Worlds turned upside down: bourgeois experience in the 19th-century revolutions.

On March 13, 1848, Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, the fifty-six-year-old municipal librarian of Lyon, sat down to draft a letter to the newly appointed "Citizen Mayor" who had taken control of the local government in France's second largest city as a result of the revolution in Paris three weeks earlier. Monfalcon was a prominent figure in his native city's local life. In addition to his post at the library, he was a doctor who had held positions at several of Lyon's public medical institutions. In the early 1830s, he had been a leading local journalist, and he was a prolific author, who had published many books on medical and public-health topics, local history, and classical literature. In other words, Monfalcon was unquestionably a local bourgeois notable, an almost perfect representative of that class that had supposedly come to power in France in 1830 and that was destined to maintain its hegemony for most of the nineteenth century.

On this particular occasion, however, Monfalcon was not feeling much like a hegemon. His manuscripts are normally neat and easily readable, but the rough draft of this letter is covered with corrections, signs of the state of anxiety in which he composed it. His state of mind was reflected in the epigraph that he placed at the top of the letter: "Vous etes traque de tous cotes." ["You are hunted from all sides."] There were good reasons for this anxiety. As a prominent supporter of the just-toppled Orleanist regime, Monfalcon was in danger of losing the librarianship he sought for many years and finally obtained in 1847. "You are certainly unfamiliar with my obscure name, so please allow me to tell you something about myself," the by-no-means obscure Monfalcon wrote to the newly installed republican magistrate, humbling himself but also giving himself an excuse to mention his ten literary prizes (two awarded by the Academie francaise), his "editions in eight languages of Virgil, Horace, Anacreon, and the Imitation of Christ," his works on public health problems, and his history of Lyon. "From 1830 to 1834," he admitted, "I defended ... the principle of constitutional monarchy, resting openly on republican institutions; it was the legal opinion and that of the majority." But, he maintained, "for the last fourteen years, I have had nothing to do with politics, either directly or indirectly."

Having listed his accomplishments and attempted to justify his political conduct, Monfalcon finally got to the point. At first, he considered adopting a tone of pathos, putting down the words, "My post at the library is my main means of existence; I have a fairly large family." On second thought, he crossed out this emotional appeal and based his case on considerations of justice and public interest. "Will you keep me in a position that I have obtained by so much effort? Engaged on the instructions of your predecessor in some important publications, will I be able to continue them and carry out the general reorganization of the library? Will the Republic, which has solemnly guaranteed bread to hardworking laborers, take away that which thirty years of hard toil has gotten me?" In conclusion, Monfalcon assured the mayor of "my sincere adherence to the Republic." Evidently deciding that this declaration was insufficient, he inserted a few more words, calling the republic "the ideal form of government when it is truly [accepted] by the country." (1)

Both the content and the form of Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon's letter are graphic evidence of the anxieties a member of the French bourgeoisie faced during the country's nineteenth-century revolutionary crises. Gustave Flaubert, one of Monfalcon's more distinguished contemporaries, provided the most famous description of those anxieties in a famous passage of his Sentimental Education, where he described the reaction to the February Days of 1848: "the fall of the monarchy had been so swift that, once the first moment of stupefaction had passed, the middle classes felt a sort of astonishment at finding that they were still alive." (2) Writing from the perspective of the 1860s, Flaubert could afford to portray his bourgeois characters' reactions to events as exaggerated and faintly ridiculous; he knew that their class would emerge intact from its ordeal, immune not only to revolutionary movements but also to his bitter satire. But for those who had to live through them without knowing their outcomes, the nineteenth-century revolutions were disasters in which hard-won positions could be swept away and long-term life projects disrupted. Monfalcon, born in 1792, was part of a generation whose longer-lived members, such as Adolphe Thiers, endured this experience not just once, but three times. In retrospect, he and the other members of his bourgeois class survived all these cataclysms: Monfalcon himself died at the age of 82, still holding the library position that he had begged to keep in 1848. To Monfalcon, however, there was nothing foreordained about this outcome. From his perspective, his whole adult life had been a never-ending struggle to live a life that made sense in the face of forces that repeatedly threatened to reduce it to chaos. Our understanding of his experience and that of his bourgeois contemporaries is incomplete if we fail to take this into account.

The exploration of bourgeois experience has been a major theme of nineteenth-century historiography for the past several decades, but the anxiety reflected in Monfalcon's letter has been a neglected aspect of the topic. In Marxist historiography, and especially in Marx's own writings about the French revolution of 1848, the notion of the bourgeoisie as a scared and angry group, traumatized by revolution, was taken for granted. As the Marxist narrative of class struggle has lost its persuasiveness, however, it has come to seem as though the hegemony of the property-owning classes in nineteenth-century France was never really in danger. Pierre Bourdieu's influential analysis of social reproduction has emphasized the stability of social hierarchies; empirical studies of social history such as Adeline Daumard's Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815 give the impression of a group steadily consolidating its hold on wealth and power throughout the nineteenth century. (3) Consequently, bourgeois fears can only be understood as fundamentally irrational. Peter Gay's monumental exploration of the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie devotes surprisingly little attention to that class's concern with the threat from the lower orders and the danger of revolution. Gay's emphasis on the psychological roots of bourgeois attitudes implies that the "hatred" to which he has devoted a full volume grew out of largely unconscious personal conflicts rooted in childhood and human nature, rather than out of actual historical experience. (4) Gay's approach shares some elements with that of feminist historians, such as Bonnie Smith, whose influential Ladies of the Leisure Class suggests that nineteenth-century bourgeois men were more preoccupied with maintaining gender hierarchies than with threats of revolution. (5)

Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon's life offers a vantage point for questioning both the assumption that nineteenth-century French society was dominated by a comfortably hegemonic bourgeois class and the proposition advanced recently by Sarah Maza that there was no self-conscious bourgeoisie during this period. (6) As we will see, the crisis that drove Monfalcon to compose his anguished letter to the newly installed republican mayor of Lyon in 1848 was just one of the many moments in his life when he faced very real dangers of losing his positions acquises and even his life. Monfalcon was quite certain that his personal experience was not unique, however. He was convinced that he represented a larger group, and one with a crucial role in society. In 1833, a newspaper he edited defined "la classe moyenne" as "the assemblage of all superior social qualities: superiorities diverse in their expression, similar in their origin, superiorities which are neither granted for life nor hereditary, which have no character of privilege ... to which anyone can attain by his own efforts ... To have defined the middle class is practically to have answered the question of who should direct society." (7) Monfalcon knew who did not belong to this class: above all, the poor and the workers, groups he regularly identified as threats.

