Despite their remarkable demographic growth, large provincial cities do not feature prominently in early labour history. Given their increasing complexity, large cities (with half a million inhabitants or more by the late nineteenth century) seemed unsuited for united endeavour: such ‘grandes villes’ lacked the structural foundations for collective action found in small and single-industry townships where communal loyalty reinforced occupational solidarity. As this essay shows, however, the size and complexity of large cities did not necessarily impede trade union development. Indeed, workers could take advantage of the metropolitan atmosphere, utilising the facilities of an agitational infrastructure – public venues, the press, the presence of intellectuals, speakers and activists – to coordinate and enhance local neighbourhood and workplace networks. (This metropolitan public political space was also open to the advocates of female emancipation, a cause which attracted considerable early support in large cities.) Furthermore, large cities were keen to assert their own identity and their provincial pre-eminence, a double-aspect cultural process which awaits adequate historical deconstruction. While distinguishing themselves from the capital, ‘grandes villes’ placed themselves at the forefront of wider, more representative national trends. As this essay suggests, in such proud ‘second capitals’ as Liverpool, Lyon and Munich, the development of the labour movement tended both to prefigure and accentuate the respective national ‘model’.

Although entirely arbitrary, the selection of Liverpool, Lyon and Munich as the ‘grandes villes’ has proved a fortunate choice for comparative labour history. Any other group of cities, it must be admitted, might have produced very different findings. At first sight, the chosen cities seem outside the scope of conventional labour history. None of the three was essentially industrial or ‘proletarian’: there was an absence of huge factories and large employers. Each city was multi-functional, a pattern emphasised by the inexorable (and complementary) growth of the ‘white collar’ lower middle class and of the ‘uniformed’ working class (‘semi-skilled’ workers in public transport and utilities). Traditional urban dwellers, whether artisan craft workers or the bourgeois professions and patriciate, were steadily outnumbered and/or displaced. In these (and other) respects Liverpool, Lyon and Munich were altogether more ‘modern’ and complex than the mono-industrial towns and medium-sized ‘polyactive’ towns privileged in most accounts of ‘labour's turning-point’. As pointers to the future, they surely merit special attention.