Controlling Paris: Armed Forces and Counter-Revolution, 1789–1848 by Jonathan M. House (review)

This thought-provoking study engages with a hidden dimension of the great Parisian revolutionary upheavals of the first half of the nineteenth century—the extent to which insurgent successes and failures were shaped by the fluctuating strength of their opponents, the official forces of order. Paris was a remarkable testing-ground for the efficacy of popular insurgency during this era, having both the memory of the revolutionary republicanism of the 1790s and a rapidly growing population of discontented workers on which to draw and a backdrop of various political elites stirring unrest and provoking uprisings. Widespread possession (or at least availability) of firearms allowed insurrectionaries to stand up to government forces in the street-level tactical combat of revolt. With barricades in place to slow down the movement of troops and to impede the use of artillery, soldiers had little more than their discipline to distinguish them from their adversaries.

These insurrections have attracted attention from both historians and social scientists for many years. House is careful to engage with, for example, Tilly and Traugott, both of whom have had a great deal to say about the “repertoires” of action undertaken by insurgents.¹ However, as this book clearly demonstrates, military authorities were also aware of those repertoires, and the quality of their response to them could be decisive.

In July 1830, a weak garrison was first distributed piecemeal across an increasingly enraged city but later concentrated into columns for a second phase of fighting. This strategy was sound; it succeeded in cutting paths through the tangle of barricades. But the limited number of troops involved, and shortages of ammunition and food, led to the columns being surrounded and rendered helpless, even though they had managed to inflict hundreds of casualties on the insurgents. Eighteen years later—despite the instability of the new Second Republic, daily political interference, and serious misgivings about troop morale and reliability—military authorities used much larger forces to crush the “June Days” and end the prospect of radical insurrection for a generation.

In the end, discipline, loyalty, and weight of numbers are the factors that House finds to have been decisive in successful military resistance to insurrection, undergirded by the quality, and unity, of the officers, their staff, and the politicians to whom they reported. Although this conclusion might seem to be disappointingly conventional, House solidly supports it with an impressive archival research base, allowing almost minute-by-minute reconstructions of key episodes.

The Parisian revolutions of 1830 and 1848 have long fascinated scholars, who have read into them many reflections of the politics of social class and ideological mobilization. This work does not add significantly to that literature, but it does effectively demonstrate that revolutionary situations are, above all, confrontations of force, and that in such situations, the circumstances and motivations of both sides need to be taken into account in explaining their outcomes.