Temporary sites of resistance: the barricade and commemorating revolution in the modern city

For those of us who work on Paris in the nineteenth century, perhaps the most obvious symbol and site of resistance is the insurgent barricade. Yet these constructions were, by their very essence, impermanent, and therefore invisible in the city’s present-day monumental and commemorative landscape. The barricade and its history have already been the subject of considerable research and discussion, so in this roundtable I would like to considethe relationship between this fundamentally temporary object – as symbol and as space of resistance – and the ways in which modern Paris’s reputation as a capital of revolution have been articulated and memorialised.