The Massacre of St George’s Fields is not much talked about these days, but its harsh lessons are no less relevant today than they were on 10 May 1768, when the British authorities ordered soldiers into Southwark, London, to quell a restless demonstration. The troops opened fire, killing seven and injuring many more. What followed offers a cautionary tale to politicians such as Donald Trump who are eager to deploy the military to suppress civilian protests: sometimes you fan the very chaos you purport to be containing.
On that day in 1768, an unsettled throng of around 15,000 people — “an unarmed giddy mob”, according to one chronicler — had gathered outside the King’s Bench prison in London to protest against the imprisonment of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes. He had been charged with seditious libel for criticising King George III and the Prime Minister in his newspaper The North Briton. Concerns over freedom of speech and individual liberty were at stake, fuelling the crowd’s discontent: troops had been sent to guard the prison in anticipation of trouble. But tensions soon boiled over. A judge read out the Riot Act and ordered the crowd to disperse, but when it defied the order, with some individuals throwing stones, the soldiers turned their guns upon the demonstrators. Among the dead was a blameless publican’s son who was mistaken for a leading agitator, hunted down, and shot dead in error. The incident inflamed popular fury, and sparked wider disturbances all over London. The disturbances were so severe that it was rumoured the shaken King contemplated abdication.
Certain common ingredients can be found in incidents throughout history in which the state and the populace have clashed disastrously. They include an intensifying political tension, which finds its flashpoint in a single issue; a large crowd of mainly peaceful protesters, a small minority of whom are bent on violence; the deployment of troops; continuing provocation from an element in the crowd; confused and exasperated official warnings; and finally, excessively forceful military retaliation against demonstrators that results in the death of blameless civilians.
From the Champs de Mars massacre in Paris, 1791, to the grim events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, this pattern repeats itself. And Donald Trump’s decision to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles recreates many elements of these historical clashes. In an unusual presidential move against what he dubbed “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, the troops were drafted in against the explicit wishes of the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Newsom’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. Indeed, the LA police chief, Jim McDonnell, said that he was confident that his police department could handle the demonstrations on their own, and that the arrival of the Marines would only make things more difficult.
The National Guard troops were said to be receiving two days of training on civil unrest in batches of 2,000, including crowd control and the protection of property. It isn’t much time for schooling a force of that size in the nuances of civic policing. Yet, in the past when the military has been enlisted to quell civilian protest, what plays out long-term is rarely the promised imposition of order. Should the gamble misfire, the ensuing casualties instead lead to the rapid radicalisation of an even larger number of citizens in outright opposition to the state.
On 17 July 1791, for example, a different National Guard appeared in front of a crowd of up to 50,000 people at the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were there to sign a republican petition demanding the removal of King Louis XVI, who had attempted to flee France with his family in the previous month, and been forced back to the city. Early in the day, a small group of vigilantes in the broadly peaceful crowd had discovered two men hiding, and summarily hanged them in the apparent belief that they were foreign spies. The nervous Paris mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly characterised all the petitioners as “brigands”: he declared martial law, dispatching the National Guard, who ordered the protestors to disperse. When the soldiers were insulted and, by some accounts, pelted with stones, they opened fire, killing between 30 and 50 people.
Thereafter, the working people of Paris abandoned trust in the more moderate revolutionaries who had previously been their leaders: the path was set clear for the rapid rise of the radical Maximilien Robespierre. The latter ensured that, in November 1793, the former Mayor Bailly was executed on a scaffold specially erected for him in the Champ de Mars, a pointed retribution for his role in sending the National Guard there just over two years earlier. The desired restoration of order was replaced by violent radicalisation.
As in most situations of this sort, Mayor Bailly — mistakenly, as it turned out — had deemed the introduction of the military helpful for containing unrest in volatile circumstances. Similarly, when Harold Wilson first sent troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, it was a response to weeks of violent sectarian rioting which had exhausted the capabilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force that was also perceived by many Northern Irish Catholics as biased in favour of Protestants. People were aware even at the time, however, that this seemingly unavoidable course of action was nonetheless fraught with dangers: a Guardian editorial warned that if the presence of British soldiers “can give both police and rioters time for reflection and for tempers to cool, they will contribute to peace. But officers and those who are giving them their orders should have no illusions about the gunpowder keg on which they are now sitting.”
