Jonathan M. House. Controlling Paris

How is order maintained or reestablished during massive popular unrest or during a revolution? In particular how is this achieved by a new, generally nervous provisional government in the face of continuing disorder? From the close of the eighteenth century, and periodically during the nineteenth, French governments wrestled with these problems; they are at the heart of Jonathan M. House's Controlling Paris: Armed Forces and Counter-Revolution, 1789–1848. The subtitle of the book, however, is a little misleading. The opening chapter provides a broad survey of the French Army's role in Paris in 1789 and 1830, but the main focus is on the events of 1848. The revolutions that affected France from 1789 onward resulted by accident rather than design; and none more so than that which toppled the July Monarchy in February 1848. These accidents commonly involved the misuse or misdirection of troops on the streets: sometimes they were deployed in bodies too small to have any impact; sometimes the orders they received were too late or were poorly considered (they sometimes received no orders at all); sometimes they were inadequately provisioned as they stood around waiting for orders while crowds wooed or abused them. All and any of these were as significant in prompting revolution as the exhortations of firebrands urging crowds to action.

Ancient history · Crowds · Economic history · Economics · French revolution · Government (linguistics) · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Unrest · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies