Parisian Workers Research Articles

Paris Commune and medical professionals

The significance of the Paris Commune "lay in the fact that it was essentially a government of the working class" (Marx). The Parisian workers give the revolution a social impetus. Karl Marx from gloomy London sends greetings to Paris. The bourgeoisie, once progressive, which earlier spoke with pride the names of Pinel and Holbach, in the days of the Paris Commune, mobilizes and organizes counterrevolution.

Freedom: The History and the Future of a Disputed Idea

Around 1882, the photographer Albert Fernique photographed a group of Parisian workers gathered around trestles and benches inside a workshop. The floor is strewn with piles of wood and the ceiling beams tower above the workmen. Even so, the space is dwarfed by a massive, sculpted shoulder, draped in Roman robes, which dominates the background of the photograph; two workers watching the scene from a beam just below the roof appear to be perched on it like sparrows. The shoulder belonged to the statue, Liberty Enlightening the World—a gift to the United States from the France of the Third Republic. Work on the statue began here, in the workshop of the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, only a year after the suppression of the Paris Commune. More people were killed in that one Bloody Week (la semaine sanglante) in 1874 than were executed in the entire Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. If the statue was supposed to symbolize liberty, this was to be an orderly liberty far removed from the license of the armed Parisian workers and their short-lived utopian government. Unlike her ancestor Marianne, immortalized by Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the statue does not wear the red cap that, since ancient Rome, had symbolized freedom from slavery. In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Third Republic banned the cap and sought to banish the unruly freedom it represented.

Zola’s environment: “The dark misery of damp times”

In naturalist novels, social and biological determinism is imposed on the fate of an individual located in a specific environment. This environment is decisive for the main theme of any literary text which follows this aesthetics. In L'Assommoir (1877) by Émile Zola, it is in the working class environment hosting Gervaise, the protagonist of the novel, where we can examine the slow but unstoppable fall of her fate, condemned to moral and physical misery and accelerated by her alcoholism. The labour world of Parisian workers, the urban landscape of the French capital, as well as the physical and psychological defects that Gervaise inherits from her father are the inescapable conditions that determine her fate. This article aims at an analytical and descriptive study of the destructive environment that ultimately kills the heroine.

Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. By Eliza Earle Ferguson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2010. xii plus 268 pp. $60.00)

In 1872 Alexandre Dumas fils set off a heated debate with his categorical reply “Kill her!” to the question of how a man should treat his adulterous wife. The crime of passion, nearly always imagined as a husband killing his faithless wife, fascinated France in sensational accounts in the press, novels, and the writings of jurists, psychologists, feminists and other social critics. But as Eliza Earle Ferguson argues in Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, this discussion did not understand domestic violence as Paris's working people practiced it. For ordinary Parisian workers, both men and women, violence was not a masculine right, nor a resurgence of primitive instinct, nor as the Director of Criminal Statistics in the Ministry of Justice speculated, a somnambulist response to modernity. Rather, violence was retribution for serious breeches in the pact of reciprocal, although unequal, obligations that constituted the couple, and integral to policing gender roles.

Mimi Pinson Goes to War: Taste, Class and Gender in France, 1900-18

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Frenchwomen of a free performing-arts programme for female workers, known as the Mimi Pinsons, began to appear frequently in popular stories, articles, poems and songs as cultural shorthand for a renovated social vision of France. Founded by composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier in 1900, the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson taught its worker–students elementary music, song and dance, and gradually expanded to include a charitable organisation and social network. A closer examination of the OMP reveals that its members were also used to reconcile early twentieth-century French anxieties about working-class militancy and even war by way of a potent cultural association of female sexuality, aesthetic refinement and labour. In the years before the First World War, the Mimi Pinsons were defined by journalists, government officials and the OMP's own organisers according to a formulaic type which at once modernised and constrained the role of the female Parisian worker. Associated almost exclusively with the luxury-garment trades – seamstresses, flowermakers, milliners and department-store clerks – the new Mimi Pinsons were embraced by the public as naturally chic yet diligent guardians of French art and craft. These female worker–students allowed an easy merging of the body of the female worker with particularly French notions of the patriotic responsibility of feminine taste. When the First World War came, many of the Mimi Pinsons joined the war effort as workers and nurses, yet they were embraced by the public primarily for their service as tasteful creators of patriotic decorative objects, and as an ideal symbolic figure for managing anxieties about the social dissolution that came with the war.

The Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the Shifting of the Revolutionary Tradition

What was the legacy of the 1871 Paris Commune at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905? Was it understood as part of an obsolete revolutionary tradition or as something new? The French left responded equivocally even as the 1905 revolution provided a comparison, and as Lenin identified the practical lessons of 1871. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, the Commune would be given new life as a legitimizing agent for the USSR. French Communists would also adopt the Leninist reading. This article examines the "rupture" of 1905 and the transformation of the revolutionary tradition from the perspective of the French left, Parisian workers and Russian émigrés, and in light of the funeral of the former Communard Louise Michel.

