Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Traugott is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis (1978) and Armies of the Poor (1985).

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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.

(table continued on next page)

(table continued from previous page)

was like for nineteenth-century French workers. It then discusses the criteria and strategy employed in selecting these autobiographies, before going on to show how such sources can be used to interpret the patterns of economic and political change that took place in the period.

On the eve of the Revolution of 178994, the members of French society had little inkling of the momentous changes in the offing. The overthrow and execution of Louis XVI represented no more than the initial phase of a century-long period of civil strife. Though the country would ultimately emerge with a heightened sense of national and cultural unity, traditional social relations were upset by new and dynamic forms of economic activity. These eventually increased the wealth of the society as a whole, but they were often introduced at the expense of the security and well-being of ordinary workers. To understand the experiences of those who lived in this eventful period, we need to examine the interrelated demographic, economic, and political influences which shaped them.

Demographic Dislocation

At the fall of the Old Regime, the size of the population of France was rivaled, among European nations, only by that of Russia. A century and a quarter later, the French population had increased from 27.5 to 40 million inhabitants. Despite this substantial increase in absolute numbers, France lagged so far behind its neighbors in its rate of growth that it had been dwarfed by Russia and surpassed by both Germany and the United Kingdom, where the population had more than tripled in the interim (see table 2).

In the 1830s, a newborn child had slightly higher than a one in six chance of dying before its first birthday, a statistic that changed little before the end of the century.5 Yet French rates of infant mortality, however high

According to Brian R. Mitchell, there were 176.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in the 1830s. The comparable figure for the 1890s was 165.7 deaths. See European Historical Statistics, 17501970 (London, 1981), pp. 13738.

by today's standard, do not explain the difference in population growth, for they were similar to those of other European nations. In fact, the relative demographic stagnation of France was largely the result of a rate of birth (just over 25 per year per 1,000 population, on average, during the nineteenth century) that was roughly half that of Russia and consistently remained the lowest in Europe.6 France saw itself being outdistanced by its European neighbors but was unable to reverse this unfavorable demographic trend.7

Just as consequential as changes in the total population were currents of migration within the borders of France. By midcentury, with the construction of railroads, the digging of canals, and improvements in the speed and reliability of the mails, not just the number of French citizens but also the rate at which they were brought into mutual contact was rapidly increasing. Many were drawn from rural areas to the cities, where they expected to earn higher wages and take part in the brawling, vital social life of Paris,

Ibid., pp. 116ff. Scholarly debates over the causes of the declining birth rate have pointed to factors as diverse as the French Revolution's promulgation of inheritance laws prescribing the equal division of property among heirs, and the changing family structures associated with industrialization. Even a simple summary of this literature lies far beyond what can be attempted in this introduction.

Rates of emigration abroad, primarily to the New World, provide an indirect indication of the demographic pressure in various European countries. During the second half of the nineteenth century, emigrants from Germany numbered just under four million, and those from the United Kingdom (including Ireland) exceeded ten million. In the same period, just 300,000 French citizens emigrated. See Mitchell, European Historical Statistics , p. 145.

Lyon, Marseille, and other centers of commercial and cultural activity. The actual number of people living in the countryside remained fairly constant at about twenty million between 1789 and 1914; but whereas at the beginning of this period the rural sector represented 82 percent of the French population, it accounted for just 56 percent at the end.8 Thus, virtually the entire net increase was experienced in urban areas.

The displacement of the population took various forms. A mason like Martin Nadaud fitted the pattern of seasonal migrants, workers who came to the city for several months at a time, typically at the height of the construction cycle when their skills were much in demand. During the slack season, they would usually return home to join their families in agricultural labors. Other workers made a permanent jump from the countryside to a large metropolitan area in a single move; but more frequent were chain migrations, which took the rural resident from the farm to a small town and then perhaps to a regional center, before he or she ventured on to one of France's leading cities. In a corresponding fashion, a family's transition to urban life might be undertaken in stages, with first the husband, then an older and employable son, and finally the wife and younger children arriving over a period of months or years. Disappointed hopes caused a small fraction to return home almost immediately, and a few eventually realized their long-term ambition of retiring to the village in which they had grown up; but these were merely eddies in a flow that could not be stemmed. Though many of the newly arrived city dwellers would long maintain their ties with the earth from which they sprang, thus bringing even the most isolated regions increasingly within the city's sphere of influence, the migratory currents continued virtually unchecked throughout the nineteenth century.