It is true that Monfalcon's conception of the middle class was not based on economic criteria. As an educated professional, an independent man of letters, and the holder of a series of administrative posts, Monfalcon avoided direct involvement in the world of the marketplace. In his own life, he perfectly exemplified the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie as recent historiography has helped us understand it. The son of a Lyon silk weaver who had risen to the status of a small-scale merchant and property-owner, (8) Monfalcon had attended medical school; through his own efforts, he had also acquired the cultural knowledge that enabled him to claim the status of a man of letters. A member of numerous local societies, such as the Societe de medicine de Lyon, he practiced the "emulation" and sociability whose central role in bourgeois life has been demonstrated by Carol Harrison. (9) He was also a classic example of the provincial savant, devoted to the cultivation of his region's history, a figure whose importance in bourgeois life of this period has been underlined by Stephane Gerson. Like most of this group, he represented "an urban bourgeoisie capacitaire, a middling bourgeoisie of talents that subsisted on current income rather than inherited wealth," as Gerson has put it. (10) He was well placed to speak for all those who had a stake in a stable social order in which not only financial and industrial property but cultural and intellectual investments were protected.

We can see Monfalcon's outlook as a reflection of ideas about society that had first been articulated in France during the second half of the 1790s. In 1795, for example, Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of the most acute thinkers of the period, had argued for a definition of property and property-ownership that highlighted the common interests of landowners, manufacturers, and educated professionals, even if the latter owned nothing tangible. Roederer imagined three young men just starting out in life, each provided with a capital of 20,000 francs. One might invest his money to buy productive land, another might invest it in merchandise and open a store, and a third might invest in himself by acquiring training in medicine. From Roederer's economic point of view, these were equivalent choices and they did not change the fact that all three would have a strong interest in maintaining social order, an interest that would unite them against the mass of those without property. Indeed, Roederer argued that the investors in intellectual property--that is, those who used their money to acquire professional skills--were more dependent on social stability than any other group, including landowners, who could always mortgage or sell their property, and merchants and manufacturers, who could easily take their activities to other countries. (11) Educated professionals, Roederer argued, had invested in life projects that required a stable pattern of interaction with their fellow citizens for their realization. They therefore had more to lose from upheavals than any other group.

Monfalcon followed in Roederer's footsteps in seeing men like himself as the very pivot of the middle class and of the social order as a whole. Monfalcon's sense that he was entitled to speak simultaneously for the middle class and the public interest was rooted in his personal life experience. He had risen from humble origins to achieve the status of an educated professional, and had then added to the practice of his career as a doctor a host of self-imposed duties as a man of letters. He was an indefatigable writer, contributing (in his own eyes, at least) to the advance of medical knowledge, to the dissemination of enlightened views about public-health issues, (12) to the chronicling of Lyon's history, to the rousing of middle-class self-consciousness in the face of the "social problem," and even, through the immense polyglot editions of Horace, Virgil, and Anacreon that he compiled in his spare time, to the appreciation of poetry and the knowledge of other languages. The more than thirty years he spend supervising Lyon's municipal libraries allowed him to combine his private passion for books with what he saw as service to the community. But, as he saw it, he had consistently devoted himself to the public welfare long before he became a librarian. He had been a member of Lyon's public health council (conseil de salubrite) for thirty years, as well holding positions as official doctor at the Perrache prison and later head doctor at the Charite hospice and orphanage. (13)

Monfalcon's career offers us valuable insights into the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century revolution, not only because he was such a typical member of his social class, but because he was directly affected by all three of the period's greatest upheavals. It is true that he experienced the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the traumas of 1870-71 in the provincial city of Lyon, not in Paris--a fact that makes him, of course, all the more representative of the majority of France's bourgeois population--but this does not mean that he was insulated from their shocks. As a liberal journalist, Monfalcon was at the center of Lyon's equivalent to the "three glorious days" of July 1830, the confrontation between crowd and troops that narrowly escaped becoming a battle, and he experienced at first hand the two Lyon insurrections of November 1831 and April 1834, the most intense outbreaks of social and political violence during the revolutionary cycle of the early 1830s. If Lyon escaped the massive bloodletting of the June Days in 1848, it nevertheless suffered its own social explosion a year later, in June 1849. The city was narrowly spared the experience of siege in 1870, and its shortlived version of the Communard movement was far less traumatic than what happened in Paris, but upsetting enough to leave its mark on those who experienced it. In addition to the fact that he experienced these upheavals, however, Monfalcon is a useful point of departure for this inquiry because he wrote about them so graphically and so extensively. In letters and documents, journalistic accounts, historical chronicles, and a lengthy autobiography, he not only recorded his experiences but tried to define their significance. Like a seismograph, Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon's pen faithfully recorded the repeated shocks to which he and his bourgeois contemporaries were exposed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Because we have so much information about Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, we can recognize that his reactions to the crises of 1830, 1848, and 1870-71 were those of an unusually nervous and insecure individual. Whatever the peculiarities of his psychology, however, Monfalcon was also a highly representative member of the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie. Like so many members of that group, he came from relatively humble origins: his father had been a financially independent silk weaver in Lyon, but too cautious to profit fully from the expansion of the industry during the Napoleonic period. His mother came from a prosperous peasant family. Born in 1792, Monfalcon had experienced the effects of political instability throughout his childhood. His father had fought against the troops of the Convention during Lyon's federalist uprising in 1793, and had been lucky to escape arrest afterward. During the thermidorian period, he had been targeted by right-wing militants. Monfalcon's own political memories began with the Napoleonic period and its unexpected end, including the experience of Austrian and Russian troops occupying the city. (14)

Had it been left to his father, Monfalcon would have received only an elementary education and would have been apprenticed to a silk merchant, but his mother had higher aspirations for him. Set to studying medicine, Monfalcon acquired the educational credentials that would qualify him for middle-class status at the price of years of hard work; as a student,

he had to rise at 5 am to hold the senior surgeon's candle at morning rounds. He continued his studies in Paris, where he developed the passion for book-collecting that would eventually lead him to the directorship of Lyon's library. He also discovered a vocation as a man of letters, finagling himself a position as a hack writer for the prestigious Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, which had begun to appear in 1812. (15)

