It Could Happen Here - The History of the Bread Riot, Part 1

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

In part 1 we look at the history of the classical bread riot in the late 1700's and their return in the early 1900's.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I have brought you all here today to discuss one of the most sacred and venerable of our political institutions. An institution whose words echo through history and carve the political, legal, and economic framework of our world. I am referring, of course, to the Bread Riot. Hey, there we go. I love a good Bread Riot. I do too. This is a good, a non-zero part of why I wrote this episode.

How is this relatable? The grain supply seems really stable right now. That's what everyone says about the grain supply. No one has thrown a molotov through a bank window in 200 years i look i was i was reliably informed by several marxist historians that that bread riots were over i'm gonna i'm gonna google ukrainian wheat harvest as i do every exactly five years the moment just now came up where i do every exactly five years. The moment just now came up where I check it every five years.

So let me just. Oh, oh, oh. Is that a good idea? Oh, dear. Is there a problem? Well, let me go eat my fifth Wonder Bread slice of the day and not think about it. Good stuff. All right.

So, yeah, let's talk bread riots. Yeah, we're talking bread riots. so bread riots are an ancient institution um you can i mean you can find them like very easily as far back as the roman republic yeah it is 80 percent of roman republican politics like okay if you wanted to like go further back than that i have no doubt you could like spend probably 10 minutes and find bread rioting in like Sumeria or something. I didn't do this. And the reason I didn't do this, even though I'm talking about the history of the bread riot, is that the sort of the structure of the bread riot is shaped inexorably by the sort of political and economic conditions around it. And the political and economic conditions of ancient Rome are somewhat similar to us, but not really.

So instead of doing that, we're starting in the late 1700s, where there are a lot of bread riots. But particularly, there's a lot of very well-documented bread riots in the UK and France. And I guess, before we actually talk about these specific riots, we should

talk about what a bread riot actually is, because okay, so I mean, on a very superficial level, a bread riot is when people don't have bread and they riot. But the actual response to that and what the riots look like are interesting and sort of complicated. I'm going to quote now from the book Free Markets and Food Riots. This is talking about specifically the 1700s riots, but yeah. Food riots took several forms. specifically the 1700s riots, but yeah.

Food riots took several forms. A, the blockade or entrave that prevented the export of grain from an area in which shortages existed. B, the price riot or taxation populare in which food was seized by protesters, a just price set, and the lot sold. C, agrarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produce as a dramatic protest. And D, the market riot in which the crowd took retributive action against commercial agents, So, okay, there's a lot of different things going on here. We're going to get back to the farmers' protest stuff a lot later because the specific kind of like rural like versions of this kind of fade into the background for a couple of centuries um what's happening in the urban centers though is really interesting in a lot of ways and it gets at the core of what's

going on in these sort of like late 1700s riots um notably the crowds who are doing the rioting are just like they're not just like seizing the bread and eating it which is the thing that like you would assume they would be doing if they were you know it's a bunch of people who are starving and there's bread and they take it right but that's that's actually not what they're doing what they're doing is essentially negotiating over price you see this in the sort of price riot thing right uh you know the thing that they actually do is they seize a bunch of grain and then they sell it off at what they sort of like – at what they deem a fair price is. And what this is attempting to do basically is it's a very, very direct way of trying to get bakers to lower their prices. And the other thing that's about these riots is that they are – they're very politically sophisticated, and they're very targeted. There's a thing you hear a lot. And if you've ever read anything about any modern riot, you will hear just people ranting about how people are destroying, blindly destroying their own neighborhoods.

And it's just like not true. Riots tend to have sort of a – riots tend to have a sort of political – specific political focus on attacking specific targets, which is why like the first things that go up in a riot are pawn shops liquor stores police stations and uh now stores that think they're employed please badly they literally have specific targets yeah yeah like it it's you know it's it's it's very like all all of all of the stuff that's happening is stuff that has like it's the result of political grievances that people have sort of been accumulating for a long time and this is also true of these sort of of these early bread riots too going back to the book free markets and food riots protesters did not rampage indiscriminately but focused their wrath on particular individuals and institutions whom the crowd held responsible for unjust practices typically it was not the producers or retailers of food, but the middlemen who were

