The use of informers and agents provocateurs by both the government and the police has not been uncommon in British history. Edward Thompson has made lengthy references to the employment of spies by the authorities in the period from 1790 to 1830. The highest levels of the London Corresponding Society were penetrated in 1794 by an informer known as “Citizen Groves”, and, following this, use was made of informers in combating the Luddite movement, and in the Pentridge Rising, the Despard and Spa Fields Affairs, and, most important of all, the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820. The use of political spies is also known to have occurred during the First World War and immediately afterwards, and allegations were made in Parliament in this respect during the period of the General Strike in 1926. The recent opening of the files of the Metropolitan Police for the 1930's has revealed that informers were also used during the unemployed disturbances of these years, in particular in the attempt to prevent the outbreak of violence during the marches on London organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM) in 1932, 1934 and 1936, and on the occasion of the National Joint Council of Labour demonstration in Hyde Park in February 1933, although in these instances it has not been possible to establish the identity of the person or persons concerned.

The task of this paper is to examine trade union policy and the 1852 lock-out in the British engineering industry. The focus of attention will be upon the development of worker militancy and how this led to the lock-out. Although a history of the British engineering worker has long been extant, the causes of the 1852 dispute remain controversial. In The Story of the Engineers, J. B. Jefferys emphasizes the opposition of workers to systematic overtime and piece-work. Henry Pelling, in a more recent work, attributes the dispute to the opposition of skilled men to the employment of unskilled labour. I hope this paper throws more light on the origins of the 1852 lock-out.

Historians of the Second Republic have long given over stage center in their accounts to Paris. Indeed, the role of the capital in most histories of the period has been so great that we often seem to be reading not about the French revolution of 1848, but the Parisian revolution. Correspondingly, the role of the provinces has rarely been recognized: Paris acts and France reacts. It is from Paris, not only the seat of government but also France's most important and most turbulent city, that all the great revolutionary stimuli proceed. Until lately, we have been accustomed to thinking of the provinces as conditioned to salivate at the sound of the Parisian bell – voting in negative response to Parisian radicalism, sending off volunteers to help crush the June insurgents, and so forth.