The margins of city life : explorations on the French urban frontier, 1815-1851 /

During the years from the end of the First Empire to the beginning of the Second, the faubourgs of France's principal cities underwent tremendous growth. Even before 1815 the inhabitants of Paris, N^imes, and Reims (to cite only several examples) viewed those who lived in the outskirts of their cities with apprehension: were not the faubouriens largely beggars, prostitutes, and criminals, and were not these undesirable elements largely beyond the reach of the law? By 1848, if not before, apprehension gave way to fear. France's cities were now surrounded by industrial suburbs, and the prosperous and propertied residents of the inner cities viewed the workers as menacing radicals. In a narrative extraordinarily rich in detail, Merriman shows how class tensions rose in France. He is at his very best in portraying the ways in which the lower classes exhibited their contempt for the priveleged. His account ends with the coup d'`etat of 2 December 1851, demonstrating that Louis Napoleon rallied the propertied classes by extending the police power of the state into the faubourgs (where it had never truly reached before). An exemplary work of social history. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-S. Bailey, Knox College