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example, in eastern France, Dijon, a crowd of 400–500
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    people gathered outside the railway station in the afternoon of 3 December to wait for news from Paris. The local démoc-soc leadership was, however, mostly arrested while waiting at a printer’s for leaflets calling for resistance to be printed. Militants in Dijon itself and in Beaune and other small towns in the region who habitually followed their lead remained inactive. Their hesitancy was in marked contrast with the obvious determination of the authorities. From the government’s point of view, the situation was, unexpectedly, to become far more serious in the provinces than in the large towns. Some 100, 000 men from around 900 communes were involved in various forms of protest; as many as 70, 000 from at least 775 communes actually took up arms and over 27, 000 participated in acts of violence (Margadant 1979).
    Insurrections occurred where démoc-soc militants had succeeded in appealing to popular conceptions of justice, linking their political programme to widespread practical grievances and, above all, where organisational structures centred on small towns and market villages had survived repression. Risings occurred in the centre (Allier, Nièvre); south-west (Lot-et-Garonne, Gers) and especially the south-east (Drôme, Ardèche, Basses-Alpes, Hérault, Var) – i.e. in a minority of rural areas south of a line Biarritz–Pithiviers (Loiret)–Strasbourg. These were regions in which small-scale peasant farming predominated and which were
    experiencing the effects of growing population pressure on the land. The difficult situation within them was made all the worse by the persistent difficulties of market-orientated activities like vine and silk cultivation, forestry and rural manufacture. To the north and west of this line, in the departments of western France, the north, north-east and most of the Paris region, there was little disorder.
    These were mostly either areas of larger-scale commercial farming in which more advanced industrial development did something to relieve population pressure, or zones in the west characterised by economic backwardness and intense poverty.
    They were regions in which traditional elites, generally enjoying the support of the church, retained considerable influence.
    The insurrections provided further justification for a settling of accounts. Over 26, 000 démoc-soc militants were arrested throughout France, rather than simply where insurrections had occurred. The authorities were anxious to eliminate the radical republican leadership, irrespective of whether individuals had been involved in resistance to the coup or not. The official statistics on those arrested revealed that 10.6 per cent belonged to the middle-class professions (including 1, 570 rentiers, 325 doctors and 225 lawyers) and that the largest group were artisans and workers in the traditional trades (builders, shoemakers, tailors, etc.), followed by peasants (5, 423 cultivateurs , 1, 850 journaliers , etc.), although peasants made 20
    up a far higher proportion of the rank-and-file (Price 1972: 289). The coup allowed the authorities to complete the work of repression without paying too much
    attention to the rule of law. The fright they had received, their bitter hatred of the left and their inability to comprehend its motives is evident from the insulting phraseology contained in the interrogation records. The insurrection was explained by the authorities in terms of the poor and ignorant being led astray by the greedy, envious and perverted. That many of the démoc-soc leaders were educated and comparatively well-off bourgeois, were in effect class traitors, was almost beyond comprehension. Throughout France republican leaders were arrested, exiled or discredited. Their followers, if they had been arrested, were usually soon released, but most had been frightened into political quiescence, throwing themselves on the mercy of the authorities as the only