THE RISE AND DECLINE OF A REVOLUTIONARY SPACE: PARIS' PLACE DE GREVE AND THE STONEMASONS OF CREUSE, 1750-1900.

Physical spaces and social groups can have intertwined and sometimes meaningful histories. One thinks, for instance, of the relationship of Stonehenge and the Druids or the Mur des Federees and the Communards of 1871. [1] Though less well known, a similar relationship existed between the Place de Greve, the open square fronting Paris' Hotel de Ville (cityhall), and the migrant stonemasons from central France who used the setting as a hiring fair. The Place de Greve is especially noteworthy for its history of contentiousness in the nineteenth century, for it was here that crowds tended to gather, rumors of insurrection circulated and rebellions reached their climax; where the heightened social tensions that marked Paris from the Revolution of 1789 though the Commune of 1871 could be seen to take shape and play out. [2] Less well known is the Place's connection to the stonemasons. Yet this combination of physical space and social group contributed to a "contentious repertoire" that would help to make Paris the nineteenth century's "capital of revolution." [3]

Charles Tilly, in particular, has emphasized the importance of this "revolutionary square" in France's notably contentious history. [4] While the Place was situated in the very heart of the city, the seemingly alien stonemasons who frequented it and the images of violence popularly associated with the site made it a marginal and dangerous location in the eyes of police and public, a stereotype that lingered even as, during the Second Empire (1852-1870), the central city grew more bourgeois and workers were pushed to the urban periphery. [5] Yet it was not so much the geography and physical characteristics of the Place that turned it into a combative setting, since these qualities had long existed. Rather, the Place de Greve gained this meaning because it became a "microcosm," both symbolically and in reality, of the contentious merging of representational, political, economic, demographic and centralizing trends that had their origins in the eighteenth century, but saw their explosive results occur especiall y in the nineteenth century. [6]

A useful analytical tool for approaching this conjuncture and its relation to the many rebellions that occurred in Paris in the nineteenth century is the notion of a repertoire of contention. Developed by sociologists, a contentious repertoire is defined by Tilly as "a limited set of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out (by groups) through a relatively deliberate process of choice... They are learned cultural creations ... (that) emerge from struggle." [7] Contentious repertoires change over time, Tilly argues, with the French Revolution "pivotal" in the development of the modern form because it enlarged the power of the state, thereby forcing groups in opposition (notably workers, since modern governments almost always aligned themselves with employers) to assume more definitive and confrontational shapes. [8] Tilly, whose research has centered especially on France and who has long argued that capitalism and state centralization share a parallel and intertwined history, views rebellion as a resp onse to these developments and as a form of repertoire distinctive to the nineteenth century. [9] He notes, however, that as a scholarly tool "no one has demonstrated the repertoire of contention's utility with sufficient clarity and concreteness." [10] This paper does not employ the theory rigorously, but rather takes up the idea broadly as a means to explore the relationship among rebellion, repression and physical place in nineteenth-century Paris.

As this article describes, an important ingredient in the contentious repertoire at the Place de Greve were images of disorder and violence. These images were the products of modernizing trends that contributed to concrete actions, and which had their greatest impact upon the stonemasons who sought jobs at the hiring fair occurring every morning at the square. Though hardworking and unpretentious, the stonemasons were nonetheless, in the words of Alain Corbin, at "the confluence of [nineteenth-century Parisians'] social anxieties," a condition most evident in the many rebellions of the period. [11] How was it that the stonemasons--who were in the capital only eight or nine months of the year, who were not more numerous than many other trades and who perceived themselves as peaceful--came to be in this situation? This article explores the conjuncture of historical trends and their relationship to a contentious repertoire at the Place de Greve that helps to explain the pattern of repression in nineteenth-centu ry Paris, and which was central to the rise and decline of this "revolutionary space." [12]

Images of the Place de Greve

"Places," David Harvey has written, "like space and time, are social constructs and have to be read and understoood as such." [13] Certainly this observation fits the Place de Greve, where popular images and representations were potent elements in marginalizing and stigmatizing the setting. These representations took root in the second half of the eighteenth century, but were embellished in the nineteenth century so that, as David Jordan writes, the area around the Place came to be viewed as "...a closed circuit, a milieu characterized by different behavior, seen and feared as criminal by bourgeois Paris ... a cauldron of regional dialects and patois." [14]

Yet this kind of imagery had not always existed. For most of the Old Regime, popular traditions associated with the Place de Greve were characterized by a mix of celebration and violence. Festivals occurred frequently at the square during the Old Regime, notably on the occasion of the birth of the dauphin and for royal marriages. The Place also hosted the annual bonfire for the midsummer fete of Saint Jean. These were all occasions when king and "people" reasserted traditional bonds, replaying the give-and-take relationship that could characterize ties between monarch and populace before 1789. This relationship seems to have been dealt a crippling blow in 1778, however, when the celebration for the marriage of the future Louis XVI was accompanied by a panic of the crowd that left many dead or injured. The subsequent demise of the tradition of the Saint Jean's bonfire was probably related to this disaster and may help to explain why, by the start of the Revolution, the celebrations at the Place that had perio dically reminded king and people of their reciprocal ties seem to have lost their former meaning. [15]

At the same time, another very different, but no less long-standing tradition associated with the square not only persisted but prospered. This was the Place's de Greve's role as the site for public execution, a custom dating from the early fourteenth century that took on a new and sometimes infamous meaning during the revolutionary period. Notorious criminals such as Ravaillac, Cartouche and Damiens had all met their end at the square under the Old Regime, as had many other individuals whose misdeeds were not so legendary. But it was the introduction of the guillotine at the Place in April 1792 that served to lend an especially macabre quality to popular impressions of the site. It was because of its association with public executions that after 1789 the Place evoked an image of violence that, unlike its status under the Old Regime, was not balanced by traditions of gaiety. [16]

Perceptions linking the square with violence were, no doubt, mostly a function of a popular discourse that had real meaning for and produced real responses by ordinary Parisians. But the Place de Greve as "emblem" was also taken up and embellished by well-known writers of the nineteenth century. These included Victor Hugo, who was fascinated by the guillotine and the ritual of execution at the square. Hugo's Last Days of A Condemned Man (1832) has left a compelling picture of the rites of judicial bloodshed carried Out at the site. Later in Les Miserables (1862), Hugo turned the character of the street urchin Gavroche into a connoisseur of "the terrible machine" (the guillotine), for whom "No festival is equal to the execution ground-la Greve." [17] Similarly, the villainous types who populate Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris (1 842-43) mingle in and out of tragic destinies tied to the guillotine and the square. Less well-known nineteenth-century writers of pulp fiction also cast the Place and surrounding streets in a uniformly infamous style, playing upon the popular perception that the blood of past executions had somehow indelibly tainted its ground. The Place's history seemed to lend itself to melodramatic language, as evident in this selection from an English-language visitor's guide of 1880:

O stones of the Place de Greve! Could ye but cry out! None of ye are so new that ye have not made this square the rendezvous of misery-the Mecca of protest-the altar of sacrifice, and every score of years they (rebels) baptize it anew in their own blood and that of their richer brethren! [18]

Throughout the century, visitors to the city could view the macabre setting and, if their timing were right, the guillotine itself. Guidebooks evoked the square's violent legacy while providing directions to this "theater of death." [19] In the 1870s, a writer could note that the "spirits" of past executions and rebellions still haunted this arena of "blood and powder." [20]

Negative images fashioned from the legacy of violence at the setting were easily joined to those of the "nomad" and "barbarian" migrant stonemasons who were drawn to the Place de Greves hiring fair. One writer, describing the "indigents at this seditious site," feared that when work was unavailable, the migrants, not wanting to return to Limousin (the area of central France from which most of them came), would" ... vegetate, become vagabonds, die of hunger, join the army already too bloated with wretched autochthones." [21] The assumption that the workers who matriculated at the Place were drawn to drink was commonplace. [22] The language of nineteenth-century novelists and commentators describing a city pregnant with violence, underlain by an almost debilitating "social fear" emerging from apparently dangerous locales like the Place de Greve and populated by marginal groups like the stonemasons was invoked in more recent times in Louis Chevalier's influential Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes (English translation, 1973). [23] For Chevalier, the Place, the provincial workers who sought jobs there and the nearby boardinghouses they resided in were key ingredients in Paris' "pathological" urban environment. The meaning of the Place in this "sick city" (and even if that meaning for Chevalier could not be "absolutely determined") was that for the public and the police it was the breeding ground for disorder: " ... offer(-ing) possibilities, creat(-ing) moments, facilitat(-ing) things." [24]

The fearful images of the Place de Greve to be found in nineteenth-century literature, and recalled in Chevalier's more recent work, no doubt were genuinely felt. The impressions conveyed by the (much rarer) words of workers who frequented the Place, however, have a different tone. The handful of recollections left by stonemasons emphasize instead the point that the hardships endured at and around the Place were the price to be paid for supporting families back home in Creuse. [25] Martin Nadaud, whose memoir offers the best description of the setting from the perspective of a worker, did not see life at the hiring fair and the nearby boardinghouses as degraded or threatening, even if the attendant unhealthy living conditions and lack of job security were things he very much wished to see changed. If a self-perception of marginality can be detected in Nadaud's recollections, then it is a marginality with a design that was commonplace among the migrants: comfortable retirement in the native village financed b y years of labor in the capital. Neither the insularity of life experienced by the migrants in the boardinghouses nor their reticence to mix with others were traits he believed promised rebellion or disorder. The few words that can be drawn from the stonemasons instead suggest a self-perception of steadfastness, humility and seclusion; what one scholar has described as an ongoing pursuit of "dignity." [26] Left to themselves, it seems, they wanted only to be allowed to work, save money and return home during the "dead season" (the winter months, when little work was available). There is little in the habits or the remaining words of the stonemasons to suggest that Nadaud or the handful of other Creusois memoirists were out of step with their fellows. [27] Clearly, perception of life around the Place de Greve was dependent upon social class.

The relative isolation of the Creusois migrants in the capital--compared to similar groups, notably Auvergants [28] -- may help to explain why their sedate and reclusive habits contrast so strongly with the dominant image of them as "barbarians," "nomads" and rebels. In this regard, the stonemasons represent an important chapter in what Corbin has called the "history of Parisian marginals." [29] Corbin, who has written extensively on the Limousin and the stonemasons, argues that the latter "resist[-ed]" the influences of the city by constructing a self-imposed "apartheid," their boardinghouses serving as a kind of "village submerged in urban society." [30] Even as the migrants acquired a reputation for hard work and dependability among employers, they were in effect contributing to a scenario that would turn them as a group into a scapegoat for the social ills of the city. This situation represented a typical paradox of the nineteenth century's "new regime" of laissez-faire, since the very group at the cente r of these apprehensions--the stonemasons--was drawn to the hiring fair by that elemental feature of the free market: the hiring fair. The potent image of a city under siege by "barbarians" was joined to another that cast the stonemasons as somehow tainted by the violent history of the Place. Thus, bourgeois Parisians could refer to the migrants as the "angels of the Greve," whose lives they perceived as destined to end in violence. [31] Often considered "yokels" by Parisian workers, suspected by police as potential troublemakers and thus kept under close watch, with few friends to back them in times of trouble, the stonemasons would especially attract attention in the wake of rebellion. [32]

Politics and the Revolutionary Legacy

The imagery associated with the Place de Greve that rendered it notorious was related to the locale's turbulent political history, which dated from the Revolution of 1789. After the Revolution and through at least mid-nineteenth century, police and municipal officials--whose primary concern naturally revolved around preserving the regime--were exceedingly concerned about the Revolution's impact upon the city's working class. It was especially the legacy of political unrest and rebellion dating from the Revolutionary era, and its potential impact upon the daily crowd of building workers gathering at the Place's hiring fair, that preoccupied authorities.

