Rebel Cities: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution, by Mike Rapport

Abstract

One of the major transitions in Europe during the early modern period was the transfer of large-scale popular unrest from the countryside to the city. The great peasant uprisings of the medieval period were increasingly overshadowed by the threat of urban insurrection, of which the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was the exemplar. As cities grew in size, states became vulnerable to the threat of urban insurrection and political revolution in their capitals or other major urban centres. Mike Rapport has chosen to explore three of the urban contexts which shaped the ‘Atlantic world’ in the late eighteenth century, Paris, London and New York, seeing them as at the frontier of a new politics in which rapidly growing city populations could threaten the political control of governments. The author’s principal concern is to demonstrate the way in which the topography and layout of individual cities facilitated protest; in particular, how ‘in all the political ferment of the later eighteenth century, the spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict’. He argues that ‘the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped to shape its cause’.