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CELEBRATING OUR URBAN HERITAGE
Cities and Insurrections
Eric J. Hobsbawm
Whatever else a city may be, it is at the same time a place
inhabited by a concentration of poor people and, in most cases,
the locus of political power which affects their lives.
Historically, one of the things city populations have done about
this is to demonstrate, make riots or insurrections, or
otherwise exert direct pressure on the authorities who happen to
operate within their range. It does not much matter to the
ordinary townsman that city power is sometimes only local,
whereas at other times it may also be regional, national, or
even global. However, it does affect the calculations both of
the authorities and of political movements designed to overthrow
governments, whether or not the cities are capitals (or what
amounts to the same thing, independent city-states) or the
headquarters of giant national or international corporations,
for if they are, urban riots and insurrections can obviously
have much wider implications than if the city authority is
purely local.
The subject of
this article is how the structure of cities has affected popular
movements of this sort, and conversely, what effect the fear of
such movements has had on urban structure. The first point is of
much more general significance than the second. Popular riot,
insurrection, or demonstration is an almost universal urban
phenomenon, and as we now know, it occurs even today in the
affluent megalopolis of the developed world. On the other hand
the fear of such riot is intermittent. It may be taken for
granted as a fact of urban existence, as in most pre-industrial
cities, or as the kind of unrest which periodically flares up
and subsides without producing any major effect on the structure
of power. It may be underestimated, because there have not been
any riots or insurrections for a long time, or because there are
institutional alternatives to them, such as systems of local
government by popular election. There are, after all, few
continuously riotous cities. Even Palermo, which probably holds
the European record with 12 insurrections between 1512 and 1866,
has had very long periods when its populace was relatively
quiet. On the other hand, once the authorities decide to alter
the urban structure because of political nervousness, the
results are likely to be substantial and lasting, like the
boulevards of Paris.
The
effectiveness of riot or insurrection depends on three aspects
of urban structure: how easily the poor can be mobilized, how
vulnerable the centers of authority are to them, and how easily
they may be suppressed. These are determined partly by
sociological, partly by urbanistic, partly by technological
factors, though the three cannot always be kept apart. For
instance, experience shows that among forms of urban transport,
tramways, whether in Calcutta or Barcelona, are unusually
convenient for rioters; partly because the raising of fares,
which tends to affect all the poor simultaneously, is a very
natural precipitant of trouble, partly because these large and
track-bound vehicles, when burned or overturned, can block
streets and disrupt traffic very easily. Buses do not seem to
have played anything like as important a part in riots,
underground railways appear to be entirely irrelevant to them
(except for transporting rioters) and automobiles can at best be
used as improvised road blocks or barricades, and, to judge by
modern experience in Paris, not very effective ones. Here the
difference is purely technological.
On the other
hand, universities in the center of cities are evidently more
dangerous centers of potential riot than universities on the
outskirts of towns or behind some green belt, a fact which is
well known to Latin American governments. Concentrations of the
poor are more dangerous when they occur in or near city centers,
like the 20th-century ethnic ghettos in many North American
cities, than when they occur in some relatively remote suburb,
as in 19th-century Vienna. Here the difference is urbanistic and
depends on the size of the city and the pattern of functional
specialization within it. However, a center of potential student
unrest on the outskirts of town, like Nanterre in Paris, is
nevertheless far more likely to create trouble in the central
city than the Algerian shanty towns in the same suburb, because
students are more mobile and their social universe is more
metropolitan than immigrant laborers. Here the difference is
primarily sociological.
Suppose, then,
we construct the ideal city for riot and insurrection. What will
it be like? It ought to be densely populated and not too large
in area. Essentially it should still be possible to traverse it on
foot, though greater experience of rioting in fully motorized
societies might modify this judgment. It should perhaps not be
divided by a large river, not only because bridges are easily
held by the police, but also because it is a familiar fact of
geography or social psychology that the two banks of a river
look away from each other, as anyone living in south London or
on the Paris left bank can verify.
