Laboring class, dangerous class, insurgent class: The Paris building trades, 1830-1871

This dissertation examines the history of Paris' building trades workers, the largest segment of the city's workforce in the nineteenth century, for the years 1830 through 1871. It is partly framed in response to Louis Chevalier's Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes and endeavors to understand the high rates of participation by building tradesmen in Parisian insurrections and the ways in which they accommodated to the new regime of laissez-faire. The analysis of rebellions is based mainly on arrest statistics. The evidence comes from archival sources and ICPSR databases. Consideration of other aspects of the building trades history--migration, construction industry and economic trends--are a synthesis of primary and secondary sources. Building tradesmen were active in, though not necessarily predisposed toward rebellion. Contrary contemporary views may have reflected perceptions more then reality. An important ingredient in class-based images were migrant masons, who were arrested in large numbers following the June Days and the Commune. This pattern was as much a function of cultural traits and isolation in the Parisian milieu as actual participation. The building trades story affirms the central role of the artisan in rebellion and labor activity and supports the argument that the ascendancy of laissez-faire was not necessarily accompanied by disruptive technological change. The dissertation describes a nineteenth-century Parisian building industry and workforce similar to its Old Regime counterpart in terms of skills but laboring in a crucially altered legal and demographic context. By 1830, construction was characterized by the role (symbolic and real) of the hiring fair, the preponderance of marchandage--a form of labor subcontracting hated by workers (and little studied by historians)--and by the arrival of "new men": enterprising subcontractors whose egoism was a formative element in relations between building workers and bosses. This history of the Paris building trades describes the limitations of compagnonnage as a vehicle of class consciousness, the tendency of building trades leaders to analyze their context in moral as well as economic terms and the seminal role of the Revolution of 1848 in the workers' movement.