New Practices - The Barricade

Title: New Practices - The Barricade
Description: Just as new words and ideas emerged, often crossing national boundaries, so too did pratices of opposition develop and migrate. See, for example, below on the Carbonari.

Of course, some practices were distinctly local: in Berlin and Potsdam smoking was restricted to 'smoking shops' - but in the opening days of the 1848 protests, people took to smoking in the streets, and blowing smoke into the faces of members of the armed forces, who were there to keep order.

Older traditions might also be reinvested with meaning - as in the case of barricades.

According to the French historians Mireille Huchon and Eric Hazan, the word 'barricade' made its first appearance in French in the Commentaries of Blaise de Monluc in the 1570s. On 13 May 1588, barricades were used in Paris for the first time after the King had summoned troops into the city, in violation of the city's privilege of not receiving soldiers within its walls (and these were mainly Swiss Guards, and thus foreign troops and doubly offensive!). So extensively were the streets blocked that the King was forced to leave the city and the troops ignominiously withdrew. Mark Traugott has, however, shown that there is evidence of earlier use, and a complex relationship between barricades and the more common (and earlier) practice of stretching metal chains across streets to prevent the passage of horses and carriages. That relationship is complicated because a chain is not a barricade, and the practices were not described using the same terminology. Nonetheless, the chain came to be used in a way that prefigures the barricade - appearing when citizens attempted to control movement in the city, especially in relation to royal attempts to impose authority - so much so that the city was deprived of its chains in the 1380s, and they returned in a bid to win popular support only after 1415.

The barricade did not contribute much to the French Revolution, since there was little fighting in the streets of the city, at least until the fall of Robespierre and the rise of protest from the poorer areas about the the price of provisions (and the abandonment of the principles of the Revolution). In May 1795, the faubourgs of St Antoine and Marceau rose in revolt and invaded the National Convention on 20 May/4 prairial. When the government regained control, they sent troops to suppress the insurgents in St Antoine. As government troops entered the faubourg, the people set up barricades to prevent their retreat, and the military responded by forcing their way through and seizing the cannons of the insurgents - thirty six of whom were arrested and condemned to death.

The barricade did not reappear in Paris until November 1827, when the rue St Denis was blocked, unblocked, and re-blocked over two days, in protest at a series of decrees strengthening the increasingly unpopular government and the King. Although short-lived, the events served as a model for citizen action against the crown in the Revolution of 1830.

Thereafter, their use spreads: Brussels, Liege, Ghent in 1830; Grenoble, and Paris, 1832; Lyonand Paris 1834; Paris in 1839; Toulouse, Auch, Lot Clermont-Ferrand in 1841; Geneva 1843 and 1846; Berlin, Ulm, Stuttgart 1847; and then Palermo, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Venice, Milan, Madrid, Iasi (Moldova), Ghent, Freiburg, Mannheim, Limoges, Rouen, Elbeuf, Lyon, Trier, Naples, Vienna, Prague, Marseille, etc. in 1848.

Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press, 2010)

Mireille Huchon, 'Petit Historie du mot barricade' in Alain Corbin, Jean-Marie Mayeur (dir.), La barricade. (Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1997)

Eric Hazan, A Hidtory of the Barricade (Paris, 20143; London, 2015).

Item sets: A European Perspective on protest and contention 1815-1850

BARRICADES PROJECT

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New Practices - The Barricade