The barricade in public recollection, as well as in the historical imagination, is at the same time synonymous with, a synthetic description of, and a symbol of revolution, reminiscent of Benjamin's poetic invocation in his famous pages dedicated to Baudelaire's urban landscape: “magic cobblestones rise up to form fortresses.” Mark Traugott is a sociologist-historian who specializes in nineteenth-century French history and author of a well-known book on the Parisian insurrection of 1848 (Armies of the Poor, Princeton University Press, 1985). With his new book he asks us to pay attention to the history of the insurgent barricade as a significant and long-lasting form of contention well entrenched in the history of Europe.

The perspective through which Traugott reconsiders the topic is a broad one: chronologically it spans the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and spatially it includes all of Europe, though France and Paris are the essential focus. His approach is also distinctly interdisciplinary: narratively constructed chapters are followed by sections that attempt to quantify barricade occurrences (see the database of European barricade events on pages 243–312), and chapters based on historical explanations precede others marked by a sociological imprint. (The author worked closely with the late Charles Tilly on the concepts of “repertoires,” “routines,” and “cycles” of collective action).

The book has an ambitious aim: to resurrect the complexity of a form of struggle that is embedded in values, practical functions, social attitudes (like that toward the building of solidarity), and symbolic meanings. In a sense, it is an attempt to bring back to life the old annaliste ideal of total history. The sources Traugott skillfully manipulates are consequently varied, ranging from diaries to governmental notes, literary descriptions to administrative dossiers. The result is a book that is intriguing and stimulating, and in some ways surprising.

Contrary to what one might expect, the volume does not focus on the modern history of barricades: the well known Paris revolts of 1830, 1848, and 1871 take up less room than Traugott's analysis à rebours of the Parisian insurrections of 1789, 1648, and 1588. He shows that the role of the barricades during the entire revolutionary period of 1789–1795 has been neglected. Here he joins the group of scholars who are searching for the nature of popular protest by emphasizing, with Charles Tilly, the remarkable continuity of the patterns of crowd action, as opposed to those that, with William Sewell, underscore the rupture in the style of contention after the French Revolution.

The painstaking search for the origins of the “barricades-phenomenon” projects the reader into France between 1570 and 1588 when the “thing” and the term (derived from barriques, wine barrels filled with earth for use as barriers) were first invented. However, the many and interesting pages devoted to this search are tainted by a tendency to overemphasize elements that gain importance only in hindsight. Even if the term was still to be invented, barricades were known well before 1588, particularly in late medieval Italian communes. The Parisian “invention” of this system of urban defense appears less innovative if it is viewed from a past perspective and not as an adumbration of the future.