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Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune.
Roger V. Gould. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 261 pp. $40.95, cloth; $15.95, paper.
Ever since Marx depicted the French insurgency of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 as the incubator of proletarian revolution, these two events have occupied a center stage in Western ideology and social science. Those of a Marxian persuasion have spotlighted them as a paradigmatic case of the class formation narrative, by which the working class has matured into a self-conscious and historically formidable collectivity. Those hostile to class analysis have similarly used them to prove the irrelevance of the working class and class dynamics to history. In one of the most important books on collective action in the last decade, Roger V. Gould synthesizes the resource mobilization perspective on social movements, with its strong class overtones, and sociology's culturalist turn, with its emphasis on identity and contingency, into a theoretically original and impressively researched account of Paris in 1848 and 1871. His most fundamental claim is that the role of social class is historically contingent. Contrary to the class formation narrative that treats the growth of the working class as a unidirectional process of increasing importance, Gould argues that while class was the social basis of the events in 1848, the Paris Commune had little to do with class. It was, instead,...