Mark Traugott's Armies Of The Poor

In his book, “Armies of the Poor,” Mark Traugott examines the motivations behind insurrection and loyalty amidst the June Days of France’s Second Republic. The June Days were preceded by the February Days in which the monarchy under Louis Philippe was overthrown by a popular uprising. The new moderate Republican government promised to create institutions that would alleviate unemployment in Paris. The most important of these institutions were the Mobile Guard and the National Workshops. Both organizations recruited the Parisian unemployed for their memberships. Unfortunately, these measures by the government were only somewhat effective, and eventually lead to a violent uprising by the Parisian workforce. Thus, Traugott argues that in the four …show more content…
The National Workshops, as they were known, were created to solve the same three problems that the Mobile Guard did. According to Traugott, membership in this new organization was expected to peak at 12,000, but enrollments eventually settled at 120,000 (Traugott 121). These numbers, while unexpected, did not change the structure of the National Workshops, but it caused issues later on. The rank and file were comprised of all sectors of the Parisian working class. Like the Mobile Guard, the National Workshops were organized in a military style structure with an officer corps. However, this officer corps was drawn only from students who attended the Ecole Centrale school in Paris. Thus, the officer corps was unified based on fraternal association from their time spent in school. The result of this organizational technique was an officer corps that reigned in the more radical workers, which ensured the loyalty of the National …show more content…
Therefore, I strongly agreed with his refutations of other hypothesis based on the evidence he provided. For example, he directly refuted Marx’s hypothesis with data that showed that the Mobile Guard did not overwhelmingly employ men who could be considered lumpenproletariat. Thus, Traugott justified his organizational hypothesis through refutation. However, Traugott did leave space for more research into the subject. For example, he did not discuss broader economic policy in the moderate Republic to better understand why the National Workshops were never able to employ more than 14,000 Parisians a day. Additional research in this area would strengthen Traugott’s argument if he were able to link economic policy to the decision to dissolve the National Workshops, which he argued was the tipping point in the Workshop’s political