ABSTRACT
Strikes, protest marches and barricades, as well as machines and factories, marked the social transformation of France in the nineteenth century. The processes of industrialization and urbanization altered the spatial arrangements of both work and protest. In France, with an old artisanal tradition, the role of pre-industrial work, its effect on urban growth and development, and the relationship between urbanization and social protest assumed crucial importance. A pattern of considerable dispersion also characterized city-dwelling industrial workers. A look at the varieties of work and the types of worker that concentrated in the nineteenth-century French city can increase our understanding of the evolution of social protest. Long-term indicators of the growth of national product in the nineteenth century show only a slight French lag; the growth of national product in France remained broadly similar to that of other advanced industrial countries.
