roles during the critical weeks and months of unrest in a variety of cities. Another reason for the interest of the book is Rapport's effort to separate out some of the causes and claims that led to mass protest in city after city -- relief of impoverishment, anger at the impersonal economic relations of the time, and the claims of ethnic and national groups for self-determination. Fundamentally, Rapport suggests that mobilization and political demands flowed from two basic issues: the crushing poverty that segments of urban society experienced at mid-century, exacerbated by financial crisis and crop failures (Paris, Berlin), and the demand for political autonomy for national and ethnic groups (Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary). Finally, the book is distinguished by its effort to treat the full canvas of unrest and violence across much of the continent -- not simply focusing on France, as one is sometimes inclined to do in thinking about 1848.

Tocqueville's Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 is a particularly intimate view of the events in Paris in spring, 1848. Tocqueville was a Deputy of the National Assembly and an aristocrat, and in January 1848 he gave a prescient speech in the Chamber of Deputies:

I believe that right now we are sleeping on a volcano ... can you not sense, by a sort of instinctive intuition ... that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel ... the wind of revolution in the air? (quoted in Rapport, 42)

In Recollections he chronicles his own experiences only a few months later, walking the streets of Paris during the street fighting in February 1848. He writes of his experience of February 23, 1848:

I took my leave early and went straight to bed. Though my house was quite near the Foreign Office, I did not hear the firing which so greatly changed our fate, and I went to sleep unaware that I had seen the last day of the July Monarchy. (Recollections, 35)

As I left my bedroom the next day, the 24th February, I met the cook who had been out; the good woman was quite beside herself and poured out a sorrowful rigmarole from which I could understand nothing but that the government was having the poor people massacred. I went down at once, and as soon as I had set foot in the street I could for the first time scent revolution in the air: the middle of the street was empty; the shops were not open; there were no carriages, or people walking; one heard none of the usual street vendors' cries; little frightened groups of neighbours talked by the doors in lowered voices; anxiety or anger disfigured every face. I met one of the National Guard hurrying along, rifle in hand, with an air of tragedy. I spoke to him but could learn nothing save that the government was massacring the people (to which he added that the National Guard would know how to put that right). (36)

Rapport describes the massacre to which Tocqueville's cook and the National Guardsman apparently refer, as being the instigating event that led to successful insurrection in February. It took place on rue des Capucines:

When the marchers came to a halt, they pressed against the soldiers, and the officer, apparently hoping to nudge them back a little, ordered his men to 'Present bayonets!' As the troops performed the manoeuvre, a mysterious shot burst into the night air. In a knee-jerk response the nervous soldiers let off a volley, the bullets killing or wounding fifty people. (52)

Tocqueville continues with his stroll on the morning of February 24:

The boulevard along which we passed presented a strange sight. There was hardly anyone to be seen, although it was nearly nine o'clock in the morning; no sound of a human voice could be heard; but all the little sentry boxes the whole way along that great street seemed on the move, oscillating on their bases and occasionally falling with a crash, while the great trees along the edge came tumbling into the road as if of their own accord. These acts of destruction were the work of isolated individuals who set about it silently, methodically and fast, preparing materials for the barricades that others were to build. It looked exactly like some industrial undertaking, which is just what it was for most of those taking part. (38)

(I've always thought it would be very interesting to take a group of students on a walking tour of the sites that Tocqueville mentions in Recollections -- though many of the locations must have disappeared in the work of Haussmann in reconfiguring the urban geography of Paris. Timothy Clark has some very interesting analysis of Haussmann's designs in The Painting of Modern Life.)

Marx's writings of the events of February and June in France are more analytical and more political at a nuts-and-bolts level. Marx's face-to-face experience of the events was more fleeting than Tocqueville's -- Rapport recounts Marx's rather unsuccessful efforts as a political speaker, attempting to raise class consciousness (231). (Blanqui and Proudhon both seem to have been more successful in this vein.) But Marx followed the events carefully through available journalism, and he made every effort to interpret the comings and goings in a way that made sense to him from the framework of historical materialism and politics as class conflict. Here is how Marx described the outcome of the bloody June repression of the revolution in Paris:

The Paris workers have been overwhelmed by superior forces; they have not succumbed to them. They have been beaten, but it is their enemies who have been vanquished. The momentary triumph of brutal violence has been purchased with the destruction of all the deceptions and illusions of the February revolution, with the dissolution of the whole of the old republican party, and with the fracturing of the French nation into two nations, the nation of possessors and the nation of the workers. The tricolour republic now bears only one colour, the colour of the defeated, the colour of blood. It has become the red republic. (N.Hr.Z., 29 June 1848)

There remained only one way out: to set one section of the proletariat against the other. For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards, each composed of a thousand young men between fifteen and twenty. For the most part they belonged to the lumpenproletariat, which in all towns, forms a mass quite distinct from the industrial proletariat. It is a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living off the garbage of society, people without a definite trace, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, varying according to the cultural level of their particular nation, never able to repudiate their lazzaroni character.... Thus the Paris proletariat was confronted by an army of 24,000 youthful, strong, foolhardy men, drawn from its own midst. The workers cheered the Mobile Guard as it marched through Paris! (Eighteenth Brumaire, 52-53)

For me, one of the most interesting questions about 1848 is also the most basic: were these disturbances "revolutionary," or were they something different and perhaps less historically significant over the long sweep of the century? Were perhaps the "February days" better described as simply a short period of civil unrest and plebeian rioting; and were the "June days" simply a show-down with a state and military increasingly willing to use force to exert its will? And might we think that it is best to look at Berlin, Milan, Vienna, and Paris in 1848 as largely separate social upheavals brought together in a relatively short period of time, but lacking the internal connections that would constitute a large revolution? In other words, was 1848 really a "year of revolution", as Rapport says in his subtitle, or was it less dramatically, a year of unrest, rioting, and eventual political change?

One reason for posing the question in these terms is the fact that the concept of "revolution" is a very imposing one. When we think of "revolutions," we think of the great examples -- France 1789, Russia 1917, China 1949. We think of organized revolutionary parties; mass movements; political contest over control of the state; a program of fundamental social and economic change; and eventual seizure of state power. Against this sweeping set of unifying ideas, one might say that 1848 never reached this threshold of significance and unity.

But perhaps this way of putting the question gets it backwards. Perhaps it is the "great" revolutions that need a second look -- as Rapport suggests somewhere in a single sentence. Perhaps it is the Russian Revolution that has been over-dramatized, and the widespread social and political upheavals of 1848 are more genuinely revolutionary than the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in one corner of Europe. The upheavals across Europe in 1848 are continental in scope; they involve a confluence of related claims (for autonomy for national groups, for poverty relief, for a democratic voice in government); and they did in fact result in "regime change" in Italy, France, Austria, and Germany. And, as Rapport, Tocqueville, and Marx seem to agree -- by June 1848 in France, at least, there was a polarization around class lines and the primacy of the social question.

So it's a simple question, really: were there any "revolutions of 1848"?