Abstract
Three times within forty years — in 1830, 1848 and 1870–71 — popular revolt in Paris succeeded in toppling apparently well-established political régimes. Ever since, the dominant organising principle of narrative histories of nineteenth-century France has been the theme of revolution and reaction, as the ideological and social divisions of the French Revolution were fought out in a cycle of violent challenge from the heirs of the sans-culottes and its repression by post-revolutionary elites. This has thus been a history both of Revolutionary France, the name of a collection edited by Malcolm Crook, and of The Bourgeois Century, the title of Roger Magraw’s history of nineteenth-century France. Only with the establishment of electoral democracy within a relatively stable Third Republic after 1877, in the words of François Furet’s famous quip, did ‘the French Revolution finally enter the harbour’ and bring revolutionary upheavals to a close.1
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Malcolm Crook (ed.), Revolutionary France 1788–1880 (Oxford, 2002);
Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London, 1983);
François Furet, La Révolution: de Furgot à fules Ferry, 1770–1880 (Paris, 1989), esp. pp. 479, 516–17.
Quentin Deluermoz, Le Crépuscule des révolutions (Paris, 2012), p. 373.
On the Revolution of 1830, see David Pinkney, The Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, 1972);
Pamela M. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France (London, 1991);
Bertrand Goujon, Monarchies Postrévolutionnaires 1814–1848 (Paris, 2012), chaps 4–5; and the path-breaking collection edited by
John M. Merriman, 1830 in France (New York, 1975).
Sylvie Vila, ‘Une révélation? Les Luttes populaires dans le département de l’Hérault au début de la Monarchie de Juillet, 1830–1834’, Droite et gauche de 1789 à nos jours (Montpellier, 1975), pp. 105–35; André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 1815–1848, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge and New York, 1983), pp. 93–116.
Roger Thabault, Education and Change in a Village Community: Mazières-en-Gâtine 1848–1914, trans. P. Tregear (London, 1971), chap. 3.
Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA, 1974).
Surveys of 1848 include Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 (Cambridge and New York, 1983);
Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York and London, 2002), chaps. 13–15;
and Roger Price, The French Second Republic: A Social History (Ithaca, 1972). Recent research is synthesized in Deluermoz, Crépuscule des révolutions, chaps 1–2;
and Jean-Luc Mayaud (ed.), 1848. Actes du colloque international du cent cinquantenaire (Paris, 2002).
Mary Lynn Stewart-McDougall, The Artisan Republic: Revolution, Reaction, and Resistance in Lyon, 1848–1851 (Montreal, 1984), pp. 42–48;
Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846–1852 (Oxford, 1992), p. 85.
On the June Days, see Donald C. McKay, The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848 (Cambridge, MA, 1933), chaps. 5–6;
Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton, 1985);
Charles Tilly and Lynn H. Lees, ‘The People of June, 1848’, in Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic, ed. Roger Price (London, 1975), pp. 170–209.
On radical provincial movements and their repression, see Ted Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, 1979);
John Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (New Haven, 1978);
Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton, 1984); and McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life.
The best treatment of the coup remains Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt. See too, Maurice Agulhon, The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge, 1970), chaps. 14–17; McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life;
Sylvie Aprile et al., Comment meurt une république. Autour du 2 décembre 1851 (Grâne, 2004); and Emile Zola’s historical novel La Fortune des Rougon.
On Noir’s funeral, see Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge and New York, 2001); and the innovative study by
Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France 1789–1996 (Oxford and New York, 2000).
See Roger L. Williams, The French Revolution of 1870–1871 (New York, 1969);
Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre: 1871 (Paris, 1971);
William Serman, La Commune de Paris (1871) (Paris, 1986);
Laure Godineau, La Commune de Paris, 1871 (Paris, 2010);
and Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (London, 1999).
John M. Merriman, The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York, 1985), chap. 4;
Marc César, Mars 1871. La Commune révolutionnaire de Narbonne (Sète, 2008);
Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century Toulouse (Albany, 1981), chap. 8;
Jeanne Gaillard, Communes de province, commune de Paris, 1870–1871 (Paris, 1971).
Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge and New York, 1981), chaps. 6–7;
Tony Judt, Socialism in Provence, 1871–1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left (Cambridge, 1979), chap. 6.