Its poor ought
to be relatively homogenous socially or racially, though of
course we must remember that in pre-industrial cities or in the
giant areas of under-employment in the developing world today,
what at first sight looks like a very heterogeneous population
may have a considerable unity, as witness such familiar terms in
history as ‘the laboring poor’, ‘le menu peuple’, or ‘the
mob’. It ought to be centripetal, that is to say, its various
parts ought to be naturally oriented towards the central
institutions of the city, the more centralized the better. The
medieval city republic that was designed on a system of flows towards and
away from the main assembly space, which might also be the main
ritual center (cathedral), the main market, and the location of
the government, was ideally suited to insurrection for this
reason. The pattern of functional specialization and residential
segregation ought to be fairly tight. Thus the pre-industrial
pattern of suburbs, which was based on the exclusion from a
sharply defined city of various undesirables — often necessary
to city life — such as non-citizen immigrants, outcast
occupations or groups, did not greatly disrupt the cohesion of
the urban complex: Triana was entangled with Seville, as
Shoreditch was with the City of London.
On the
other hand the 19th-century pattern of suburbs, which surrounded
an urban core with middle-class residential suburbs and
industrial quarters, generally developing at opposite ends of
town from one another, affects urban cohesion very
substantially. ‘East End’ and ‘West End’ are both physically and
spiritually remote from each other. Those who live west of the
Concorde in Paris belong to a different world from those who
live east of the Republique. To go a little farther out, the
famous ‘red belt’ of working-class suburbs which surround Paris
was politically significant, but had no discernible
insurrectionary importance. It simply did not belong to Paris
any longer, nor indeed did it form a whole, except for
geographers.[i]
All these are
considerations affecting the mobilization of the city poor, but
not their political effectiveness. This naturally depends on the
ease with which rioters and insurrectionaries can get close to
the authorities, and how easily they can be dispersed. In the
ideal insurrectionary city the authorities — the rich, the
aristocracy, the government, or local administration — will
therefore be as intermingled with the central concentration of
the poor as possible. The French king will reside in the Palais
Royal or Louvre and not at Versailles, the Austrian emperor in
the Hofburg and not at Schoenbrunn. Preferably the authorities
will be vulnerable. Rulers who brood over a hostile city from
some isolated stronghold, like the fortress-prison of Montjuich
over Barcelona, may intensify popular hostility, but are
technically designed to withstand it. After all, the Bastille
could almost certainly have held out if anyone in July 1789 had
really thought that it would be attacked. Civic authorities are
of course vulnerable almost by definition, since their political
success depends on the belief that they represent the citizens
and not some outside government or its agents. Hence perhaps the
classical French tradition by which insurrectionaries make for
the city hall rather than the royal or imperial palace and, as
in 1848 and 1871, proclaim the provisional government there.
Local
authorities therefore create relatively few problems for
insurrectionaries (at least until they begin to practice urban
planning). Of course, city development may shift the town hall
from a central to a rather more remote location: nowadays it is
a long way from the outer neighborhoods of Brooklyn to New
York’s City Hall. On the other hand in capital cities the
presence of governments, which tends to make riots effective, is
offset by the special characteristics of towns in which princes
or other self-important rulers are resident, and which have a
built-in counter-insurgent bias. This arises both from the needs
of state public relations and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of
security.
Broadly
speaking, in a civic town the role of the inhabitants in public
activities is that of participants, in princely or government
towns, of an admiring and applauding audience. The wide straight
processional ways with their vistas of palace, cathedral, or
government building, the vast square in front of the official
facade, preferably with a suitable balcony from which the
multitudes may be blessed or addressed, perhaps the parade
ground or arena: these make up the ceremonial furniture of an
imperial city. Since the Renaissance, major western capitals and
residences have been constructed or modified accordingly. The
greater the desire of the ruler to impress or the greater his folie de grandeur, the wider, straighter, more symmetrical his
preferred layout. Few less suitable locations for spontaneous
riot can be imagined than New Delhi, Washington, DC, Saint
Petersburg, or for that matter, the Mall and Buckingham Palace
in London. It is not merely the division between a popular east
and middle-class and official west in Paris which has made the
Champs Elysees the place where the official and military parade
is held on July 14, whereas the unofficial mass demonstration
belongs to the triangle Bastille-Republique-Nation.
