Croix-Rousse appears as the setting of a workers’ victory that swiftly collapses into bewilderment and defeat. Its significance lies not simply in the riot, but in the workers’ inability to turn victory into a changed social order: they return home without knowing what to do, and the regular army has little trouble overcoming them.

Setting and Workers’ Revolt

The passage identifies the workers at Croix-Rousse in the aftermath of a riot. They have won, but their victory supplies no clear next step. Returning home bewildered, they fail to make use of their success, leaving the regular army able to overcome them without difficulty. The location is therefore associated with a reversal: a moment of apparent triumph gives way to the restoration of military power.

Suffering and the Possibility of Change

The episode forms part of an argument about how people apprehend hardship. The workers’ misfortunes do not appear to them as merely habitual; they appear natural, as the conditions that simply constitute a worker’s life. Because suffering is integrated into their sense of being, they endure it without standing back to consider it or giving it a value that could motivate action. To suffer and to be are, in this account, one and the same for them.

Action becomes possible when a different state of affairs can be conceived. The worker must imagine a possible happiness for the class and view the present situation in the light of that possibility. This double act of negation makes the existing order appear alterable rather than natural, and suffering can then be recognized as intolerable. The passage thus links the defeat at Croix-Rousse to a broader distinction between enduring hardship as an unquestioned condition and acting after imagining that life could be otherwise.