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The geographical term Paris is, similarly, imprecise because much of this book concerns people who did not live in the city proper. To write a social history of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to treat the industrial communities on the periphery of the capital, the banlieue. A dynamic area in our period, it had only 15 percent of the population in the Seine Department at the end of the Second Empire but more than 30 percent 1.
In a fundamental way, the peripheral communes were becoming the demographic and economic center of gravity of greater Paris. Not even the dates in the title express our interests aptly.
They should not be taken in a literal fashion, for this study considers the grand events of Parisian history of those years, the Boulanger and Dreyfus affairs, and the like, only in passing. What were the long-term social processes and structural shifts that make an examination of working people in greater Paris between the Commune and World War I a worthwhile enterprise? These decades comprised one of the few moments when the mass of French people was caught up in social change.
Yet, compared with the middle third of the nineteenth century, ours was only very partially an era of fundamental innovation and departure. Under the July Monarchy and Second Empire, commercial capitalism had decisively reorganized the luxury crafts. The state had taken steps to make the urban environment more healthful and livable. The capital expanded territorially, absorbed a new population, and attained its present-day boundaries.
