The construction and defense of barricades, along with the practical and symbolic functions they perform in violent confrontations, have fascinated me since I first undertook the study of French revolutionary history. Part of the barricade’s allure is its close association with moments of dramatic upheaval and accelerated social change. Equally intriguing to me has been the fact that barricades in their purest form are artifacts of the popular imagination, the collective and spontaneous creations of anonymous crowd members who base their actions on knowledge that has been sustained, transmitted, and applied without the benefit of formal organization or institutional hierarchy. How and why do people manage, despite formidable difficulties and tremendous risks, to re-create the complex sequence of behaviors that typify even the humblest barricade event? And how did these behaviors, repeated at irregular intervals over hundreds of years, end up taking on a cultural meaning that had made the insurgent barricade all but synonymous with the European revolutionary tradition by the mid nineteenth century?
Though this study takes up many aspects of the “barricade phenomenon,” there are three that remain a consistent focus in the pages that follow. The first has to do with continuities in barricade use. Not only has the concept of the barricade survived intact over several centuries (despite remarkable variations in the physical makeup or method of deployment of the actual structures), but it has given rise to a widely recognized “routine of collective action” that even inexperienced and otherwise unrelated insurgents can reproduce on a moment’s notice. Understanding the recurrent quality of the barricade will be a constant preoccupation in this work, beginning with the early chapters. Demonstrating the remarkable parallels among events separated by vast distances or long lapses of time is an important advantage of the comparative perspective and comprehensive frame of reference evident in chapters 4 through 6.
Precisely the opposite concern constitutes a second theme of this inquiry: the equally significant discontinuities in barricade use. We begin by noting that barricades underwent a more or less continual process of adaptation and change, largely as a by-product of the opposition between insurgents and repressors that defines the insurrectionary situation. But it is also important to recognize that barricades, which developed as the unique and exclusive property of French society for the first two hundred years of their existence, eventually underwent a process of diffusion that would, in the course of the nineteenth century, make them a pan-European phenomenon. Understanding what made this transformation possible and the pattern and logic of their spread will absorb much of our attention in the middle section of this book.
A third motif, which combines the other two, asks how the function of the barricade has changed over time; and how, paradoxically, the specific shift from pragmatic tactic of insurrection to preeminent symbol of the revolutionary tradition accounts for the persistence of the practice of barricade construction throughout the modern era, when other forms of early-modern protest have disappeared. The final two chapters of the book place these developments in the context of the long-term evolution of methods of contention in the European world, for in the end, the significance of the barricade is its utility as an indicator of the changing dynamic of violent protest and revolutionary transformation.
The research style adopted in this work reflects my commitment to combining the two disciplinary perspectives that have shaped my personal outlook. Trained as a sociologist and personally inclined toward the search for patterns and regularities, I have ended up in a department of history where reliance on primary sources and the importance of context are axiomatic. My work has always been uncomfortably poised between these divergent ways of viewing the world, and while I aspire never to lose sight of either one, they are not always equally well represented or seamlessly integrated in what I write. In this book, there are certain chapters more likely to appeal to the historically oriented reader for whom the setting in which the facts are embedded is crucial; and others that will inevitably be more to the liking of social scientists for whom the attempt to generalize comes naturally. This preface seeks to direct these different but overlapping audiences toward the segments of this work that they will find most rewarding.
Organizing an investigation of this kind around a concept like the barricade may seem unorthodox, but it has its virtues. Insurrections and revolutions are not only infrequent events, but ones whose outcomes and consequences often require years or decades to reveal themselves. They tend to be unplanned—or, if not, to be organized in secrecy—and in either case are unlikely to generate extensive documentation. The study of individual instances of barricade use, especially the exceptional cases where insurgents are victorious, tends to present an incomplete or distorted view of reality. Alternatively, choosing to focus in a systematic way on a technique of insurrection in general—all instances of barricade use—takes in events both large and small, successful and unsuccessful, and deriving from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In surveying the full range and diversity of this type of civil conflict, we are able to form a broadly based image of barricade combat. And because the barricade constituted the most striking embodiment of the classic revolutionary episode and therefore elicited frequent comment by contemporary observers, it has been possible to document more than 150 events involving its use during the time period covered by my research.
A few words about the limits I have imposed upon this study are in order. Some readers may be surprised to find that some of the most important barricade events of all time get short shrift in my account. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the failed insurrections of June 1848 and May 1871 figure in these pages, but only briefly, and mainly to evoke, however summarily, the role they played in the barricade’s evolution (or vice versa). My decision to confine consideration of these major events to the necessary minimum is explained by the fact that every one of them has been subjected to extensive scrutiny by historians, to the point where there is little that I could add to what is already known beyond assessing the barricade’s part in determining the course and outcome of those events.
Other readers may have cause to regret that that period covered by this study does not extend beyond the end of the nineteenth century. The reasons for this are simple. The modern European barricade had already taken shape by that time, and venturing into the twentieth century would have required that I examine the much broader diffusion process involved in its spread to the non-European world, a much more ambitious effort, which lay beyond my practical, historical, and linguistic resources.
