Social Structures and Shared Beliefs: Four Worker Communities in the “Second Industrialization”

Abstract

Editor's Note?The following essay is an abbreviated translation of a report which initially appeared in the Bulletin du centre d'histoire ?conomique et sociale de la region Lyonnaise, 4 (1980), 1-28. It was translated by Louise A. Tilly, with the assistance of Sarah Tilly, and it is reproduced with the permission of the author and the director of the Centre Pierre L?on Histoire Economique et Sociale de la R?gion Lyonnaise. All footnotes have been omitted. Several analytical themes which were proposed in this essay have subse quently been developed more extensively in the issue of Le mouvement social (no. 118 Jan.-March, 1982), entitled Ouvriers dans la ville, and presented under the editorial direction of Yves Lequin. The central problem ofthat issue is the develop ment of the industrial suburb, outside the walls and tariff gates of the continental European city, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and of the network of interlocking neighborhood and workplace relationships from which the working-class politics of that epoch derived its specific shape and sustenance. The researchers of the Lyon group, whose work is described below, have directed their attention to the ways in which those networks were disrupted during the first four decades of this century. They hope to explain both the great silence of 1922-1936 and the social basis of the emergence of Communism as the hegemonic ideology of the working-class communities under examination after World War II. The hypotheses and research methods with which they have approached the prob lem lend this discussion of their work clear relevance to the understanding of workers in the United States, Germany, Britain, and other advanced capitalist countries in the ebb tide of the revolutionary upheavals of 1916-21, despite the divergence in political courses among the various national movements. [D.M.]