Monfalcon's career was typically bourgeois also in that it was clearly structured around longterm life projects that required considerable investment and planning. His medical studies had taken eleven years. When he graduated, Monfalcon knew he still had more to do to establish himself. A pamphlet he published at the time of his graduation, Quelques reflexions sur les rapports des medecins avec la societe, aside from giving him the opportunity to advertise on the title page the fact that he was "a doctor in medicine from the Paris faculty, one of the collaborators of the Dictionnaire des sciences medicales and of the Biographie medicale, one of the editors of the Journal complementaire du Dictionnaire, a former surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu de Lyon, corresponding member of several medical societies, etc.," indicated how carefully he had thought about the strategies that would be necessary to build a career. His comments have a strong autobiographical ring to them. "How difficult is the position of a doctor starting off in the world!" he exclaimed. "A young doctor is impatient for the moment when he will enjoy general consideration; unsure of what destiny awaits him, he worries, runs around, complains about his situation ..." He outlined a program that included the careful cultivation of women patients, the acquisition of social graces, the development of a broad range of intellectual interests, and the demonstration of a devotion to public interests shown by courage during epidemics and charitable work for the poor. (16) In short, he conceived of a professional career as a project requiring careful management and long-range planning, and whose payoff would come from the achievement of a reputation that would ensure a dependable clientele. Needless to say, Monfalcon's strategy posited a stable social setting, one in which the painstaking accumulation of cultural capital would not be suddenly interrupted by unexpected events.

Until the early 1820s, Monfalcon anticipated that he would build his career in the conservative framework of the Restoration. His 1818 pamphlet took pains to praise religion and to refute the common allegation that doctors were usually atheists. (17) Settling in his native city, Monfalcon doggedly pursued the strategies he had outlined. The death of his first wife disrupted what seems to have been a love match, but he then married into a bourgeois family with royalist connections going back to the revolutionary era. (18) He accumulated honors in the prize contests sponsored by various medical societies, published a series of works leading up to his first major book, a study of medical problems in France's swamp regions, (19) got himself appointed to the newly created Conseil de salubrite, and obtained an unpaid position as medicin suppleant at Lyon's famous charity hospital, the Hotel-Dieu. Surviving records do not explain how he came to associate himself with the liberal movement that developed around the local newspaper the Precurseur, founded in 1826. Monfalcon probably realized that middle-class opinion in the city was increasingly hostile to the Restoration regime, and he may have been influenced by friends like J.-F. Terme, a fellow doctor who later became the city's mayor during the July Monarchy. By 1827, when he tried unsuccessfully to become the Lyon correspondent of the Revue encyclopedique, a progressive monthly published in Paris, Monfalcon had clearly cast his lot with the liberal opposition movement. (20)

Monfalcon was thus well placed to profit from the unexpected opportunity presented by the Revolution of 1830. In his autobiography, he wrote that he had "sensed that the new political order would benefit me in some way." (21) The transition was not entirely an easy one, however. In September 1830, Monfalcon's fellow doctors had devoted a lengthy discussion to the psychological "illnesses caused or cured by the events of July," including the case of a patient who "did nothing for two weeks except sing the 'Parisienne' or the 'Marseillaise,' or else recite the verse that the revolution of three days had inspired Victor Hugo and Casimir Delavigne to write." (22) Monfalcon suffered his own stresses. He was named to replace a royalist as the official doctor at Lyon's main prison, the newly constructed facility at Perrache, but he was soon complaining to the prefect that he was not being paid as well as his predecessor. He was particularly aggrieved because, as he put it, he had been so careful to demonstrate his loyalty to the new regime while not antagonizing any of its increasingly divided partisans: "I haven't wanted to sell myself either to the 'movement' party or to the 'resistance' ..." (23) At the moment he wrote this letter, Monfalcon was also having to digest another major disappointment: he had been thwarted in his hope to be named editor of the Precurseur, the liberal newspaper whose heroic defiance of Charles X's attempted constitutional coup had made it the symbol of the 1830 Revolution in Lyon. Within a few months, the paper, the most important provincial periodical in the country, had fallen into the hands of the city's more radical 'movement' liberals; by June 1832, it would convert itself into an outspokenly republican organ. (24)

Having to orient himself in a new, politically polarized environment was not the worst trauma waiting for Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon in the wake of the 1830 Revolution, however. While the city's bourgeois liberals were fighting over local offices and the control of the Precurseur, the thousands of silk workers in Lyon's manufacturing suburbs were organizing to protest the deterioration of their economic situation. On 21 November 1831, negotiations between them and the merchants who controlled the industry broke down, and a column of weavers descended from the Croix-Rousse hill, waving a black banner inscribed with a slogan destined to echo throughout the continent: "Live working or die fighting." The result was the first great episode of social conflict in nineteenth-century Europe. At the foot of the hill, the marching workers encountered a bourgeois unit of the National Guard and shooting broke out. In the ensuing melee, the more numerous workers routed the Guard; when the prefect and the local military commander tried to enter the Croix-Rousse to restore order, they were taken hostage. The army garrison retreated from the city, leaving armed workers in control of the streets. The era of modern social conflict had begun with a spectacular victory for the working class.

Monfalcon was naturally on the bourgeois side of this confrontation, but, because of his origins as the son of a silk weaver and the knowledge of the workers' milieu he had acquired in the course of his charity medical work, he knew both sides of the barricades. A decade earlier, he had written a graphic account of the miserable living conditions in the city's working-class neighborhoods. (25) When the fighting broke out, Monfalcon put on his National Guard uniform, but he treated the wounded from both sides. On the second day of the insurrection, when a volunteer was sought to carry a prefectoral proclamation to the silkweavers' headquarters at the top of the Croix-Rousse hill, Monfalcon accepted the mission. Monfalcon himself is the only source for the account of what happened to him, a story that he told and retold in print for the rest of his life, but it can be said that if he invented anything, he did so with remarkable speed and then stuck to his narrative faithfully: his first printed account of the incident was written on 29 November 1831 and published in a Paris newspaper three days later. In his effort to convey to Parisian readers the extremity of the situation in Lyon, he mentioned that National Guard members sent to parlay with the insurgents had been mistreated, and that "one of them, a doctor at the HotelDieu, was miraculously saved by a worker who recognized him, and protested that he was not a silk merchant." Two days later, Monfalcon elaborated on this account and named the lucky doctor: himself. He had "treated the wounded on the field of battle on the 21st; on the morning of the 22nd, he took up arms and went to the Grand-Cote, where the fiercest fighting was taking place. It is he who, in the role of a parlementaire, took a proclamation from the prefect to the workers' headquarters, and who owed his life to the gratitude of one of them, at the moment when the populace, after having disarmed and mistreated him, was about to indulge ... in the ultimate excess." (26)

In his autobiography, written twenty years later, Monfalcon polished this episode into a passage worthy of Hugo or Balzac:

  Everything is silent and nothing moves all up and down the Grand'Cote:
  no sound of a loom, no human sound can be heard in this street,
  ordinarily so crowded and so noisy. Men, women and children stand at
  the windows watching us without saying a word. There is nothing really
  hostile about this, but somehow the unaccustomed silence at that hour
  and in such critical circumstances fills me with a vague unease about
  the possible outcome of my mission ... An old woman whom I recognize,
  seeing me pass by her shop, makes a movement of astonishment that she
  accompanies with a gesture of pity ...

