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  • The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris
  • Leslie Page Moch
The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Casey Harison (Newark, Delaware University Press, 2008) 331 pp. $65

Harison's task is a daunting one—to explain the history of an important and singular migrant group with a rebellious reputation in Paris, while embedding it in the history of this revolutionary city, the labor history of building workers, and this group's history of migration. The current readers of history do not incline to such topics. Indeed, Hanson notes that historians have turned to other questions in recent decades, but "this shift happened before some of the unanswered and important questions about rebellion had been adequately addressed—among these, taking into account the group arguably more involved or affected than any other: the migrant stonemasons" (16). Even Sewell, a longstanding proponent of the cultural turn in historical studies, agrees that "plenty of significant problems from within the social history research program still remained to be solved in the 1980s—or for that matter, remain to be solved today," while recognizing Traugott and Gould's excellent quantitative studies of Paris uprisings.1

Harison's answer to the central question of rebellion—why these stonemasons suffered such disproportionate repression (arrests and casualties) from the uprisings of 1830 through the Commune—draws from such well-developed material about Paris workers and rebellions as the databases that Charles Tilly compiled at the University of Michigan with Lynn Lees about the pivotal year 1848 and with David K. Jordan about the years 1830 to 1960, as well as French analyses of workers arrested in the Commune by Maitron and the Appert Report of 1875—the report submitted to the National Assembly by the French army.2 In the end, [End Page 95] Harison agrees with Alain Corbin that the masons were under suspicion because police assumed they had participated in the rebellions (201). Urban space is important in this case: Harison makes the case for the garnis (boarding houses) of central Paris, and especially the Place de Grève, as sites of police attention and repression because they were the key gathering spots for hiring fairs. A longstanding literature about crowds in Paris undergirds this argument.

The labor history of the stonemasons, the second dimension of the book, relies on the classic archival sources provided by French state archival documents. Harison makes the case for the centrality of marchandage—a pernicious form of subcontracting—for much of the suffering of stonemasons and traces the long history of the battle against this practice, which was not definitively resolved until 1911, although the practice had been outlawed decades before.

Migration history provides the third strand of this study—recognizing the evolution from travel, largely on foot, to rail travel and from seasonal to permanent settlement in Paris. By the Third Republic, Harison concludes, the stonemasons of the Creuse were settling in Paris with their wives, though he might have provided the nuance afforded by Farcy and Faure whose 2003 study demonstrates that men from the Creuse were more likely to return home than any other migrants to Paris between 1880 and 1906.3

This complex history has a central character who appears throughout the triple story of the rebellions, the labor, and the migration of the stonemasons—Martin Nadaud, who began his life as a migrant worker at age fifteen, left for Paris in 1830, and lived a life of labor and politics in Paris, and exile in England, before his retirement and return to the Creuse in 1889. Nadaud's well-known life provides a much-needed thread through Harison's multifaceted history.

Leslie Page Moch
Michigan State University

Footnotes

1. William H. Sewell, Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 53; Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (New Brunswick, 2002; orig. pub. Princeton, 1985); Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995).

2. Some of Jean Maitron's extensive research can be found in idem, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris, 1975), 2v...

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