From Street Fight to State Right
The mass of individuals that the smallest military unit ofers
the eye, united in a common voyage.
\- Clausewitz, 1806
IN EVERY REVOLUTION there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1 848: "The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity. " Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that "they called to the streets, and the streets killed them. " The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.
For the mass of unemployed, demobilized workers without an occupation, Paris is a tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and avenues in which they roam, for the most part, with neither goal nor destination, subject to a police repression intended to control their wanderings. For the various revolutionary groups, as for the
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