By 30 January 1972, a large number of metaphorical and literal explosions had already detonated, resulting in the deaths of civilians and soldiers alike. The calculated risk was facing worsening odds. The events of Bloody Sunday in Derry carried broad echoes of St George’s Fields: a banned march, anti-internment protestors demonstrating against unjust incarceration, sporadic stone-throwing and petrol-bombing, a confusion of rioters and peaceful marchers, and an increasingly keyed-up soldiery. After members of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic marchers, the Northern Ireland conflict intensified sharply: the events were described as the best recruiting sergeant the Provisional IRA ever had. In post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, the lesson has been learned: during the current spate of severe rioting in mainly Protestant towns, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has called for back-up from UK-wide police forces: it has not asked for assistance from the army.
In a historical context, there is something unusual about President Trump’s decision to call the troops into LA: it has not been forced upon him by necessity, but engineered by choice. Indeed, many high-ranking former military figures have expressed their unease. Despite a measure of far-Left violence and the torching of some self-driving cars, certainly worthy of police containment, the current unrest has not remotely approached the level of disorder seen in early-Seventies Northern Ireland. Nor is it comparable to the last time troops were called into LA itself, during the 1992 Rodney King riots in which 63 people died and thousands were injured. Indeed, Trump’s mobilising of the National Guard in a civilian setting has already had a catalysing rather than a restraining effect upon public protests, which have spread to numerous cities across the US.
Much of America is now waking up to the profundity of the presidential power-grab. The rather lacklustre military parade in Washington on Saturday, in which the Army’s 250th anniversary coincided with Trump’s own birthday, contained less civic vigour than many of the “No Kings” demonstrations in 2,000 cities and towns across America. The slogan itself knowingly harks back to the American Revolution and the rejection of arbitrary authority that sits at the very heart of the United States.
“By describing protestors as ‘insurrectionist mobs’, Trump has been laying the verbal groundwork for invoking the 218-year-old Insurrection Act.”
Where can the dispute go next? The potential for further conflagration is still there. The president’s rhetoric before Saturday’s parade — that “any” protestors would be met with “very big force” — made no apparent distinction between violent and peaceful protestors, leaving it to journalists to clarify with his press secretary that he continued to support the rights of the latter. Thus far, the active role of the National Guard has been limited. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement, and Trump’s order currently sits in a kind of legal limbo: a federal court has ruled that his actions were illegal, while the appeals court put that ruling temporarily on hold. Yet by describing protestors as “insurrectionist mobs”, Trump has been laying the verbal groundwork for invoking the 218-year-old Insurrection Act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, which allows the president to deploy the military directly to suppress an “insurrection”. It was notably not invoked on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol, with some violently assaulting the police.
In the US, once described by John F Kennedy as a “nation of immigrants”, the question of immigration has now become a cauldron of contention. But the time-honoured mechanisms for solving problems with democratic argument and consensus are being swiftly eroded. The old cross-party courtesies and conventions, which do more than most people realise to oil the moving parts of a nation, are being replaced by open contempt and muscular force: last Thursday a Democratic senator for California, Alex Padilla, was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed for seeking to ask a question during a news conference held by the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The murder by a lone gunman on Saturday of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife, was an even bleaker signal of an overheating political system.
President Trump, who avoided the Vietnam draft in his youth due to “bone spurs” in his heels, has now developed a growing escalatory instinct, a taste for combat and constant drama. It is telling, perhaps, that seconds after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear last July, he began yelling “Fight! Fight!”. A fight needs enemies, and Trump is locating them — not among the world’s despots, but among his fellow Americans. The President is turning up the heat in a country long held together by a unifying national ideal which he is now vigorously dismantling. Is he ready for what he could unleash? Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland, where democracy did indeed catch fire, can only watch his dangerous game with a sense of foreboding: an elderly child, in a room stuffed with kindling, playing with matches.
