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Poaching: crime and protest from the eighteenth to the twentieth century

1789 was a golden age for poachers. By the summer and autumn of that year, there was no one both able and willing to prevent a holocaust of game. In Provence, 'every rusty gun' could be heard hard at work. This Revolutionary slaughter was a joyful and anarchic indulgence in an almost universal pleasure. Before and after the Revolution, hunting game was for many Frenchmen more than simply an enjoyable leisure pursuit or a vital supplement to family food supplies: it was a compulsion. Even in normal times it was an inescapable reality of life, but the breakdown of authority in the Revolution gave the French population a unique opportunity. In the Ilede-France around Paris, near Poissy, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Corbeil, Pontoise, Fontainebleau and Compiegne, the forests, which had long been the hunting preserve of the King under the control of the Capitaineries, were invaded by hunting parties reported to be one to three hundred strong. As one pamphlet ironically observed, Parisians who in July had devoted themselves to the heroic defence of liberty, in August turned to a total war on rabbits and hares. Peasants, so long prevented by seigneurial rights from protecting their crops from the depredations of game, could finally retaliate. The killing and injuring of a few guards were seen as just revenge for centuries of feudal oppression. The restrictions on hunting which had been one of many grievances before the Revolution did not disappear with the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century. Instead, once the Revolutionary period was over, the laws were altered in form and rationale while poaching practices slowly adapted to the new circumstances. Monopoly rights based on feudal law, which limited hunting to monarchs and those with seigneurial authority, were replaced by property rights which gave the ownership of