The dread of unrest that characterized French governments for much of the nineteenth century was partly a product of the promise of political equality and the insurrectionary legacy bequeathed by the Revolution of 1789. The political promise, aborted in 1793 and largely dormant under Napoleon, was resurrected in the 1820s and thereafter repeatedly played a role in mobilizing workers and others from 1830 through 1871. [33] A "message" of the Revolution's political legacy that police feared would find its way into the conversation and thoughts of building workers gathered at the Place de Greve was that their (workers') rights could be gained through rebellion. Indeed, the insurrectionary legacy of 1789-1794 was given new life in the first half of the nineteenth century through the writing of the Revolution's history and in the programs and rhetoric of groups such as the Society for the Rights of Man and individual leaders like Louis-Auguste Blanqui. To judge by police reports and the occasional worker's memoir , this message did have resonance in the crowds at the Place. Thus, Nadaud was drawn to republicanism following the Revolution of 1830, became acquainted with the socialist and associative doctrines of the day, kept up with politics and even took to wearing an old-fashioned phrygian cap as a sign of fidelity to the revolutionary cause. [34] Viewing the Place de Greve as a barometer for rebellion, the police were naturally concerned about a revival of the "spirit of '93" and the effect upon the stonemasons of political ideas or the persuasion of dedicated purschists. [35]

On the one hand, as described below, the suspicions of the police seem to have been exaggerated, contributing inadvertently (and ironically) to a contentious repertoire between themselves and the stonemasons. On the other hand, the special concern police had for the impact of politics at the Place was not entirely misplaced, for this site and the adjacent Hotel de Ville had played crucial roles in the political and revolutionary history of France from at least the mid-seventeenth century and particularly since 1789. Because it was the seat of municipal government, the Hotel de Ville--"a museum of Parisian history since the late Middle Ages" [36]--was nearly always a magnet for rebellious crowds during the city's long history of urban upheaval. As Tilly has written, the Place and Hotel de Ville were "for centuries the locale par excellence of popular politics." [37] The adjacent sites were repeatedly the focus of revolutionary journees, most occurring from the political left (with a handful from the right), t he historical examples of which are numerous and familiar to historians. To cite some of the more famous episodes, in April 1789, crowds "executed" the effigies of Parisian notables at the Place during the "Revellion riots," and during the tumultuous summer of that year Louis XVI paid a symbolic visit to the cityhall just days after the fall of the Bastille. The Commune (Paris's municipal government during the Revolution) was headquartered at the Hotel de Ville, where the wounded Maximilien Robespierre was arrested just before his execution in July 1794. [38] Famous nineteenth-century episodes include the execution at the Place of the "Four Sergeants of La Rochelle" in 1822, Lafayette's symbolic embrace of Louis-Philippe (and of the monarchy rather than a republic) in July 1830 and Blanqui's arrival with his contingent of the "Society of the Seasons" during the putsch of May 1839. Between 1830 and 1839, popular upheavals swirled around and across the square and the cityhall; likewise, the site entertained the opening acts of revolution in 1830, 1848 and 1870. In the February Revolution of 1848, Lamartine's proclamation of the republic happened at the Hotel de Ville (where the Provisional Government took up residence). A liberty tree occupied a corner of the Place de Greve that spring, and in May the revolutionary Armand Barbes fled to the cityhall following the failed "invasion" of the National Assembly. [39] As described below, the setting would continue to play a notable role through 1871.

In terms of politics, then, the Place de Greve and the Hotel de Ville served as something like the epicenter of revolution in France after 1789, when they first played a role in national political affairs. The potential danger of this public space, its revolutionary heritage and the emeutes (riots) that seemed invariably to swirl around it was a condition that made governments justifiably nervous, and for which they periodically sought solutions. Even before Baron Haussmann's massive rebuilding project tackled the rebellious aspect of Paris' urban geography in the 1850s, the Comte de Rambuteau, Prefect of the Seine in 1833-1848, identified the neighborhood around the Place as the seedbed of revolution (see map). Like Haussmann later, Rambuteau was a "decentralizer" who believed that urban renewal would be the antidote to the contagion of unrest. [40] Rambuteau produced construction plans that called for setting the Hotel de Ville apart from the "riotous slums" (the boardinghouse district where the migrant st onemasons stayed) located just behind it, and thus the potential rebels living in close proximity. Beyond the architectural strategy, Rambuteau believed that the construction would provide jobs for the workers who came every morning to the "Labour Exchange" just outside his office, and thus distract them from politics. [41] With these strategic considerations in mind, Rambuteau oversaw work between 1833 and 1843 that doubled the size of the Hotel de Ville and widened streets in the area. By the time he left office in 1848, however, it was clear that the renovation had fallen far short of solving this "crisis of old Paris." [42] It would take the shock of the June Days Rebellion and the subsequent full-scale urban transformation of "haussmannization" to adequately address the political and demographic problems that rendered this setting in the heart of the city so combustible.

Although Rambuteau's ambition to create safe space around the cityhall had failed, his plan points to the fact that by the 1830s the Place de Greve and the Hotel de Ville had come to stand politically for what the area would also represent economically and demographically: a microcosm of the developments and disruptions that had transformed and unsettled Paris since the eighteenth century, and which seemed to erupt periodically in rebellion. Even more than the advance of laissez-faire and growth of the population (described below), the politics and revolutionary legacy associated with the square and the cityhall appeared to the government, middle-class public and police as portentous. Apprehension about the politics brewing at the Place was, in a sense, to be expected since the economic and demographic changes represented there occurred slowly, while rebellion or revolution were, by definition, immediate and violent.

The migrant stonemasons were an important ingredient in the political, as in all the components of the conjuncture described in this paper, because they were suspected by the police of being susceptible to political suasion and rebellion. Yet from an historical distance the fears of the police seem exaggerated, for there is no evidence that the stonemasons were more likely than other workers to join secret societies, follow political leaders or take strong political stands; indeed, they were less politically active during the nineteenth century than some other Parisian trades, notably typographers and carpenters. Likewise, the influence upon the stonemasons of politicization in Creuse was not exceptional. [43] Nadaud did eventually make a career in politics, it is true, but this was unusual and in any event his recollections reveal no predisposition toward rebellion by him or his fellow migrants. [44] For Nadaud, participation in revolution might actually have counted as a plum during part of his political c areer, yet he is evasive on the topic, his memoirs unequivocally indicating that, despite several opportunities, perhaps only twice (and then as a teenager) did he ever take to the streets as a rebel. [45] Workers at the hiring fair likely were part of the crowds of February 1848 that demonstrated before the Hotel de Ville, and during the spring of that year the popular fervor to create political clubs affected even the normally reclusive stonemasons, some of whom briefly produced their own "Club of the Creuse." [46] The adoption of universal male suffrage that year gave all workers the right to vote, and many stonemasons probably cast ballots for Nadaud, who was elected to the National Assembly in 1849. [47] In the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the stonemasons, like much of the population from Limousin, would vote consistently on the political left. Yet, none of this necessarily shows a predisposition for rebellion. Similarly, studies for the period 1750-1900 suggest that the level of criminal behavior by stonemasons was not matched by their reputation for lawlessness. Admittedly, propositions about criminality in the past are difficult to substantiate one way or the other. Still, scholars who have investigated crime and the culpability of persons arrested in the wake of rebellion in nineteenth-century Paris have discovered, not surprisingly, that arrests tended to be colored by pre-existing attitudes that could determine which laws were enforced and which persons arrested. [48]

And yet when it came to exacting a price for failed rebellion in nineteenth-century Paris, stonemasons suffered disproportionately from other working-class groups in the capital. The evidence for this assertion involves the records of insurrections of the nineteenth century which show a remarkably high rate of arrest or casualties for the stonemasons in the uprisings of the 1830s, the June Days rebellion of 1848 and the Commune of 1871 (see Table 1). As identified by departement of origin, the Creusois in Paris were sixth out of eighty-two departmental populations in 1848 with 235 arrests, placing them just behind native Parisians and suburban dwellers. In 1871, the pattern is even more pronounced: 953 arrests, to place Creuse a remarkably high third out of eighty-three departements. Compared with other comparable groups in the city, these figures are truly exceptional, yet have never been satisfactorily explained. [49] Here I argue that the combination of images and political history with the economic, demo graphic and centralizing developments described below point toward an explanation.

Economic Change

Crucial to the transformations that turned the Place de Greve into a contentious setting and the stonemasons into presumed rebels was the emergence of economic laissez-faire. Laissez-faire operated in parts of the French economy before 1789. However, it was only with the liberal principles enunciated during the Revolution and institutionalized in constitutions and laws over the succeeding decades that an economic structure and a "market culture" founded upon Enlightenment ideas of political economy and the promise of general wealth could truly begin to flourish. [50] The coming of laissez-faire in France was transforming and disruptive, even though many of the cultural habits associated with it had difficulty taking root and though the process did not follow precisely the English model of industrialization. For the working-class population of Paris, this new regime had significant meaning in daily life. The abolition of the guilds in 1791 resulted in an expansion of subcontracting and changes in hiring pract ices that placed workers in a free market to which most were unaccustomed. Over time, laissez-faire seemed for many workers to translate to "anarchy" in hiring practices and to a diminution of skill and accountability. During the Napoleonic and Restoration eras (1799-1830), the response of French governments to this "disorganization of labor" took the form of efforts to proscribe the actions of workers' by outlawing coalitions, requiting internal passports (livrets) and, in general, keeping disproportionately close watch upon this portion of the population. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, were encouraged to coordinate their actions and to foster a renewed sense of paternalism (presumed to have been lost with the disappearance of the guilds) through the creation of chambres syndicales. These developments were accompanied by what workers saw as a decline in apprenticeship, and increases in piece-work and (what would later be termed) sweated labor. By 1830, when popular revolution helped make Louis-Philippe ki ng, Parisian workers tended to view their situation as more precarious than that of their forebears. [51]

The Place de Greve, which played a meaningful role in the economic life of Paris long before 1789, also had an important part in this story of modern economic transformation. For centuries, the Place had been the capital's chief port of entry for foodstuffs brought along the Seine River. By the eighteenth century, several guilds were headquartered in buildings flanking the square. The important economic activities at the Place contributed to its emergence as the seat of municipal government during the late Middle Ages. [52] As the physical center of the city and one of its largest open areas, the square was also a natural setting for the germination of crowds, as well as a landmark for persons traveling from one point in the city to another. [53] "Anyone who crossed the city," David Garrioch writes of eighteenth-century Paris, "was likely to pass, if not through the Greve itself, at least close by." [54]

The Place also hosted the daily hiring fair or "shape-up" where building workers sought employment from the jobbers (tacherons) who took them on for specified periods. Hiring like this had occurred for centuries. There is evidence of the open hiring of independent building workers by small contractors as early as the fourteenth century, and the practice seems not to have abated thereafter. [55] "Clandestine laborers," "alloues" (rented persons) or "faux ouvriers" (false workers), wherever they might be found in Paris, including at the Place de Greve, provided a reservoir of cheap labor and a realm of production that operated, within certain limits, beyond the formal control of the guild. Masters in the building trades officially frowned upon this practice and periodically called for city officials to crack down on hiring fairs by restricting the movement of workers or the kinds of labor they could perform. Yet the guilds never seem to have called outright for the fairs' abolition. Part of the reason for the persistence of illicit labor was the fact that the poorly-paid, highly mobile and increasingly numerous portion of the population which performed it was difficult and expensive to control. Moreover, many masters were reluctant to clamp down because in fact they themselves sometimes employed "rented" labor alongside their journeymen and apprentices. Indeed the poorly-paid laborers at construction sites, commonly known as "limousins" (in reference to the province), were typically hired at the Place. Certainly by the eighteenth century; the hiring of persons "a la journee" (by the day) from the Place, whether by independent subcontractors or guild masters, was a familiar, daily routine in central Paris. Because they were hired and worked in the open, the migrant stonemasons may well have been the least "clandestine" of all clandestine labor. [56]

An early, illicit form of laissez-faire existed, then, before the Revolution of 1789. Yet it would be incorrect to say that a free market recognizable to the nineteenth or twentieth century operated under the Old Regime, since there were notable limits to the independence and certainly the social mobility of both jobbers and "rented" workers. Because the supposedly clandestine labor congregating every morning at the Place de Greve could operate only with the tacit consent of masters, the potential dynamism of the hiring fair was kept in check. Moreover, the labor performed by these workers was situated at the low end of a hierarchy enforced by masters and journeymen. Unlike the nineteenth century, opportunities for independent, ambitious entrepreneurs to make their fortune were limited during the Old Regime. Guild and clandestine labor had coexisted for centuries without undoing the supremacy of the former.