Before he could reach the top of the long street, Monfalcon found himself surrounded:

  Forty men armed with a few bad rifles encircle me. They swear at me,
  they attack me from all sides; my rifle, my sabre, my officer's
  epaulettes, my uniform are torn from me. Menaces give way to blows. My
  proclamation is stamped underfoot, and from all sides I hear cries of
  vengeance: 'he's a merchant; let him pay for the others ...' Strong
  hands seize me by the neck and drag me to the gutter, and I realize
  how this violent scene is likely to end, when, over the shouts, I hear
  these words: 'Don't kill him, he's my doctor, let him go.' It is the
  voice of a lame silkworker who is not my patient, but who I know quite
  well.

Monfalcon's savior persuaded the angry silkweavers to inspect their victim's rifle; when they saw that it had not been fired recently, they let him go. (27)

Monfalcon's subsequent obsession with the story of how he had been "miraculously saved," as he wrote in his first version of the incident in Le Temps, shows how deeply personal the social danger revealed in 1831 was for him. He had faced the possibility of the annihilation of the nineteenth-century bourgeois order, not as a theoretical issue, but as a life-or-death question in the most literal sense: he had been in the hands of a working-class mob, moments away from being lynched. He was not merely an apologist for a system that rewarded him: he was a survivor who had nearly paid with his life for his efforts on behalf of social order, and who had returned from the abyss to spread a warning to his fellow citizens. Even in its earliest newspaper-bulletin versions, however, his story contained a second theme in addition to its dramatization of the workers' violence. Monfalcon emphasized that his life had been spared because he had devoted himself to the welfare of the poor. The silkworker Merie, named in his autobiography, knew of Monfalcon's charitable medical activities and intervened on his behalf at the critical moment. Monfalcon's message for his bourgeois readers was thus a double one: they should not underestimate the danger represented by the workers, but they could mitigate it through sincere efforts to improve the condition of the poor.

Judging from the number of times he retold the story, Monfalcon's experience in November 1831 was the most searing moment of his life. It was only the start of several tumultuous years for him, however. Ousted from the increasingly radical Precurseur even before the insurrection, he resurfaced as the editor of a more conservative daily, the Courrier de Lyon, which began publication shortly after the revolt. In it, he defended the Orleanist monarchy and warned of the danger of a renewed working-class movement. The life of a politically engaged journalist in the early 1830s was a stressful one. In addition to his worries about lower-class insurrection, Monfalcon often found himself in conflict with other writers; as he recalled in his autobiography, this was the only period in his life when he had to risk his life in duels. (28)

In April 1834, Monfalcon's predictions about another uprising came true, as republican insurgents seized the center of the city, setting off several days of streetfighting against the army. From the confines of his apartment, Monfalcon composed dramatic bulletins for a Paris daily. "What a horrid spectacle an insurrection is! The tocsin is still sounding, the cannons thunder, and bullets are whistling through the air as I write these lines. What a shame that the citizens who are friends of order do not know where to gather or are in situations where they cannot help repress the revolt," he wrote on the first day of the fighting. The next day's report was equally dramatic: "Trapped in our house for the last thirty-six hours, we have no news of our relatives and our friends. No one knows what is happening anywhere else but in his neighborhood ... What anxiety! Feel pity for us." When the army finally defeated the rebels, Monfalcon toured the city and told his readers, "the scene in Lyon is awful, a number of buildings ... have been completely burned down; many others are scarred by cannonballs." (29) In his autobiography, Monfalcon recalled that his accounts of these events attracted so much attention that "Louis Philippe waited impatiently for them and read them with the closest attention ...;" in August 1834, the king invited Monfalcon for a personal meeting, which remained in the Lyon author's memory as one of the great events of his life. (30)

After the defeat of the second insurrection, Monfalcon redoubled his efforts to defend social order. No longer employed as a journalist, he wrote what became for more than a century the definitive account of the city's troubles in the 1830s, his Histoire des insurrections de Lyon, followed by a longer work, Code moral des ouvriers, in which he tried to demonstrate that workers had nothing to gain from either trade union organization or political agitation. (31) In addition to inculcating in bourgeois readers a clear sense of the danger facing them, however, Monfalcon also increased his efforts on behalf of social improvement. Alone or with colleagues, he campaigned for measures that he thought would reduce the number of abandoned children in working-class neighborhoods and for reforms in urban sanitation that would help control epidemic illnesses. (32) As the July Monarchy consolidated itself and as memories of the tumultuous early 1830s began to fade, Monfalcon's life settled down and he was increasingly able to devote himself to the literary and historical interests that constituted his private passion. In 1841, his friend and medical colleague J.-F. Terme, the city's Orleanist mayor, rewarded Monfalcon with the position of librarian of the smaller of the city's two libraries, the Library of the Palais des Arts. This job, and the erudite research he was able to carry on thanks to his access to the collection, became the focus of Monfalcon's mature life plan. When he was appointed, he recalled in his autobiography, "I was finally ... in my element, in the middle of these books that I loved so much!" (33) He threw himself into his work, bombarding Terme with detailed accounts of his efforts to clean up the building, reorganize the collection, and add to its holdings.

In 1844, Monfalcon had an elaborate report on his achievements published, in which he exalted the joys of his new profession. "No one is less subject to ambition than [a librarian]," he wrote, "and more completely insulated from the passions and deceptions of politics. He lives in intimate commerce with his books, friends of his choosing, which always treat him the same, and never abandon him. All is noise and movement outside, but around him reigns a profound silence ... Many positions have greater prestige, but there are few as desirable." (34) Instead of writing about current events, Monfalcon turned his attention to the past; his Histoire de la ville de Lyon appeared in 1847. Its final chapters summarized the dramatic events of the early 1830s, but he felt confident enough to write that "the clashes between the different classes of citizens" were not part of "the real history of cities," which was instead found in "the attentive study of the progress of civilization, manifested by the development of public works and commerce, by the improvement of welfare systems, by the movement of literature, science, and the arts, by the amelioration of the material and moral condition of the population." As for himself, the fifty-five-year-old author announced that "my literary career is over, but I still have something to do: love those who love me, pay respect to my native territory until my dying day, and keep the few remaining days I have filled, so that I will deserve a good death." (35) In imagination, at least, Monfalcon saw himself pursuing a life of private routines in the context of a stable social world; the dramatic upheavals of the early 1830s, he insinuated, belonged to the past as much as the forgotten conflicts between the archbishops and burghers in the fourteenth century.