See, for example, Sanford Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic: Class and Politics in France, 1868–1914 (Baton Rouge, 1975);
and Philip Nord, The Republican Movement. Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1995).
Michel Vovelle, Les Métamorphoses de la fête en Provence, de 1750 à 1820 (Paris, 1976); Agulhon, The Republican Experiment;
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976).
The debate on ‘politi-cization’ is analyzed in Edward Berenson, ‘Politics and the French Peasantry: The Debate Continues’, Social History, 12 (1987), pp. 219–29; McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life, chap. 5; and Deluermoz, Le Crépuscule des révolutions, chap 2.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, 1998); The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2004); and The Saint-Napoleon. Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA and London, 2004).
See also Alain Corbin’s prelace to Corbin et al., Les Usages politiques des fêtes aux XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1994);
Rosemonde Sanson, Le 14 juillet: fête et conscience nationale 1789–1975 (Paris, 1976);
Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (London and New York, 1997);
Sylvie Aprile, La Révolution inachevée, 1815–1870 (Paris, 2010), chaps. 10–11.
See Mona Ozouf, LaFête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1976);
Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (Berkeley, 2000);
Françoise Waquet, Les Fêtes royales sous la Restauration ou l’Ancien Régime re-trouvé (Geneva, 1981);
Alain Faure, Paris Carême-Prenant: du carnaval à Paris au XIXeme siècle (Paris, 1978); Agulhon, Marianne into Battle;
Olivier Ihl, La Fête républicaine (Paris, 1996).
Charles Tilly ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective’, in The History of Violence in America, ed. H. Graham and T.R. Gurr (Washington, 1969), pp. 45–84;
Charles Tilly ‘How Protest Modernized in France, 1845–1855’, in The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History, ed. W.C. Aydelotte (Princeton, 1972), pp. 192–255;
Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1986);
and Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
Irene Collins (ed.), Government and Society in France, 1814–1848 (London, 1970), pp. 62–70. On the food riots of 1816–17,
see Nicolas Bourguinat, Les Grains du désordre. L’Etat face aux violences frumentaires dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2002), pp. 154–61 and passim.
Charles Tilly, ‘The Changing Place of Collective Violence’, in Essays in Social and Political History, ed. M. Richter (Cambridge, MA, 1970), pp. 139–64.
For a cross-section of different approaches to the nature of class formation, see Aminzade, Toulouse, chap. 4; Joan W. Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Cambridge, 1974);
Rolande Trempé, Les Mineurs de Carmaux, 1848–1914, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971); Merriman, The Red City chap. 3;
Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (eds), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization and Practice (Ithaca, 1986) chaps. 13–16;
Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, trans. H. McPhail (New York, 1990).
William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Régime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 216;
Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Scott, ‘Political Shoemakers’, Past & Present, 89 (1980), pp. 86–114.
Quoted in Roger Price (ed.), 1848 in France (London, 1975), pp. 111–12.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (first published London, 1871);
Jacques Rougerie, Procès de communards (Paris, 1964);
Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995);
Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871 (Princeton, 1993);
David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (New York and Basingstoke, 2005).
Stewart Edwards (ed.), The Communards of Paris, 1871 (London, 1973), p. 124.
An accessible summary of organized labour in these years is Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, vol. 2, part V (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1992).
FélixNapo, 1907: la révolte des vignerons (Toulouse, 1971); Jean Sagnes, ‘Le Mouvement paysan de 1907 en Languedoc-Roussillon: révolte viticole, révolte régionale’, Le midi rouge. Mythe et réalité (Paris, 1982), pp. 215–61.
Olivier Bosc, La Foule criminelle, Politique et criminalité dans l’Europe du tournant du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2007);
Philippe Bourdin, Mathias Bernard and Jean-Claude Caron (eds), La Voix et le Geste. Une approche culturelle de la violence socio-politique (Clermont-Ferrand, 2005).
Jean-Claude Caron, Frères du sang. La Guerre civile en France au XIXe siècle (Seyssel, 2009).
Note the analyses and commentary about examples of collective homicide in Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1992);
Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasant, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780–1830 (Oxford, 1999), chap. 8.
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McPhee, P. (2015). The Revolutionary Century? Revolts in Nineteenth-Century France. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_12
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