Offers a study of the urban experience of France in the nineteenth century. This work assesses the different aspects of the relations between urbanisation, structural change, politics, and the lives of ordinary men and women.

French Cities in the Nineteenth Century

Politics & Social Sciences

Merriman, John M.

Sociology

Hutchinson Educ.

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 urbanizaiton 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.

The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century

History

Americas

Oxford University Press

The Margins of Urban Life brings to life the "floating worlds of the periphery" in nineteenth-century French cities--the world of beggars, the most miserable prostitutes, ragpickers, casual labor, and unwanted people; the location of slaughterhouses, gas factories, tanneries, and, increasingly, even executions. The men and women of the suburbs and faubourgs were long identified by urban elites and government officials with the turbulent "dangerous classes" who might one day fall upon the wealthy quarters of the center. Merriman analyzes and evokes the social, class, neighborhood, cultural, and political solidarities--the shared sense of not belonging--that made the marginal people in peripheral places emerge as contenders for political power. His investigation explores the world of the Catalan agricultural laborers, the textile workers of the "high town" of Reims, the bitter rivalry between Catholic and Protestant workers in the faubourge of Nimes, the haven for under- and unemployed proletarians in Ingouville, above Le Havre, and France's strange frontier town, Napoléon-Vendée.

The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851

Europe

dust jacket is blue and white with a street scene on the bottom half

The agony of the Republic: The repression of the left in revolutionary France, 1848-1851

Yale University Press

Distinguished historian John Merriman maintains that the Age of Modern Terror began in Paris on February 12, 1894, when anarchist Emile Henry set off a bomb in the Café Terminus, killing one and wounding twenty French citizens. The true story of the circumstances that led a young radical to commit a cold-blooded act of violence against innocent civilians makes for riveting reading, shedding new light on the terrorist mindset and on the subsequent worldwide rise of anarchism by deed. Merriman’s fascinating study of modern history’s first terrorists, emboldened by the invention of dynamite, reveals much about the terror of today.

The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror

Europe 1789 to 1914 Volume 1: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire

Winter, J.M.

Thomson

Europe 1789 to 1914 : Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire: Volume 5: Talleyrand to Zollverein; Index

Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (English and Japanese Edition)

McClain, James L.

NCROL

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Books by Merriman, John M.