Introduction to the Fifth International Workshop on Structure and Function of Large Arteries

From February 3 through February 5, 2005, the Fifth International Workshop on Structure and Function of Large Arteries was held in Paris. As with the preceding Workshops, the program and participants were a resounding success and, as organizers of the Workshop, we are delighted with the attendance, the presentations, discussions, and, especially, with the manuscripts that were contributed for publication in this issue of Hypertension . The proceedings of the past 3 (of the 4) Paris workshops were also published in this journal, and we are particularly pleased with the responses of those many new workers in this field who have been stimulated and contributed to the extant knowledge in this growing field. With much satisfaction, since publication of these workshops, the number of papers dealing with this subject cited in PubMed has increased remarkably. Evidence of worldwide interest clearly reflects the remarkable stimulus of the Parisian workers in this field and the obvious impact made by publication of these workshops (Figure). This does not minimize the fundamental conceptual and technical developments in this field by others, but this figure reflects the impact made by these 4 Workshops. In addition, the stimulus is no doubt exacerbated by the contemporary interest generated by the vast problem of isolated systolic hypertension in the elderly and the convergence of each of these events. Furthermore, we are most grateful to Servier Pharmaceuticals for their unrestricted educational support for each of these Workshops. The increasing prevalence of publications with literature based on 2 key words/phrases: arterial stiffness and pulse pressure. Note the relationship between these 2 items and the 4 Paris Workshops dealing with this overall subject. The scientific program of this Workshop was introduced by a keynote discussion on vascular stiffening by David A. Kass (Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Md), who provided an …

Logic of the Site

Logic of the Site Alain Badiou (bio) Translated by Steve Corcoran (bio) and Bruno Bosteels (bio) The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of the Commune Take any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this world—whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this world—is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that happens to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance. Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singularity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself. We will ask: can we give a more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site? Let us consider the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim government of bourgeois "Republicans" capitulates to Bismarck's Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"—very comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal enemy)—it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by a frightened rural world, an assembly that sits in Bordeaux. Led by Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition. The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National Guard, battalions [End Page 141] that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of Paris—Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth. Thus we have a divided world whose logical organization—what in philosophical jargon could be called its transcendental organisation—reconciles intensities of political existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria. Concerning the representative, electoral, and legal dispositions, one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance, political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the International, local military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this world, which had been separated and disbanded [délié] owing to the war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the inexistent aspect [l'inexistant propre] of the term "political capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The government receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these reprobates." First up then, an imperative task, and a seemingly easy one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military committees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will make...

Popular Classes and Cohabitation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris

This article aims to show that we do not know what we believe we do about the extent and meaning of recourse to cohabitation among popular classes in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. Discourse on cohabitation and illegitimacy is deconstructed, revealing that analyses of popular behavior are based on problematic data and flawed methods. If cohabitation was widespread, this was because of the legal and economic constraints imposed on workers, particularly migrants, rather than a symptom of cultural breakdown or the emergence of a counterculture. The article interrogates serial data, and especially marriage records, as well as the archives of charity organizations, to argue that Parisian workers were anxious to marry, to marry in church, and to marry respectably. It suggests that we should dedramatize cohabitation and recognize that popular-class attitudes and behavior were more conformist and traditional than we have been led to think.

Trade Cohesion, Class Unity, and Urban Insurrection: Artisanal Activism in the Paris Commune

Sociologists and historians generally agree that working-class protest in 19th-century France relied on the close-knit networks and corporate solidarity of artisanal trades. But urban uprisings invariably mobilized workers from a broad range of trades, a fact which some scholars have interpreted as evidence of growing class consciousness among French workers. This article shows that social organization within trade groups cannot account for insurgency in the Paris Commune: workers from close-knit occupational groups participated at lower rates than those in weakly organized trades. The reason was that Parisian workers were mobilized for insurgency through neighborhood networks, not through their membership in craft groups. The disappearance of trade boundaries during insurrections did not, therefore, reflect the emergence of class unity, but rather a shift from trade to neighborhood as the organizational framework for the mobilization of protest.

Voices of the People: The Social Life of "La Sociale" at the End of the Second Empire.

These texts, from the work of French radical historians and philosophers, focus on the day-to-day realities of Parisian workers' lives.

Corporations Républicaines: The Revolutionary Idiom of Parisian Workers in 1848

When the insurrection of February 1848 chased Louis-Philippe from the throne and brought a provisional republican government to power, the Parisian workers who had made the insurrection suddenly found themselves at the center of the political stage. As the heroes and victors of the revolution, they immediately won important concessions: the declaration of the right to work (the ‘droit au travail’), the opening of the National Workshops, and the establishment of the Luxembourg Commission—a body composed of representatives of all the capital's trades, chaired by the socialist theorist Louis Blanc, which was to discuss the organization of labor and make proposals to the government. The workers responded to this revolutionary situation with a monumental outpouring of words and action, attempting to construct a new social and political order based on labor and its rights. In this paper I shall try to describe and interpret one prominent feature of the workers' projects for revolutionary transformation: their use of language and of organizational forms that were apparently borrowed from the corporate system of the old regime.