The Insurgent Barricade

A case study in how techniques of protest originate and evolve this book tells how the French perfected a repertoire of revolution over three centuries, and how students, exiles, and itinerant workers helped it spread across Europe.

How the French invented the barricade, and its symbolic impact on popular protests throughout history In the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan’s native Paris, where they were instrumental in the revolts of the nineteenth century, helping to shape the political life of a continent. The barricade was always a makeshift construction (the word derives from barrique or barrel), and in working-class districts these ersatz fortifications could spread like wildfire. They doubled as a stage, from which insurgents could harangue soldiers and subvert their allegiance. Their symbolic power persisted into May 1968 and, more recently, the Occupy movements. Hazan traces the many stages in the barricade’s evolution, from the Wars of Religion through to the Paris Commune, drawing on the work of thinkers throughout the periods examined to illustrate and bring to life the violent practicalities of revolutionary uprising.

One-time lovers who share libertarian ideals find themselves on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1960s. They continue to seek a path to liberation and their letters record the repression and satisfactions they experience under different manifestations of the modern state. A beautiful, tender and inspiring collection. In all actuality, a collection of work from Fredy Perlman.

Focusing on the efforts of nine European intellectuals, including Tocqueville, Flaubert and Marx, to make sense of 1848, Jonathan Beecher casts a fresh and engaging perspective on the experience and impact of the Revolution, and on why, within two generations, a democratic revolution had twice culminated in the dictatorship of a Napoleon.

In June 1848, two irregular armies of the urban poor fought a four-day battle in the streets of Paris that decided the fate of the French Second Republic. The Parisian National Workshops and the Parisian Mobile Guard-organizations newly created at the time of the February Revolution-provided the bulk of the June combatants associated with the insurrection and repression, respectively. According to Marx's simple and compelling hypothesis, a nascent French proletariat unsuccessfully attempted to assert its political and social rights against a coalition of the bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, represented by the Parisian Mobile Guard. Through a detailed study of archival sources, Mark Traugott challenges this interpretation of these events and proposes an organizational explanation.Research has consistently shown that skilled artisans and not unskilled proletarians stood at the forefront of the revolutionary struggles of the nineteenth century. Traugott compares the social identities of the main participants on opposite sides of the conflict and sorts out the reasons for the political alignments observed. Drawing on work by Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees, Traugott demonstrates that the insurgents were not highly proletarianized workers, but rather members of the highly skilled trades predominant in the Parisian economy. Meanwhile, those who spearheaded the repression were little different in occupational status, though they tended to be significantly younger. Traugott's ""organizational hypothesis"" makes sense of the observed configuration of forces. He accounts for the age differential as a by-product of the recruitment criteria that Mobile Guard volunteers were required to meet. Finally, he explains why class position creates no more than a diffuse political predisposition that remains subject to the influence of situation-specific factors such as organizational affiliations. Armies of the Poor helps clarify our understanding of the dynamic at work in the insurrectiona

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions--from 1776 to 1848--entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied. This posed representational difficulties that went beyond questions of institutionalization and law, extending into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was, and is, a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. The Democratic Sublime offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the "people out of doors"--came to be central to the political aesthetics of democracy during the age of democratic revolutions. Jason Frank argues that popular assemblies allowed the people to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. Moreover, Frank asserts that popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation as they claimed to support the voice of the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any single representational claim. Popular assemblies continue to retain this power, in part, because they embody that which escapes representational capture: they disrupt the representational space of appearance and draw their power from the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people's will. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, the visual culture of the barricades, and the memoirs of popular insurgents, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how making the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment became a central dilemma of modern democracy, and how it remains so today.

To the Barricades moves back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends, forming an anti-archive of the revolutionary record where words are bricks hurriedly thrown up as linguistic "barricades." Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-winning On the Material and three titles in the ongoing "Barricades Project." An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012).