- Workers
Revolutionaries
- Delacroix
Works
Cited
|
On July 29, 1830, a revolutionary
crowd of
700 workers - led by
print shop workers - forced their way into the Royal Printing
Workshop in Paris and used gunstocks and iron bars to damage
and beat the mechanical presses. After destroying the printing
presses, they left. The workers only wanted to disable the machines,
which they thought were their biggest threat. The workers did
not yet see that capitalism and the owners using the machines
were their true threat.
Painting by Honore Daumier, The Uprising,
1860
- Workers Dissatisfaction with Industrialization
- The printer outburst during the 1830 revolution
was not the first time workers struck out against machines, nor
would it be the last. After the revolution, outbursts occurred
among female shawl-workers, tobacco
workers, and other skilled artisans.
- In fact, "there were 89 strikes in Paris 1830-3, 30
of them in 1830"
(Magraw,
53).
Anger
at industrialization was reflected in and a main motivator of
the workers' participation in the revolution of 1830. French
workers were angered by the industrialism taking place during
the nineteenth century. They felt that their world was changing
and being overtaken by machines. Although the industrial growth
in France was not nearly as close to that of England, it did
transform the French economy, altering the orginization of workplaces
and patterns of inequality. The economic change in the mid-nineteenth
century "produced
a more cohesive and politically organized working class, [with]
a political agenda increasingly dominated by issues of economic
inequality and expressed in a language of class" (Aminzade, 4).
The
working class' political views were shaped by their economic standing. The
workers' "republican
socialist discourse of the early 1830s was . . . the creative
response of artisanal craftsmen faced with harsh new political
and economic realities" (Aminzade,
44).
- Although
factories, like that to the left did not exist throughout France,
their presence and economic consequences were felt by the French
workers at an early stage.
-
-
- The operation of a bessimer
converter in a Saint-Seurin factory. Reprinted from Turgan,
- Les grandes usines, taken
from Aminzade,
104.
The
economic realities facing the worker from the industrialization
in 1830 were:
- their liberal and undemocratic state
- the expanding market economy, in which
unapprenticed labor, ready-made products, non mechanized factories,
and prison labor all competed with the handicraft industry
-
- In Les Miserables, Saint Denis,
Book V, Hugo describes the economic realities and consequences
of revolutionary politics, during the revolution of 1832, and
the aftermath of 1830:
- "The Faubourg Saint
Antoine had still other causes of excitement, for it felt the
rebound of the commercial crises of the failures, the strikes,
and stoppages, inherent in great political disturbances. In time
of revolution, misery is at once cause and effect. The blow which
it strikes returns upon itself. "
France's
industrialization would continue throughout the nineteenth century
and be a player in other revolutions, such as the Lyonnais silk
weavers of 1832 and 1834, and the revolution of 1848.
|