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7 A world of wine: European integration and globalisation The meaningful narrative of the CRAV’s history ends in 1992 with the condemnation of CRAV activists as ‘terrorists’ by Colonel Weber. Yet it is also possible to connect the CRAV and the Défense movement into the larger anti-globalisation movement in France and demonstrate the bonds between the core of the CRAV in 1992 and the broader ‘new peasant left’. The CRAV did not fade away in 1992 nor did the problems of the Midi viticole neatly resolve themselves.1 Indeed, the overarching narrative of the
This book is a wide-ranging survey of the development of mass movements for democracy and workers’ rights in northern England. It surveys movements throughout the whole period, from the first working-class radical societies of the 1790s to trade unions in the 1830s and Chartists and Owenite socialists in the 1840s. It offers a provocative narrative of the privatisation of public space and workers’ dispossession from place, with parallels for contemporary debates about protests in public space and democracy and anti-globalisation movements.
Space and place are central to the strategies and meaning of protest. The book examines the reaction by governments and local authorities, who sought to restrict public and private political meetings, demonstrations and marches. It charts the physical and symbolic conflicts over who had the right to speak and meet in northern England. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 marked a particularly significant turning point in the relationship between government, local elites and the working classes. Radicals, organised labour and Chartists fought back by challenging their exclusion from public spaces, creating their own sites and eventually constructing their own buildings. They looked to new horizons, including America. This book also examines the relationship of protesters with place. Rural resistance, including enclosure riots, arson and machine-breaking during Luddism in 1812 and the Captain Swing agitation of the early 1830s, demonstrated communities’ defence of their landscape as a place of livelihood and customary rights.
continually impressed by the relevance of his preoccupations to our own age. When I read Thompson’s denunciations of the impact of right-wing ‘modernisation theory’ on the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s, I thought about the contemporary anti-globalisation movement’s 3 Introduction complaints against the ideology of bodies like the International Monetary Fund. When I found Thompson decrying the attacks on the jury system of 1970s British governments, I knew what he would make of the curtailing of civil liberties in his homeland during the age of the ‘War on Terror
explain how the old ideology of 1907 became conflated with a narrative of struggle which pushed winegrowers towards odd alliances with Occitanistes and, eventually, altermondialistes (and other anti-globalisation activists). Political loyalties adapted and became more nuanced after the CRAV had begun to bear arms in 1976, when a shootout between the forces of public order, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), and militant vignerons left two dead and some 30 injured. Published in response to this turbulence, La Révolte du Midi, an edited collection of essays
could best be understood as sharing contrasting relations to the means of production, Harvey defined class as ‘situatedness or positionality in relation to processes of capital accumulation’ – he argued that ‘certain segments of the working class . . . [have] a great deal to lose besides its chains’.39 Despite the pessimistic conclusions that could be drawn from these arguments, Harvey remains hopeful that ‘alternative models of organising’ could be constructed.40 Indeed, he has recently suggested that it is the strength of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ that it
periods when ‘deferential bitterness’ cracked in some areas into open resistance. Though it originated from specific historical and socio- economic contexts of place, rural resistance was not localised or bounded. Doreen Massey has powerfully argued that both historical opposition to enclosure and modern anti-globalisation campaigns were ‘not local protectionism but a critique of dispossession’.92 On the one hand, Luddites and C. Griffin, ‘More- than- human histories and the failure of grand state schemes: sylviculture in the New Forest, England’, Cultural