Monfalcon was not destined to live out his days in happy solitude among his books, however. Promoted to the directorship of the city's principal library in 1847, he almost immediately found himself confronted with a social upheaval even more serious than the one he had faced in the early 1830s. This time, the revolutionary tide had swept the national government along with it, and Monfalcon, as we have seen, found himself swearing fealty to the democratic republic. The thought that the political upheaval might cost him a position that meant so much to him was painful; so was the fear of what uncultured members of the newly enfranchised lower classes might do to the institution he loved. In a chronicle of the 1848 revolution that he published a year later, Monfalcon recorded how the library's main reading room had been converted into a political club in March 1848. "The peaceful asylum of meditation was taken away from its studious public; its marble tables covered with bottles, the floor tiles stained with wine," he complained. (36) The noisy club meetings that bothered him so much soon came to an end, but putting his orderly bourgeois world back together was a more difficult task. The new government did in fact keep him at his post, but other pressing needs forced a drastic reduction in the library budget. "I am not so unreasonable as to expect all of our customary allocation," Monfalcon assured the new mayor. "The circumstances are exceptional and we find ourselves in a situation of force majeure...." (37)

More was at stake for Monfalcon in 1848 than his job or even his beloved books, however. In his pleading letter of March 1848, he tried to downplay the significance of his commitment to the July Monarchy in the early 1830s, but Monfalcon had been deeply attached to its institutions, which he had seen as models of rationality and safeguards of social order. In his autobiography, written in 1853, he had still not recovered from the shock of discovering that "this representative monarchy, based on parliamentary government, my religion for thirty years, was an illusion!" (38) Drafting a letter to a "Citizen Mayor" and announcing his conversion to republicanism were acts that could hardly have come easily to him. Monfalcon had withdrawn from polemical journalism in favor of erudition after the April 1834 uprising, but the new circumstances compelled him to emerge from his studious isolation and re-enter the fray. He described the two volumes of Annales de la ville de Lyon, ou, Histoire de notre temps that he compiled in 1849 and 1850 as a continuation of the municipal history he had published in 1847, but they were also an impassioned defense of "these eternal truths without which there is no possible society or government." Although he pretended to be impartial, he could not resist proclaiming that "the historian of the future will hardly believe that a great nation suffered the opprobrium of being governed by the men we have seen taking power," a reference to the members of the Provisional Government of the first half of the year. (39) By the time he came to write the introduction for the second volume of this series, published in January 1850, Monfalcon could conclude that the most immediate danger of radical revolution was past, but even so, he wrote, "one lives from day to day, without any confidence in the future." (40) In addition to the chronicle of events in the Annales, Monfalcon made propaganda against the revolution in another publication, the Annuaire du Departement du Rhone, which he edited anonymously in 1849 and 1850. (41) Monfalcon thus made himself a leading spokesman for Lyon's version of the Party of Order, the coalition of those who, to quote his own words, supported "the respect of acquired rights, of the law, of the family, of property, of religion" and who took for their motto "Public Order and Liberty!" (42)

Even as he engaged himself publicly in defense of conservative values, Monfalcon continued to worry privately about his own future. In a letter to the prefect protesting changes in the arrangements concerning his position as official doctor at the Perrache prison, Monfalcon expressed his fears. The prison job paid very little in comparison with his position at the library, but "in the times in which we live, no one can be sure of his position for more than twenty-four hours; it is widely believed that the position of city librarian carries a salary of eight or ten thousand francs, and everyone thinks he could be a librarian." Monfalcon was surprised that the radicals hadn't insisted on his ouster, since the most militant group among them, the so-called Voraces, "hold me, with good reason, in profound execration." As a result, he had decided to hang on to the prison job, so that he would have something to fall back on "if a highhanded act of la Sociale [the republican government] overturned the municipal administration" and forced him to return to the practice of medicine. (43) Monfalcon's ideological opposition to the Second Republic was thus overlaid with concerns about his personal position and the fate of the life plan he had constructed around his position as librarian. In addition to his concerns about public affairs and his career, Monfalcon was overwhelmed during these years by private sorrows. The death of his sickly son Fleuri in March 1850 was not unexpected, and Monfalcon's autobiography makes no mention of the death of his half-brother, also named Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, which occurred in December 1850, but the loss in December 1851 of his beloved daughter Delie plunged him into deep depression: "it seemed to me for a long time afterward that I was living a horrible nightmare." (44) His father died four months later. (45) To add to his woes, Monfalcon became embroiled in an acrimonious lawsuit with the publisher of his history of Lyon, an affair that would continue to dog him into the 1860s. (46)

Despite all this, Monfalcon did manage to keep his post at the library, but the twists of politics brought him under attack from an unexpected direction. In December 1851, Louis Napoleon staged his coup d'etat, overthrowing the conservative republic of the parti de l'ordre. Not only did Monfalcon lose the editorship of the Annuaire de Lyon that he had created three years earlier, but the distinctly pro-Orleanist summary of the city's recent history that he had included in his editions of it was replaced by one claiming that the Revolution of 1830 had brought to power "that class of men for which the Emperor Napoleon had so much aversion: lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, etc., all men who sought to mask their mediocrity behind honors." (47) Monfalcon, the physician and indefatigable pursuer of prize medals and other distinctions, could hardly have avoided applying the reference to himself.

