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

Abstract

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.