This situation started to change in the late eighteenth century as corporate control was challenged from several directions. This story is well known. [57] The monarchy, operating partly upon physiocratic principles, threatened the guilds with abolition in 1776. Over the course of the next decade, the corporate structure was further eroded by struggles between journeymen and masters played out in the courts. [58] At the same time, population pressures in the capital contributed to periodic episodes of collective violence that shook the structure of the guilds. [59] On a more mundane level, the pre-revolutionary rifts in corporate life could be detected, as Arlette Farge writes, at locales like "la Greve" where the words coming from crowds depicted "Masters and officials ... as 'assassins' ... ready to take advantage of the workforce without paying a fair price." [60] Meantime, journeymen complained incessantly about the migrant workers flooding into the city, taking jobs and lowering wages--a lament that wou ld not abate in the nineteenth century.

Following the Revolution, the tensions of economic transformation were played out even more conspicuously than before, as the migrant stonemasons and other formerly illicit laborers shed the anonymity that had been their lot in the Old Regime. Likewise, the complexion of the hiring fair at the Place de Greve shifted to one in which profit and market forces rather than tradition or the acquiescence of the guilds determined who would work and who would not. By the July Monarchy, the small-time, often moonlighting jobbers of the Old Regime had matured into the group described by the Paris Chamber of Commerce report of 1847 as "clever fellows" (hommes habiles): persons whose ambitions, lack of scruples and occasional financial success became emblematic of the rewards and excesses of the new regime of laissez-faire. [61] It is not surprising that during the first half of the nineteenth century the Place also came to stand for labor troubles. This association partly derived from the spread of "marchandage," the na me given to the practice by which jobbers subcontracted construction labor at hiring fairs. By at least 1840, marchandage was pervasive, the word itself connoting an abusive and undignified haggling over hiring particularly associated with the shape-up at the Place. The abolition or alteration of marcbandage was, accordingly, an issue of paramount concern for Parisian workers and an important source of labor disputes. It is from the Place de Greve and especially from this era that the French term for labor strike (grave) derives. [62]

Laissez-faire opened the way for the expansion of marchandage, and it was especially because of this form of subcontracting that by the July Monarchy (1830-1848) the hiring fair was commonly viewed as a microcosm of the worst excesses of capitalism. [63] The hiring fair persisted through the Second Empire, though undergoing crucial changes during Prefect of the Seine Haussmann's rebuilding of the city that would pave the way for its demise and the end of the era of rebellions.

Population Growth and the Hiring Fair

A fourth element in the development of the contentious repertoire that marked the Place de Greve was population growth. Paris doubled in size in the first half of the nineteenth century, expanding from about one-half million persons in 1800 to more than a million by 1850, most of this the result of migration of persons like the stonemasons. Much of this new population was crowded into the boardinghouses situated near the place. [64] For the working class, this demographic situation meant acute competition for jobs, stagnant real wages and unhealthy living conditions. [65] Because of its location in the approximate geographic heart of the city, the Place could hardly help but reflect and be affected by population growth. As police reports from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show, the Place, along with the market of Les Halles, attracted much of the flotsam and jetsam of the urban populace: members of the "laboring classes" like the stonemasons, but also the so-called "dangerous classes"-an elusive cl assification that included criminals and the indigent. Understandably, histories of the period give the Place a prominent role in the life of the city's lower classes. Garrioch notes, for instance, that as early as the second half of the eighteenth century:

... the central quarters were left, not just to the poor, but increasingly to a highly mobile, floating population. Nowhere was this more marked than in the quarter of the Greve and in those adjoining it. Situated at the crossroads of the city, they were to Paris what Paris was to much of the rest of France: a precarious refuge in hard times, a melting-pot for the most diverse elements of the population.... [66]

Farge writes of the same period that the Place "rather resembled a cabaret," a setting where "mouches" (police-spies) kept a close eye on crowds and, when required, even manipulated the people into festive demonstrations of devotion to the monarchy. [67] These qualities were accentuated in the next century.

A significant portion of Paris' burgeoning population were building workers, including the migrant stonemasons who haled from Limousin in central France, and particularly that area which became in 1790 the departement of Creuse. Building workers had migrated from Creuse since at least the seventeenth century, though the numbers leaving grew dramatically in the nineteenth century, from about 6,000 in 1789 to 42,000 in 1876. [68] The migrants are fairly well known because of the memoirs and political career of Nadaud. [69] But even aside from this, the stonemasons were a familiar part of Paris' social landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to their presence at the hiring fair, because they worked in plain view on many of the capital's great construction projects, were marked by distinctive habits and resided in the notorious boardinghouses of the central city. Amidst the distractions of the capital, the Creusois clung to distinctive cultural traits: hard work, frugality, a certain solemnity ( they rarely whistled or sang while working, for instance), strong family ties, an inclination to keep a distance from Parisian workers and a stubborn adherence to the dialect, clothing and diet of their home region. [70] These were qualities that fostered group cohesion, but also traits that set them apart.

Fortunately, it is possible to know quite a lot about the migrants, the hiring fair and the daily grind of laissez-faire at the Place de Greve through the daily bulletins of the Paris police. [71] These documents provide both a numerical survey of the workers and a reading of the crowd's "mood" at the hiring fair. The graphs (see Appendix) illustrate daily, monthly and yearly rhythms at the hiring fair between 1830 and 1846. Most of the persons represented are stonemasons from Creuse, though housepainters, stonecutters and carpenters from other parts of the country and from Paris make up a small portion of the numbers.

During these years, crowds at the hiring fair ranged in size from about 100 persons to nearly a thousand, with a daily average of over 200. Graph 1 shows the mean figure by day of the week for persons looking for work and for those who found work. More jobs were available at the start of the week (Monday through Thursday) than at the end (Friday through Sunday). Fewer persons were at the Place on Sunday and Monday. The mean figure for persons (217.6) and for the number of jobs available (46.4) shows that during this period (1830-1846) a worker stood about a one-in-five daily chance of landing a job.

Graph 2 shows monthly patterns at the hiring fair. These figures partly illustrate the "dead season" of December through February in the construction industry. The numbers at the hiring fair increased as migrants returned to the city in the spring when construction projects began or resumed with better weather. However, the figures do not fully convey the impact of the migratory rhythm, since during the stonemasons' absence in the winter months Parisian workers took their place at the hiring fair. Whether sedentary or migrant, a worker at the Place stood only a 17 percent chance of finding work during the dead season, compared with a 23 percent chance for the other nine months of the year.

Graph 3 shows hiring patterns for particular years. The likelihood of finding work was good in 1830, 1831 and 1840, but poor for the other years. The increase in the average number of workers after 1840 may be related to the rise in Paris' population and is also represented (as described below) in the increased population at nearby boardinghouses. Deviations between years may reflect the availability of jobs at public works projects in 1830-1831 and 1840, the impact of the cholera epidemic in 1832 (which saw a decline in building work and an exodus from the city by many migrants) and economic downturns in 1833 and 1843-1846. [72]

Overall, these numbers show a substantial crowd of workers at the Place de Greve every day of the week, year after year, with variations occurring by season and especially by year. The number of workers and jobs increased particularly after 1840. There was a handful of good hiring years for workers at the hiring fair, but many more bad ones. On average, the vast majority of building workers showing up each morning--about 80 percent--went away without work.

The police reports provide a good measure of the number of persons attending the hiring fair and, as indicated below, may also be read to understand the perspective of the authorities. Nadaud's first-hand account is one of the rare descriptions of the setting by a worker. His recollections of this "lieu de reunion" (gathering place) denotes an implicit etiquette governing the time of day when different categories of workers might situate themselves at the square. Older workers normally arrived first, while newcomers from the countryside were at the bottom of the pecking order. Decorum--sullen though it might be if no work were available--was expected of all. [73] Despite a commonly held perception to the contrary, the hiring fair was not especially marked by the "rixes" (punchups) common to the practice of compagnnanage--and even if older workers might remind "poulains" (greenhorns) firmly when they disregarded the "rules." [74]

Nadaud writes that jobseekers arrived at the square by six o'clock in the morning, gave up looking for work by nine o'clock and then would either cajole soup from soldiers at nearby barracks or purchase a loaf of bread from bakers before wandering back to the boardinghouses. Workers also typically arranged credit from neighborhood bakers and charcutiers. On Sundays and Mondays, some workers may have skipped the fair to go to the cabarets or taverns in the suburbs (where wine and food were cheaper), though the extent of this custom should not be exaggerated. [75] Hard rain could disperse the crowds, or very cold temperatures reduce their numbers. The police reports note that rumors about government building projects, politics or war were rife at the daily affairs, though even more constant were grumblings about the lack of work, the high price of bread and apprehensions about the inevitable hardships of the winter months. The complaints sifting through the crowd recorded by police are corroborated by Nadaud, in whose memoirs the hiring fair is depicted as the product of a misguided faith in the "laws" of laissez-faire, the unhappy result of which was this "last vestige of the ancient slave markets of Antiquity." [76]

Nadaud, like most of the stonemasons who made up the crowds frequenting the Place, lived in a nearby boardinghouse. These establishments were classified by police in five categories. The first three were generally single-room dwellings lodging middle-class residents and travelers, and were more costly than those of the lower categories; the respectable, if slightly shabby, setting of Balzac's Pere Goriot, for instance, was probably such a place--though there were few of these types in the central city. Rather, close by the Place de Greve were the fourth-and fifth-class boardinghouses considered by the police who watched them closely and by general bourgeois opinion as unsavory and suspicious. Workers usually lived in fourth-class establishments, while fifth-class buildings catered to the down-and-out. [77]

As the city's population expanded, so did that of the boardinghouses. By the mid-nineteenth century, the city virtually teemed with them. In 1831, the 3,106 garnis of Paris held a population hovering around 32,000, with the ward (quartier) that included the Place de Greve and the Hotel de Ville hosting 133 such establishments. Nearly one-fourth of all persons living in the quartier Hotel de Ville in 1841 resided in garnis, and by the middle of the next decade 41% of the district's population did so. In 1844, there were 72,000 residents en garni throughout Paris. [78] The Melun Law of 1850 promised an amelioration of this situation, but in fact there were no substantive improvements in working-class housing until the twentieth century. Meantime, the number of persons in the boardinghouses continued to increase even after the urban improvements of the Second Empire. By 1876, police counted more than 142,000 boardinghouse residents in over 9,000 buildings. [79]

Many garnis were situated on the streets (the Rue de l'Hotel de Ville, Rue de la Tissanderie and Rue de la Mortellerie) on the immediate east side of the cityhall, just moments away by foot from the Place. This densely-populated area essentially comprised a ghetto housing a closely-watched population made up largely of migrant workers residing in closely-packed and often unclean rooms. Indeed, the dubious character of the garnis and its denizens was something for which they were, rightly or wrongly, infamous. Daniel Roche (paraphrasing the Old Regime commentator Louis-Sebastien Mercier) describes the rented rooms of the eighteenth century as "repulsive, dirty, let at exorbitant prices ... 'lairs,' dens with that aura of bestiality that for the moral observer always characterized the obvious primitiveness of the habitat populaire." [80] Negative views of this sort were even more pronounced in the next century as the boardinghouses became an object of inquiry for hygienists and political economists seeking to understand the social impact of laissez-faire and population growth. The hygienist Rene Villerme who visited many of the central city garnis occupied by the migrant stonemasons, concluded that their squalor and the density of the human habitation in them were to blame for the high rates of cholera that afflicted the area in 1832. [81] Like many contemporaries, Villerme believed that the condition of the boardinghouses also had political implications that could threaten the hoped-for "perfect equilibrium" (juste milieu) of the July Monarchy.

