‘Who can we blame for this madness?’: collective violence in fin-de-siècle French newspapers

Abstract This article compares the media coverage of two instances of collective violence in early 1890s France to understand how the French press interpreted, judged and portrayed social unrest to their readership. By examining coverage of the attacks at Fourmies and Aigues-Mortes, we learn that press attitudes to violence stemmed from how the three main political press camps—the republican, conservative and intransigent papers—imagined the social consequences of violence. In this way, newsprint media functioned as powerful arbiters of justice in the face of societal violence. The article finds that ideas about blame were conditional and contextual, dependent on who newspapers judged to be the social ‘stabilizer’ and ‘destabilizer’ in each episode. The offenders in the two events—the army and xenophobic workers—were universally lauded by newspapers and absolved from guilt for targeting their social inferiors: proletarian strikers and foreign immigrants. We thereby make out a conceptual hierarchy of participants, from the most socially stabilizing to the least stabilizing, in the eyes of the French press—with those most unassimilated or distanced from the French republican nation receiving the most blame..