Such ceremonial
sites imply a certain separation between rulers and subjects, a
confrontation between a remote and awful majesty and pomp on one
side, and an applauding public on the other. It is the urban
equivalent of the picture-frame stage; or better still, the
opera, that characteristic invention of western absolute
monarchy. Fortunately, for potential rioters, this is or was not
the only relationship between rulers and subjects in capital
cities. Often, indeed, it was the capital city itself which
demonstrated the ruler’s greatness, while its inhabitants,
including the poorest, enjoyed a modest share of the benefits of
its majesty. Rulers and ruled lived in a sort of symbiosis. In
such circumstances the great ceremonial routes led through the
middle of the towns as in Edinburgh or Prague. Palaces had no
need to cut themselves off from slums. The Vienna Hofburg, which
presents a wide ceremonial space to the outside world, including
the Viennese suburbs, has barely a yard or two of urban street
or square between it and the older Inner City, to which it
visibly belongs.
This kind of
town, combining as it did the patterns of civic and princely
cities, was a standing invitation to riot, for here palaces and
town houses of great nobles, markets, cathedrals, public squares,
and slums were intermingled, the rulers at the mercy of the mob.
In time of trouble they could withdraw into their country
residences, but that was all. Their only safeguard was to
mobilize the respectable poor against the unrespectable after a
successful insurrection, e.g. the artisans guilds against the
‘mob’, or the National Guard against the propertyless. Their one
comfort was the knowledge that uncontrolled riot and
insurrection rarely lasted long, and were even more rarely
directed against the structure of established wealth and power.
Still this was a substantial comfort. The King of Naples or the
Duchess of Parma, not to mention the Pope, knew that if their
subjects rioted, it was because they were unduly hungry and as a
reminder to prince and nobility to do their duty, i.e. to
provide enough food at fair prices on the market, enough jobs,
handouts, and public entertainment for their excessively modest
needs. Their loyalty and piety scarcely wavered, and indeed when
they made genuine revolutions (as in Naples in 1799) they were
more likely to be in defense of Church and King against
foreigners and the godless middle classes.
Hence the
crucial importance in the history of urban public order, of the
French Revolution of 1789-99, which established the modern
equation between insurrection and social revolution. Any
government naturally prefers to avoid riot and insurrection, as
it prefers to keep the murder rate down, but in the absence of
genuine revolutionary danger the authorities are not likely to
lose their cool about it. Eighteenth-century England was a
notoriously riotous nation, with a notoriously sketchy apparatus
for maintaining public order. Not only smaller cities like
Liverpool and Newcastle, but large parts of London itself might
be in the hands of the riotous populace for days on end. Since
nothing was at stake in such disorders except a certain amount
of property, which a wealthy country could well afford to
replace, the general view among the upper classes was
unconcerned, and even satisfied. Whig noblemen took pride in the
state of liberty which deprived potential tyrants of the troops
with which to suppress their subjects and the police with which
to harry them. It was not until the French Revolution that a
taste for multiplying barracks in towns developed, and not until
the Radicals and Chartists of the first half of the 19th century
that the virtues of a police force outweighed those of English
freedom. (Since grass-roots democracy could not always be relied
on, the Metropolitan Police was put directly under the Home
Office in the national government, where it still remains.)
Indeed, three
main administrative methods of countering riot and insurrection
suggested themselves: systematic arrangements for deploying
troops, the development of police forces (which barely existed
in the modern form before the 19th century), and the rebuilding
of cities in such ways as to minimize the chances of revolt. The
first two of these had no major influence on the actual shape
and structure of cities, though a study of the building and
location of urban barracks in the 19th century might provide
some interesting results, and so might a study of the
distribution of police stations in urban neighborhoods. The
third affected the townscape very fundamentally, as in Paris and
Vienna, cities in which it is known that the needs of
counterinsurgency influenced urban reconstruction after the
1848 revolutions. In Paris the main military aim of this
reconstruction seems to have been to open wide and straight
boulevards along which artillery could fire, and troops advance,
while at the same time — presumably — breaking up the main
concentrations of potential insurgents in the popular quarters.