The impressions of middle-class observers like Mercier and Villerme reflect a cultural divide between themselves and workers, whose views of the Place de Greve are of a different vein. During his years as a habitue of the hiring fair, Nadaud stayed in a boardinghouse on the nearby Rue de la Tissanderie. [82] Like many migrants, he used the same boardinghouse season ("campagne") after season, staying in a room holding six beds shared in shifts by twelve occupants. A contemporary, Louis Doignon, recalled nearly identical conditions for the 80 Creusois "locataires" (boarders) in his building, each of whom paid six francs a month to cover the expense of bedding and two soupes a day. [83] There were unpleasant memories of these days for both Nadaud and Doignon--overcrowded living conditions, lack of work, the high death rate from disease--but overall their recollections, no doubt colored by nostalgia, reflect a camaraderie engendered by shared hard times and a sense of sacrifice (since wages earned in Paris suppo rted families back home). This perception, like others associated with the Place and the stonemasons, contrasts with those of police and middle-class public, who saw the garnis as a kind of malignancy eating away at the health of society. [84]

Population increase, like the concurrent development of laissez-faire hiring, had significant impact at the Place de Greve. The meanings of this concurrence were different for the stonemasons--who had few alternatives to this existence--and the bourgeois observers and police concerned with preserving the juste milieu, and who were fearful that the densely-packed population of the central city provided fuel for revolution. For police, the response to this apparent formula for social upheaval--laissez-faire, a centralized hiring fair, a large population of marginalized workers and the representational and political legacies associated with the square--was increased vigilance.

Police and the Place de Greve

After coming to power in July 1830, the first order of business each day for King Louis-Philippe was to read the police bulletin, the opening paragraph of which described the size and attitude of the crowd of building workers that had gathered the previous morning at the Place de Greve hiring fair. The arrangement of the report, with the description of the hiring fair situated as the very first item to meet the king's eye, was a sign of the importance that police attached to this setting. [85] A careful reading of the bulletins shows that police were quite cognizant of the equation of trouble produced by the combination of revolutionary and political legacy with centralized hiring and population growth at the Place. For police, like the stonemasons, the hiring fair thus represented a microcosm. But it also constituted a quandary, as prefects struggled with the task of maintaining an orderly city based upon the traditional premise that the number of workers in the city had to be regulated and that this class should be gainfully employed at fair wages, and the requirement to enforce laws founded upon principles of economic laissez-faire. Police were particularly concerned lest economic troubles translate into rebellion. A nearly full-time pursuit of Paris' police in the first half of the nineteenth century was to "keep the lid" on the disorder and rebellion believed to emanate from the crowds at the Place. [86] In the end, police inevitably addressed this quandary by acting against workers, thereby contributing to a contentious relationship. Because those who gathered at the "foire des macons" (masons' fair) most often were the Creusois migrants whose habits made them distinctive, the police paid special attention to this group. The daily surveillance of the hiring fair by police was another critical component in the contentious repertoire. By the 1830s, police had developed a near preoccupation with the Place de Greve, though spying on crowds had occurred there for centuries. [87] What changed in the first half o f the nineteenth century was that the routine of surveillance had intensified following the social upheavals of the Revolution of 1789-1 794. [88] This alteration in the intensity of surveillance, coupled with the passage of laws that made it nearly impossible for workers to organize, protest or move about the country freely, meant that by the Restoration of 1815, the authorities concentrated more attention on the hiring fair and the stonemasons than on any other site and any other trade group in the city. [89]

While laissez-faire and centralization could work together to promote the interests of business and state, there also existed a tension between the two. On the one hand, police were obligated to enforce liberal economic practices written into constitutions and legal codes after 1789. On the other hand, prefects had to find ways to stifle the potential for rebellion for which laissez-faire seemed partly responsible. The hiring fair at the Place de Greve, the epitome of laissez-faire hiring, and the migrants were consequently deemed worthy of special surveillance as both a source and a gauge for unrest. [90] Police employed a variety of methods to keep close tabs on the stonemasons: daily observation at the Place, checking registers at the boardinghouses, conferring with bosses, keeping in touch (through the minister of interior) with the prefects whose departements dispatched the migrants and administering internal passports. [91] Police also found ways to accommodate the need for order with economic goals. O ne method was the creation under Napoleon Bonaparte of labor offices (bureaux de placement). This was not a new idea. Similar bodies ("corporate employment offices") had existed from time to time during the Old Regime as a way to deal with surplus labor. [92] The labor offices of the Napoleonic period, however, were specifically designed to both promote social peace and encourage economic "rationality" by directing the hiring process. While the labor offices handled several thousand placements in 1810 and 1811, they did not become fixed in the routine of migrants. By the time the offices were ended in 1815, they were handling only a few hundred cases a year. [93]

The combination of too many persons looking for too few jobs, the tensions induced by the spread of marchandage, and the Place de Greve's revolutionary image and heritage, continued to render the site uniquely suspicious and combustible in the eyes of the authorities through at least the Second Republic (1848-1852). [94] Portentous and often frightened images emphasizing the potential disorder arising from funneling unemployed, presumably resentful workers into so small a space are omnipresent in the police reports of the first half of the nineteenth century. [95] Because these documents begin with an account of the number of workers at the hiring fair, the two--workers and location--are often conflated into the same daily "story" of life in the capital. A bulletin from October 1824, for instance, describes the reasoning behind the close watch kept on the workers at the Place:

This surveillance of construction workers is essential and conducted daily because it represents what is the earliest and usually the largest gathering of workers ... it is where popular ideas are represented most clearly ... where, since the Restoration (of 1815) the spirit of faction and anarchy take root and threaten the authority of the laws ... the construction workers who gather in Paris and form a considerable portion of the population, and who are, for the most part foreigners to Paris, require a close surveillance. [96]

Six years later a report notes that the locales most likely to produce troubles continued to be the "gathering places" of workers, of which the Place de Greve was by far the most dangerous. [97] A description from January 1831 asserts that when workers at the hiring fair are in need of food or jobs "the threat of riot is always there." [98] Referring to crowds at the square, an 1832 bulletin states that "it is overall this class of men and these same groups who form the first ranks in all the riots." [99] Another, from September 1831., offers this assessment of tensions beneath the service at the hiring fair:

A somber tranquility continues to reign among the laboring classes; but this tranquility provides no reassurances. All reports assure us that a great many workers are preoccupied by sinister intentions.... In our opinion, the riots will come, and if nothing is done to prevent them they will be worse than earlier ones because the working classes have adopted a more aggressive attitude. [100]

The police reports usually cite economic difficulties or political ideas as the incentive for troubles. However, the terminology employed to describe the persons at the hiring fair also shows a cultural distance between observer and observed. Thus, the language describing the migrants includes words such as "nomad," "vagabond" and (less often) "barbarian," but also utilizes an imaginative, sometimes unintentionally ironic mix of terms from the Old Regime and the new lingo of laissez-faire: "gens sans aveu" (persons without means), "artisans of disorder," "inferior classes," "proletarians," "rabble-rousers" (perterbateurs), "miserables," ," "indigent class," "needy class," "artisans of trouble" and "entrepreneurs of disorder." [101] The linguistic device of combining words evoking the image of a civilization collapsing under the weight of invading hordes ("nomads," "gens sans aveu") and terms suggesting the emergence of a new social class whose interests were different from those of the bourgeoisie ("proletar ians," "artisans of trouble," entrepreneurs of disorder") is another sign of conjuncture at the Place de Greve.

The police's obsession with rebellion, falling as it did upon a particular group (the stonemasons) and a particular setting (the Place de Greve), reflects what one scholar has identified as a "shared body of prejudice and automatic reaction." [102] The biases of Parisian police fit a nineteenth-century European pattern in which the law was applied "selectively and with discretion ... (the police) concentrat(ing) their attention on marginal social groups who already fit popular stereotypes of the potential criminal." [103] In a social and cultural setting that perpetuated indistinct images of "laboring" and "dangerous classes," it was especially the "internal migrant who aroused ... anxieties." [104] The concerns of the authorities settled easily on marginal populations, inducing "tensions" that might erupt into violence. [105] What Jacques Revel and Arlette Farge identified in the eighteenth century as a" 'common, unwritten code of conduct between Parisians and the police" may still have existed in the ninet eenth, but if so it had been altered from something like an obliging indulgence on the part of the authorities to a more apprehensive and contentious stance toward crowds. The police bulletins show how the centralization of state power was manifested in the daily scrutiny of the habitues of the Place de Greve. It was less the actions of the stonemasons that promised contention then the daily observations of them by the police and the reports they produced for their superiors.

The End of the Repertoire of Contention at the Place de Greve

Representational, political, economic, demographic and centralizing developments converged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to render the Place de Greve a contentious setting and the migrant stonemasons who attended its daily hiring fair a suspicious population. One consequence of this conjuncture was that in times of rebellion the stonemasons suffered repression disproportionately from other sections of the capital's population. The conjuncture began to break down during the Second Empire as Paris was rebuilt under the direction of Prefect of the Seine Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. With the defeat of the Commune of 1871, the pattern of rebellion that had commenced in the late eighteenth century and had centered so often around the Place and the Hotel de Ville, came to an end.

