Mike Davis, Slavoj Zizek, et al. have written about the growth of
global slums and informal sectors and what that means for the
prospects of social revolution.  What do such urban informal workers
think of themselves and the world in which they live?  What social
identities and ideologies do they develop?  While urbanization of the
global South is new, the fact that insurgent identities are not
necessarily -- perhaps seldom -- based on the idea of the "working
class" is not new.  Even those who organized the Paris Commune, what
Marx thought of as the first dictatorship of the proletariat at work,
thought of themselves quite differently than many Marxists imagined
them to be.  Contradiction between objective and subjective -- who we
are and what we think of ourselves -- is a permanent feature of lives
under capitalism, though contradiction is more visible than ever
today.  Moreover, if recent studies of workers involved in the Paris
Commune are correct, those who were less well organized in existing
craft and trade associations got involved in the commune more than
better organized workers.  The key to mobilization was cross-class
neighborhood networks, rather than single-class work-based
organizations.  That's an important insight that we can put to use in
many parts of the world.  -- Yoshie

<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0348/is_n1_v39/ai_20641674/print>
Labor History, Feb. 1998

Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848
to the Commune. - book reviews
Judith F. Stone

Roger V. Gould, 1995 Chicago, University of Chicago Press pp. viii +
253; $15.95 (paperback)

Roger V. Gould has written an ambitious study in historical sociology.
His major concern is theory and he approaches the history of 19th
century revolutionary upheavals in France as a "uniquely informative
natural experiment" (192). To a large degree this experiment is a
negative one: to demonstrate the inadequacies and limitations of the
"new social history" developed in the 1960s. Gould argues that this
"master narrative of class formation" still retains considerable
influence in the analysis of 19th century social movements. Class
struggle and the story of working class formation persist as dominant
explanatory themes and, in Grould's view, often distort empirical
evidence. Variations of the class formation theory have also been
influential in the field of urban sociology. Gould mentions the
limitations of liberal explanations for the transformation of Paris
from 1853 to 1870, but he saves his sharpest criticism for the
varieties of Marxist, class-based analyses of the reordering of the
French capital during the Second Empire. As an alternative to a class
analysis of collective behavior, Gould offers participation identities
based on collective identities that are multidimensional, change over
time and are shaped by varying social networks and particularly
powerful events. Gould argues that this perspective is preferable to
the discursive, culturalist alternative to class analysis, since
participation identity can be supported by empirical evidence.

Insurgent Identities is an extended test of participation identities
theory and a persistent refutation of class analysis as an overarching
explanatory method. The Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of
1871 provide the empirical data for this experiment. Gould's central
point is that the uprising of June 1848 and the Commune, often
presented as two related episodes in the unfolding saga of the French
labor movement, were fundamentally different. Causes and participant
motivation in each struggle bore few similarities to the other; these
distinctions are essential in order to under-stand the dynamic of the
two revolts. Simply put, those who mounted the barricades in 1848 did
so as workers, fired by the Revolution's initial linking of universal
male suffrage and the right to work. The specific conjuncture of mass
unemployment in the 1840s and the revolutionary institutions of the
Luxembourg Commission and the National Workshop forged an identity of
workers as a social class. When the conservative National Assembly
moved to dismantle these working class institutions, workers defended
them on the barricades. In 1871 many who participated in the Commune
did so as members of the outlying neighborhoods newly created during
Baron Haussmann's transformation of Paris. They also acted as
Parisians committed to defending their newly won municipal liberties
and adamant in their hostility to a conservative government. Unlike
the class-based insurgency of 1848, Gould insists that the Commune was
an urban protest, made possible by the dramatic reconstruction of the
city between 1853 and 1870. The new socially heterogeneous networks
which emerged in the peripheral neighborhoods, the multiclass
organizations of radical clubs and the National Guard, and, most
importantly, the Franco. Prussian War with its devastating four month
siege of Paris, forged new identities open to revolutionary
mobilization. Could concludes his analysis of the motives and
identities of the Communards by asserting that they took up arms to
defend their "new urban villages," as well as Parisian municipal
autonomy again an authoritarian state. Class, he insists, was an
insignificant factor.

In his effort to demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional
theory of collective identities, Gould provides brief, but well
constructed, summaries of revolutionary developments from March to
June of 1848, and the developments leading to the Commune. His
insistence on the differences between these two movements is well
founded. His discussion of the labor movement in 1848 and then during
the Second Empire makes useful distinctions between class identity and
craft identity, as disparate bases for worker mobilization. His
implication that class identity in 1848 resulted from a unique
constellation of economic and political factors, and that it rapidly
eroded after the repression of the June uprising merits further
consideration. The portrait of the emerging labor movement in the
1860s as one based on strong craft affiliations is not new, but does
support Gould's central claim of the need to re-examine the master
narrative of class formation. In the case of Elie Commune the
centrality of what Gould calls "spatially defined communities" does go
some way to explaining the dimension of patriotic fervor which often
remains inexplicable in narrow class interpretations of the 1871
insurrection. Gould's stress on the political dimension of the Commune
and the participants' view that they were doing battle against an
alien state is most welcome. (But of course Marx, albeit from a
different perspective, already had focused on the issues of state
power as central to the Commune.) Gould then permits us to re-examine
both these insurgencies from a new vantage point. He asks for new
conceptualizations in urban sociology to account for social movements.
He demonstrates the need to reconsider the development of the French
labor movement, and he argues convincingly for the importance of
politics and specific events in the mobitization of revolutionary
actors. But has he demonstrated with empirical evidence the
explanatory force of the collective identity theory? I for one have
not been entirely persuaded.

