<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0348/is_n1_v39/ai_20641674/print> Labor History, Feb. 1998
Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. - book reviews Judith F. Stone
Roger V. Gould, 1995 Chicago, University of Chicago Press pp. viii + 253; $15.95 (paperback)
Roger V. Gould has written an ambitious study in historical sociology. His major concern is theory and he approaches the history of 19th century revolutionary upheavals in France as a "uniquely informative natural experiment" (192). To a large degree this experiment is a negative one: to demonstrate the inadequacies and limitations of the "new social history" developed in the 1960s. Gould argues that this "master narrative of class formation" still retains considerable influence in the analysis of 19th century social movements. Class struggle and the story of working class formation persist as dominant explanatory themes and, in Grould's view, often distort empirical evidence. Variations of the class formation theory have also been influential in the field of urban sociology. Gould mentions the limitations of liberal explanations for the transformation of Paris from 1853 to 1870, but he saves his sharpest criticism for the varieties of Marxist, class-based analyses of the reordering of the French capital during the Second Empire. As an alternative to a class analysis of collective behavior, Gould offers participation identities based on collective identities that are multidimensional, change over time and are shaped by varying social networks and particularly powerful events. Gould argues that this perspective is preferable to the discursive, culturalist alternative to class analysis, since participation identity can be supported by empirical evidence.
Insurgent Identities is an extended test of participation identities theory and a persistent refutation of class analysis as an overarching explanatory method. The Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 provide the empirical data for this experiment. Gould's central point is that the uprising of June 1848 and the Commune, often presented as two related episodes in the unfolding saga of the French labor movement, were fundamentally different. Causes and participant motivation in each struggle bore few similarities to the other; these distinctions are essential in order to under-stand the dynamic of the two revolts. Simply put, those who mounted the barricades in 1848 did so as workers, fired by the Revolution's initial linking of universal male suffrage and the right to work. The specific conjuncture of mass unemployment in the 1840s and the revolutionary institutions of the Luxembourg Commission and the National Workshop forged an identity of workers as a social class. When the conservative National Assembly moved to dismantle these working class institutions, workers defended them on the barricades. In 1871 many who participated in the Commune did so as members of the outlying neighborhoods newly created during Baron Haussmann's transformation of Paris. They also acted as Parisians committed to defending their newly won municipal liberties and adamant in their hostility to a conservative government. Unlike the class-based insurgency of 1848, Gould insists that the Commune was an urban protest, made possible by the dramatic reconstruction of the city between 1853 and 1870. The new socially heterogeneous networks which emerged in the peripheral neighborhoods, the multiclass organizations of radical clubs and the National Guard, and, most importantly, the Franco. Prussian War with its devastating four month siege of Paris, forged new identities open to revolutionary mobilization. Could concludes his analysis of the motives and identities of the Communards by asserting that they took up arms to defend their "new urban villages," as well as Parisian municipal autonomy again an authoritarian state. Class, he insists, was an insignificant factor.
In his effort to demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional theory of collective identities, Gould provides brief, but well constructed, summaries of revolutionary developments from March to June of 1848, and the developments leading to the Commune. His insistence on the differences between these two movements is well founded. His discussion of the labor movement in 1848 and then during the Second Empire makes useful distinctions between class identity and craft identity, as disparate bases for worker mobilization. His implication that class identity in 1848 resulted from a unique constellation of economic and political factors, and that it rapidly eroded after the repression of the June uprising merits further consideration. The portrait of the emerging labor movement in the 1860s as one based on strong craft affiliations is not new, but does support Gould's central claim of the need to re-examine the master narrative of class formation. In the case of Elie Commune the centrality of what Gould calls "spatially defined communities" does go some way to explaining the dimension of patriotic fervor which often remains inexplicable in narrow class interpretations of the 1871 insurrection. Gould's stress on the political dimension of the Commune and the participants' view that they were doing battle against an alien state is most welcome. (But of course Marx, albeit from a different perspective, already had focused on the issues of state power as central to the Commune.) Gould then permits us to re-examine both these insurgencies from a new vantage point. He asks for new conceptualizations in urban sociology to account for social movements. He demonstrates the need to reconsider the development of the French labor movement, and he argues convincingly for the importance of politics and specific events in the mobitization of revolutionary actors. But has he demonstrated with empirical evidence the explanatory force of the collective identity theory? I for one have not been entirely persuaded.