In Vienna the reconstruction took the form mainly of two wide
concentric ring roads, the inner ring (broadened by a belt of
open spaces, parks, and widely spaced public buildings) isolated
the old city and palace from the (mainly middle-class) inner
suburbs, the outer ring isolating both from the (increasingly
working-class) outer suburbs.
Such
reconstructions may or may not have made military sense. We do
not know, since the kind of revolutions they were intended to
dominate virtually died out in western Europe after 1848.
(Still, it is a fact that the main centers of popular resistance
and barricade fighting in the Paris Commune of 1871, Montmartre-northeast
Paris and the Left Bank, were isolated from each other and the
rest of the town.) However, they certainly affected the
calculations of potential insurrectionaries. In the socialist
discussions of the 1880s the consensus of the military experts
among revolutionaries, led by Frederick Engels, was that the old
type of uprising now stood little chance, though there was some
argument among them about the value of new technological devices
such as the then rapidly developing high explosives like
dynamite. At all events, barricades which had dominated
insurrectionary tactics from 1830 to 1871 (they had not been
seriously used in the great French Revolution of 1789-99), were
now less favored. Conversely, bombs of one kind or another
became the favorite device of revolutionaries, though not
marxist ones, and not for genuinely insurrectionary purposes.
Urban
reconstruction, however, had another and probably unintended
effect on potential rebellions, for the new and wide avenues
provided an ideal location for what became an increasingly
important aspect of popular movements, the mass demonstration,
or rather procession. The more systematic these rings and
cartwheels of boulevards, the more effectively isolated these
were from the surrounding inhabited area, the easier it became
to turn such assemblies into ritual marches rather than
preliminaries to riot. London, which lacked them, has always had
difficulty in avoiding incidental trouble during the
concentration, or more usually the dispersal, of mass meetings
held in Trafalgar Square. It is too near sensitive spots like
Downing Street, or symbols of wealth and power like the Pall
Mall clubs, whose windows the unemployed demonstrators smashed
in the 1880s.
One can, of
course, make too much of such primarily military factors in
urban renewal. In any case they cannot be sharply distinguished
from other changes in the 19th- and 20th-century city which
sharply diminished its riot potential. Three of them are
particularly relevant.
The first is
sheer size, which reduces the city to an administrative
abstraction, and a conglomerate of separate communities or
districts. It became simply too big to riot as a unit. London,
which until the 21st century still lacked so obvious a symbol of
civic unity as the figure of a mayor, is an excellent example.
It ceased to be a riotous city roughly between the time it grew
from 1 million to 2 million inhabitants, i.e. in the first half
of the 19th century. London Chartism, for instance, barely
existed as a genuinely metropolitan phenomenon for more than a
day or two on end. Its real strength lay in the ‘localities’ in
which it was organized, i.e. in communities and neighborhoods
like Lambeth, Woolwich, or Marylebone, whose relations with each
other were at the most loosely federal. Similarly, the radicals
and activists of the late 19th century were essentially locally
based. Their most characteristic organization was the
Metropolitan Radical Federation, essentially an alliance of
working men’s clubs of purely local importance, in such
neighborhoods as had a tradition of radicalism — Chelsea,
Hackney, Clerkenwell, Woolwich. The familiar London tendency to
build low, and therefore to sprawl, made distances between such
centers of trouble too great for the spontaneous propagation of
riots. How much contact would Battersea or Chelsea (then still a
working-class area electing left-wing MPs) have with the
turbulent East End of the 1889 dock striker? How much contact,
for that matter, would there be between Whitechapel and Canning
Town? In the nature of things the shapeless built-up areas which
grew either out of the expansion of a big city or the merging of
larger and smaller growing communities, and for which artificial
names have had to be invented (‘conurbation’, ‘Greater’ London,
Berlin, or Tokyo) were not towns in the old sense, even when
administratively unified from time to time.
