Unlike most historians of France, who draw a sharp contrast between cities and the countryside, John Merriman focuses on the spatial and social margins of urban life, the faubourgs, or suburbs, where rural migrants and the labouring poor of the cities congregated in growing numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the eyes of the urban elite, the women and men of the periphery resembled barbarians at the gates of civilization. The book examines the cultural and social traditions - as expressed in festivals, in songs, in strikes, and in political movements - that took root in these areas. Neighbourhood solidarities developed that were based on a collective sense of exclusion from the urban centre. Urban elites came to realize that the `disreputable' persons they had cast out to the suburbs were becoming a ring of organized worker communities, `the cord that might wring our necks one day'. To know the margins is also to know the centre, Merriman argues, for the periphery of urban life was a mirror in which the French upper classes viewed the most frightening aspects of their world.
The Margins of Urban Life brings to life the "floating worlds of the periphery" in nineteenth-century French cities--the world of beggars, the most miserable prostitutes, ragpickers, casual labor, and unwanted people; the location of slaughterhouses, gas factories, tanneries, and,
increasingly, even executions. The men and women of the suburbs and faubourgs were long identified by urban elites and government officials with the turbulent "dangerous classes" who might one day fall upon the wealthy quarters of the center. Merriman analyzes and evokes the social, class,
neighborhood, cultural, and political solidarities--the shared sense of not belonging--that made the marginal people in peripheral places emerge as contenders for political power. His investigation explores the world of the Catalan agricultural laborers, the textile workers of the "high town" of
Reims, the bitter rivalry between Catholic and Protestant workers in the faubourge of Nimes, the haven for under- and unemployed proletarians in Ingouville, above Le Havre, and France's strange frontier town, Napoleon-Vendee.
'Merriman's study is welcome because it explores the twilight world on the outskirts of French cities ... grounded in a wide range of archive material from many departments. It is entertaining to read ... this is a valuable and interesting book.'
Roger Magraw, French History, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1992
