Passage Thiaffait

This guide to Passage Thiaffait in Lyon traces the crooked stone corridor a philanthropist cut through the Croix-Rousse hillside in 1827, and the silk weavers, the canuts, who once carried finished cloth downhill through passages just like it, sheltered from the rain. It follows the labor revolts they staged in 1831 and 1834, the first great labor uprisings in French history, and the traboule's later turn as an escape route soldiers could never map. By the 1980s the passage had fallen into two decades of decay, boarded windows and empty workshops.