Capitalist Industrialization and Patterns of Industrial Protest: a Comparative Urban Study of Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This study analyzes the development of patterns of collective industrial protest among three different groups of mid-nineteenth-century French workers-the household Weavers of St.-Etienne, the handicraft artisans of Toulouse, and the textile factory workers of Rouen. Temporal and spatial differences in the incidence, forms, targets, and content of industrial protest are explained in terms of the way in which divergent local patterns of capitalist industrialization intersected with national-level political changes to alter workers' interests/grievances and capacities. The research documents a disjuncture between the conditions within which interest polarization between labor and capital was sharpest and the conditions under which capacities for collective industrial protest were strongest. Although full-scale proletarianization did create an intense polarization of interests between workers and employers, it did not produce the strongest capacities for collective action because such capacities were not narrowly rooted in production. They were shaped by other factors, including the persistence of preexisting traditional communities, labor market vulnerability, and the changing political opportunity structure, which are not reducible to the development of productive forces.