Monfalcon eventually succeeded in insinuating himself into the good graces of the Second Empire, but in the first years after the coup of December 2, 1851, his situation seemed quite gloomy. He had contributed to the defeat of the revolution, but this brought him not recognition but instead public insults from supporters of the new Napoleonic regime--insults published, moreover, in a publication he had himself directed during the crisis. It was under these conditions that Monfalcon turned to a completely different kind of writing. In 1853, he completed his Souvenirs d'un bibliothecaire, a retrospective account of his life. Although the work was not meant for public sale--Monfalcon had facsimile copies made from his manuscript, rather than allowing it to be printed--he certainly intended it to be preserved. In the privacy of what he called his "long monologue," Monfalcon maintained that the true aim of all his efforts had been to reach a modest state of personal stability. He claimed that he had in fact achieved this: "From the time I began to take stock of my own actions, I have not deviated for a single minute from my line of conduct: to obtain through my work a small sufficiency and the best reputation possible, that was my goal." The two revolutionary periods he had lived through had forced him to step into the public arena, but these episodes had not been expressions of his true self. "If I have been a political man during several difficult years, it was because there was honor and danger in being so." (48) Even though Monfalcon insisted that he had lived the life he had aspired to, the tone of his memoirs was anything but positive. Its pages recorded his estrangement from his parents, because of his ascent into the bourgeoisie, as well as the deaths of his first wife and two of the three children from his second marriage. "Stripped by experience of my numerous illusions," he concluded, "I cling all the more strongly to these three great truths: work, prayer, and God." (49)

When he completed his memoirs in 1853, Monfalcon was sure that he had reached "the end of a long and busy career," and that he would neither be embarking on new life-defining projects nor be at the mercy of any further public upheavals that would force him onto the public stage again. Despite the valedictory tone of his Souvenirs, Monfalcon was to live for another twenty-one years, and it was not really in his character to retreat into idleness. From his privileged position in the city library, he continued his researches on the history of Lyon, and he soon conceived the idea of redoing the book he had published on the subject in 1847, but on a grander scale. The example of the Histoire generale de la ville de Paris, sponsored by Napoleon III's prefect Baron G. E. Haussmann, gave him the inspiration he needed: he would transform his modest two-volume work into an Histoire monumentale de la Ville de Lyon, an illustrated multi-volume publication in an oversized format that would glorify both his native city and its author. By the end of the 1850s, he had won the support of the powerful Senator-Prefect Claude-Marius Vaisse, Haussmann's local equivalent. Like Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, the Histoire monumentale became an obsession with Monfalcon. The publication's length and cost kept growing, leading to some strained correspondence with its printers, the Didot firm in Paris, but Monfalcon forged ahead, and the nine volumes finally appeared between 1866 and 1869. (50)

The publication of his Histoire monumentale was by no means the end of the affair, however. Monfalcon had been determined that the book should not be seen as a vulgar commercial venture. Throughout the 1860s, he had lobbied the local authorities to give it a special status by buying the entire edition. As he wrote later, "In my thinking, this monumental book was not to be given over to booksellers, whether in Lyon, in Paris, or anywhere else ..." Instead, his scheme was for the city to purchase the volumes, "so that this edition would become a civic recompense," to be given to French and European dignitaries in the name of the city as a way of promoting Lyon's prestige. (51) To make this possible, Monfalcon had paid the staggering cost of publication out of his own pocket, leaving him deeply in debt. Despite the death in 1864 of his protector Vaisse, the local government had committed itself to reimburse him; to celebrate the completion of the project in 1869, the euphoric author had even used his own funds to publish an additional volume of indexes, which he donated to the city. (52)

By sheer willpower, the now septuagenarian Monfalcon had seen his project to completion, but he had reckoned without the unpredictability of his country's history. While the imposing volumes of the Histoire monumentale rested in their crates in Lyon's town hall, the imposing edifice of the Second Empire suddenly came crashing down. Monfalcon had anticipated some kind of disaster in the gloomy private notes on local history that he had been compiling since 1865, as a continuation of the printed text of his Histoire monumentale, which terminated with the prefect Vaisse's death in 1864. "Oh France, Oh City of Lyon that I love so much, why do I feel pain in my heart, why does my pen tremble between my fingers, do I sense a revelation of God's anger?" he wrote in early 1869, denouncing the Emperor's incoherent liberalization measures and the "immense horde of passionate and stupid socialists" who had come to dominate city politics. (53) Monfalcon's handwriting had deteriorated noticeably by this time, and his words are often hard to read, but their tenor is clear. An undated draft, probably from 1870, titled "Mes adieux," and included in a volume that Monfalcon himself labelled "Materiaux 1869 et annees suiv. 1870!!! Finis Fr[anciae].," is a jumble of short phrases, presumably notes for a farewell letter resigning his job: "It is really for the last time--the munic[ipal] council, elected--God help with the stupidity of the era univ[ersal] suffrage, without guarantees, without cap[acities]--hobbyhorse of the era--a long and well-filled career. Enlightenment, abilities and devotion it is the end--your days and those of your historian are numbered." (54) A letter from November 1870 saw him lamenting, "I may well have been reduced to a state on the verge of poverty ...," and a note written in February 1871 refers to "the horrible ruin of France, and the immense misfortunes that have resulted from it."

Monfalcon complained that the new republican authorities had ousted him from his job, making it impossible for him to continue his compilation of historical data, and concluded, "Poor France! what a horrible cataclysm! and my beloved city of Lyon on the eve of an atrocious siege! My heart is broken." (55) As in 1848, Monfalcon discovered that his private fate was intimately linked to that of the regime whose representatives had appointed him. In fact, the new government did not actually dismiss him, and Lyon escaped the agonies of a siege by the Prussians, but the project in which he had invested so much of his life fell victim to events. Instead of being bestowed on distinguished recipients as a prestigious gift in the city's name, the volumes were ignominiously dumped on the market for whatever pittance they might bring. In 1873, he wrote, "the revolution disrupted everything and my monumental history, necessarily abandoned, went to waste ..." (56)

By this time, Monfalcon had passed the age of eighty and may well have been partially demented. A report on the condition of the library drawn up after his death in 1874 claimed that in his later years, "confusing his office with a shooting gallery, he took target practice in it, as one can see from the damage his bullets inflicted on the busts, bindings, and woodwork, whereas damage to the mosaics in the main room is due to his hobby of flourishing a Cossack lance, which was found in his office." (57) He had still been coherent enough, however, to compile an elaborate list of his major life accomplishments in January 1874, and he was still writing letters about book purchases for the library until 28 August 1874, less than four months before his death. (58) However incompetent his administration of the library may have become, he was still alert enough to realize what the national defeat of 1870 and the creation of a new republican government had done to his personal projects. The "immense history of Lyon on which I worked for thirty-five years" (59) had foundered in the general debacle of the last of the authoritarian, elitist regimes to which this spokesman for and exemplar of the French bourgeoisie had dedicated himself. He died in December 1874; fortunately, he did not have to read the critique of his "bizarre and petty" funeral composed by one of his local critics. (60)

The saga of Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon's difficulties during the crises of the early 1830s, the Second Republic, and the years following the fall of the Second Empire is the story of a rather self-centered individual who could not separate public from private concerns--which is to say that it is a story whose significance goes well beyond the fate of its obscure protagonist. Through the lens of Monfalcon's experiences, we can see that these crises were anything but passing episodes in the lives of the members of the French bourgeoisie. From our twenty-first century perspective, the revolutionary crises of the nineteenth century--1830, 1848, 1870-1--may seem like pale imitations of the great convulsion of the 1790s or the ordeals of the two world wars. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that none of the nineteenth-century crises resulted in a real reshaping of the French social order; textbooks confidently describe the entire period as an era of bourgeois domination. Nineteenth-century France, it is agreed, was a country where political agitation coexisted with social stability. At the time, however, it had not looked that way to Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, and his shock and fear had no doubt been shared by thousands of others like him.

