“Peterloo,” March 18, 2023 (2019), Amazon Prime. It’s usual in a Ken Loach film to have a real time debate about tactics and strategy, but here, director/writer Mike Leigh gives us 1 ½ hours of these verbal broadsides as he lays out the story behind the Peterloo Massacre. I suspect that your response to the film (not the terrifying chaos of the brutal repression at St. Peter’s Fields) will be determined by how you respond to the remarkable speechifying by those for or against the maintenance of a brutal status quo. And there’s a lot of speechifying, borrowing from the Bible, from Tom Paine and the American Revolution, from the French Revolution, Locke and Rousseau, as well as the Glorious Revolution and the millenarian impulse. It is quite the confluence of sources.
Defenders of the oppressors and the oppressed make their many varied cases with a zeal and control of language unmatched by our poor political spokespeople. There are two sides here, but they are themselves complex coalitions for and against political and economic change; brutal repression vs. accommodation; peaceful resistance vs. violent revolution; and aristocratic and elite rule vs. egalitarianism. You might want to brush up on your English history with a quick (that is a joke, of course) re-read of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class and the work of Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé before diving into this one.
Set to commemorate the event’s 200th anniversary, Leigh’s history of the 1819 massacre at a rally of 500-600,000 peaceful, unarmed men, women and children that left as many as 19 dead and hundreds more injured. Local yeomen of the Home Guard and a unit of Hussars and infantry attacked the crowd as it attempted to hear Henry “Orator” Hunt (Rory Kinear), a pro-reform Parliamentarian. The film is worth viewing as a stark reminder of the brutal repression that non-elite English men and women faced while struggling for economic and political justice and rights. They were plagued by high food prices (thanks to prohibitions on food imports via the Corn Laws), unemployment, abuse on the job and in the courts, and the many pains induced by mechanization (deskilling, brutal working conditions, etc.) They are also excluded from political standing and the vote. Indeed, Manchester had no elected representatives in Parliament!
Peterloo takes us from the Battle of Waterloo to the Massacre at Peterloo, tracking a young PTSD-suffering bugler (David Moorst) home from the wars to his family’s privation in Manchester. It shows us a society ruled by hanging for petty crimes, gross injustice and privilege, removal to Botany Bay (Australia) as imprisonment becomes a tool of empire building, and the profound arrogance of power that is unwilling to concede an inch. It gives us complex coalition of opponents of oppression some of whom are, themselves, driven by ego and conceit as well as high purpose. And it gives us ‘common folk,’ some of whom are uncommon in their rising and sustained by hope, if not belief in, the possibilities of change. The film also provides us others who are spies, agent provocateurs, thugs, and brutish representatives of authority repressing their own folk.
It shows us the emergence of newspapers as a force that, within days, spread eye-witness reports of the violence and actually named the ‘Peterloo Massacre.’ Although many of the local broadsheets were repressed, the Manchester Guardian emerged from their ashes in 1821.
The cinematography is excellent, the acting is remarkably affecting, and I found the film well worth my time and energy. The complete absence of a post-script, however, left viewers, especially those without a background in English history, with no sense of what followed on Peterloo. And much does, including a massive legal crackdown on dissent, the imprisonment of many local rally organizers as well as Hunt – who eventually returns to Parliament as an advocate for reform including women’s right to vote, abortive uprisings and plots, and a further spiral into the cruelties of child labor, mass exploitation, and the Dickensian world. And so, also, follows way-to-gradual reform. That’s a complex post-script, to be sure, but even the immediate effects are left unspoken.
Despite that difficulty, I quite enjoyed and recommend this historical drama.