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Description of  The Making of the Citizen-Worker: Labour and the Borders of Politics in Post-revolutionary France (Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France)

Over the course of the 19th century, European societies started thinking of themselves as civilisations of work. In the wake of the political and industrial revolutions, labour as a human activity and condition gradually came to embody a general principle of order, progress, and governance. How did work become so central to our systems of citizenship and social recognition? The book addresses this question by considering the French context in the long transition between the 1789 and 1848 revolutions and focusing on a specific fragment of history in the early 1830s marked by a pandemic crisis and the first consequences of industrialisation. It combines the analysis of both political institutions and social movements to retrace the rise of a labour-based social contract revolving around the citizen-worker as the quintessential subject of rights. Read more