Paris’ 19th Century Barricades
Friday, May 14, 2010 at 10:08AM Tweet 
3 May 2010. The International School of Stuttgart visits Paris. The group of 45 teachers and students travel back in time with the Time Traveler Tours to the barricades of the 19th century, first erected in 1830, then again in 1848, and one final time in 1870-71. It has been said that the French Revolution of 1789 actually took 100 years to resolve.
Learn about the rebellious 19th century here and in subsequent FrancoFiles posts…
Paris in 1830 was a divided city. To the west, the bourgeoisie lived in lavish homes (Paris’ wealth had been shifting westward ever since Louis XIV had moved to Versailles in 1682). To the east, from the Marais outward was the Faubourg St. Antoine, a warren of decaying, medieval buildings on criss-crossing narrow, dark, muddy streets.
The smell of sewerage and smoke caught in the throats of the many poor and unemployed who made the Faubourg their home. It was a danger to walk the streets in the Faubourg St. Antoine: all too easy to be run over by a carriage traveling its traffic-clogged alleyways; or to slip into a deep pool caused by heavy rains and fouled by filth and pollution and never climb out again!
Houses were overcrowded. The people had no plumbing and lacked potable drinking water. Their waste, both human and otherwise, went out the windows and into the street. They could count only on the rains to wash the filth away, down, down into the river Seine. The Faubourg was appalling to the senses.
When diseases, like cholera, swept through Paris, this is where you found the majority of the dead. In 1830, the Faubourg was home to the highest death rate in France. And the Faubourg St. Antoine made Paris the filthiest, most pestilential and savagely overcrowded city in the world.
This is where where the barricades were thrown up no less than eight times between 1827-1849.
Image:
The Distribution of Barricades in Paris, 1848 from Harvey, David; Consciousness and the Urban Experience; Baltimore, MD; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985; http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/City_Divided.html.
