Working People of Paris 1871-1914

<p>In <em>The Working People of Paris 1871-1914</em> Lenard Berlanstein examines how technological advances expanding industrialization bureaucratization and urban growth affected the lives of the working poor and near poor of one of the world's most influential cities during an era of intense social and cultural change. Berlanstein departs from other historians of the working classes in treating in a parallel manner not only craftsmen and factory laborers but also service workers and lower-level white-collar employees. Avoiding the fallacy of letting the city limits set the boundaries of an urban study he deals also with the industrial suburbs with their considerable concentration of workers to examine the transformation of the work leisure and consumer experiences of the people who did not own property and who lived from one payday to the next during the Second Industrial Revolution.<br /><em>The Working People of Paris</em> describes a cycle of adaptation and resistance to the forces of economic maturation. For several decades after 1871 Berlanstein argues working people and employees preserved accommodations with management about reciprocal rights in the workplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century however these forms of adaptation had broken down under new economic pressures. The result was a crisis of discipline in the workplace as wage earners and modest clerks began to challenge managerial authority.<br />Berlanstein's study confronts the widely accepted view that during this period workers became better integrated into a society of improving standards of living and mass leisure. Instead he documents uneven patterns of material progress and growing conflict over work roles among all sorts of laboring people.</p>