Abstract

The article focuses on that process of political subjectivation which took the name of ‘labour movement’ and on the emergence of the concept of ‘working class’. It sets out from the Lyonnais weavers’ insurrection of November 1831, which historians have generally envisaged as marking the symbolic point of origin of the modern workers’ movement in Europe. Different historical readings of this event are retraced to show how they have nurtured different ways of understanding the idea of labour movement and the very notion of working class. These readings and theories are then set in relation with sources of the 1830s in order to frame an original interpretation of the genesis of the labour movement. By drawing upon working-class, republican, and socialist sources, the article retraces the reception of the concept of ‘class’ in these discursive fields and investigates how the latter assigned a new, social meaning to this notion by setting it in relation to other terms such as ‘people’, ‘proletariat’, and ‘workers’. In such a way, it describes the emergence of the ‘collective singular’ working class as a unitary representation within which the still heterogeneous universe of the subaltern classes was able to identify and envisage itself as a collective subjectivity. Hence, the rise of the labour movement is framed as a subjectivation process developed first of all on the level of political discourse. The argument is that the genesis of this subjectivity can be understood as a ‘discursive formation and practice’ aimed at redefining the boundaries of the political field by including work conditions and issues.