seen as responsible for shortages and price raises, the grain dealers, wholesalers, speculators, and mills. Grain shipments by wagon, ship, and canal barge were seized and distributed among participants or sold at a just price. Warehouses were raided with similar results. Textile workers in 1770 Reams, quote, seized the the town's markets proceeded to sell all the grain in the market at three quarters of the current price they then turned their attention to the warehouse into the granaries of numerous religious houses which they treated in a similar fashion yeah so you know this this is like this is a pretty remarkable degree of political sophistication right they're not targeting sort of farmers or bakers and especially not targeting people who

are like well-known and liked in the community they're targeting people who they can directly tie it to grand price speculation and this is a you know in some sense like this is a demonstration of the kind of like basic contradiction of the market right on the one hand you have bread as this like physical thing that you need to survive on the other hand you have bread as this market commodity and the mark you know as a market commodity it's a sort of speculative asset which people are like buying and selling and hoarding like stocks because not because they actually need to eat it but because they're interested in this sort of market value and the marxist will call this uh the difference between use value or like the value you get

from eating a piece of bread and the exchange value which is like the the bread is a commodity that can be traded for the commodities and you know like this is this isn't sometimes like this is behind a lot of like the housing crisis right now you have a bunch of people who buy houses and apartment buildings that you know not because they need to live in them but as an asset that will appreciate over time you know like appreciate in value over time like stocks do but this means that people who like need houses to like live in them like don't get a house because they're being held by people who are trying to get the value to appreciate and the goal of these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an exchange value that is to sort of like market commodity use for speculation

and turn them back into use values but even again here this is interesting right because it's not like these people are like like like anti-market anticapitalist, right? They tend not to sort of just seize the bread outright. What they're doing is they're insisting on buying it at a specific quote-unquote just price. And this sort of gets into the question of like why are these riots happening in the first place? The obvious explanation like, okay, the people are rioting because the price of bread is increasing. But that's not actually like an explanation, right? just it's a precondition but there's a lot of places where bread price is rising you're never going to riot so a lot of of people have studied this and try to figure out what is happening uh the the the second explanation that historians come up with

is something called the moral economy um and and in this model people aren't just reacting to like a price increase what they're actually reacting to is what becomes known as the entitlement gap which is this gap between people what people think they're entitled to based on like the morality and how hard they work etc etc and like what they actually get and so you know in less academic language it's people going like i'm getting price gouged this is bullshit Bring the prices down to what they're supposed to be. And that's part of it. There's another theory that argues that food riots are driven by these really complicated webs of horizontal social relations and things like networks of wives and political organizations and alliances that happen inside of villages stuff like that and that uh you know and these groups sort of like react to price increases by banding together and voicing people lower prices um now notably i one of the like the things i listed in those that like web of things

right his wife's networks as the sort of like first community web release the food riots um and this is this is turns out to be important women are often like the leaders and initiator of bread riots and the sort of theory behind it is that they're actually the ones like buying the bread and so they're sort of they're more in tune with disturbances of food prices etc etc and you know the food price increases are a threat to what academics call social reproduction or in essence like taking care of yourself your family in your household like making sure you can sort of support and raise your children so there's well so the the the good version of it is it's you're taking care of the people around you the cynical version of it is

it's social it's social reproduction because you're creating another generation of workers for capital uh but because women end up doing like an enormously disproportionate amount of that work uh they you know they wind up in the streets first because they're the people who are most acutely sort of like sensitive to the stuff happening um yeah what's what's you know the and and the other thing that's sort of worth noting here is that riots are these these kind of bread riots are usually urban affairs and they're sort of they're the product of people who live in cities right it's your sort of artisans your industrial workers there's this like fighting core of teenagers who seem to show up in all these

bread riots and uh thankfully that that that never happens today we do not have a bunch of teenagers who show up every time to fight the cops and something bad happens no experience with this yeah i've certainly never seen anything like that happen do these other countries have the feds put piles of bricks out on the street well you know this is why we haven't they haven't gotten to that level of entrapment yet they're not powerful enough this is before the development of the police state. Yeah, they didn't have an FBI to burn down the third precinct. Yeah, they haven't invented the agent provocateur yet. Yeah, a cunning false flag.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community,

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his

mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, what's interesting about the 18th century riots, though, is I've been talking a lot about how these are led by women, and that's true, but specifically the 1700s ones tend to be more gender balanced than later riots. And I'm going to read this from the historian Lynn Taylor because it's one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and I love it. Cynthia Bolton's study of the French Flower War of 1775 makes clear the mixed nature of traditional food riots.