A further limitation of this study is that not everything that someone has called a barricade will merit our attention. Chapter 1 tackles the problem of how the term “insurgent barricade” is interpreted here and tries to provide examples, starting with the account of the Paris insurrection of 1832 that begins the book, of what has been included and excluded from that category. It also introduces the concept of the “repertoire of collective action”—the array of all protest techniques available at a given place and time—which has been a touchstone in this research. Those with little interest in or tolerance for definitional or methodological discussions might be better advised to skip or skim that chapter and proceed directly to the early-modern history of the barricade that is the focus of the two substantive chapters that follow.
Chapter 2 has ostensibly been structured around the attempt to identify the first barricades, a search that initially takes us back to the great Parisian insurrection of 1588. We are, however, ultimately forced to delve still further back in time and to acknowledge that with the barricade, as with so many similar historical phenomena, there can be no discrete, discoverable moment of origination, nor any readily specifiable inventor. What we learn, in the process of addressing these questions, is that the difference between history-as-lived and history-as-written has often been mediated by memorable events of presumed world-historical significance. This is notably the case with what has been dubbed the “First Day of the Barricades,” the incident that set in motion the downfall of the Valois dynasty in France.
Chapter 3 extends consideration of early barricades through the great Parisian insurrection of 1648 that clearly established their recurrent character. This “Second Day of the Barricades” climaxed the period of intense civil conflict known as the Fronde parlementaire, but it also proved to be a turning point in the history of French contention, for as the central state’s control over French territory began to be consolidated during the long reign of Louis XIV, the barricade went into eclipse. Together, chapters 2 and 3 delineate the contours of the early-modern barricade, the foil against which the most distinctive properties that the barricade developed during the 1800s are later contrasted. To do so, they cover ground extending from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries at breakneck speed, and readers unprepared for a raft of dense historical detail should be forewarned.
The fourth chapter is briefer and based on different types of evidence than those that precede it. It makes use of a database (included here as appendix A) to reconstruct the distribution of barricade events and to graphically represent their incidence and magnitude, year by year, from 1569 to 1900. Even a cursory glance at the accompanying charts tells us that barricade events have been concentrated into a small number of sharp peaks, corresponding to key moments in the history of European contention. This chapter also provides an initial introduction to the modern barricade, discussing the four occasions on which barricades were built during the French Revolution of 1789, incidents that historians have long ignored, when they have not denied their existence outright.
The diffusion of the barricade is the subject of the next two chapters. The first examines the important contributions of the Belgian people, who hold the honor of having been the first to build such structures outside their country of origin. Their claim to that distinction goes all the way back to 1787 and the Brabant revolution, though that rebellion’s ultimate lack of success explains why a further Belgian revolution, also the occasion for widespread barricade construction, was necessary in 1830 to definitively establish their nation’s independence. The successful adaptation of this technique in the respective struggles against the Austrian and Dutch armies naturally raises the question of why it was the Belgians who ended the French monopoly on the use of this insurrectionary technique. Chapter 5 weighs the relevance of the two countries’ close economic, political, linguistic, and cultural ties in determining this result.
Chapter 6 recounts the story of the barricade’s spread to dozens of new locations scattered across the Continent in the spring and summer of 1848. The February revolution in Paris gave the signal for these uprisings, which in most cases borrowed their political vocabulary, demands, and symbols from the French, along with the tactic of barricade construction. This chapter also looks at the threads of human agency that connect these events to one another, paying particular attention to the role of students, political exiles, and itinerant workers in determining the path followed by this process of dissemination.
The final two chapters attempt to place my research findings in some larger perspective. Chapter 7 explores the wide variety of functions that the barricade can perform in the context of a highly charged insurrectionary situation, breaking them down according to whether they are essentially pragmatic, sociological, or symbolic. Taken together, these different types of function go some way toward explaining the recurrent character of the routine of barricade construction, the question that provided the point of departure for this investigation. But though the various functions of the barricade frequently overlap and co-exist, there has also been a discernable tendency over time for their more practical uses to recede in importance in favor of the more symbolic. The concluding chapter tries to make sense of that shift by relating it to the displacement of an early-modern repertoire of collective action by its modern equivalent. This underscores the fact that the barricade is all but unique in having survived the wholesale elimination of the methods of contention in widespread use in the eighteenth century and earlier and their replacement by new ones introduced in the nineteenth century, which remain familiar to us today. Thus, the study of the barricade not only sheds light on a particular form of insurrectionary behavior that flourished in Europe over the past four centuries but also teaches us how people select, sustain, and symbolize the forms of contention through which they seek to achieve their collective aspirations.
