ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the economic and political changes that transformed the bourgeois elites in two industrializing provincial towns, Reims and Saint-Etienne. The political dissatisfaction of wealthy industrialists came to dominate bourgeois political life during the last years of the empire, and played an important part in rallying provincial bourgeois support for the Third Republic in 1870–1871. At Saint-Etienne, the introduction of modern methods of production first in the coal industry and later in the steel industry also created a prolonged period of economic and political crisis. The liberal-republicans easily defeated the conservatives in the municipal elections of 1871 and Warnier, spokesman for the new industrial interests, was soon elected to the National Assembly. Republican industrialists at Saint-Etienne encouraged the radical demands of the city's artisan weavers against their employers; the republican elite were also willing to provoke working-class agitation both among the town's artisan weavers and among proletarian miners against the town's traditional conservative leadership.