John M. Merriman – författare

This imaginative study recaptures 100 years in the life of Limoges, France's first socialist city, at a time when Limoges rode high on the crest of every wave of social, political, and industrial change. The story of this single city is the story of urban transformation and political radicalism in 19th-century France, of the struggle between tradition and modernity in French society and politics that took place not only within cities but also between cities and the countryside. Here, Merriman offers vivid portraits of particular social groups, neighborhoods, and events in 19th-century Limoges to describe and analyze the impact of large-scale industrialization, the social bases of political conflict, and the eventual emergence of a powerful working class. The central characters of Merriman's study are the very ordinary denizens of this extraordinary city--its butchers, porcelain workers, laundresses, priests--through whom one sees the effects of urbanization and industrialization on their quarters, work, religion, culture, and political life. The close of the 19th century marked the end of one of France's last truly revolutionary situations, concludes Merriman, as growing centralization dampened revolutionary zeal and the 20th century ushered in a combination of industrial capitalism and a powerful state that was seemingly invulnerable to revolutionary challenges from the working class.

Unlike most historians of France, who draw a sharp contrast between cities and the countryside, John Merriman focuses on the spatial and social margins of urban life, the faubourgs, or suburbs, where rural migrants and the labouring poor of the cities congregated in growing numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the eyes of the urban elite, the women and men of the periphery resembled barbarians at the gates of civilization. The book examines the cultural and social traditions - as expressed in festivals, in songs, in strikes, and in political movements - that took root in these areas. Neighbourhood solidarities developed that were based on a collective sense of exclusion from the urban centre. Urban elites came to realize that the `disreputable' persons they had cast out to the suburbs were becoming a ring of organized worker communities, `the cord that might wring our necks one day'. To know the margins is also to know the centre, Merriman argues, for the periphery of urban life was a mirror in which the French upper classes viewed the most frightening aspects of their world.

One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary government that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in ‘Bloody Week’ – the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government’s forces. By then, the city’s boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile – a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters.  In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards – the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women – and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.