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The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era

University of California Press

In presenting excerpts from the autobiographies of seven nineteenth-century French workers, this volume invites the reader to enter a world to which direct access is difficult to obtain in any other way. The limited body of memoirs written by wage-earning men and women, many of them self-educated, is remarkable for the evocative quality of the narratives they present. This collection includes some of the finest examples to have survived from the early industrial age in France. Taken individually, each of these texts highlights the fascinating testimony of a person whose dual status as both worker and author gives voice to the sentiments of those who more often lived in anonymity. Taken collectively, these memoirs become a window on the world of the working class at a crucial moment in its transformation into an independent economic and political force in French society.

These authors offer a perspective on their era that is unique in at least two respects. First, drawing upon their own experience, they describe in great detail the everyday activities of ordinary workers. Second, they add a subjective dimension to the information they impart, conveying their private thoughts and often passionate reactions to the events that marked their lives. The autobiographer's act of reconstructing what his or her existence has meant lends it the coherence of a "life lived whole."1 To be sure, this coherence is achieved in part through the selective embellishment or excision of certain life experiences. The result is an apparently seamless raiment of just the sort that we each weave to clothe ourselves before others. For just this reasonthat it is a very human creation much

The phrase is borrowed from Charles Lemert, "Whole Life Theory," Theory and Society 15, no. 3 (1986): 43142.

like the ones we ourselves continually fabricate and mendthe autobiographical account offers a privileged point of access, allowing us to don the apron and step into the shoes of a worker who inhabited a period and a culture both like and unlike our own. Because we meet the protagonists on a personal footing, we are better able to discern and appreciate the blend of similarities and differences.

For those who read them (as for those who write them), autobiographies may serve quite different purposes. From a literary or "discourse" perspective, memoirs may constitute ends in themselves, texts worthy of study for what they reveal of cultural conventions. In this introduction, however, as in the task of editing the original book-length texts for this anthology, I have chosen to view these sources as a vehicle for deepening and completing our knowledge of how French workers of the previous century lived and labored.2 The seven texts are described in summary terms in table 1 (pp. 45), and the map (opposite) shows places mentioned in each. Some of these texts are acknowledged classics of the literature on nineteenth-century workers; others have only recently been published or reprinted in French. Virtually all have, of course, long been available to specialists in the history of France, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that extensive segments of any have been translated into English. For this reason, the present volume both opens these texts to a broader audience and creates the opportunity for new perspectives to emerge. Used in combination with the collections published by Burnett, Bonnell, and Kelly, the present work will be particularly useful to those who wish to undertake the comparative study of class formation in Europe by weighing the direct testimony of British, French, German, and Russian workers.3

The distinction between texts as means and as ends is adapted from an observation made by Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre: L'Autobiographie de la littrature aux mdias (Paris, 1980), p. 273. It is, of course, impossible to separate the two perspectives completely, since the form and content of a text and the conditions in which it is produced are inextricably linked. Though these issues are discussed in the third part of this introduction, mention of the particularizing circumstances under which the manuscripts were written is largely confined to the brief introductory notes to each chapter.

John Burnett, ed., The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working-Class People, 18201920 (Bloomington, 1974), and Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education, and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1982); Victoria E. Bonnell, ed., The Russian Worker: Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley, 1983); and Alfred Kelly, ed., The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley, 1987). A useful bibliography of British working-class autobiographies can be found in David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (London, 1981).

Nineteenth-Century France. The shaded areas are the departments where the
authors were born or raised; the numbers correspond to the chapter numbers.

This collection will also enable the reader to form a clearer picture of working-class life during France's turbulent nineteenth century.4 To provide a context for interpreting the authors' autobiographical accounts, this introductory essay begins with an overview of the forces at work in French society in the age of industrialization, and goes on to sketch what daily life

I have chosen to regard the nineteenth century as beginning with the demise of the Old Regime around 1789. This slightly elongated nineteenth century roughly corresponds to the period in which French society witnessed the accelerated capitalist expansion associated with early industrialization. The seven workers chosen for this book make up a group whose members were economically active across the entire period in question. My interest in the interrelationship between the realms of work and collective action led me to focus on the authors' years of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, corresponding to the periods in which their socialization, training, and identity formation as workers took place.