Barricades rue Saint-Maur. Avant l’attaque, 25 juin 1848.

Les journées de Juins (or the June Days uprisings) of 1848 were a brief but violent workers’ revolt in Paris against the conservative turn of the newly established French Republic. Though certainly not the first political upheaval in a city long defined by rebellion, these four days marked a consequential moment: the first known instance of a photograph appearing alongside a newspaper article. This image, attributed to Charles-François Thibault and printed in the French paper L’Illustration, captured not only the makeshift nature of the barricades (note the piled cobbles and the toppled wagon), but also the atmosphere of palpable suspense.

The use of barricades in revolutionary France was already widely known, but their photographic documentation signified a fundamental shift. No longer confined to textual accounts or interpretive, oftentimes propagandistic illustrations, political conflict — framed and frozen in silver nitrate — now bore the evidentiary weight of the camera. Through the 19th century camera lens, world events were not simply narrated; the revolution was now seen, demanding new ways of bearing witness to spectacle that irrevocably changed the nature of public life.