The second is
the growing pattern of functional segregation in the 19th- and
20th-century city, that is to say, on the one hand, the
development of specialized industrial, business, government, and
other centers or open spaces, on the other, the geographical
separation of classes. Here again London was the pioneer, being
a combination of three separate units — the government center of
Westminster, the merchant city of London, and the popular
Southwark across the river. Up to a point the growth of this
composite metropolis encouraged potential rioters. The northern
and eastern edges of the City of London and Southwark where the
merchant community bordered on districts of workers, artisans,
and the port — all in their way equally disposed to riot, like
the Spitalfield weavers or the Clerkenwell radicals — formed
natural flash-points. These were the areas where several of the
great 18th-century riots broke out. Westminster had its own
population of artisans and miscellaneous poor, whom the
proximity of king and Parliament and the accident of an
unusually democratic franchise in this constituency, turned into
a formidable pressure group for several decades of the late 18th
and 19th centuries. The area between the City and Westminster,
which was filled by an unusually dense accumulation of slums,
inhabited by laborers, immigrants, and the socially marginal
(Drury Lane, Covent Garden, St. Giles, Holborn), added to the
ebullience of metropolitan public life.
However, as
time went on the pattern simplified itself. The 19th-century
City ceased to be residential, and became increasingly a pure
business district, while the port moved downstream, the city
middle and lower-middle classes into more or less remote
suburbs, leaving the East End an increasingly homogeneous zone
of the poor. The northern and western borders of Westminster
became increasingly upper- and middle-class settlements largely
designed as such by landowners and speculative builders, thus
pressing the centers of artisans, laborers, and others inclined
to radicalism and riot (Chelsea, Notting Hill, Paddington,
Marylebone) on to a periphery increasingly remote from the rest
of radical London. The slums between the two cities survived
longest but by the early 20th century they had also been broken
into small patches by the urban renewal which has given London
some of its gloomiest thoroughfares (Shaftesbury Avenue,
Roseberry Avenue) as well as some of its most pompous ones
(Kingsway, Aldwych), and an impressive accumulation of
barrack-like tenements purporting to increase the happiness of
the Drury Lane and Saffron Hill proletariat. Covent Garden and
Soho (which elected communist local councillors in 1945) are
perhaps the last relic of old-fashioned metropolitan turbulence
in the center of the town. By the late 19th century the
potentially riotous London had already been broken up into
peripheral segments of varying size (the huge and amorphous East
End being the largest), surrounding a non-residential City and
West End and a solid block of middle-class districts, and
surrounded in turn by middle- and lower-middle-class outer
suburbs.
Such patterns
of segregation developed in most large and growing western
cities from the early 19th century, though the parts of their
historic centers which were not transformed into business or
institutional districts, sometimes retained traces of their old
structure, which may still be observed in the red-light
quarters, as in Amsterdam. Twentieth-century working-class
rehousing and planning for motor transport further disintegrated
the city as a potential riot center. (The 19th-century planning
for railways had, if anything, the opposite effect, often
creating socially mixed and marginal quarters around the new
terminals.) The recent tendency to shift major urban services
such as central markets from the centers to the outskirts of
cities will no doubt disintegrate it further.
Is the urban
riot and insurrection therefore doomed to disappear? Evidently
not, for we have in recent years seen a marked resurgence of
this phenomenon in some of the most modern cities, though also a
decline in some of the more traditional centers of such
activities. The reasons are mainly social and political, but it
may be worth looking briefly at the characteristics of modern
urbanism which encourage it.
Modern mass
transportation is one. Motor transport has so far contributed
chiefly to the mobilization of that normally un-riotous group,
the middle class, though such devices as the motorized
demonstration (Frenchmen and Algerians still remember the massed
horns of reaction hooting Al-ge-rie francaise) and that natural
device of sabotage and passion, the traffic jam. However, cars
have been used by activists in North American riots, and disrupt
police action when on the move, while forming temporary
barricades when stationary. Moreover, motor transport
distributes the news of riots beyond the immediate area affected
since both private cars and buses have to be extensively
re-routed.