When I first undertook this study, I had no idea of where it would lead me. The search for the origins of the barricade required that I learn about periods of French history that lay well outside my field of specialization, just as the attempt to understand the diffusion of the barricade to other European countries obliged me to acquaint myself, however superficially, with their experiences in 1848. A study of this kind relies utterly on the work of other scholars, most of whom I have never met, but whose writings, cited in the pages that follow, have been invaluable to me. And there are also those to whom I owe a more direct and personal debt of gratitude for the kind assistance they have provided. The list is really too long (and my memory really too short) to do them all justice, so I simply beg the indulgence of those that I have inadvertently left out in the following remarks.
The influence of Charles Tilly will be obvious to anyone who reads this book. His ideas—in particular the concept of the repertoire of collective action—have been so central a point of reference in this research that I often find others assuming that I was either his student or a close associate, neither of which is true. Despite the lack of such ties, I always found him to be incredibly generous in offering assistance and feedback. His death in 2008 deprived those who work in the interstices of history and the social sciences of a model and an inspiration. I very much regret that he has not lived to see this book in print, but I count myself fortunate that he was one of the then-anonymous reviewers whom my editor at the University of California Press, Niels Hooper, chose to review my manuscript.
I subsequently learned that the other anonymous reader was none other than William H. Sewell. I am not convinced that I have satisfactorily corrected the shortcomings he identified in the version of the manuscript he reviewed, but his comments were always acute and have helped me to improve my earlier draft enormously. I took them all the more seriously because I consider him the outstanding exemplar of what a social science historian can be, and his writings—not only his books but his often gem-like articles—have the amazing ability to range effortlessly (or so he makes it appear) from the specificity of thoroughly researched historical particularities to the power of well-grounded generalizations.
Within my own department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I have many valued colleagues. I think immediately of Buchanan Sharp, who first called to my attention the importance of early-modern barricades and the use of chains in Flanders and England, and who was always willing to read a chapter, regale me with an anecdote, or share his love for “the dust of the archives.” And I have long relied on Terry Burke and Mark Cioc for help with barricade events and associated documents from the parts of the world that they know best. But I would like to reserve special recognition for my fellow French historian Jonathan Beecher. Despite overlapping interests in the nineteenth century, our intellectual styles remain quite different. Perhaps for that reason, he has, in his unassuming way, taught me an enormous amount about France, about history, and about what it means to have a vocation for intellectual work. I have him to thank, not only for having brought me into the Santa Cruz History Department in the first place, but for having been so warmly and unwaveringly supportive at every stage of a project that took far longer than I had ever imagined.
For the rest, constraints on space restrict me to mere mentions of individuals who have made contributions that deserve much fuller acknowledgment. The list includes:
Rod Aya, for his always frank and incisive critiques and his insistence that I strive to clarify my sometimes lax terminology.
Keith Baker for a valuable exchange on the notion that barricades arise out of asymmetries in the distribution of power between insurgents and repressors.
Peter Bearman, who pointed out the relevance of an article by Denis Richet (1982) that led me to the key testimony of Nicolas Poulain concerning the events of 1588.
Simone Delattre for her part in organizing the 1995 conference on barricades in Paris and for her follow-up bibliographic assistance.
Ludovic Frobert for pointing me toward useful sources on nineteenth-century insurrections, including Christophe-Michel Roguet’s Insurrections et guerre des barricades dans les grandes villes (1850).
Jan Goovaerts and Sylvie Foucart, officers of the Commune of Ixelles, Belgium, for their kind assistance in locating rare sources on incidents in the 1789 Brabançon revolution.
Richard Hamilton, who has been such a faithful reader over the years and whose suggestions concerning the role of imitation in diffusion and the perspectives of nonparticipants and social control agents were especially perceptive.
Ted Margadant, who went above and beyond the call in alerting me to new barricade events, including, most recently, pointing me in the direction of Timothy Tackett’s When the King Took Flight (2003).
John Merriman, who is a fount of information about provincial French events I would never otherwise have become aware of.
Janet Polasky, who was an enormous resource on events in the Belgian provinces, particularly the elusive incidents of 1787–89; and who provided crucial leads on the few primary sources available for that period.
Art Stinchcombe, who first inspired me as a teacher and later as a thinker and problem-solver.
Sid Tarrow, who taught me an appreciation for the importance of cyclical variations in the incidence of protest and how the concepts of cycles and repertoires could complement each other in the explanation of collective action.
Bruce Thompson, whose sharp critical eye and always pertinent suggestions for further reading have been much appreciated.
The members of the Berkeley French History Workshop and, later, the Stanford French Culture Workshop for both their conviviality and critical acuity.
The staff of my university library, especially Beth Remak-Honnef, Debbie Murphy, and Alan Ritch, who were always kind enough to take an interest in my obscure questions and conscientious enough to persevere in coming up with answers. In addition, I am indebted to the entire Interlibrary Loan Department of McHenry Library, without which this research would not have been possible.
The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which provided a fellowship that supported this research at an early stage in its elaboration, as did various small grants from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
This project has been so long in the making that there are surely others who have an equal claim to my gratitude whom I have forgotten to mention. I may not always have managed to do justice to the advice I received, but my sense of indebtedness for the assistance they generously offered is genuine.
Boulder Creek, California