Local Life in Working-Class Paris at the end of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article questions the emphasis that many historians have placed on community and solidarity in nineteenth-century working-class neighborhoods, and the associated idea that these values were under-mined by improved housing, social welfare systems, urban transit, and growing links with the outside world. Taking late nineteenth-century Paris as a case study, it shows that working-class neighborhoods always contained strong internal tensions and that forced proximity did not necessarily create solidarity. Far from being communitarian in outlook, people had a strong sense of private life and of boundaries. Poverty and unstable employment made residential and daily mobility so high, well before mass transit arrived, that attachment to a single neighborhood was impossible. Neighborhood solidarities did exist, but they were only one small aspect of urban life.