A temperate meeting’s aftermath triggered an immediate colonial ban with armed-force threat.

Evidence

On the face of it, this was neither a radical nor particularly revolutionary event. But if the gathering remained relatively tempered and contained, the events that surrounded it, the interpretations of what it represented, and the sentiments that traveled and were attributed to those who took part were not. Rochussen’s assessment of the situation after it took place was very different than it had been a week earlier. He wrote Baud the next day, expressing outrage that his permission for a temperate meeting of a few wellplaced citizens in a private house turned into what he called “a public assembly of many hundreds of persons of different rank, unknown to one another; some with the explicit aim of discussing matters of state and the basic principles of governance.” That same day, he banned all public meetings “concerning matters of government and of common interest,” giving notice that armed force would be used if his order was disobeyed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 506

Categorization

• XREF: The gap between a modest event and a disproportionate repressive response echoes Foucault’s analysis of how the ‘micro-physics’ of events get discursively amplified; also resonates with the reader’s colonial archive focus.