Annuaire d'études françaises

The uprising that took place in Paris in 1413 and traditionally referred to as the Cabochiens’ revolt has long been the subject of monographic research. Its story is presented only in the context of large narratives about the civil wars of the Bourguignons and Armagnacs, that is quite justified, but does not imply an increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, all available sources have been studied well already. In this article, it is proposed to approach this event using the so-called "out-of-the-way effect", which Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about and which Aron Gurevich liked to recall. In this case, the events in Paris in 1413 may be associated with much larger processes, which were previously defined as the "crisis of feudalism", which formerly caused considerable controversy. One of the manifestations of this crisis was considered as "bastard feudalism", though this term was although disputed in historiography. The formation of a modern state (État moderne) was an equally debated process. It is also important to include the Cabochiens’ revolt in the series of urban movements of the second half of the 14^th – 15^th centuries. Such a combination does not interfere, but rather helps to identify the specifics of the events of 1413, which firmly occupied a place in the chain of Parisian "revolutions" that stretched for six centuries or even more. In 1413, several processes temporarily merged in Paris, each of which had its own logic and its own history. These are the political activity of the University of Paris, and the movement for the reform of the Church and the kingdom, and the logic of the struggle of feudal rulers, and the evolution of the image of royal power, and the balance of forces within the Paris municipality, and the traditions of urban riots, and much more. In addition to the effect of "non-occurrence", the technique of defamiliarisation, developed at the beginning of the last century by Victor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist philologist, may also be useful. It allows you to look at a familiar thing from an unexpected side, breaking stereotypes of perception. Regarding the Cabochiens, this allows us to draw attention to how immediately after the uprising work began to remove all references to the participation in the events of the University, the municipality, "moderate reformers", some aristocrats and to construct a negative image of butchers and knackers, hungry for blood and money, who managed to lead the Parisian rabble. This image made it possible to contaminate the Paris events of 1413 and 1418. As always, the power of stereotypes turned out to be so powerful that phenomena of fundamentally different nature were combined here: in one case, it was about a movement based on municipal structures and amenable to socio-political interpretation, in the other – about a surge of wild violence comparable to St. Bartholomew's Night and the September murders of 1792.

Lessons of the Cabochiens’ revolt in 1413

Uvarov Pavel

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