To Live Working or to Die Fighting: The Canut Revolts

The story of how silk workers in Lyon heralded a new era of class-based radical struggle...

Far to the southeast of Paris, Lyon’s silk industry was world-famous, and it played a key role in the development of French capitalism during the early nineteenth century.
 
This process created big profits for the Lyonnais bourgeoisie, but it also concentrated large numbers of French workers in and around the city.
 
By the 1830s, half of the population of Lyon depended on the silk industry.
 
But silk wasn’t a dependable commodity. As a luxury item, the silk sector was volatile and its workforce were the first to suffer from a decline in demand in the wider economy.
 
Meanwhile, French politics was increasingly turbulent, too. 
 
The attempted restoration of the Ancien Regime after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 had failed. 
 
In July 1830 the restored Bourbon monarchy was overthrown by a new revolution, and replaced by the more liberal constitutionalist monarchy of the Duke of Orleans. 
 
But this settlement still left a lot French citizens unhappy. 
 
In addition to reactionary Bourbon partisans and the advocates of a new Bonapartist regime, there were radical republicans still loyal to the dream of 1789.
 
These two headwinds, class struggle and political discontent, came together in Lyon in October 1831.

Economic downturn had made silk prices tumble, and hundreds of silk weavers – the canuts – united to demand that the local government implement a minimum price on silk, to stop falling wages and job losses.
 
But when this was agreed by the local prefect, more than a hundred big manufacturers refused to budge. 
 
Shifting the costs of economic decline onto the workers rather than their own profits suited the bosses just fine.
 
So, on 21 November 1831, the silk weavers seized control of the commune of Croix-Rousse outside Lyon and from there marched on the city proper. 
 
They were flying the Black Flag that would soon become the symbol of anarchism in Europe, just as the Merthyr Uprising in South Wales, also in 1831, pioneered the use of the Red Flag of socialism.
 
The working-class Lyonnais rebels took the town barracks, armed themselves, and drove the government forces out of town. Many National Guardsmen switched sides to join them. 
 
Lyon was now ruled by its workers. But it wouldn’t last. 
 
Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon’s best generals, was sent to Lyon to restore order with 20,000 soldiers. The canuts knew they were beat, and agreed to surrender the city. 
 
But the uprising wasn’t over yet.

Just three years later there was an even more boisterous uprising, this time against the silk bosses’ attempts to halt wage rises during an economic boom. 
 
The government continued to see old enemies – republicans, Bonapartists, Bourbon Legitimists – behind every striking worker in Lyon. 
 
But they were missing the point. 
 
Sure, there was increased cooperation between the striking canuts and the republican underground. 
 
But the struggle in Lyon was also of an entirely new kind: class struggle. 
 
This wasn’t just the old struggle of republican versus royalist – this was proletariat versus bourgeoisie, fighting to overthrow or maintain French capitalism. 
 
It was the signal for a new era of French radical history, led by the French working class. 
 
In 1871, it was to the canuts of Lyon that the legendary communards of the Paris Commune looked back for a model of working-class urban insurrection.
 
So, too, did their wealthy enemies. 
 
The tactics used to crush the Canut Revolt of 1834 – evacuate the town, then bombard and reconquer it from the outside – were the template for the bloody defeat of the communards forty years later. 
 
A new chapter had begun in French radical history, and for once it wasn’t Paris leading the way. 
 
The first step of the modern French working class was taken by the radical silk weavers of Lyon.