On Insurgent Identities

In his 1995 book, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune, Roger Gould disavows the Marxist heritage of the Paris Commune and argues that the men and women who led the insurgency of 1871 were not doing so on the basis of class, but on the basis of urban citizenry. He contrasts this to the Revolution of 1848, which was very clearly rooted in the working poor of Paris. Rather than the Paris Commune acting as a rebellion against capitalism, it is instead a commune (in the sense of a small polity) acting against the provincial French government, which was rooted in Versailles.

Gould begins the book by informing the reader that he noticed profound differences between the February Revolution of 1848 and the Revolution of 1871. First, French demands for “right to work” legislation was absent from the Revolution of 1871 while it was at the forefront of revolutionary ferment during the February Revolution. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the February Revolution was limited to the quartiers populaires of east Paris, where most of the workers lived, while the Revolution of 1871 occurred throughout the entire city of Paris.

Gould identifies the chief cause of these differences to the urban reforms of Paris by Baron Haussmann. While some workers did stay in their labor communities by the end of these reforms, many workers were relocated into residential areas. With this relocation, workers developed a sense of neighborhood (and, further, urban) identity rather than class identity. Importantly, Gould points out that most of the people involved in the Revolution of 1871 were those who had come to live in residential areas, while traditional artisanal workers actually remained relatively passive during the events of the Revolution of 1871.

Trained as a sociologist, Gould relies heavily on his training by building statistical models to see which classes of people live in each part of Paris and to find who were most active in the insurgency of 1871. Nevertheless, Gould also relies on documents that are more traditional to the historian’s craft. Over the course of his project, he utilized four archives and fifteen contemporary newspapers to find representative documentation on those who lived through these revolutions.

I found Gould’s conclusions to be both convincing and provocative, leading me to consider it one of the best books that I have read in the past few weeks. The scholarship is sound and Gould delivers insights that I would not have even considered had I been in his position. His training in sociology was invaluable to this project, leading me to wish for further cooperation between historians and sociologists in order to see further monographs like this one.