A History of the Barricade

by Eric Hazan

How the French invented the barricade, and its symbolic impact on popular protests throughout history

In the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan’s native Paris, where they were instrumental in the revolts of the nineteenth century, helping to shape the political life of a continent.

The barricade was always a makeshift construction (the word derives from barrique or barrel), and in working-class districts these ersatz fortifications could spread like wildfire. They doubled as a stage, from which insurgents could harangue soldiers and subvert their allegiance. Their symbolic power persisted into May 1968 and, more recently, the Occupy movements.

Hazan traces the many stages in the barricade’s evolution, from the Wars of Religion through to the Paris Commune, drawing on the work of thinkers throughout the periods examined to illustrate and bring to life the violent practicalities of revolutionary uprising.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, Politics, French Revolution, 19th Century

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Eric Hazan is a writer, historian and founder of the independent publishing house La Fabrique. His most recent books in English include The Invention of Paris (2012) and A People's History of the French Revolution (2014).

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A History of the Barricade is the second book on this topic I've read and it cited the first: The Insurgent Barricade. The two are very different. The Insurgent Barricade is a stolid and systematic academic text, while A History of the Barricade is a brief narrative history. Perhaps it would make more sense to read them in the reverse order. As it was, I found Hazan's book intriguing yet insubstantial. It provides brief snapshots of the most notable barricade incidents from French (almost always Parisian) history. Despite being compact, it isn't particularly introductory. Without contextual knowledge of the French Revolution, European political upheavals from 1830 to 1849, and the Paris Commune, it might be hard to follow. A quote on the back cover mentions 'fine vignettes' and that seems a fair description of the structure. I enjoyed the quotations from primary sources, which were also a feature of other Hazan histories I've read. The topic itself is obviously of interest, so A History of the Barricade was compelling enough. I just wish there was more of it. The highlight was chapter three, an account of the single barricade episode during the French Revolution, after Thermidor: 'The Hunger Barricades'.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I would like this book, figuring Eric Hazan would come through for the reader, and he did. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of revolutionary Paris over the course of the centuries when barricades were part of the action. It is a sad history, in some ways, but in other ways an inspiring one (not that we are likely to start building barricades in the age of the tank and the drone, but it's good to know that people have always tried to take their fate in their own hands).

This was an impulse purchase, I went in search of the book we are reading for the October meeting of the sci-fi book club I'm in (which I found), and while I was in the store, I came across this book as a half-price remainder, so of course I could not resist. Just looked up the author's Wikipedia page, seems he died in 2024. But the list of his books looks like an impressive legacy, and I'll be keeping an eye out for them.

[Caterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This detailed and extremely well researched monograph on the use of the barricade revisits some of the most important uprisings in European history; from the War of Religion in the mid-16th century to the glorious defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the barricade stands as a "symbolic form of insurrection", as the author points out. The chapter on the Paris Commune is fascinating, with references to the actual persons who fought and the streets where their barricades stood. Another interesting fact is the link found between the 19th century barricades and the ones used in Paris in May, 1968; perhaps, it is the collective memory that preserves those devices of struggle, even though almost all barricades were in the end defeated.
This is an easy read, not very complicated, the translation is very smooth and elegant, but it requires a basic knowledge of French history, especially the events of the 19th century, as the author does not bother with too many details on the historical background, but prefers to go forward with his main theme. There are also several well-drawn maps and photographs. I will surely be reading some more books by Eric Hazan.
Many thanks to Verso Books and NetGalley for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Eric Hendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this kind of stuff. Really this is about Paris but it’s also a kind of incredible look at this ongoing feedback loop between the barricade as practical tool of resistance and as symbol of resistance.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing fancy, lot of good anecdotes. Props for including my boy Blaise Monluc, even though he doesn't really fit the theme. Didn't realize his jaw was shot off by an arquebus and he had to wear a leather mask for the rest of his life.

Also there's a good bit where Wagner meets Blanqui during a barricade in Europe.