Gould's central argument is that the supporters of the Commune were
mobilized because of their strong identification with their
neighborhoods. To a large degree their neighborhoods were the new
peripheral arrondissements created by Haussmann's razing of central
Paris and the annexation of previously autonomous villages into the
city. In these new neighborhoods residency was the principal identity
and their inhabitants were socially heterogeneous. The outer
arrondissements did not replicate the old neighborhoods of central
Paris where residence, craft-affiliation and workplace were all in
close physical proximity. The new arrondissements separated residence
and work. To demonstrate their social heterogeneity, Gould has studied
the records of 153 civil marriages in these outlying arrondissements.
He has identified one-third of the witnesses, attending working class
marriage ceremonies, as middle class. This identification is based on
a commercial directory of the period, listing occupations. Certainly
this is a significant finding, but what exactly does it mean? Why
precisely should we interpret the presence of "middle-class" witnesses
at a working class marriage as a sign that the couple rejected a
working class identity? What of couples in the neighborhood who lived
in stable consensual unions? The public meetings of the late 1860s
reinforced the collective identities of these neighborhoods. Gould
demonstrates that such meetings and their confrontational attitude
toward the police and the imperial state occurred much more frequently
in the new arrondissements. What is less clear is why the language of
class struggle, standard at these meetings, should be discounted, as
Gould does, while animosity expressed toward the state should be
viewed as their main characteristic. The question still remains open,
in my mind at least, as to how these Parisian viewed the neighborhoods
with which they so closely identified.

Gould seems reluctant to explore the meanings of this collective
neighborhood identity. He argues convincingly that these
arrondissements contained strong social networks and vibrant
communities. But the nature of the life of these neighborhoods does
not emerge clearly from his study. If the collective identity was not
one of class, what precisely was it? Here perhaps Gould's concern with
dismantling the "master narrative of class formation" distracted him
from a fuller exploration of the realities of these neighborhoods.
Gould's mention of the intersections among clubs, meetings, bals
populaires, the cabarets and a growing political sense of the "people
vs the state" is tantalizing. It might have been fruitful to examine
more thoroughly that elusive and politically charged concept of "le
peuple," the emerging mixed social and cultural category of
"populaire," and the development of radical republicanism. It is
possible that in the convergence of these experiences, Could might
have been able to describe more vividly the life of the "spatially
defined community" whose importance he has underscored.

<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12942.ctl>
Gould, Roger V. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in
Paris from 1848 to the Commune. 262 p., 10 halftones, 2 maps, 12 line
drawings, 16 tables. 6 x 9 1995

Cloth $55.00sc ISBN: 978-0-226-30560-8 (ISBN-10: 0-226-30560-0) Fall 1995
Paper $25.00sp ISBN: 978-0-226-30561-5 (ISBN-10: 0-226-30561-9) Fall 1995

In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and
to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts
that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class
struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective
identities framing conflict during these two upheavals and in the
intervening period, Gould reveals that while class played a pivotal
role in 1848, it was neighborhood solidarity that was the decisive
organizing force in 1871.

The difference was due to Baron Haussmann's massive urban renovation
projects between 1852 and 1868, which dispersed workers from Paris's
center to newly annexed districts on the outskirts of the city. In
these areas, residence rather than occupation structured social
relations. Drawing on evidence from trail documents, marriage records,
reports of police spies, and the popular press, Gould demonstrates
that this fundamental rearrangement in the patterns of social life
made possible a neighborhood insurgent movement; whereas the
insurgents of 1848 fought and died in defense of their status as
workers, those in 1871 did so as members of a besieged urban
community.

A valuable resource for historians and scholars of social movements,
this work shows that collective identities vary with political
circumstances but are nevertheless constrained by social networks.
Gould extends this argument to make sense of other protest movements
and to offer predictions about the dimensions of future social
conflict.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1: Collective Identities and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France
2: Class Mobilization and the Revolution of 1848
3: Urban Transformations, 1852-70
4: Labor Protest in Paris in the 1860s
5: Public Meetings and Popular Clubs, 1868-70
6: Neighborhood, Class, and the Commune of 1871
7: Conclusion
Appendix A: Statistical Analyses of June 1848 and Paris Commune Arrests
Appendix B: Methodological Concerns
Bibliography
Index

--
Yoshie

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