For the republicans and working-class militants on the other side of the barricades, sudden upheavals such as the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870-71 might have been moments of exaltation, the fulfillment of years of expectation, even opportunities, as Jill Harsin has recently suggested, to prove one's manhood. (61) Monfalcon himself had some inkling of this: in one of his account of the Lyon silkweavers' revolts, he had written, "There is, I know, something about a struggle with power that makes a man feel bigger and makes his heart beat with more energy." (62) For people such as Monfalcon, however, these were moments when the whole meaning of their public and private lives was cast into doubt. Social and political institutions that had seemed to embody the very possibility of civilized existence suddenly crumbled.

The case of Monfalcon brings home with particular clarity the threat that these crises posed to members of the bourgeoisie who saw the distinctive virtue of their class as being its capacity for planning individual lives as coherent, long-term projects. In his writings, Monfalcon often saw the worst flaw of the working classes as being their incapacity to do more than live from day to day, their inability to make sacrifices in the present in order to reap rewards in the future. By contrast, as we have seen, he described himself, and, by implication, his social class, as people who deliberately shaped the courses of their lives. Monfalcon had spent more than a decade obtaining his medical training, and another decade executing the elaborate program for the building of a career that he had outlined in his 1818 brochure, only to have his efforts suddenly thrown into disorder by the Revolution of 1830. As a mature man, he had bent all his efforts toward obtaining the librarian's position that he imagined would allow him to devote the last part of his life to erudition and the joys of bibliophilia; the Revolution of 1848 threatened both his career and the tranquility of the library. The last two decades of his life were shaped above all by the enormous, if quixotic, effort to immortalize himself and his city through his Histoire monumentale; the disasters following the Prussian victory at Sedan torpedoed his project. To Monfalcon, the upheavals he experienced challenged the very possibility of living a meaningful life.

In the heyday of Marxist-inspired French social history, a generation ago, nineteenth-century French social history was often read as the prologue to a still-expected culmination in which the proletariat would finally seize power. With the dissolution of the Marxist paradigm, another reading of that history has emerged, one in which the hegemony of the bourgeoisie has come to seem ineluctable and the challenges to it at the time doomed to failure. The personal experiences that Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon recorded, in his letters, his chronicles, and his autobiography, remind us that this interpretation, like the earlier Marxist paradigm, is an artifact of interpretation, and one far removed from the experience of those who lived this history. This is not the lesson the didactically minded Monfalcon hoped to teach his readers, but it is one well worth bearing in mind.

ENDNOTES

1. Monfalcon to "Citoyen Maire," 13 Mar. 1848, in Bibliotheque Municipale de Lyon (hereafter BML), Ms. Fonds Coste 1129.

2. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1964), 293.

3. Adeline Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815 (Paris, 1987).

4. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, v. 3, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 270-3, 429-34.

5. Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class (Princeton, N.J., 1981).

6. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary 1750-1850 (Cambrdige, Mass., 2003).

7. Courrier de Lyon, 30 Oct. 1833.

8. Notarial documents show that in 1849, Monfalcon's father, Vivantiol Monfalcon, owned two buildings in Lyon, worth at least 25,000 francs. After his father's death in 1853, Monfalcon sold one of these properties for 30,000 francs. Archives Departementales du Rhone (ADR), section ancien, 3E 13521, no. 430, and 3E 13529, no. 140.

9. Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (New York, 1999). Monfalcon is listed among the members of the Societe de medicine de Lyon in Alphonse Dupasquier, Compte-rendu des travaux de la Societe de Medicine de Lyon, depuis le 11 aout 1830 jusqu'au 1er janvier 1833 (Lyon, 1833), 172.

10. Stephane Gerson, Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 58.

11. Pierre-Louis Roederer, "A qui appartiennent le droit de cite et le titre de citoyen," in A. M. Roederer, ed., Oeuvres du comte P. L. Roederer, 8 vs. (Paris, 1857), 95-102. Roederer's article was written in the context of debates over the definition of the electorate in the Directorial constitution of 1795; he was responding to polemicists who argued that voting rights should be limited strictly to landowners.

12. One recent scholar ranks Monfalcon among the three or four most important French writers on public-health questions during the 1830s and 1840s. Ann F. LaBerge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement (Cambridge, 1992), 24n.

13. In addition to the account in his autobiography, Souvenirs d'un bibliothecaire, ou, Une vie d'homme de lettres en province (Lyon, 1853), Monfalcon's various activities are summarized in "Etat des services de Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, bibliothecaire en chef de la Ville de Lyon," in Archives municipales de Lyon, (AML) 177 WP 1. There are records of his various medical appointments in the Archives hospitalieres de Lyon, Reg. 23, Reg. 43, and Reg. K, "Registre des appointements 1830-1835," and documents about his participation in the Conseil de salubrite in ADR, 5 M 7. I have not been able to find a record of his birth, which occurred just when record-keeping was shifting from parish baptism registers to the new etat civil in 1792, but his death certificate is in AML, Etat civil, microfilm 920 (5 Dec. 1874).

14. Monfalcon, Souvenirs d'un bibliothecaire, 5, 23.

15. Monfalcon, Souvenirs d'un bibliothecaire, 5-6, 8-21, 25-9.

16. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Quelques reflexions sur les rapports des medecins avec la so-ciete; par J. B. Monfalcon, Docteur en medecine de la faculte de Paris, l'un des collaborateurs du Dictionnaire des sciences medicales et de la Biographie medicale, l'un des redacteurs du Journal complementaire du Dictionnaire ancien chirurgien de l'Hotel-Dieu de Lyon, Membre correspondant de plusieurs societes de medicine, etc. (Paris, 1818), 6-7, 8-12.

17. Monfalcon, Quelques reflexions, 12-3.

18. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 38-43, 67-8.

19. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Histoire des marais, et des maladies causees par les emanations des eaux stagnantes (Paris, 1824).

20. Monfalcon to Revue encyclopedique, 8 Mar. 1827, in Bibliotheque Municipal de Lyon (BML), Ms. Charavay 613. On the Precuseur, see Jeremy D. Popkin, Press, Revolution and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835 (University Park, Pa., 2002), 82-95.

21. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 92.

22. Dupasquier, Compte-rendu, 131, 133.

23. Monfalcon to prefect, 25 July 1831, in ADR 1 Y 155. The terms 'movement' and 'resistance' designated the more progressive and conservative factions among the Orleanists who had come to power in 1830.

24. Monfalcon's hopes of replacing Jerome Morin, the local hero of the 1830 events, had been definitively quashed on 21 July 1831, when the paper's council had named another man as editor. Archives nationales (Paris), F 18 495 (1), d. Precurseur.

25. [Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon], "Maladies des Tisserands," in Ph. Patissier, Traite des Maladies des Artisans, et de celles qui resultent des diverses professions ... (Paris, 1822), 384-401; Monfalcon drew on this account repeatedly in later publications describing Lyon's working class.

26. Le Temps, Dec. 2, 1831 (letter from Lyon, 29 Nov.) and Dec. 4, 1831 (letter from Lyon, 1 Dec. 1831). Although these dispatches were printed anonymously, sections of the appear in Monfalcon's later works, and there is no doubt that he was their author.

27. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 115.

28. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 141-4

29. Le Temps, 13 April 1834 (letter from Lyon, 9 April, 8 pm); 16 April 1834 (letter from Lyon, 10 April, 9 am); 18 April 1834 (letter from Lyon, 14 April 1834). These letters are unsigned, but the paper indicated that they were by the same correspondent as its news bulletins in November 1831, i.e., Monfalcon.

30. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 186, 195-7.

31. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Histoire des insurrections de Lyon, en 1831 et 1834, d'apres des documents authentiques; precede d'un essai sur les ouvriers en soie et sur l'organisation de la fabrique (Lyon, 1834); Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Code moral des ouvriers, ou Traite des devoirs et des droits des classes laborieuses (Paris and Lyon, 1836).

32. J.-F. Terme and J.-B. Monfalcon, Histoire des enfants trouves, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1840); J.-B. Monfalcon and A.-P.-I. Poliniere, Traite de la salubrite dans les grandes villes, suivi de l'Hygiene de Lyon (Paris, 1846).

33. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 233.

34. [Monfalcon}, Rapport sur les livres et estampes des bibliotheques du palais des Arts, presente a M. Terme (Lyon, 1844), xl-xli, copy in ADR 4 T 91.

35. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Histoire de la ville de Lyon, 2 vs. (Lyon, 1847), 2:1201, 1279.

36. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Annales de la ville de Lyon, ou, Histoire de notre temps, 2 vs. (Lyon, 1849 and 1850), 47.

37. Monfalcon to mayor, 8 Jan. 1849, in BML, Ms. 5751.

38. Monfalcon, Souvenirs d'un bibliothecaire, 333.

39. Monfalcon, Annales de la ville de Lyon, 1:ii.

40. Monfalcon, Annales de la ville de Lyon, 2:xi.

41. Annuaire de Lyon, 1849 and 1850 (Lyon, 1849, 1850).

42. Monfalcon, Annales de la ville de Lyon, 2:ix.

43. Monfalcon to prefect of Rhone, 9 Mar. 1850, in BML, Ms. Charavay 613.

44. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 368, 387. His younger half-brother Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, a "negociant," left a modest estate of 9,818 francs, of which Monfalcon inherited three-quarters. In all of Monfalcon's voluminous papers, there is no mention of this relationship. ADR (Section Ancien), 3E 13524, no. 24, and no. 62.

45. The father's death is not mentioned in Monfalcon's Souvenirs. The date, 11 April 1852, is mentioned in a notarial document concerning the sale of property Monfalcon had inherited, in ADR (Section Ancien), 3E 13529, no. 131 (12 Mar. 1853).

46. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 376-7, 384, and letter to "Monsieur le secretaire general" [of the Lyon municipal council], 12 Jan. 1867, in AML, 81 WP 4.

47. Annuaire du departement du Rhone ... pour 1852 (Lyon, 1852), 61.

48. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 413.

49. Monfalcon, Souvenirs, 415.

50. Letters from Ambroise-Firmin Didot to Monfalcon, 19 Oct. 1861 and 14 June 1863, in BML, Ms. 2017.

51. Monfalcon to "Monsieur le secretaire general," 3 Sept. 1873, in AML, 177 WP 1.

52. Monfalcon to "Monsieur le Senateur Prefet," 22 Mar. 1869, in BML, Ms. Fonds Coste 1129.

53. BML, Ms. 1795, t. IV, pt. 2, "Annales de la ville de Lyon. Administration de M. le Senateur-Prefet Henri Chevreau 12 septembre 1864-1 janvier 1870," 215 (Jan. 1869), 225 (Mar. 1869).

54. "Mes adieux. C'est bien pour la derniere fois--le conseil munic, elu--Dieu veuille que avec la stupidite de l'epoque suffrage univ., sans garanties, sans cap.--Dada de l'epoq.--carriere longue et si bien remplie. Lumieres capacite et devouement c'est la fin--vos jours et ceux de votre historien sont comptes." BML Ms. 1702, "Annales de la ville de Lyon Suite de l'Histoire monum. Materiaux 1869 et annees suiv. 1870!!! Finis Fr."

55. BML, Ms. 2464; BML, Ms. 1795, vs. V-VI, pt. 2.

56. Letter of 3 Sept. 1873, in AML, 177 WP 1.

57. Cited in Anon., "Un Medecin-Bibliothecaire: J. B. Monfalcon," a 10-page typed account of Monfalcon's life, probably compiled around 1900, in BML, Ms. 2464, "Lettres de Mr. Monfalcon Bibliothecaire de la ville de Lyon recueillies par M. Leopold Niepce Conseiller a la Court, President de la societe litteraire, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, Lyon, 1875." I have not been able to find the original of the report on the library cited in this document.

58. Documents in AML, 177 WP 1.

59. Letter of 3 Sept. 1873, in AML, 177 WP 1.

60. Leopold Niepce, notes in AML, dossier de presse "Monfalcon."

61. Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848 (New York, 2002).

62. Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon, Code moral des ouvriers, 502.

By Jeremy D. Popkin

University of Kentucky