The massive reconstruction project known as haussmannization (after Paris' top municipal official, Haussmann, who like most prefects, resided at the Hotel de Ville) was the key to undoing the Place de Greve's role as epicenter of rebellion. The work of the 1850s and 1860s physically and socially recast the area around the Place. As property values rose in the central city, workers were forced out and the area's social complexion altered. [106] Haussmannization, in effect, addressed the conjuncture described in this paper by combining the goals of cleaning up Paris and making it more conducive to the flow of commerce with the strategy of making the city less susceptible to rebellion. In this regard, "... arguments about (military) strategy and salubrity marched together." [107] The irony that the construction enticed ever more potentially rebellious building workers to the capital was not lost on city officials, though the obliteration of the narrow, winding streets that made the old Paris the theater of unre st outweighed the demographic threat. [108] In any event, the city's last and largest rebellion, the Commune of 1871, began not in the center of the city, but in the working-class suburb of Montmartre. The stonemasons--clustered in the few remaining garnis near the Hotel de Ville or in nearby Left Bank boardinghouses--were arrested, as noted, in very large numbers with the defeat of the Commune. But from a long-term perspective the arrest of so many Creusois in 1871 seems less a reflection of culpability, then a last spasm by the authorities of habits engendered by the years of contention at the Place de Greve. [109]

Haussmannization was crucial to the breakdown of the conjuncture, but it was not the only factor that came into play. With the defeat of the Commune, the Place de Greve's revolutionary legacy came to an end. Likewise, the hiring fair withered away after 1871 as workers moved to the suburbs, mass transit increased mobility, and the search for jobs was decentralized. [110] By the 1890s, building workers could apply to the revived labor offices (public and private, both regulated by the city) as well as the city's official labor clearinghouse (the bourse du travail). In addition, as industry professionalized, workers began to adopt the modem habit of applying for jobs at personnel offices. With the shift of the working-class population to the urban periphery and changes in the ways workers found jobs, police lost interest in the Place. The hiring fair seems to have ended entirely sometime before 1900, as the few building workers who matriculated in the central city shifted to the Place Lobau on the east side of the Hotel de Ville--a site with neither the public exposure nor the notoriety of la greve and, since haussmannization, no longer surrounded by garnis. [111] The apprehensions inspired by the hiring fair at the Place de Greve and the contentious relations it provoked between stonemasons and police thus faded during the Third Republic (1870-1940).

As haussmannization altered conditions in the central city, other routines were changing for the stonemasons. Improved rail service from central France by the 1880s prompted the stonemasons and their families to move permanently to the capital. This movement foreshadowed the end of the long history of seasonal migration. The cultural isolation of Creusois in Paris took some time to break down, but assimilation did eventually happen as Creusois women took jobs as cooks or laundresses, restaurants run by retired stonemasons sprouted and sons abandoned the trade of their fathers. As the Creusois became Parisians, and as the era of urban rebellion ended, public perceptions of the stonemasons moderated. [112]

After 1789, the Place de Greve changed in ways that both symbolized and impacted modernizing trends in Paris. Part of this change was tangible and could be seen in the lives of the stonemasons who frequented the site looking for jobs. Another change was representational, having to do with contemporary and historical meanings the police and public drew from the site. These developments were the product of the conjuncture of five trends: the emergence of a perception linking the site with violence; the promise of political rights and the revolutionary heritage; the advance of laissez-faire; the growth in the city's population; and the continued rise of the centralized state. During the years 1789-1871, there developed an association by police and public tying the Place to two potent images: crowds of provincial workers looking for jobs, living in the equivalent of ghettoes and presumably harboring resentment against bourgeois society; and violence, itself a product of the insurrectionary legacy and the square's status as the site for public execution. These qualities were the raw ingredients, so the authorities and public believed, of insurrection.

The Place de Greve served as a kind of epicenter for unrest in this period, with the square and the stonemasons sharing a close physical space and parallel role in the city's history of rebellion. The Revolution of 1789 was the pivotal event in this development because of the many transformations ushered in by it. One result of the conjuncture was that the extraordinary history of rebellions at the Place de Greve would, indirectly, have near global impact through the influence of Marx and Lenin, both of whom founded their understanding of the dynamic of revolution largely upon the experience of nineteenth-century Paris. A second result was that the migrant stonemasons who frequented the hiring fair, and whose lives were so closely entwined with this physical location, suffered extraordinarily in the wake of rebellion. At Paris' Place de Greve, the shared destiny of a geographical place and a social group bore fruit.

The migrant stonemasons are pivotal characters in both the history of the Place de Greve and in the history of rebellion in nineteenth-century Paris, for they bore the legacy of stereotypes that cast them as the epitome of the threatening "nomad"; their best-known spokesperson (Nadaud) sought out political office in order to change their condition; their working lives reflected the rise of laissez-faire; they were the most numerous segment among the workers at the Place and the nearby boardinghouses; and their presence was a preoccupation to the police--the very embodiment, in other words, of the conjuncture outlined above. Taken together and viewed from an historical distance, the five trends merging at the Place illustrate the rise and decline of this revolutionary space; they may also be understood as necessary ingredients for the creation of a contentious repertoire involving the authorities and public opinion on one side, and migrant stonemasons on the other.

This analysis suggests that contentious repertoires have a spatial aspect worth considering. It remains difficult to say with certainty why rebellion was so frequent in Paris, the nineteenth century's "capital of revolution," though that tendency may have been the result of a (perhaps unique) conjuncture of historical trends. The migrant stonemasons, a marginal population, inspired public apprehensions that were easily triggered, and then made obvious targets admist the fears generated by the disruptions of a modernizing society.

ENDNOTES

(1.) For a discussion of the many meanings of "place" and location, see David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Maiden, Mass., 1996).

(2.) Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 50-61.

(3.) An important interpretation and an excellent overview of collective action in France is Tilly, The Contentious French. A recent work that compares the June Days rebellion of 1848 and the Commune of 1871 is Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris From 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995). See also Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (Berkeley, 1994).

(4.) Tilly, The Contentious French, 42-61. On the relationship between physical setting and revolution in Paris, see Darrin M. McMahon, "The Birthplace of the Revolution: Public Space and Political Community in the Palais-Royal of Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orleans, 1781-1789," French History 10 (March 1996): 1-29.

(5.) On the concept of "marginality" and its usefulness for historians, see John M. Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (Oxford, 1991), 4-6, 9-12, 224-25.

(6.) On "microcosm," see Tilly, The Contentious French, 50,60. Tilly emphasizes "the growth of capitalism and the rising importance of the national state" in the transformation of the Place into a contentious setting; 60-61.

(7.) Tilly, "Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758-1834," Social Science History 17 (Summer 1993): 257,264,265,268. See also Tilly "How To Detect, Describe, and Explain Repertoires of Contention" (New School of Social Research Working Paper, No. 150, 1992).

(8.) Tilly, "How to Detect," 12.

(9.) Mark Traugott, who has written extensively about the repertoire of contention in the case of Paris, does not view the French Revolution as an historical "hinge" and argues otherwise with regard to insurrection, noting precedents as early as the sixteenth century; "Barricades As Repertoire: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of French Contention," Social Science History 17 (Summer 1993): 311,313. See also Traugott, ed., Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action (Durham, NC, 1994).

(10.) Tilly, "Contentious Repertoires," 276. An important discussion of the theory is Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge, 1994), 33-46. Tarrow describes "old" and "new" forms of repertoires, relating changes in the two to the development of a "national social movement" in the nineteenth century. Among the repertoires cited by Tarrow are urban insurrections, strikes, demonstrations of many types, bread riots and grain seizures, though he does not mention hiring fairs.

(11.) Alain Corbin, "The Peasants of Paris: A History of Limousin Building Workers in the Nineteenth Century," in Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, tr. Jean Birrell (nc, 1995), 158. The connection between rebellion and the stonemasons in Paris has been recognized by several scholars. Corbin has written most extensively on this, but see also Tilly and Lynn Lees, "The People of June 1848," in Roger Price, Revolution and Reaction (London, 1975), 196; Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (New Haven, 1978), 168-69; and Gerard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la societe francaise [XIX.sup.e]-[XX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1986), 50-1.

(12.) The phrase is from Jacques Rougerie, "Espace populaire et espace revolutionnaire," in Le Commune. Revue d'histoire de l'Association des amis de la Commune de Paris de 1871," no. 8 (sept. 1977): 25-45. I use "conjuncture" here to denote a temporal and geographical convergence. Tilly has utilized the term to describe "revolutionary situations," equating the notion with the "components of a traffic jam"; European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993), 10-12. Alain Faure has described the period 1830-1834 in Paris as a "conjoncture revolutionnaire"; "Mouvements populaires et Mouvement ouvrier a Paris (1830-1834)," Annales (ESC) 29 (juillet-aout 1974): 53. On "conjoncture" in the French historical tradition, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989 (Stanford, 1990), 112-13.

(13.) Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Malden, Mass., 1996), 324. Harvey adds: "Places are constructed and experienced as material ecological artefacts and intricate networks of social relations. They are the focus of the imaginary, of beliefs, longings, and desires.... They are an intense focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings, and they are a distinctive product of institutionalized social and economic power"; 316.

(14.) David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995), 108. During the same period, the rise of working-class suburbs produced a parallel "two cities" phenomenon; Merriman, The Margins of City Life, 59-60.

(15.) Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, tr. Carol Shelton (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 136,17,206-07; David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1790 (Cambridge, 1986), 197; and Tilly, The Contentious French, 47. A guidebook from 1789 describes the Place as" ... a site where both executions and joyous gatherings happen"; Le Voyager a Paris, extrait du guide des amateurs et des etranger voyageurs a Paris (Paris, 1789). Napoleon Bonaparte did use the cityhall for many important ceremonies, including his marriage to Marie-Louise in 1811. It was also the site of Charles X's coronation in 1825, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of England stayed there on a visit to Paris in 1854. None of these instances, however, were popular affairs in the style of the Old Regime.

(16.) Jordan, Transforming Paris, 249. Criminal executions were carried out at the Place de Greve, though executions for political crimes were done at the Place du Carrousel and, after October 1792, at the Place de la Revolution (today the Place de la Concorde). Beginning in July 1795, all executions were conducted at the Place de Greve; Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, tr. Christopher Miller (New York, 1987), 105-06. On popular fascination with the guillotine, see Daniel Gerould, Guillotine, Its Legend and Lore (New York, 1992).

(17.) Cited in Gerould, Guillotine, 92. See also Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 189, and Hugo, The Last Days of a Condemned Man, tr. Geoff Woolen (Oxford, 1992), 14. Writings that describe the popular myths and "ghosts" associated with "la Greve" include Challamel, Les Revenants de la Place de Greve; Christine Faber, Fickle Fortune: A Story of the Place de Greve (New York, 1878); Edouard Tricotel, Claude le Petit, sa fin tragique en place de Greve, a Paris et ses ouvrages (Paris, 1863); and Andre Rigaud, Paris, ses rues et ses fantomes: la vraie cour des Miracles (Paris, 1972). The 1990 edition of the Guide Bleu notes that "Riots and festivities succeeded one another in the history of the building," (New York), 384.

(18.) The Watchman Illustrated, Almanac for 1880 Illustrating the City of Paris (Boston, 1880).

(19.) The quote is from Gavarni, et al., La Diable a Paris; Paris et les Parisiens, 2 vol. (Paris, 1845), 2: xiii. The Paris Guide par les principaux ecrivains et artistes de la France (Paris, 1867) describes the setting this way: "The Place de l'Hotel de Ville! The Place de Greve! A sinister name, evoking at once a bloody and unhappy cortege of victims and their executioners! A worthy name that delivers up insurrection and revolt; a word that is shouted as a call to arms, as a protest and as a threat. The word has taken its place in the language of workers: to strike," (p. 1391). Other allusions to violence at "la Greve" may be found in the Guide pittoresque de l'etranger dans Paris et ses environs (Paris, 1855), 100--10; Le Pariseum moderne (Paris, 1830), 39; Edward Planta, A New Picture of Paris; or, The Stranger's Guide to the French Metropolis (London, 1819), 259; and Parfait almanach de Paris et des ses environs, ouvrage indispensable au Parisian et a l'Etranger, 1847-48 (Paris, nd), 90. The American wr iter Washington Irving described the eerie sensation of visiting the Place de Greve in the early 1820s; in Gerould, Guillotine, 115-17.

(20.) Challemel, Les Revenants, 2,65. See also Patricia O'Brien, "Urban Growth and Public Order: The Development of A Modern Police in Paris, 1829-1854," (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1973), 27,35.

(21.) Paris guide par les principaux ecrivains et artistes de la France (Paris, 1867), 1891.