Public transport, and especially underground railways, which are
once again being built in several big cities on a large scale,
is more directly relevant. There is no better means of transport
for moving large numbers of potential rioters rapidly over long
distances than trains running at frequent intervals. This is one
reason why the West Berlin students have been a rather effective body
of rioters: the underground links the Free University set among
the remote and spectacularly middle-class villas and gardens of Dahlem, with the town center.
More important
than transport are two other factors: the increase in the number
of buildings worth rioting against or occupying, and the
development in their vicinity of accumulations of potential
rioters. For while it is true that the headquarters of central
and municipal government are increasingly remote from the
riotous quarters, and the rich or noble rarely live in palaces
in the town centers (apartments are both less vulnerable and
more anonymous), sensitive institutions of other kinds have
multiplied. There are the communications centers (telegraph,
telephone, radio, television). The least experienced organizer
of a military coup or insurrection knows all about their
importance. There are the gigantic newspaper offices,
fortunately so often concentrated in the older city centers, and
providing admirable incidental material for barricades or cover
against fire in the form of delivery trucks, newsprint, and
packages of papers. They were used for street-fighting purposes as
long ago as 1919 in Berlin, though not very much since. There
are, as we all know now, the universities. Though the general
tendency to move these out of city centers has diminished their
riot potential somewhat, there are enough academic precincts
left in the middle of big towns to satisfy the activists.
Besides, the explosion of higher education has filled the
average university to bursting point with thousands, or even
tens of thousands, of marchers or fighters. There are, above
all, the banks and large corporations, symbols and reality of
the power structure, and increasingly concentrated in those
massifs of plate glass and concrete by which the traveler
recognizes the centers of a proper 21st-century city.
Theoretically
these should be individually as much the object of attack by
rioters as city halls or capitols, for IBM, Shell, or General
Motors carry at least as much weight as most governments. Banks
have long been aware of their vulnerability, and in some Latin
countries — Spain is a good example — their combination of
symbolic architectural opulence and heavy fortification provides
the nearest thing to those town-citadels in which feudal and
feuding noblemen barricaded themselves in the middle ages. To
see them under heavy police guard in times of tension is an
instructive experience, though, in fact, the only champions of
direct action who have been systematically attracted by them are
unpolitical robbers and revolutionary ‘expropriators’. But if we
except such politically and economically negligible symbols of
the American way of life as Hilton hotels, and the occasional
object of specialized hostility such as Dow Chemical, riots have
rarely aimed directly at any of the buildings of large
corporations. Nor are they very vulnerable. It would take more
than a few broken plate-glass windows or even the occupation of
a few acres of office space, to disrupt the smooth operations of
a modern oil company.
On the other hand, collectively ‘downtown’ is vulnerable. The
disruption of traffic, the closing of banks, the office staffs
who cannot or will not turn up for work, the businessmen
marooned in hotels with overloaded switchboards, or who cannot
reach their destinations: all these can interfere very seriously
with the activities of a city. Indeed, this came close to
happening during the 1967 riots in Detroit. What is more, in
cities developing on the North American pattern it is not
unlikely to happen, sooner or later. For it is well known that
the central areas of town, and their immediate surroundings, are
being filled with the minority poor as the comfortable whites
move out. The ghettos lap round the city centers like dark and
turbulent seas. It is this concentration of the most
discontented and turbulent in the neighborhood of a relatively
few unusually sensitive urban centers which gives the militants
of a smallish minority the political importance which black
riots would certainly not have if the 10 or 15% of the
US population who are African-Americans were more evenly
distributed throughout the whole of that vast and complex
country.
Still, even
this revival of rioting in western cities is comparatively
modest. An intelligent and cynical police chief would probably
regard all the troubles in western cities during recent years as
minor disturbances, magnified by the hesitation or incompetence
of the authorities and the effect of excessive publicity. With
the exception of the Latin Quarter riots of May 1968 in Paris,
none of them looked as though they could, or were intended to,
shake governments. Anyone who wishes to judge what a genuine
old-style insurrection of the urban poor, or a serious armed
rising, is and can achieve, must still go to the cities of the
developing world: to Naples which rose against the Germans in
1943, to the Algerian Casbah in 1956 (excellent movies have been
made about both these insurrections), to Bogota in 1948, perhaps
to Caracas, certainly to Santo Domingo in 1965.
