To understand what is meant by the revanchist city, it is instructive to look back to the birthplace of revanchism: late-nineteenth-century Paris. [Page 666]Revanchists (from the French word revanche, meaning revenge) were a group of bourgeois nationalist reactionaries opposed to the liberalism of the Second Republic, the decadence of the monarchy, and especially the socialist uprising of the Paris Commune, where the working classes took over from the defeated government of Napoleon III and controlled the city for months. The revan-chists (led by poet-turned-soldier Paul Deroulede and the Ligue des Patriotes) were determined to reinstate the bourgeois order with a strategy that fused militarism and moralism and claims about restoring public order on the streets. They hunted down enemies (the Communards) with a noxious blend ...