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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution. By Allan Potofsky. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 320pp. 65.00 ISBN: 978 0 230 57471 7.
Wishing that stones could speak is a tourist clich, but in Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution, Allan Potofsky comes close to fulfilling that prosopopoeic urge,

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not through ventriloquism, but through a meticulous historical analysis of the craftsmen and builders who laid and carved those blocks. Potofskys is not so much a social as an institutional history: the set of questions at its core are primarily connected to the state and its transformations. At the same time, Potofsky is at pains to point out that this is no simple state-centred narrative (11)a monolinear depiction of a bureaucratic modernitybut much more mixed picture that gives proper place to the private sphere, to the role of corporations, and to the resistance of the workers themselves. At the same time, the state played a principal role in regulating the role of the entrepreneur, and policing the lives and labour of workers, and in the financing of vast public construction projects. In contrast to T.J. Clarks famous View from Notre Dame, Potofsky gives us a kind of view from the Panthon that great ongoing project of the age, a space whose function was radically transformed during the three decades of its construction, from a grand religious edifice celebrating the recovery of Louis XV to a repository for the bones of Voltaire, a secular monument to the cult of Great Men. Using the surprisingly fascinating materials from the btiments civils series in the Archives Nationales, as well as a panoply of other manuscript sources, Potofsky draws a rich picture of the conflicts and compromises, the ruptures and continuities that exercised the hundreds of carvers, stonecutters, carpenters, architects, engineers and bureaucrats in the construction of this massive edifice. When its foundations were laid in 1758, the builders corporations and the artisanal guilds were still fundamental pillars of the ancien regime: its construction saw the abolition and then the reinstatement of the guilds in the 1770s, the institution of livrets (passbooks) in the 1780s; the elimination of all corporate bodies under the Revolution, and the resurrection of a newly subservient corporatism under Napoleon. The view from that half-constructed edificeand equally from many humbler development projectsoffers more than simply a history of a trade, or of those workers who plied it: through the prism of construction, it illuminates the French state itself in new ways, and offers a great deal both for specialists in economic history, and for a wider audience interested in the social and political changes across this period. The vast literature on Parisperhaps the most written-about of all cities has certainly covered many aspects of the building trade, and that interest has been given a further impetus by the new economic history. But Potofsky insists in his introduction that the existing structural analyses and micro-histories have not drawn construction into a larger picture of the history of Paris. The great specialists of the eighteenth century cityDavid Garrioch, Jeffrey Kaplow, Daniel Roche, among othersare a strong presence in the background here. Potofskys concern is not principally with the economic aspects of construction, but rather with the transformations of corporatism across a more extended revolutionary period. Setting aside the myth that the Revolution was a giant wrecking-ball, Potofsky shows how the increasingly radical socio-political changes were installed at the level of the building site, how they were variously taken up by revolutionary ideologues, by architects and entrepreneurs, and by the workers themselves. Equally, though, he demonstrates that the projection of the Revolution into bricks and mortar, and into the financial arrangements of construction, helped to shape the course of the Revolution itself, just as the struggle with the guilds had contributed to the fate of ancien regime reform. Building was a way of dealing with unemployment and unrest, and urban renewal would demonstrate the merits of the new order. But the building site could just as easily be seen as a dangerous hotbed of sans-culotterie, or a haven for dangerous foreigners from

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outside Paris. Potofsky shows that the Republic did not have a single attitude to building workers, or even a single line of development its responses were often as piecemeal as those of the monarchy. Like a number of recent historians, he identifies the Directory and Consulate as a crucial period in the installation of revolutionary reforms, rather than as a mere coda, and his treatment of the period from 1795-1805, and the Napoleonic reaction that followed, is among the richest and most satisfying elements in the book. With so many excellent qualities, the book disappoints only in its presentation it is a shame to see fine research marred by such poor editing and production. The text is difficult to read as a result of innumerable typographical errors, missing or repeated words, and even incomplete paragraphs: perhaps more disturbingly, the tables on pp. 42-43 seem to be missing a line as a result of incorrect formatting. Overall, however, this is a book that offers as much to the general reader as to the specialist: it is well worth struggling past these cosmetic defects for this perspective on a Paris in transformation, seen from the scaffolding of its great monuments, its bourgeois streetscapes, and the milling Place de Grve, where the modern strike (grve) was born. University of Melbourne IAN COLLER doi:10.1093/fh/crr005 Advance Access published on January 21, 2011

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