(22.) Challamel, Us Revenants, 16.

(23.) Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a Paris pendant la premiere moitie du [XIX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1978), 182. A reassessment of Chevalier is Ratcliffe, "Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses Paris pendant la premiere moitie du [XIX.sup.e] siecle?: The Chevalier Thesis Reexamined," French Historical Studies 17 (1991)." See also Gordon Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France (New York, 1983), 60ff.

(24.) Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, 11-18,182.

(25.) Jean Anglade, Le Massif central au [XIX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1971), 37ff. For the songs of the masons, see H. Germouty, "La Chanson des macons de la Creuse et son auteur," Memoirs de la Societe des Sciences naturelles et Archeologiques de la Creuse 27(1938-40): 436,437,449.

(26.) Pierre Urien, "Les Macons migrants de la Creuse au [19.sup.e] siecle," Cercle parisien de la ligue francaise de l'enseignement 214 (juillet--aout--sept. 1988): 128.

(27.) The hygienist Rene Villerme, who was appalled at conditions in the garnis, considered the stonemasons to be "conscientious, thrifty workers"; "Notes sur les ravages du cholera dans les maisons garnies de Paris," Annales d'hygiene publique 11(1834): 399-400. Louis Bandy de Naleche thought them sober and hardworking, and their reputation for rebelliousness exaggerated; Les Masons de la Creuse (Paris, 1859), 70. Bandy de Naleche was a noble from Creuse who considered himself a friend of the migrants. His book was intended to counter prevailing stereotypes by offering a positive view of the migrants. Corbin writes of the stonemasons:" ... a careful analysis, whilst not wholly demolishing these stereotypes (of the migrant stonemasons), considerably qualifies them. If they were by no means disinclined to brawls, though usually in response to the gibes of Parisian workers, the masons from the Limousin rejected the violence of journeyman, rarely, in practice, joined the Parisian workers' organizations and remai ned unenthusiastic with regard to collective activity"; "The Peasants of Paris," 159. For many employers in the nineteenth century, "la periode limousine" denoted dependable laborers, skilled work and low wages; Abel Chatelain, "La Main d'oeuvre dans l'industrie du batiment francaise au [XIX.sup.e] siecle," Technique, Art, Science 101 (oct. 1956): 37.

(28.) On the differences between the "Limousin model" and the "Auvergant model" of migration and assimilation, see Phillipe Vigier, "Conclusion," in Limousin de Paris. Les Societes d'originaires du Limousin sous Li IIIIeme Republique (Limoges, nd), 185-92. On the Auvergnars in Paris and a brief comparison with the migrants from Limousin, see Francoise-Raison Jourde, La Colonie Auvergnate de Paris au [XIX.sup.ee] siecle (Paris, 1976), 377.

(29.) Corbin, "The Peasants of Paris," 158. See also Paul Saillol, "Classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses: l'exemple des macons de la Creuse en 1825," Historique 1 (jan.-fev. 1960). Even though the migrant stonemasons did not belong to compagnnonage, the impression of violence associated with the tradition seems to have become attached to them.

(30.) Corbin, "The Peasants of Paris," 159,163,164,167.

(31.) Challamel, Les Revenants, 2,16,43.

(32.) For an example of the role of neighborhood support in exonerating individuals in the aftermath of rebellion, see Robert Tombs, "Prudent Rebels: Paris and the Rural Hordes: An Exploration of Myth and Reality in the French Civil War of 1871," The Historical Journal 29 (Dec. 1986): 410.

(33.) Among works on this topic are Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871 (Princeton, 1993) and Gould, Insurgent Identities. See also Bernard Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830-1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley, 1976). A work which argues that crowd activity during the July Monarchy was not necessarily tied to republican traditions is Pamela L. Pilbeam, "Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century France, 1814-1835," French History (1991): 2-47.

(34.) Martin Nadaud, Memoirs de Leonard, ancien garcon macon (Paris, 1976), 49,59,96,180.

(35.) On the Society of the Rights of Man and other republican secret societies of the July Monarchy, the standard is Gabriel Perreux, Au temps des societes secretes: la propagande republicaine et le romantisme en France: etude de la presse socialiste de 1830 a 1848 (Paris, 1935). Recent reassessments are Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814-1871 (London, 1995) and Phillip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

(36.) Jordan, Transforming Paris, 248, 249.

(37.) Tilly, The Contentious French, 54.

(38.) Tilly writes that "No doubt 1789 marked the all-time high point of national significance for the Place de Greve"; The Contentious French, 53. An example of a rightist political episode at the Hotel de Ville (in the twentieth century) is the demonstration by members of the "Jeunesses Patriotes" in the aborted insurrection of February 1934; Tilly, The Contentious French, 59. On the Reveillon riots, see Leonard N. Rosenband, "Jean-Baptiste Reveillon: A Man on the Make in Old Regime France," French Historical Studies 20 (Summer 1997): 504.

(39.) Challamel, Les Revenants, 96.

(40.) Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852-1870 (Paris, 1977), 16.

(41.) Though labor disputes and political troubles were rarely linked in the first half of the century. The phrase "Labour Exchange" is from the English-language translation of Rambuteau's memoirs. Rambuteau wrote: "I was always desirous of avoiding perils by maintaining a proportion between the works undertaken and the men needing employment. The Masons' and Navvies' Labour Exchange greeted me every morning on the Place de l'Hotel de Ville," Memoirs of the Comte de Rambuteau, tr. J.C. Brogan (New York, 1908), 294. See also Jordan, Transforming Paris, 105, and Tombs, "Crime and the Security of the State: The 'Dangerous Classes' and Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Paris," in V.A.C. Gatrell, et al., eds., The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), 225.

(42.) Michel le Moel, et al., La Place de Grave (Paris, nd), 79.

(43.) In 1830 and 1871, Creuse's political equilibrium remained relatively unperturbed. The exception to this history of civil calm was a tax rebellion in Gueret (the departmental capital) in 1848, and in December 1851, when three villages took up arms to defend the Second Republic during Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, 1979), 10-12; Merriman, The Agony of the Republic, 169 and Corbin, Archaisme et modernite, 502-09. Limoges (in the adjacent departement of Haute-Vienne), the largest city of the region, does have a singular history of left politics and some legacy of rebellion; Merriman, The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1985).

(44.) Another relatively well-known migrant stonemason in Paris in the nineteenth century was Antoine Cohadon, who headed a state-supported stonemason's cooperative during the Second Empire. Cohadon was not a political radical; see the entry in Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographie du mouvement ouvrier francaise (Paris, 1964- ).

(45.) During the Revolution of 1830, when Nadaud was fifteen years old, and again during the failed rebellion of June 1832. Nadaud's most recent biographer claims that the mason took part in the sack of the archbishop's residence in February 1831; Daniel Dayen, Martin Nadaud, ouvrier macon et depute, 1815-1898 (Paris, 1998), 27. In his memoirs, Nadaud details his experiences during the February Revolution of 1848, though this activity could not be considered rebellion. He briefly alludes to his participation in the demonstration of June 1849, but does not provide detail. It is likely that Nadaud was in Paris during the failed uprisings of April 1834, May 1839 and June 1848, though he does not describe his whereabouts on those occasions. William Reddy describes Nadaud as "not one of the shock troops" of the revolution; Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987), 193.

(46.) Archives Nationales (hereafter, A.N.),C 941/1, "Clubs de Departement de la Seine"; Nadaud, Macon de la Creuse, 234.

(47.) Nadaud was even suggested by the notables Pierre Leroux and Emile de Girardin (both of whom hailed from Creuse) as a possible candidate for president in the election of 1852 (which did not happen because of the coup d'etat of the preceding year); Dayen, Martin Nodaud, 84ff.

(48.) In the case of the Commune of 1871, for instance, Jacques Rougerie noted that almost anyone might be considered guilty of participation; "Composition d'une population insurgee, Le Mouvement social (1964): 16. See also Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 203-04. The only close study of rates of criminality of Parisian building workers in any period is by Allan Samuel Porofsky, who found that the late eighteenth-century image of the building worker as "the criminal type par excellence--transient, violent, unruly ... " is not substantiated by the records; Potofsky, "The Builders of Modern Paris: The Organisation of Labor from Turgot to Napoleon," (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1993), 132.

(49.) Corbin examines the extraordinary rates of arrest suffered by Creusois in Paris following the rebellions of the nineteenth century in "Migrations temporaires et societe rurale au [XIX.sup.e] siecle; le cas du Limousin," Revue Histoire (1976): 293-334. Corbin does not develop an explicit thesis to explain this pattern, but suggests that this was largely a result of a combination of the migrants' cultural isolation in the city and the impact of political ideas. See also Antoine Perrier, "Les Emigrants creusois dans les mouvements revolutionnaires parisiens au cours du [XIX.sup.e] siecle, [32.sup.e] Congres Federation Societes savantes Centre, Gueret (1972) (1973) and Urien, "Les Communards creusois et la vindicte versaillaise," Memoirs Societe Scientifique national archeologique de la Creuse 45 (1993): 112-22. As the table shows, stonemasons also participated at high rates in the successful revolution of 1830. The fact that the hiring fair took place early in the morning may have mitigated against unrulin ess. On timing as a factor in crowd behavior, see Mark Harrison, "The Ordering of the Urban Environment: Time, Work and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1790-1835," Past and Present 110 (1986): 136,163,167-8.

(50.) On the economic context, see Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, eds., Histoire economie et sociale de la France: l'avenement de l'ere industrielle (1789-1880) (Paris, 1976), especially vol. 1: 83-4, vol. 2: 780 and Fabrice Laroulanderie, Les Ouvriers de Paris au XIXeme siecle (Paris, 1997), 111-40. William Reddy, argues that though "market society" was a "mirage" in France, "market culture" had real impact, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900 (Cambridge, 1984), 1.

(51.) On the transformations of this era, see Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth Century French Trades (Cambridge, 1989) and Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York, 1995); on the chambres, Michael David Sibalis, "Corporatism after the Corporations: The Debate on Restoring the Guilds under Napoleon I and the Restoration," French Historical Studies 15 (March 1989). There is a large literature on the nineteenth-century French working class. Among recent works, a good place to begin are the words of workers themselves; see Traugort, ed. and tr., The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley, 1993).

(52.) Tilly, The Contentious French, 43,45; Jordan, Transforming Paris, 20. The square is known officially today as the Place de l'Hotel de Ville. On the history of the Place, see also Michel le Moel, et al., La Place de Greve (Paris, nd); Jehan de Ia Cite, L'Hotel de Ville et la Greve a travers les ages (Paris, 1895); and Andre Flament, Les Grandes heures de Paris, l'Hotel de Ville et la place de Greve (Paris, 1966). The word "greve" derives from the French for "beach."

(53.) Farge, Fragile Lives, 125,172.

(54.) Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community, 234.

