Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [71]
On the morning of 14 July 1789, most of these people awoke in alarmingly crowded quarters in the historic center of Paris, many of them having slept 15 or 20 to a room, only to vacate their garni beds for the day-shift sleepers; many had eaten nothing the previous day, because of spiraling bread prices, and had picked their way through two days of riots and looting. They were packed into slum dwellings in the Île de la Cité and the area around the Hôtel de Ville and Les Halles, and in a fast-growing arrival city in the Faubourgs, the dense and smoky neighborhoods just beyond the old walls. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, home to tanneries and workshops, was the most volatile and densely populated; it also happened to sit directly behind the Bastille prison. Most of the men and women living here would have made daily excursions to the Place de Grève, a public square at the center of the Parisian arrival city, which, as well as being the site of executions, served as an open-air job fair for all manner of trades and domestic occupations.‡ Most, that day, would have found no work, the building boom that had expanded the arrival city in the previous decade having come crashing to a halt. In previous years, they would have returned to their villages at such news, but famine had made them desperate, and they lingered in Paris, listless and angry.
The Paris crowds who formed on the fourteenth and stormed the Bastille and sacked the Hôtel de Ville were almost entirely these people of the arrival city. A detailed examination of the arrest records by the historian George Rudé led him to conclude that “the men and women who burned down the barrières were mainly drawn from the menu peuple living in the faubourgs on the outskirts of the capital”—in other words, the core residents of the largest arrival city in Paris, people with one foot still in the village. Of the 635 people captured by police during the storming of the Bastille, at least 400 “were of provincial extraction” and a significant portion were listed as being unemployed. These rural migrants were the original sans-culottes; the Revolution, first and above all, was an uprising of the arrival city.8 And in the months that followed, the French Revolution continued to be an event of the arrival city. “The Paris crowds that propelled the revolution in its early days,” one observer noted, “drew much of their fighting manpower from a floating population of recent migrants from the countryside.”9 It was these sans-culottes of the arrival city who, in 1793, propelled the Jacobins into power and further amplified the Revolution.
Yet, while the village arrivals were the reagents of the Revolution, they were never permitted to become its beneficiaries. During the next decade and a half of history-altering foment, absolutely nothing would be done to improve the conditions or standing of these urban arrivals (except counterproductive moves, such as fixing bread prices), or the nature and design of their neighborhoods. Instead, the French Revolution focused its attentions on keeping peasants in the village and making sure they stayed peasants. On the night of 4 August 1789, the Estates-General became the first European government to abolish feudalism formally in a set of decrees that limited the power of the nobility and clergy to control access to rural land, broke up the great landholdings, and, through a process of parcelization, gave peasants ownership of their plots, in theory at least. But there were few sources of rural investment. In many regions, intergenerational land division led to tiny plots unsuited to commercial farming. This was good for the idyllic image of the French peasant, but its humanitarian consequences were terrible. Thatched roofs may be picturesque, but life beneath them is short, hard, disease-ridden, and prone to bouts of starvation. This, in turn, led the peasants to accumulate debt or become dependent on systems very similar to feudalism. In practice, this