emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

fragility of power when men at last cease to defend it. Henri
Lefebvre plausibly describes what happened:
[Between men / 109]
«The dense crowd surrounds the soldiers and paralyses
the transportation of the cannons. Knots of people form.
They club together to offer food and wine to the hungry
and thirsty men (they had not brought their kit bags). They
chat. They shout: 'Long live the army!' The bars and
cabarets are opened. Housewives go back up to fetch their
modest supplies and spread them on the tables for the
soldiers. The crowd fêtes and regales them. Some soldiers
even exchange their guns for a glass of wine. The
effervescent mass becomes a community, becomes
communion.
The women openly criticise the officers; they address them
without worrying about hierarchy and without a trace of
military respect: 'Where are you taking these cannons? To
Berlin?' The ranks broke, closed up again, broke again,
under the cries and threats of the officers.
General Lecomte realises too late the danger the throng
presents for his troops, submerging them, throwing them
back into everyday life. He has forgotten, if ever he knew it,
one of the tactical principles of civil war: never let soldiers
come into contact with civilians. He gives the order to fire if
the crowd approaches to within thirty steps around 8.30
a.m. and he is not obeyed.» [7]
From mutiny to barricades, the town rose up. During the whole
of that day, there was only one real fight, at Place Pigalle,
lasting barely twenty minutes. Paris woke up the following
morning without a state. There was neither army nor police
force, for those who remained had fled to Versailles under cover
of darkness. On that day, did women still have to rise early to
fetch the milk? History is silent about that. But it does tell us
how men immediately began to reconstruct power through a
central committee, and how it was subsequently reestablished
as a republic after a bloodbath in which 30,000 men and women
were shot on the orders of butcher Adolphe Thiers.
[110 / Holy virility]
Up till now, men have always guarded power well, either as they
benefited by submitting to it, or as they have reproduced it by
fighting it. All the rebellions and revolutions in the past were
defeated by their own limitations. All they did was offer an
increasingly brighter glimmer of hope for our future. Those
which were supposedly victorious did not signify much more
than a change of masters. However, if the taking over of the
economy by the bourgeoisie and its political consequences did
not really alter the hierarchical organisation of men and the
appropriation of women in Judeo-Christian patriarchy, it did
radically change their dynamics.