The
effectiveness of recent western city riots is due not so much to
the actual activities of the rioters, as to their political
context. In the ghettos of the United States they have
demonstrated that black people are no longer prepared to accept
their fate passively, and in doing so they have doubtless
accelerated the development of black political consciousness and
white fear; but they have never looked like a serious immediate
threat to even the local power structure. In Paris they
demonstrated the instability of an apparently firm and
monolithic regime. (The actual fighting capacity of the
insurrectionaries was never in fact tested, though their heroism
is not in question: no more than two or three people were
killed, and those almost certainly by accident.) Elsewhere the
demonstrations and riots of students, though very effective
inside the universities, have been little more than a routine
police problem outside them.
But this, of
course may be true of all urban riots, which is why the study of
their relation to different types of towns is a comparatively
unimportant exercise. Georgian Dublin does not lend itself
easily to insurrection, and its population, which does, has not
shown a great inclination to initiate or even to participate in
uprisings. The Easter Rising took place there because it was a
capital city, where the major national decisions are supposed to
be made, and though it failed fairly quickly, it played an
important part in the winning of Irish independence, because the
nature of the Irish situation in 1917-21 allowed it to.
Saint Petersburg, built from scratch on a gigantic and geometrical
plan, is singularly ill-suited to barricades or street fighting,
but the Russian revolution began and succeeded there.
Conversely, the proverbial turbulence of Barcelona, the older
parts of which are almost ideally suited to riot, rarely even
looked like producing revolution. Catalan anarchism, with all
its bomb throwers, pistoleros, and enthusiasm for direct action,
was until 1936 never more than a normal problem of public order
to the authorities, so modest that the historian is amazed to
find how few policemen were actually supposed (rather
inefficiently) to ensure its protection.
Revolutions
arise out of political situations, not because some cities are
structurally suited to insurrection. Still, an urban riot or
spontaneous uprising may be the starter which sets the engine of
revolution going. That starter is more likely to function in
cities which encourage or facilitate insurrection. A friend of
mine, who happened to have commanded the 1944 insurrection
against the Germans in the Latin Quarter of Paris, walked
through the area on the morning after the Night of the
Barricades in 1968, touched and moved to see that young adults
who had not been born in 1944 had built several of their
barricades in the same places as then. Or, the historian might
add, the same places that had seen barricades in 1830, 1848, and
1871. It is not every city that lends itself so naturally to
this exercise, or where, consequently, each generation of rebels
remembers or rediscovers the battlefields of its predecessors.
Thus in May 1968 the most serious confrontation occurred across
the barricades of the Rue Gay Lussac and behind the Rue Soufflot.
Almost a century earlier, in the Commune of 1871, the heroic
Raoul Rigault who commanded the barricades in that very area,
was taken — in the same month of May — and killed by the
Versaillais. Not every city is like Paris. Its peculiarity may
no longer be enough to revolutionize France, but the tradition
and the environment are still strong enough to precipitate the nearest
thing to a revolution in a developed western country.
[i]
How far such working-class suburbs can be separated from
the central city area and still remain a direct factor
in insurrections is an interesting question. Sans in
Barcelona, the great bastion of anarchism, played no
important part in the revolution of 1936, while
Floridsdorf in Vienna, an equally solid bastion of
socialism, could do little more than hold out in
isolation when the rest of the city’s insurrections had
already been defeated in 1934.
Eric J. Hobsbawm is
Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College in
London, UK, and a founding member of the Board of
Directors of Global Urban
Development. He is the author of many books, including
his recently published autobiography, Interesting
Times, and his highly acclaimed four-volume history
of the world from 1789 to 1991: The Age of
Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of
Empire, and The Age of Extremes. Dr.
Hobsbawm’s article is an adaptation of a chapter that
was originally published in his book Revolutionaries
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), and is reprinted
with the permission of the author.
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