A broad historical sweep of Parisian revolutions and bridges
The contrast between a rigid French political and social system and its rapidly changing economy created periodic revolutionary explosions in France’s most industrialised city, Paris.
Paris is the spiritual and material home of nearly every variation of socialist, communist, anarchist, cooperative, feminist, trade unionist, human rights and environmentalist thought. If Left thought and action didn’t originate in Paris it was certainly influenced by it.
This website, which is a work in progress, hopes to highlight the people who have ‘made a difference’ in France and internationally on and for the Left, who they were and a guide to where they lived, loved, organised and agitated. It also tries to explain the politics and events they lived through.
The contrast between a rigid French political and social system and its rapidly changing economy created periodic revolutionary explosions in France’s most industrialised city, Paris.
Absolutism created a particularly self-pitying, aggressive and nasty capitalist class and an indomitable working class, sections of which had an exceptional readiness to both resist capitalist de-humanisation and to struggle for freedom.
For over half a century a French ruling class fiction survived: France was a great power capable of shaping world events. This was shattered by the Left in 1936 and by military defeats in 1940 and 1962.
One hundred years after it expanded to the current 20 arrondissements, Paris remains consistently unequal. It is now divided into a very wealthy West and South-Central and a less wealthy North, East and South East.