(55.) On hiring in the eighteenth-century Paris building trades, see Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 31-34,37,39,139-40 and Jean Derens, "La Greve au [XVIII.sup.e] siecle," in Le Moel, et al., La Place de Greve, 178. There had been a close association between the Place and the building trades since at least 1621 when a city ordinance required that all carpenters, masons, roofers and plumbers assemble periodically at the square to agree upon a "tarif" (city-wide wage scale); Histoire generale de Paris, collection de documents, vol. 18 (Paris, 1953). Repeated reference to the hiring fair for the 1790s and the period of Napoleon's Consulate may be found in Alphonse Aulard, Paris pendant le Reaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire (Paris, 1902) and Paris sous la Consulat (Paris, 1909); and for the Restoration in Georges Bourgin and Hubert Bourgin, eds., Le Regime de l'industrie en France de 1814 a 1830, 3 vols. (Paris, 1912). Other historians have noted the hiring fair; see Farge, Fragile Lives, 112; Garrioch, N eighbourhood and Community, 109-10,234; and Sibalis, "The Workers of Napoleonic Paris, 1800-1815," (Ph.D. Diss., Concordia University, Montreal, 1979), 266-67. On hiring at the Place de Greve during the years of the French Revolution, see Potofsky, "The Builders of Modern Paris," 29,316-17,323-24. Relatively little is known about how casual labor was hired during the medieval and early modern periods. Overviews may be found in Steven Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991) and Gervase Rosser, "Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town," Past and Present 154 (Feb. 1997): 3-31. A description of the hiring fair at the Place de Greve which touches briefly upon its relationship to rebellion in Paris, is in Faure, "Mouvements populaires," 71-72. See also Tilly, The Contentious French, 54-57. For comparison with an American experience, see Charles P. Larrowe, Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattl e Waterfronts (Westport, Conn., 1976).

(56.) Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 44ff. Guild officers in the building trades, sometimes assisted by royal officials, policed their own members and relied upon municipal authorities to monitor "clandestine labor." On clandestine labor, see Steven L. Kaplan, "Les Corps, les 'faux ouvriers' et le faubourg St.-Antoine au XVIII siecle" Annales (ESC) 43 (mars-avril 1988) and Robert M. Schwarz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 125-31. Some stonemasons from Limousin were recruited by masters to work in Paris; Marie-Antoinette Carron, "Prelude a l'exode rural en France: les migrations anciennes des travailleurs creusois," Revue d'histoire economique sociale 43 (1965): 290,292-3. A hierarchy of skills at the eighteenth-century construction site is described in Lucotte, L'Art de maconnerie (Paris, 1783), 35. In this work, "limousins" are among the lowest paid workers, ranking ninth out of twelve categories.

(57.) Sonenscher, Work and Wages.

(58.) Sonenscher, "Journeymen, the Courts and the French trades, 1781-1791," Past and Present 114 (Feb. 1987): 81,107.

(59.) Thomas M. Luckett, "Hunting for Spies and Whores: A Parisian Riot on the Eve of the French Revolution," Past and Present 154 (Feb. 1997): 116-43.

(60.) Farge describes the Place as a setting "ripe ... for the eruption of a fight or for tempers to get overheated"; Fragile Lives, 125,177.

(61.) Casey Hanson, "An Organization of Labor: Laissez-Faire and Marchandage in the Paris Building Trades through 1848," French Historical Studies 20 (Summer 1997): 367-70.

(62.) Ibid. In the eighteenth century, "embauchage" was generally used to describe hiring. Sonenscher writes that the term "greve" was first used to denote a labor strike in 1785; Work and Wages, 77. This is confirmed in Potofsky, "The Builders of Modern Paris," 104, 328, though this author argues that the modem usage did nor really take hold until the early years of the nineteenth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century, greve had several related meanings, the most common being unemployment; Reddy, "Skeins, Scales, Discounts, Steam and Other Objects of Crowd Justice in Early French Textile Mills," Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (Jan. 1979): 205. The earliest use of the term I have found is in a police report of 17 July 1840; A.N., [F.sup.7]3890. The Paris Chamber of Commerce inquiry of 1848 observed that protests against hiring labor at the Place had lent itself to a new phrase, "se metrre en greve," which could also denote a work stoppage; Chambre de Commerce de Paris, Statis tique de l'industrie, 98. The Place was nor the only site in the city to host a daily hiring fair. To note just those for the building trades: locksmiths and glaziers assembled at the Quai des Gesvres (and at the Place du Temple on Sundays); housepainters at the corner of the Rue and Quai des Arcis; and joiners at the Rue des Ecouffes. Masons also gathered at the Place St.-Sulpice; A.N., C930/7.

(63.) Hanson, "An Organization of Labor," 363-67.

(64.) The capital's population grew at a rate of about ten percent every five years between 1831 and 1846; Chevalier, La Formation de la population parisienne au [XIX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1950), annexe 1. The Creusois, like most migrants, were not counted, so that it is impossible to say precisely how many were in Paris at any one time. On the difficulties of enumerating the capital's floating population, see Gaillard, Paris, la villa, 184; Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d'une villa, [XIX.sup.e]-[XX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1993), 11-12; and Barrie M. Ratcliffe and Christine Pierre, "Immigration into Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Proceedings, Western Society for French History (1991). The figures presented here are from the intendants or departmental prefects who were required to keep close tabs on the persons departing for the larger cities of France. For Creuse, there were perhaps 6,000 migrants leaving in 1789 (representing about 2.8% of its population); 30,000 in 1846(10.5%); and 42 ,000 in 1876(15%). Officials estimated that two-thirds of Creusois migrants went to Paris each year, the vast majority of whom would have labored in the construction industry; Caron, "Prelude a l'exode rurale en France," 296 and Charles H. Pouthas, La Population francaise pendant la premiere moitie du [XIX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1956), 42. For the present purposes, a useful measure of population density is boardinghouses and residents per quartier (one of the administrative subdivisions of Paris). Thus, in 1833, the quartier Hotel de Ville had a sedentary population of 12,740 compared with 26,329 in the quartier Saint-Martin des Champs to the north, but the former had the largest number of garnis (133) and the most boardinghouse residents (1,489) of any quartier in the city; Chevalier, Le Cholera: la premiere epidemie du [XIX.sup.e] siecle (La-Roche-sur-Yon, 1958), 30,34.

(65.) On wages, the standard work is Rougerie, "Remarques sur l'histoire des salaires a Paris au [XIX.sup.e] siecle," Le Mouvement social 63 (1968): 71-108. See also Peter Scholliers, ed., Real Wages in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (New York, 1989). The literature on the standard of living in Paris is diffuse, though there is a consensus that there are important signs of decline in the first half of the nineteenth century and improvement in the second half. Useful sources are Laroulanderie, Les Ouvriers de Paris, chs. 4-8; William Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison, Wis., 1982); Christine Piette, "La misere a Paris dans la premiere moitie du [19.sup.e] siecle: contribution a la critique des statistiques officielles," Canadian Journal of History (Aug. 1992): 235-275; Scarlett Beauvalet, "Perdre la vie en le donnant: la mortalite maternelle a Port-Royal, 1815-1826,' Annales de demographie historique (1992); and Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992).

(66.) Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community, 232. See also Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718-1789 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), 173.

(67.) A relationship likened by Farge to "dancers in a perpetual set"; Fragile Lives, 171.

(68.) There is a considerable literature on this. Along with Corbin, Archaisme et modernite en Limousin au [XIX.sup.e] siecle, 1845-1880, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975) and Caron, "Prelude a l'exode rural en France," see Annie Moulin, Les Macons de la Creuse" les origines du mouvement (Clermont-Ferrand, 1994); and Henri Hemmer, "La Creuse et l'emigration de la periode revolutionnaire," Memoirs de la Societe des Sciences naturelles et Archeologiques de la Creuse 37 (1971): 668-77.

(69.) Nadaud, Memoirs. Nadaud was twice elected to the national legislature. The record of his speeches during the Second Republic are in Discours de Martin Nadaud a l'Assemblee legislative (1849-1851) (Paris, 1884). The most recent biography is Dayen, Martin Nadaud.

(70.) One contempory, the working-class writer Pierre Vincard, described the stonemasons as afflicted by an "oriental fatalism"; cited in Urien, "Les Macons migrants," 130. See also Corbin, "Migrations temporaires," 308-09, and Bandy de Naleche, Les Macons, 68.

(71.) These are located in A.N., [F.sup.7] series. The Bulletins have been used over the years by many scholars, including Louis Girard, La Garde nationale, 1814-1871 (Paris, 1962), Mireille Varrara, "La Vie a Paris d'apres les bulletins de police, 1833-1839" (Diplome d'Etudes Superieures, Paris, 1962) and Pierre Mougey, "Paris d'apres les bulletins de police 1841 a 1848" (Diplome d'Etudes Superieures, Paris, 1962).

(72.) On the public works projects of 1830-31, see David Pinkney, "Les Ateliers de secours a Paris (1830-1831): Precurseurs des Ateliers nationaux de 1848," Revue de l'histoire moderne et contemporaine (1965); on the impact of the cholera epidemic, George Sussman, "Carriers of Cholera and Poison Rumours in France in 1832," Societas 3 (1973); on economic downturns, Michel Lescure, Immobilier et batiment en France (1820-1980) (Paris, 1983), 7-26.

(73.) Nadaud, Memoirs, 56,77. One of the other rare accounts is by Louis Doignon, like Nadaud from Creuse, who made his first trip to Paris in 1835. Doignon's story is reproduced in Anglade, Le Massif central. An excellent description of the routine at the hiring fair by a scholar well-acquainted with the topic is Urien, "Les Macons migrants," 120-23. See also Fernand Borie, L'Ouvrier macon (Paris, 1924), 89-93.

(74.) Compagnonnage was a ritual of travel and labor practiced by journeyman in some trades. It reached its peak of influence before 1848 and declined thereafter. The most recent historical treatment is Cynthia Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, 1994).

(75.) Nadaud, Memoirs, 29,77. Like many workers, the stonemasons observed the tradition of'le lundi bleu' (blue Monday), though as one contemporary noted the migrants exercised an "extreme" sobriety, the better to "wisely control their expenses"; quoted in Urien, "Les Macons migrants," 126.

(76.) Nadaud, Memoirs, 77.

(77.) Chevalier, Laboring Classes, 359-93; Nadaud, Memoirs, 10-12; Villerme, "Notes sur les ravages du cholera, 399-400. Daily notations of the garnis first appeared in the police reports in December 1831; A.N., F7 3885.

(78.) For eighteenth-century numbers at the garnis, see Roche, The People of Paris, 120, and for nineteenth-century figures A.N., F7 3890 and 3892. There was a seasonal "pulse" at the garnis that corresponded to the rythmn of migrattory labor; Faure, "Mouvement populaires," 54. Of the 65,951 persons living in boardinghouses in November 1839, over 9,000 were foreign (of whom the 1,674 English were the largest group); A.N., F7 3890.

(79.) Chevalier, Laboring Classes, 230 and Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison, Wis., 1985).

(80.) Roche, The People of Paris, 121.

(81.) Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease, 59-60. Bernard Marchand, whose general history of Paris is the most recent, writes that "The old central area constituted the most destitute section of the city"; Paris, 51.

(82.) Indeed, the fourth floor of the building at no. 62, of whom Mine. Champesne was the long-time proprietress; Nadaud, Memoirs, 47.

(83.) In Anglade, Le Massif central, 45-6.

(84.) Villerme, "De la moralite dans les divers quarriers de Ia ville de Paris," Annales d'hygiene publique 3 (1830): 337-38.

(85.) Less than a month after the revolution of July 1830, the bulletins included a breakdown by trade of workers at the hiring fair. By early 1831, the section on "Ouvriers" (Workers) focused on the hiring fair, but also described episodes of crowd activity in other sections of the city. From this point on through the early 1840s, the section on workers at the hiring fair was normally the first item listed in the report; A.N., F7 3885.

(86.) Charged with the day-to-day work of surveillance during the July Monarchy were ordinary police (sergents de ville) and police-spies (mouchards). Both reported to district commissioners ( commissaires) , who in turn were responsible to the prefect of police, whose office produced the daily reports cited here. On those occasions when riot or rebellion did occur, repression was handled by a riot corps (the Municipal Guard), mounted gendar-rnes, the National Guard or some combination of these forces. During very serious troubles, regular troops could be called upon. The sergenrs de ville were nor yet, by 1830, a truly professional corps (they would become more so following reforms in the 1850s). There were about 600 sergents de villa in 1829, when the force was created, a number that grew to 2,700 by 1859; O'Brien, "Urban Growth and Public Order."

