3-028-322 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Street Characters of Paris: the Faubourg St. Antoine, 1870. [Behind the boulevards,]...there rises a formidable working city with a laborious and evidently largely suffering population...one in every sixteen [Parisians] is in receipt of public charity...The majority of the working population of the quarter are either cabinetmakers or else engaged in some branch of trade connected with that industry; and it is one of those streams of workpeople, emanating at the dinner-hour from some large furniture manufactory, which has furnished the subject of our Artist's sketch. The central figure, with the large slouched hat and beard, is one of those old Republicans who defended the barricade...during the coup-d'etat of 1851. In the group of old...we have some small shopkeepers of the neighbourhood...the young woman in the waterproof [is] a seamstress...A considerable proportion of the working population of the Faubourg St. Antoine are either provincials or foreigners, the latter being for the most part Germans... whatever universal suffrage and a strong Government and twenty years' of demolitions and rebuildings may have done for other classes of Parisians, they have not ameliorated in any sensible degree the condition of the working population'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.