Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune.

This is the most original and challenging reinterpretation of the Paris Commune to appear, certainly in English, for many years. More generally, we have long needed a book that takes a rigorous critical look at the roots of Parisian popular militancy during the nineteenth century. As such, it has important implications beyond its immediate subject matter. Gould has constructed a skillfully sustained argument, accompanied by ingenious and painstaking statistical experiments. As a sociologist particularly concerned with urban theory and the mechanisms of mass mobilization, his principal targets are "structural Marxist" interpretations of the Commune as a stage in the history of urban class formation, and the "humanist" view (whose best known exponent is perhaps Henri Lefebvre) that it was a reaction against loss of community in the aftermath of the Second-Empire rebuilding of Paris. He is also (if politely) dismissive of the empirical accounts of "liberal" historians.

In brief for although this is quite a short book the argument is dense - he argues that the Commune was not an episode in the "class-formation narrative," and indeed that it was less about class than the June Days revolt of 1848, which forms the starting point of the argument. Class was not the crucial element in language, organization or patterns of popular mobilization during the Commune, which was a city-wide inter-class struggle. Nor, however, was it an attempt by a working class dispossessed and alienated by Haussmann's urbanization program to recapture its city: on the contrary, a fundamental aspect of city life was the integration of the population into "urban villages" that survived and were even strengthened by Haussmannization. It was these neighborhood communities, he argues, that were the indispensible mechanism of mass mobilization.

The overall tenor of this interpretation I find convincing; indeed it is pleasing to find a number of arguments advanced empirically by several historians (including your reviewer) confirmed by a sociologist using more systematic theory and more technically sophisticated methodology. This means, admittedly, that I am inclined to accept Gould's step-by-step argument because I favor his conclusions; but in any case, he shapes - and rather effectively - his thesis to stand or fall together as a whole that is greater than its individual parts.

Not every step in the argument is convincing in isolation, especially as presented in this book. It may be the author or his publishers who are primarily at fault here, but some technical parts of the exposition are too sketchily presented. For example, I have doubts about the figure showing arrests by working-class composition of districts (p. 175), but not enough information is given for critical scrutiny, let alone verification, to be possible. Another key demonstration, concerning the "network of cross-district National Guard enlistments" (pp. 184-5) is practically incomprehensible, and the reader is referred to one of the author's published articles, which is unsatisfactory. Even another ten pages of explanation could greatly have enhanced the book's cogency. In compensation, there is an excellent essay on the use of the main archival sources.

Gould draws bold conclusions from his evidence, and puts his arguments trenchantly. This makes for an exciting book, and also one that should arouse debate. For example, his rather elegant sampling of marriage records, showing a high proportion of "bourgeois" witnesses at working-class weddings, he takes as proving cross-class community integration in the new peripheral districts of Paris - an interesting and provocative conclusion. But here again, one would need to know a little more about these "middle-class" friends: were many of them employers, or were they mainly white-collar wage-earners? The answer might lead us to a somewhat different interpretation. And might wedding statistics anyway relate to a "respectable" and deferential element among the working-class population. I also agree strongly with his ably argued contention that local community pressure was a key element in mobilizing combatants. But I am not sure that Gould's logic explains why most of the Parisian middle class from the beginning in fact steered clear of the struggle: surely here one would have to consider cultural representations of revolution as a lower-class rampage that respectable people feared. In general, such considerations of politics and ideology are, no doubt deliberately, deemphasised in favor of sociological explanation: this after all, is the nature of the exercise. Gould is not writing a general explanation of radicalism or the Commune (hence little mention of the Parisian republican tradition, for example) but identifying social conditions that facilitate mass mobilization - a different problem.

Yet even given this particular focus, the relative weight he gives to different factors is surprising. He stresses the importance of public meetings in the 1860s as creators of a popular political radicalism based on neighborhood. But must not the shared experiences of war and siege have had an infinitely greater effect: food queues, local clubs and committees, municipal politics, several months of National Guard comradeship in the firing line? True, Gould mentions some of these things, but gives them strikingly little prominence. Perhaps his hypothesis that it was changes in the urban fabric that influenced popular mobilization requires him to downplay the extraneous element of war - even though an analysis of wartime experience would strongly support his argument about the fundamental importance of community ties. But it would also lead him towards an old-fashioned conclusion that he dismisses a priori: that the principle cause of the Commune was the experience of the war.

These objections, however, in no way alter my view that this is an impressive and important book. It should be required reading for all interested in the Paris Commune, the French revolutionary tradition, and theories of urban radicalism.

Robert Tombs University of Cambridge