The king and queen arrived in Paris on return from the land of Normandy, from where they brought a large quantity of monkeys, parrots, and small dogs purchased in Dieppe. Some of these parrots, the majority trained by the Huguenots, gave out all kinds of nonsense and railing against the mass, the pope, and the ceremonies of the Roman church; when some people who had been offended said this to the king, he replied that you don’t interfere with the conscience of parrots.2

It is quite possible that Brissot was the inventor of the barricade. What at all events is certain is that the construction that made its first appearance in Paris that day no longer had anything in common with the chains that it had long since been the custom to stretch between houses to block passage. These barricades were made of upturned carts, cobblestones, pieces of furniture, and above all barriques (barrels), filled with earth to give them solidity. The network of these was so dense that soldiers were caught as if in a net, under fire from the barricades and neighbouring houses. One detachment that tried to reach the place Maubert from the Île de la Cité was blocked by barricades in the rue Galande. ‘The Swiss guards were prevented in this way from passing and came to a halt. Following the example of this barricade, every quarter did the same to stop other soldiers in their tracks.’
There are certainly similarities between the barricades of May 1588 and those of August 1648. They were constructed from the same elements: an upturned cart, furniture, ‘beams placed across, [and] barrels filled with paving-stones’. In both cases, they were put up at a speed that amazed witnesses (an amazement that would be voiced in almost the same terms before the speed with which the students raised barricades in the rue Gay-Lussac on the night of 10 May 1968). The entire population took part in their construction, including women and children. From their starting-point – place Maubert in 1588, the Île de la Cité in 1648 – they spread in a few hours across the entire city centre. Above all, they were completely effective. The royal troops were trapped in a network of barricades built very close together – more than a thousand barricades in an area whose diameter was around one kilometre. Whether Swiss or French, the soldiers were poorly commanded by officers who quite understandably lacked the faintest idea of what an urban insurrection was. In both cases, they were reduced to a pitiful retreat under musket fire and stones thrown from buildings.
How could an insurrection without leaders take hold of the largest city on the continent in just a few hours? Rumour, word of mouth, contagion from one neighbour to another, does not explain everything. The answer must be sought in the collective memory of the people. In August 1648, the barricades of the League were only sixty years in the past – more or less the same span that separates us today, for example, from the Mendès-France government, and everyone knows how alive the memory of that still is today. We have seen in Retz, and the same is found in several of his contemporaries, allusions to the League, and it may well be this memory that enabled the almost spontaneous generation of a general insurrection. Spontaneity, the absence of leaders and strategy, also explain why the journées of 26 and 27 August, spectacular as they may have been, did not have a follow-up. When Broussel returned and the barricades were taken down, Paris was ‘calmer than on a Good Friday’.
Kilmaine decided to hand back their cannon to the Montreuil sans-culottes, the barricade was opened, and the column continued its way:
When we reached the last barricade we encountered a more stubborn resistance than at the two former ones, increased by a large number of wandering citizens from the Indivisibilité section and the main rue Saint-Antoine. … Tired of the little success of reason, I had the cannon pointed at the barricade, resolved on rapid fire if I was not obeyed within three minutes. Finally, the column managed to reach the boulevard [Beaumarchais].
As Kilmaine explains, it might easily have been massacred, blocked as it was between the barricades and very inferior in number to the insurgents. It escaped only because the sans-culottes had no plan and no leader. Spontaneity is often a good counsellor for the offensive, but more rarely when it is a matter of defence against a force commanded by experienced officers like Kilmaine, who had fought at Valmy and Jemmapes.
During these discussions the position of the troops became increasingly untenable. In places, officers refused to open fire, and there were growing signs of fraternization between the soldiers of the line – despised by the guards and less well treated – and the insurgents. This is one of the effects of a war of barricades: the moment of tension before confrontation is propitious for discussions in which the insurgents may be able to convince the soldiers to put an end to a fratricidal struggle.
A house under construction in the rue Aubry-le-Boucher facilitated the execution of our means of defence; wooden scaffolding and rubble, along with paving-stones that were constantly being taken up, were piled up at prodigious speed; a large quantity of rubble, carried on people’s backs in scuttles that were found in the building, was used to fill the gaps and consolidate the work. A very large flour cart that we had overturned and filled with cobbles made up around half of the Saint-Merry barricade. Finally, two hours later, our first two barricades were nearly six feet thick and five feet high, and crenelated all along their length. ... The entrenched camp of Saint-Merry, however, held fast. ‘From all sides,’ Jeanne wrote, ‘people brought us packets of powder and some bullets; we had removed the lead from the gutters; but with all that, we had to make bullets and cartridges.’ He put the young people to work and established a dressing station in the house at no. 30:
This first duty accomplished, I kept inside the barricades forty men armed with rifles, as well as the four or five youngsters who would not abandon this post, and I divided up the rest of my brothers in arms, almost all armed with hunting rifles and carbines, in various houses from which they could destroy a large number of our enemies by a crossfire from above, while the barricade fighters stopped them by a sustained and well-supplied fire.
