Refusing workers’ rights of combination broke the Jacobin’s urban support base.

Evidence

Maintaining the Le Chapelier law, they were not willing to concede to the workers the right of combination; as a consequence they had to pass the law of the maximum . 85 They thus broke the Paris urban bloc: their assault forces, assembled in the Commune, dispersed in disappointment, and Thermidor gained the upper hand. The Revolution had found its widest class limits. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 476

Categorization

• XREF: The notion that a political bloc’s widest limits are set by class-boundary concessions prefigures later theory on how universalist projects (republicanism, secularism) hit limits at specific exclusions.