In his book Work and Revolution in France, William SewellS Jr., endeavors to recast the history of the French working classes.1 He offers a new reading of the French of that emphasizes both the persistence of a corporate mentality and the development of class consciousness out of the dialectic of corporatism and revolution. This reading in turn calls attention to his ambition to reshape the methods and perspectives of labor history more generally. In this essay, we will examine the most important aspects of Sewell's reading and argue that the weaknesses of his methodological approach lead him to some misleading though until now largely uncontestedonclusions about working-class consciousness. At the same time, however, it will become clear that our analysis of these questions was stimulated in essential ways by the very richness of Sewell's work. No one in French history can ignore his contributions. We begin, therefore, with a brief appreciation of his methodological and substantive aims. The most obvious manifestation of Sewell' s methodological ambition is his chronological scope. While most historians of France work exclusively on one side or another of the great 1789 divide, Sewell sets out to analyze and synthesize developments spanning the Old Regime to 1848. The advantages of such an enterprise are apparent: the revolutionary tradition is put in context, and the startling development of nineteenth-century socialism gets, as it wereS its prehistory. Even more telling, however, is the author's attempt to overthrow our commonplace system of analytical priorities. The language of most French history