Indeed, the number of men involved had increased significantly in the flower wars due to the changing male economic, social, including familial, and political status during the Ancien Regime. Theirs was a life of precarious and declining social-economic position, disequilibrium in the family structure and political alienation, one that left them in positions similar to those of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. Oh boy. They forced – they are rioting because they've been forced to. in in Myanmar during the uprising. There are kind of local local cultural sort of attitudes there that make it that have made it for a long time, like essentially considered like shameful to touch women's clothing or particular like there's certain things that like you don't wear and that you're not supposed to look at if you see someone dressed that way um that are like traditional women's clothing and so a bunch of male protesters would dress that way and form up and like ranks at the protests because it made the police like uncomfortable and sometimes like back off that's extremely cool yeah there's like some literal examples of that in very recent

riots yeah and i think that gets at one of the things that's sort of happening is happening in this period too which is that like one of the kinds of things that generates these bread riots is this kind of is is this instability in gender roles and is this sort of instability in in what the role of a person in society is going to be and that i don't know it has a lot of interesting effects and when those effects are riots the stuff the stuff that happens is really cool because you get a lot of sort of like gender roles getting messed up. You get a lot of like foreshadows a lot of what the sort of later bread riots are going to be about is that and this is this is like the fourth theory of bread riots if you sort of like go through your economic historians of this stuff um they're talking about basically the the late 1700s are are one of the sort of key moments in like the formation of of

the modern state and what what this means in terms of food is that control the food supply is moved from these this sort of like parentalistic like feudal state thing where on a local level you have guaranteed prices and access to food and this is shifted to laissez-faire capitalism in which there is there there are there are no price controls there's no guarantee you can get food and And subsequent to this also, at the same time, is the centralization of the military bureaucracy. And the centralization of the military bureaucracy means that they're taking more control of the food supply. Here's from Free Markets and Food Riots again. Older parentalistic models operating at the local level and assuring a plentiful

supply of necessaries at a low price were undermined by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation. Spanning a century and more, the policies included such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capital intensification of farming, proletarianization, grain exports, taxes, tariffs, and other government efforts to regulate the food supply. Price riots were simply one expression of popular grievances stemming from this broader change. And this is something that's very common.

Bread riots are deeply and intimately linked with the ways that the food production process is changing, and specifically linked to the ways the food production process is changing because of the state and markets. But we're sort of leaning into the late 1700s. And at this point, something happened that no one expected. A bread riot went completely the other direction and irrevocably changed the state and the market itself. And I am talking about history's maybe most famous bread riot. That's right. It's the French Revolution, baby.

Liberty, egalité, fraternity hon hon and this is this is like you mean to tell me that the french had a revolution i mean it's kind of it's kind of marginal admittedly the fame that doesn't sound like the french that i know that's true the the the the the modern french have replaced revolution with racism unfortunately but you know look look we're we're in the 1700s things are different um yeah and so we're we're in in a second we're going to talk about the bread riot that changed the history of bread riots in the course of world history forever but first do you know who doesn't love bread riots marion twinette. Yep, who is the primary sponsor of this show. She realized the whole cake thing didn't work out great,

so now she's saying, let them have podcasts. Let them cast pods. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun,

el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and our primary sponsor has been executed by a mob so if you are a member of european nobility maybe you're a hapsburg you know um hit us up and uh offer us a sponsorship yeah uh well okay we're going to rewind a little bit before they kill Mary Antoinette to get to how that happened. So one of the things, if you read the sort of literature on bread riots, one of the things bread riot people will talk about over and over again is bread riots being apolitical.

And they kind of like stretch this to a point. Well, because I mean, okay, so like there's a couple levels which doesn't make any sense, right? Like, okay, if you think that bread is being sold at too high a price because people are are gouging you that is political right and then you go out and make them not do that yeah that's politics i people love to say things aren't political when they don't align with like a simple political party like if it if it doesn't line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics between the political parties that dominate things,

they like to say shit is apolitical, but, you know, starving because of tax decisions or whatnot is an inherently political thing. Yeah, and deciding that you're not going to starve and taking bread from people is an incredibly political thing. Yeah, that's a politics.

You have done a politics. Yeah, you've done a lot of politics and you know but but one of the things that that and the other thing this leads to is if if a if a thing that involves bread suddenly like turns into capital p politics and suddenly you have people doing things that are like well understood as like conventional political gestures. Immediately, everyone stops calling it a bread riot. And if but like if you look at what's actually happening, it's here's a bunch of people who are mad about the price of bread. They went to change the price of bread. It kind of didn't work. And so instead they went through the government.

