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Faubourg Saint-Antoine

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine was one of the traditional suburbs of Paris, France, now divided by the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine between the 11th arrondissement and 12th arrondissement. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine was the site of the 1652 Battle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine during the Fronde rebellion. After 1657, King Louis XIV's letters of patent exempted from the qualification of mastership all artisans and tradespeople who lived there, leading to the boom of the woodworking trade in the Faubourg. Skilled German and Flemish artisans moved to the faubourg and worked as carvers, gilders, polishers, turners and cabinetmakers. Throughout the French Revolution, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine became the home base of the radical working-class sans-culottes, and the people of its Quinze-Vingts and Montreuil sections took part in the 10 August insurrection of 1792 and the 2 August 1793 purge of the Girondins. The Revolt of 1 Prairial Year III began in the faubourg, where, for the first and only time during the French Revolution, the rebellious locals erected barricades before being forced to surrender after a military siege; the savage repression of the sans-culotte rebellion ended their influence over revolutionary politics. During the 1830 July Revolution, one of Auguste Marmont's French Army columns was sent into the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the initially found peaceful; the locals instead complained about over-priced bread, unemployment, and economic distress. As the column made its way to the Hôtel de Ville to relieve their comrades, they found that the Parisians had barricaded all the streets, trapping them deep in the east end of Paris without water, wine, food, or ammunition. The Faubourg continued to serve as a hotbed of leftism, and it was the last neighborhood to capitulate to the military during the June Days uprising of 1848, after being heavily shelled from artillery in the Place de la Bastille area and then attacked by troops from Popincourt on 26 June 1848. Under Napoleon III, the Fauborg was divided between two arrondissements with new street names, but the locals continued to use the old street names and continued to hold radical views even as late as the Dreyfus affair of the 1790s.

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