Citoyens-combattants a Paris, 1848-1851

The sources available to the historian of the working class are inevitably limited by the ‘silence of the people’. Even the plethora of material thrown up by a mass insurrection such as that which occurred in Paris in June 1848 offers descriptions of the ‘experience’ of ‘events’ mediated by the language employed by the various witnesses, as well as their conflicting identities and interests. Louis Hincker shows how the dossiers compiled as part of the process of arrest and interrogation were shaped by the procedures employed and the formalisation of conflictual interrogation processes. The transcriptions of the responses made by prisoners with varying levels of linguistic competence into something akin to standard French, together with the survival strategies of the accused and the obsequiousness and self-protective silences which often ensued, and our inability fully to appreciate the threatening atmosphere which must often have prevailed during interrogations, add to the analytical

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