The situation became critical, especially as munitions were beginning to run out. Jeanne proposed to his comrades to flee while there was still time, but all of them wanted to die at their post:
The rue Saint-Merry was already occupied by the troops of the line; a large number of troops were advancing through the rue Saint-Martin from the quays, and to top the difficulty of an already desperate position, a cannon positioned at the end of the rue Aubry-le-Boucher was starting to fire very heavily on the crossroads by no. 30. ‘My friends,’ I said to those around me, ‘if we go into the house we will be taken and shot; we still hold the rue Maubuée and only have facing us a company of conscripts. Let’s run against them and try to break through by bayonet!’
At the head of a dozen men, Jeanne managed to break through the lines. A hail of crockery, flowerpots and household objects slowed down the pursuing soldiers (‘I heard it said’, wrote Jeanne, ‘that even a piano had been dropped’), and the group succeeded in taking refuge in a friendly house, from where they heard the fusillade continuing. The last defenders of no. 30, those who had not been able to escape over the roofs, were massacred on the spot – like Enjolras and Grantaire in Les Misérables, after the barricade in the rue de la Chanverie was taken.
‘It was the best blood of France that ran in the rue Saint-Martin, and I do not believe that there was better fighting at Thermopylae than at the mouth of the alley of Saint-Merry and Aubry-le-Boucher, where at the last a handful of some sixty Republicans fought against sixty thousand troops of the line and National Guards,’ wrote Heine in his report of 16 June.10
In what has now become a tourist district, nothing, no monument or plaque, recalls the memory of these heroes of the barricades of June 1832. And yet thanks to Heine, to Hugo, even to the letter of Charles Jeanne, this remains a living memory for us.
This great diversity, however, did not mean incoherence, and the accepted term of the ‘springtime of peoples’ is justified by the many common features between the various revolts: hatred of absolutism and the European system established by the Congress of Vienna, as well as the quasi-general diffusion of a procedure that represented both a symbolic form and a military disposition: the barricade.
The term ‘export’ used in the title of this chapter is not arbitrary: its agents were the tens of thousands of political refugees in Paris – Italians, Hungarians, Poles and Germans. They returned to their home countries in the earliest days of the movement, and explained the mode of construction and use of the barricade which they had learned from their Paris comrades.
However, amidst this general retreat the year 1849 still had a number of surprises in store. One of these episodes has remained famous, not so much on account of its political importance but rather because of the participation of two major figures, Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin. In Dresden, capital of the kingdom of Saxony, Friedrich-August dissolved the chamber he had been forced to accept and called on the Prussian army to help defeat the liberal opposition. In response to this news, on 3 May 1849, Dresden was covered with barricades.
poor men’s names, rescued from wholesale oblivion: Legénissel, an industrial draughtsman, Voisambert, a shoe-mender, Barthélemy, a mechanic, Marche, a worker on the Nord railway, Racary, also a mechanic, Hibruit, a hat-maker, Lahr and Daix, builders.3 Tocqueville was not mistaken: ‘In truth it was not a political struggle (in the sense in which we have used the word “political” up to now), but a class struggle, a sort of “Servile War”
this is the coolest: The workers also prepared for battle. Improvised powder workshops were constructed in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. Bullets were founded in sewing thimbles, and in the faubourg du Temple even a cannon was built.
In all the little streets around that building [the Hôtel de Ville] I found the people busy constructing barricades. They went about the work with the methodical skill of engineers, not taking up more paving-stones than were needed to provide squared stones for a solid and even fairly tidy wall, and they usually left a narrow opening by the houses to allow people to circulate.12
The repression was ferocious. Workers caught with weapons were shot on the spot; others were taken to police stations, barracks and the Luxembourg palace, which were turned into slaughterhouses. Witnesses spoke of rivers of blood, heaped bodies, manhunts and cold-blooded slaughter. The dead, at least 10,000, were thrown into the Seine, dumped in wells, or buried in mass graves.
Blanqui, who as noted was in prison during those days, drew the lessons of the defeat in his Instructions pour une prise d’armes, written in 1861. He castigated the Parisian barricade:
No point of leadership or overall command, not even consultation between the fighters. Each barricade has its particular group, more or less numerous but always isolated … Often there is not even a leader to direct the defence. The fighters just do what they like. They remain, they leave, they return, as they see fit. At night they go home to sleep. … ‘Let each defend his post, and all will be well’, the most solid ones say. This singular reasoning derives from the fact that the majority of insurgents fight in their own quarter, a capital error with disastrous consequences after defeat, especially in terms of denunciation by neighbours. For, with such a system, defeat is inevitable.
In June, the lack of a general command that Blanqui denounced led to a defensive battle of barricades. By this stage, however, such a battle could only be lost, since no barricade could withstand artillery fire. Most importantly, the military leaders had learned the lessons of past blunders. No longer engaging their troops in isolated skirmishes where they risked being contaminated by the insurrection, they launched massive operations in which any fraternization could be ruled out. As Blanqui put it, ‘while the insurgents smoked their pipes behind the paving-stones, the enemy successively concentrated all its forces on one point, then a second, a third, a fourth, and in this way exterminated the insurrection piece by piece.’

[tout · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title should probably be something more like "a brief technical history of barricades in France up to the Paris Commune". Additional strategic insights rather than mostly play by play tales of insurrectionary action would have been nice. A sense also that the French were the Prometheons who brought revolutionary fire to the world via revolutionary technologies seeps through, which feels a tad arrogant even if it is true. Enjoyable nonetheless and refreshingly partisan.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice and brief description of the Barricade in France. Hazan starts with the barricades of the 1600s and ends with failed barricade from the Paris Communes of the late 19th century. The book does a good job of getting straight to the point and does not go into too much detail that may make it a little distracting. Finally, the cool part of the idea of the barricade is that it has often come about"organically" through the people rather than a more tactical decision by a ruling body.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly technical description of Parisian insurrections, pivoting around the construction of barricade networks. Thankfully, much colour added through the writer's clear empathetic passion for their cause, and his contextual knowledge of the political and cultural context in which these notable events occurred. Light on theory. Keep a map nearby while reading.

[Electric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not care for the structure, but thats because I did not know the specific details of the episodes he was referencing. Still of course a very interesting and pretty unique historical essay on the barricade up to the Paris Commune of 1871. Would have liked a little more contextualization and specifics of the barricade as a military tactic. See also: Budas Wagon by Mike Davis.

[Kai · Rating 2 out of 5]

parochially parisian, mostly consists of dry descriptions of a series of barricades with little to no attempt to analyze how they might be understood to be connected. only in the last few pages is an attempt made to derive meaning from these barricades as "symbolic" tactics, but it's halfhearted and uninteresting. pass on this one.

[Harry Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Enough of militarism! No more staff-officers with their gold-embroidered uniforms! Make way for the people, for the combatants bare-armed! The hour of the revolutionary war has struck . . . The people know nothing of learned manoeuvres. But when they have a gun in their hands and paving-stones under their feet, they fear not all the strategists of the monarchical school."

Good book.

[Arno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun enough overview of the (mainly Parisian) barricades through the centuries. Too bad there's no further analysis of their use and meaning, nor goes it beyond the 19th century. You also need enough historical background about the events themselves, because Hazan doesn't give all of it; often there's references to elements of significance without any context.

[Kelly Roache · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and recommended read that does what it says it will, profiling key incidents in extreme detail rather than establishing as much in the way of a narrative. But it is these latter bits that were the most fulfilling and left me wishing they had comprised more of the focus.

[Noah W · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant and concise history of the french barricade! clearly written and enjoyable, easy to understand and yet packed with information + anecdotes, thank you eric hazan

[Andrew Douglass]

The book is interesting enough, but I don’t have enough pre-existing knowledge of French history to feel like I follow the narrative.

[Francis Bass · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like A List of the Barricades (in Paris). Rarely any insights, no conclusion, just some stuff that happened. adequate.

[Wander Waals · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit dry summary of who blockaded which street at what time in Paris, not much of a story imo

[Miguelángel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leí el ebook, y quizás eso influya, pero al libro le hacen falta más mapas. Tiene uno muy básico por capítulo, pero es demasiado fácil perderse entre calles parisinas que, si uno no conoce, dicen nada. Muchos nombres de patriotas franceses pero poco contexto histórico.

Más allá de eso, lo encontré superficial en el análisis y un poco parco en las descripciones. Es interesante el tema y el libro tiene momentos que cumplen, pero en general me decepcionó un poco.

[Emilio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una muy legible historia de la organización popular centrada en el uso, ventajas y desventajas de la barricada. Centrado principalmente en París y asume un conocimiento básico de la Revolución Francesa y la historia Europea del Siglo XIX.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

A popular history of the barricade that nicely brings together the actual and symbolic uses of the barricade in the history of Paris, especially. Few surprises here for people familiar with 19th century revolutions, but a nice little book anyway.

[Matt Heil · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent short history of the barricade. Primarily focuses on its use in Paris, with a brief chapter on the use of the barricade in the 1848 revolutions.

[Olivia Raiche-tanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin. 3.5*

[Isabel]

Quand la version française est introuvable dans son coin du monde ... on se rabat sur la trés bonne tradution.
Une excellente façon de revoir certaines parties de son histoire de France et d'Europe.