And this is this is this is this is this is the bread riot that we're getting to now. Up until 1789, you can argue that – historians will argue that, oh, these bread riots are apolitical. That just ends on – I think it's October 5th, 1789. But by this point, the revolution is like well underway um they've stormed the bastille there's a bunch of people in a parliament writing a constitution but like in october of 1789 it's still unclear like how radical any of this is going to be right um at this point it still seems likely that there's going to be a king and not only is there going to be a king the king is still going to be pretty strong.

And then, yeah, on October 5th, 1789, maybe history's most famous bread riot breaks out. So 7,000 women who are, like, incredibly pissed off at the high price of bread in Paris march on Versailles, which is where the royal family of france had been like governing france from for like 100 years and these women are really really angry and they they they basically forced the royal family to come back with him to paris and i guess it's important to note here that paris and versailles are like 12 miles apart so this isn't like a multi-day journey they just like get mad one day and they wake up and they walk to the next city over and this radically changes the entire direction of the french revolution because once well if the royal family is in versailles right like the the parisian mob doesn't have direct access to them but once that once they're in paris and once once once this bread riot like brings the king to paris suddenly the entire like the entire concentrated political power of the French system is now centered in Paris and is now in a place where subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff.

And this directly leads to the kings being executed. This leads to our sponsors getting guillotined. And it basically – it completely cements bread as sort of like the central part of – like one of the central aspects of what the French Revolution is about. Like by the end of the revolution, the slogan of the sort of revolutionary French working class is bread in the constitution of 1793. So you can look at the priorities there and look at like all of this is sort of an extended rolling bread riot. Unfortunately for us, and spoilers to everyone who has not caught up on the end of the French Revolution, the revolution loses and Napoleon takes power. And this is where we enter the era of what's known as the bourgeois revolution. This is the modern era.

And if you've read your like Arab Cobb Swamp, you're like – you the the rural class has been like displaced at the center of history by the industrial working class and that's just like not true um and it's not true in in two senses one it's in the sense that like we have bread riots now but it's also not true because there's another wave of bread riots that are that are very very conventional and very much sort of in the classic 1700s mode. Here's Lynn Taylor again. It is true that the proactive form of protest became common, even

predominant, by the early 20th century. However, scattered through the periodical literature are accounts of 20th century food riots which look surprisingly like those of the 18th and early 19th century, something not expected in modern industrialized nation-states. Food riots occurred in northern France in 1911, in Britain during the winter of 1960-1917, in New York in 1917, in Toronto in both 1924-1923, in Barcelona in 1918, in Vichy France in 1942, and in northern France throughout

the German occupation. The form of protest was remarkably consistent in each and reminiscent of traditional food riots of earlier centuries. And these are very conventional sort of 18th century bread riots. They're led by women. They refuse – they're led by women who are refusing to pay higher prices for food. who are refusing to pay higher prices for food and in some sense they kind of are apolitical in that there are various attempts in like basically all of these protests by like organized political organizations to take them over and basically every single time the women who are involved are like no absolutely not uh there's there's a very funny one where i i think this is the the i think this is the british one in in 1960, where like a bunch of men show up and the women are like, no, go home. You can't riot with us. This is our riot.

Now, yeah, the British case in particular is also interesting because this is the middle of World War I. And so, you know, this is the sort of giant presence looming over these bread riots. And, you know, the government sort of of like the government in response to this response to widespread hunger like decrease these price controls on food but farmers are just refusing to obey them and so women in mayport organized and the result was quote when one farmer said he did not care what the government said about price controls there was bedlam the women rushed the farmer's cart and the street was quote filled with hooting yelling women and young people while potatoes cabbages and turnips were flying through the air

the example of mayport soon spread to other parts of the country these riots were led by housewives who had filled the front lines and did much of the fighting although the miners of cumberland were also active in supporting their wives efforts both as added bodies strengthening the crowds but also through the miners association other working class institutions so a i i don't know i i had to include this specifically because the image of a bunch of people throwing cabbages at farmers is extremely funny to me um but the other thing i think is interesting here is you can start to see the shifts from the sort of 18th century like riots to these ones on a social level where you know in the 1800s you're dealing with sort of like town

