Working-Class Politics in Nineteenth-Century Toulouse, France: Paths of Proletarianization Revisited

“The worker has different opinions than his employer and is naturally socialist,” Toulouse’s police commissioner asserted confidently in 1849. “I have made this observation after visiting several workshops, especially those of printers, bookbinders, hatmakers, and tailors . . . where workers speak enthusiastically of 1793 and of the need to renew the terrors of this period in order to improve the conditions of the working class” (Aminzade 1981: 95).