ABSTRACT
The remarkable growth of social history during the past two decades has changed substantially what we know and how we think about nineteenth century Europe. In 1963, for example, Peter Amann wrote in the pages of The American Historical Review that "For over [a century] the French Revolution of 1848 has proved a source of embarrassment for historians" (Amann 1963:938). He would never say that today. A torrent of books and articles has carried us into the nooks and crannies of life in France around the middle of the past century. We have visited villages in Provence and workshops in Lyon, listened in on Icarian societies and revolutionary clubs, peered over Parisian barricades, tracked down opponents of the coup d'État, and even tried to get inside the heads of ordinary workers (Weber 1980). While we now know much more about 1848, one thing was clear when Amann voiced his lament: the Revolution was linked in some way to a general crisis of the French economy. Marx had said as much, of course, but it was not until the publication of a collection of articles edited by Ernest Labrousse in 1956 that historians generally accepted it as true (Labrousse 1956). Because Labrousse was an expert on the economic origins of the Revolution of 1789, it came as a disappointment that, having established its existence, he and his students never got around to probing the precise nature of the relationship between political and economic upheaval in 1848. We haven't made much progress since, either. In their important article "The People of June, 1848," for example, Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees resort to the metaphor of an economic funnel channeling a revolutionary stream of milk (Tilly and Lees 1975:172).