and sort of peasant cultural groupings who are supporting the protest but by the 1900s bread riots are being backed by like organized political institutions um there's another one in new york in 1917 which is remarkable for being it's self-organized by – it's remarkable because it's self-organized by women, even though this is – the part of New York they're in is a socialist party stronghold. But the socialist party aren't the people who do it. It's the women who are married in a lot of cases to the socialist party, and to some extent are in it, but are sort of operating autonomously. party or to some extent are in it but are sort of operating autonomously and they they do this thing where they sort of like they start setting enforcing these boycotts uh of like shops that are deemed to be at like press gouging levels and they fight the cops they do a bunch of stuff um and the the ones i mentioned in toronto earlier interesting because those ones actually do like

have an organization in the beginning but in keeping with sort of the tradition of of the bread right the organization was the jewish women's uh the jewish women's labor league and these are these are remarkably effective political movements they win their demands really quickly um i'm gonna read one more account because it just rules uh lester golden and tema caplan have both examined food riots in barcelona 1918, part of a wave of riots which occurred between June 1917 and March 1919 throughout Spain. As in previous cases, these riots erupted because of devastating price inflation, a thing we know nothing about now, this time resulting from the post-war collapse of the economy. The participants were all women, they forbade men's

participation, and the actions were led first by radical republicans and then by a small group of female anarcho-syndicalists the women's demands were simple and straightforward they demanded lower prices for foods they attacked bread shops and coal wag as it took over a ship laden with fish when police and civil guard attempted to break out the women crowds of women on the street the woman turned on them stripping some of the officers of their pants spanking or thrashing them and sending them home yes yes it rules so much that's that's it's so good perfect perfect this is the energy we need in every century that human beings have ever inhabited it's amazing uh the the historians a parenthetical note after that is quote uh rather undermining their authority in the process which yes i would

imagine so yes if you are if you are being spanked by a crowd you have lost control of that crowd that that that is that is fair to say and so they it takes about three weeks, and they win, and prices drop 30%. That's good. Good for them. That's a pretty solid. Look, hey, I think most of the people listening would do some hardcore spanking if they could get a 30% cut on their grocery bill. Yeah. Look, I'm just saying, it is much harder to pull down a

modern cop's trousers because they're wearing like so much weird shit on top of it but belt technology has improved tremendously since then yeah however comma where there is a will there's a way yep if i learned one thing from high school it's that anyone can be pantsed just you just you just have to you just have to you just have to want it hard enough you have to want it more than the person wants to be wearing their pants that's right that's right you have to believe so there's one more of these bread riots that's worth talking about which also is not conventionally framed as a bread riot but is entirely keeping with everything i've said here uh the february revolution in russia um so the february revolution is the revolution that actually overthrows the czar uh there's

another revolution which is the october revolution which is the one where the bulls come to power but that's a that's that's a separate one they're fighting a completely different group of people the february revolution has all of the sort of key factors of a bread right right there's these massive bread lines women are pissed off by lack of food the revolution itself is is led by women whose like male comrades had literally told them don't like don't go out and do a protest on that day because this is international women's day but the like all all of the men who are like doing this are are convinced that like the conditions aren't right for revolution so they try to get everyone to stay home and everyone's like no and you know like the the sort of key difference between the like this bread riot and the other bread rows we're talking

about is that you know the the demands of the of the the march on international women's day 1917 are overtly political like they are chanting down with the czar and they are trying to overthrow the government. And this, you know, this is another thing that has this sort of, like, incredible impact on how the Bolshevik Revolution is sort of working, right? Like, Lenin winds up using peace, bread, and land as one of the sort of, like, central, like, Bolshevik slogans because a huge part of what the revolution is is just a bread riot and that that's where we're that's that's where we're gonna leave it today with the world uh just completely and utterly transformed by another bread riot and next episode we're gonna get to the modern bread riots because those are also interesting and yeah we're gonna once again prove everyone who insists that bread riots don't happen anymore wrong a thing that i didn't know existed until i started reading this and now incredibly mad about yeah so go out there and have a bread riot um pants a cop or some other kind of riot you know

uh a guacamole riot um a mate riot um you could have you could have some kind of corn riot you could have a riot over ortolan that would be a unique kind of riot don't think anyone's ever rioted over that bird that's such a beautiful songbird that eating it is a sin so you have to like

hide your shame underneath a sheet so God doesn't see you eat it have a riot over one of those you know yeah do that yep it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right.

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