(87.) Faycal el Ghoul, La Police parisienne dons la seconde moitie du [XVIII.sup.e] siecle (1760-1785), 2 vols. (Tunis, 1995), 1:25; 2: 494-500; Tilly, The Contentious French, 54. William Beik's recent analysis of popular protest in seventeenth-century France de-emphasizes the centralizing tendencies of the state; Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997).

(88.) Sonenscher argues that "nothing in the history of the eighteenth-century French trades foreshadowed" the rebellions of the nineteenth century; Work and Wages, 329. Likewise Farge's Fragile Lives depicts a social milieu and habits of collective action that do not portend the upheavals after 1830.

(89.) Other contentious venues existed in Paris: notably the central market area of Les Halles, the "thieves' den" of the Cite and the theater district.

(90.) Aulard, Paris pendant le Reaction thermidorienne and Paris sous la Consulat. Howard G. Brown assesses the process by which French "organic society" was replaced by the "security state" as a consequence of the Revolution of 1789 and the rise of Napoleon; "From Organic Society to Security Stare: The War on Brigandage in France, 1797-1802," Journal of Modern History 69 (Dec. 1997): 661-695. State centralization is also a motif of Potofsky, "The Builders of Modem Paris"; he notes that"... no area was mentioned (in the police reports of the Directory) with the frequency of the Place de Grave.... The loathing this area inspired was only matched by apprehension, as it was often monitored for numbers of workers and their demeanor"; 316.

(91.) In general, the authorities regulated these passports to control the flow of workers to the city. At the end of the building season, the prefect of police might expedite the process in order to encourage migrants to depart for provincial homes; A.N., [F.sup.7] 3884,5 d&. 1830; and Braudel and Labrousse, eds., Histoire economie, 2:781. For examples of the exchange of information on migrant populations from central France, see Bourdelais and Raulor, "Le Marche du cholera en France," 107-15,117 and Daniel Bernard, "Surveillance des itinerants et ambulants dans le departement de l'Indre au [XIX.sup.e] siecle et au dobut du [XX.sup.e] siecle," in Philippe Vigier, et al., Maintien de l'ordre et polices en France et en Europe au [XIX.sup.e] siecle (Paris, 1987). Like the hiring fair, the boardinghouses had long been an object of police scrutiny. A law of 15 July 1832 required inspection of garnis and registration of lodgers by boardinghouse proprietors; Maryvonne Bernard, "La Reorganisation de La police sous l e Second Empire (1851-1858): 'de bras infatigables,'" in Vigier, et al., Maintien de l'ordre, 132. An analysis of collective action in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century based upon information from the police reports would likely find that most incidents occurred in the suburbs and nor in the city itself. This would correspond to the picture offered in Merriman, The Margins of City Life, which describes how social tensions moved to the urban peripheries even as negative stereotypes of the central city persisted.

(92.) The first bureau de placement in Paris may have been that at the hosrellerie Ste.-Catherine, created in 1184, which catered to women seeking jobs as domestic servants; Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionaire de Paris (Paris, 1996), 736. The first government-operated bureau opened in 1628. Private labor offices existed after 1791, following the abolition of the guilds. By the second half of the nineteenth century, commercial employment offices had become an object of protest by workers, who considered these "places de greves" demeaning and exploitive; A. Savoie, Las Bureaux de placement. Leur origina, leur histoire, leur suppression (Paris, 1913), 8,14.

(93.) Robert Marquant, "Les Bureaux de placement en France sous l'Empire et la Restauration," Revue d'histoire economique et sociale XL (nd), 200-37; and Potofsky, "The Builders of Modern Paris," 323-24,370. The government labor offices were briefly revived in 1816, though here again the desire to place persons without jobs concentrated on a "particular and numerous class of workers ... masons, painters and other construction workers"; A.N., [F.sup.7] 9817.

(94.) The belief that popular ideas could translate to riot or rebellion contributed to the decision in January 1832 to transfer the guillotine to the Place St.-Jacques, a peripheral location that was presumably less provocative than the Place de Greve; A.N., BB [18] 1321 A 7.

(95.) For eighteenth-century images of criminality and rebellion attached to the building trades, see Potofsky, "The Builders of Modern Paris," ch. 3.

(96.) A.N., [F.sup.7] 3878.

(97.) A.N., [F.sup.7] 3884, Bulletin de Paris, 25 fev. 1830.

(98.) A.N., [F.sup.7] 3885, Bulletin de Paris, 4 jan. 1831.

(99.) A.N., [F.sup.7] 3887, Bulletin de Paris, 12 aout, 1832.

(100.) A.N., [F.sup.7] 3885, Bulletin de Paris, 28 sept. 1831.

(101.) See also Tombs, "Crime and the Security of the State," 215.

(102.) Ibid., 218.

(103.) Ibid., 221,235.

(104.) Jennifer Davis, "Urban Policing and Its Objects: Comparative Themes in England and France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger, Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism, and Public Order, 1850-1940 (Westport, Conn., 1991), 2. See also Pierre-Yves Saunier, "Maintien de l'orde et controle de l'espace urbain au [XIX.sup.e] siecle: le cas du Lyon," Les Cahiers de La Securite interieure Paris (1994): 77-85. This was not entirely a new phenomenon: Robert Schwartz describes the "popular fears" inspired by the "mobile poor" in eighteenth-century France; Policing the Poor, 10, 241-42.

(105.) Davis, "Urban Policing," 3,6,10.

(106.) Tilly, The Contentious French, 56-9, and Jordan, Transforming Paris, 20,248ff. Ann-Louise Shapiro writes of the era that "The sense is inescapable that (Paris) had been invaded by an alien breed who had penetrated and, even more, contaminated public spaces," a problem that could be addressed by improving workers' housing; Housing the Poor of Paris, 7.

(107.) Transforming Paris, 109. See also Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Towm Planning, 1850-1970 (London, 1970), 31.

(108.) Louis Girard, La Politique des travaux publics du Second Empire (Paris, 1951), 331,336. David Pinkney quotes a source of the period to the effect that "'A week's interruption of the building trade would terrify the government'"; Napoleon III, 38. Pinkney found 35,000 Creusois in Paris in 1851 and approximately 40,000 for most years through the end of the Second Empire; "Migrations to Paris during the Second Empire," 3-4. John Merriman writes that by 1870 Paris had become "two cities"--a bourgeois interior surrounded by a working-class ring of suburbs; The Margins of City Life, 26.

(109.) Culpability, particularly in the large rebellions of the era, is notoriously difficult to gauge. There is a consensus among researchers that arrest is not necessarily a sign of culpability. Gullickson writes of the trials that followed the Commune that "Viewed as an inquiry into guilt or innocence, (they) are deeply troubling.... These were show trials ... designed to assuage the bourgeois desire for vengeance and to stand as a warning for anyone contemplating revolutionary activity in the future.... Evidence was of little importance, as was the testimony of the defendants themselves. The judges, prosecutors, spectators, and press had determined in advance that the prisoners were guilty"; Unruly Women of Paris, 203. Following the Commune, Creusois and building workers were sentenced or released at roughly the same rates as other groups, suggesting no special pattern of culpability; Hanson, "The Paris Commune of 1871 and the Paris Building Trades," Proceedings, Western Society for French History (Boulde r, CO, 1997), 16-17.

(110.) Bandy de Neleche, Les Macons, 68; Sutcliffe, Autumn of Central Paris, 137. Nadaud was in exile during the Second Empire and so can tell us nothing about Paris in these years. A print of 1869 shows workers at the hiring fair seeking jobs from subcontractors: "La Foire aux macons en Place de Greve au [XIX.sup.e] siecle," by Jules Pelcoq; Collection de Vinck, inventaire analytique, r. VII (Paris, 1979), reproduced in Tilly, The Contentious French, Fig. 9.

(111.) Jacques Julliard, Clemenceau, briseur des greves, l'Affaire de Draveil-Villeneuve-St.Georges (Paris, 1965), 46. The Place Lobau is also known as the Place Sr.-Gervais.

(112.) By 1900, former migrant stonemasons who had done well enough to become entrepreneurs in Paris had organized several "societies" promoting positive alternatives to the popular "black legend" of Limousin; Caroline Girard, "Les Societes d'originaires et le reponse a l'image noire de Limousin travers Le Limousin de Paris," in Limousins de Paris, 53-4. See also Pierre Vallin, Paysans rouges du Limousin; mentalite et compartement politique a Compreignac et dans le Nord de Haute-Vienne (1870-1914) (Paris, 1985), 74.

(113.) These may be compared with Pinkney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, 1970), 253 and Edgar L. Newman, "The Blouse and the Frock Coat," Journal of Modern History (March 1974): 30, note 17.

(114.) Harison, "The Paris Building Trades and the Commune of 1871," 325-32.

Sources: For 1787-95, calculated from George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), appendix IV; for 1830, [113] courtesy of Alan B. Spitzer, A.N. [[blank].sup.1d]III. Min. de l'Interieur, Comm. des Recompenses Nationales, Archives de Paris V.D. [3] and Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Rapport de M. Sencier, Serie 23, Ms. 1027; for 1832, A.N., BB [18] 1330 and Proces des 22 accuses du cloitre Saint-Mery suivi des pieces justijicatives (Paris, 1832); for 1834 and 1839, David H. Pinkney, "The Revolutionary Crowd in Paris in the 1830s," Journal of Social History (Spring 1972); for February 1848, Mark Traugott, "The Crowd in the French Revolution of 1848," American Historical Review (June 1988); for June 1848, "Inter-University Consortium on Social Research: Arrests Following June Days 1848: Originally Collected by Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees"; for 1871, "Rapport Appert," Archives Parlementaires (Paris, 1913).

Explanation: "Rebels" are killed and wounded in 1830; for all other episodes, the term indicates persons arrested during and after rebellion. The percentages are for all casualties in the episode. Thus in 1871, stonemasons were 5.9% of the more than 38,000 persons arrested and building workers 23.3% of that total. (In 1871, stonemasons constituted more than one-quarter [25.5%] of all building workers arrested, the next highest trade being joiners [18.4% of all building workers arrested]).

For the rebellions of 1787-95, 1830, 1832, June 1848 and 1871, stonemasons had the highest percentage of arrests among all building trades. Overall, the building trades were more represented among the casualties of these rebellions than any other trade; in 1830, 1832 and 1871, day-laborers (many of whom probably worked as excavators in the construction industry, and many of whom were also probably migrants) were the next most represented group; in 1787-95 and 1839, clothing workers were second; in June 1848, workers in ordinary metals were second to the building trades. Only in the rebellion of April 1834, did a group other than the building workers have a higher percentage of arrests (students, with 22.2%).

For the Paris rebellions of the nineteenth century, there is much detail available on the trade of casualties but less on where these persons lived or, if migrants, from where they came. The best information available is for the Commune of 1871, which shows that more than ten percent of the nearly 9,000 building workers arrested were from Creuse, placing it second behind the city of Paris itself (with a percentage of 23.7%); the next highest percentage in 1871 was a departement (Seine-et-Oise) adjacent to the capital (though still much behind Creuse, with 4.7% of all building trades arrests). [114] In the June Days rebellion, 192 building workers from Creuse were arrested, placing the departement behind only Paris itself. The statistical evidence from 1848 does not indicate how many of the Creusois were stonemasons, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that nearly all of them were.