Gould's central argument is that the supporters of the Commune were mobilized because of their strong identification with their neighborhoods. To a large degree their neighborhoods were the new peripheral arrondissements created by Haussmann's razing of central Paris and the annexation of previously autonomous villages into the city. In these new neighborhoods residency was the principal identity and their inhabitants were socially heterogeneous. The outer arrondissements did not replicate the old neighborhoods of central Paris where residence, craft-affiliation and workplace were all in close physical proximity. The new arrondissements separated residence and work. To demonstrate their social heterogeneity, Gould has studied the records of 153 civil marriages in these outlying arrondissements. He has identified one-third of the witnesses, attending working class marriage ceremonies, as middle class. This identification is based on a commercial directory of the period, listing occupations. Certainly this is a significant finding, but what exactly does it mean? Why precisely should we interpret the presence of "middle-class" witnesses at a working class marriage as a sign that the couple rejected a working class identity? What of couples in the neighborhood who lived in stable consensual unions? The public meetings of the late 1860s reinforced the collective identities of these neighborhoods. Gould demonstrates that such meetings and their confrontational attitude toward the police and the imperial state occurred much more frequently in the new arrondissements. What is less clear is why the language of class struggle, standard at these meetings, should be discounted, as Gould does, while animosity expressed toward the state should be viewed as their main characteristic. The question still remains open, in my mind at least, as to how these Parisian viewed the neighborhoods with which they so closely identified.
Gould seems reluctant to explore the meanings of this collective neighborhood identity. He argues convincingly that these arrondissements contained strong social networks and vibrant communities. But the nature of the life of these neighborhoods does not emerge clearly from his study. If the collective identity was not one of class, what precisely was it? Here perhaps Gould's concern with dismantling the "master narrative of class formation" distracted him from a fuller exploration of the realities of these neighborhoods. Gould's mention of the intersections among clubs, meetings, bals populaires, the cabarets and a growing political sense of the "people vs the state" is tantalizing. It might have been fruitful to examine more thoroughly that elusive and politically charged concept of "le peuple," the emerging mixed social and cultural category of "populaire," and the development of radical republicanism. It is possible that in the convergence of these experiences, Could might have been able to describe more vividly the life of the "spatially defined community" whose importance he has underscored.
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12942.ctl> Gould, Roger V. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. 262 p., 10 halftones, 2 maps, 12 line drawings, 16 tables. 6 x 9 1995
Cloth $55.00sc ISBN: 978-0-226-30560-8 (ISBN-10: 0-226-30560-0) Fall 1995 Paper $25.00sp ISBN: 978-0-226-30561-5 (ISBN-10: 0-226-30561-9) Fall 1995
In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective identities framing conflict during these two upheavals and in the intervening period, Gould reveals that while class played a pivotal role in 1848, it was neighborhood solidarity that was the decisive organizing force in 1871.
The difference was due to Baron Haussmann's massive urban renovation projects between 1852 and 1868, which dispersed workers from Paris's center to newly annexed districts on the outskirts of the city. In these areas, residence rather than occupation structured social relations. Drawing on evidence from trail documents, marriage records, reports of police spies, and the popular press, Gould demonstrates that this fundamental rearrangement in the patterns of social life made possible a neighborhood insurgent movement; whereas the insurgents of 1848 fought and died in defense of their status as workers, those in 1871 did so as members of a besieged urban community.
A valuable resource for historians and scholars of social movements, this work shows that collective identities vary with political circumstances but are nevertheless constrained by social networks. Gould extends this argument to make sense of other protest movements and to offer predictions about the dimensions of future social conflict.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1: Collective Identities and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France 2: Class Mobilization and the Revolution of 1848 3: Urban Transformations, 1852-70 4: Labor Protest in Paris in the 1860s 5: Public Meetings and Popular Clubs, 1868-70 6: Neighborhood, Class, and the Commune of 1871 7: Conclusion Appendix A: Statistical Analyses of June 1848 and Paris Commune Arrests Appendix B: Methodological Concerns Bibliography Index
-- Yoshie