Those who participated in the great rural exodus, especially during the middle years of the century, commonly encountered new living conditions which we might think appalling. Because the stock of urban housing was inadequate to accommodate the flood of new residents, dense overcrowding was the rule in working-class quarters. Sanitation practices were often primitive, with no consistent provision for street cleaning, garbage disposal, or the removal of human waste. Such conditions encouraged the spread of a number of diseasesmalaria, diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox, even dysentery and croupthat claimed lives on a regular basis. An epidemic of cholera in 1832, for example, killed 100,000 people in France, including 18,000 in the poorer districts of Paris alone; the disease returned

See Jean-Claude Gegot, La Population franaise aux XIX et XX sicles (Paris, 1989), p. 25. He uses the traditional but relatively conservative definition of the rural sector as comprising communes of less than 2,000 inhabitants.

in still more virulent form in 1849. The public health facilities available in most cities, though superior to what was found in rural areas, were incapable of attending to the medical needs of so many impoverished people. Yet the influx continued virtually without interruption throughout the nineteenth century.

It is important to appreciate the role of Paris as the primate city, one which dominated all aspects of French society. In 1811, some 623,000 people lived within the city limits, a population nearly six times greater than that of France's second largest city, Lyon. By 1851, there were one million residents of Paris proper, a figure that exceeded the combined total of the nine next largest cities of France. By the end of the nineteenth century, the greater Paris region had a population of three and a half million and accounted for over 28 percent of the urban, and 9 percent of the total population of France.9 To translate the numerical preponderance of Paris into terms that fit the contemporary United States, we would have to imagine a metropolitan area of roughly twenty-five million persons. In actuality, there has never been anything comparable in the American experience to the hegemony which Paris exercisedand exercises stillin France. In addition to being by far the largest city, it was also the seat of government, the locus of all administrative and judicial control, the hub of commerce, the site of origination for most important artistic and creative activities, the focal point of the country's system of transport and communication, and the home of the nation's principal cultural and educational institutions. For all these reasons, Paris exerted a powerful attractive influence, making it the end destination for a sizable proportion of all rural migrants and ensuring that through most of the nineteenth century, persons born in the capital constituted only a minority of its population. Changes in other French cities differed mainly in degree, with the result that the urban working class, most of whose members were no more than one generation removed from their rural village of origin, underwent a phenomenal increase in size in the course of the nineteenth century.

Economic Expansion

Between the time of the French Revolution and the last years of the nineteenth century, the French economy underwent a gradual but cumulatively far-reaching transformation. Impediments to the spread of capitalist relations, such as internal tariff barriers and the paternalist regulation of trades, were swept away; new domestic markets for manufactured goods

Georges Dupeux, Atlas historique de l'urbanisation de la France, 18111975 (Paris, 1981).

were developed; and the productive capacity of the economy as a whole increased significantly. The labor force in the cities grew at the expense of a slowly contracting agricultural sector, as migrants from the countryside, including an increasing proportion of women, took jobs in workshops and factories.

France blazed its own path in pursuit of economic development. The commercialization of agriculture, the adoption of power-driven machinery, and the shift to an economy of mass production all occurred at a more deliberate pace than in England, the first nation to undergo industrialization. And unlike Germany and Russia, which would overtake it toward the end of the period in question, France relied to a very limited extent on large factories employing masses of unskilled workers.

In fact, factories in France were long restricted to a handful of industrial towns, located for the most part in the north. Skilled artisans formed the backbone of the economy, dominating the labor force in the first half of the nineteenth century and continuing to outnumber factory workers through the turn of the twentieth. Pockets of large-scale industrial production did arise in economic sectors where competition from foreign producers forced the conversion to factory organization, notably in the spinning of cotton and the weaving of some woolen goods. Yet even in textiles, small-scale manufacture like the silk-weaving trade survived into the late nineteenth century, though it ceased to dominate the economy of Lyon after 1850. Indeed, the competition engendered by industrial innovations often produced a proliferation or intensification of more traditional modes of production, especially in the countryside. Aside from Paris and a few regional centers, whose highly skilled labor forces produced luxury goods much in demand abroad, most of the French economy was oriented to domestic (and often local) markets. These and other factors led many earlier analysts to view the French pattern as backward compared to the British model of industrialization. Today, however, the French experience tends to be seen as a differentiated strategy of economic development which by 1900 had succeeded in producing a per capita income comparable to that of England, the standard by which material progress in the industrial age has traditionally been measured.10

Growth was, however, very uneven, throwing the lives of workers into frequent disruption. Real wages made halting progress, rising to an early peak in the 1820s, only to decline by 10 to 15 percent through the 1840s

See Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 17801914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978).

before resuming their upward climb for much of the rest of the century.11 Over the long term, the relatively privileged status of skilled workers faced a serious threat. Competitive pressure from new forms of factory organization began to render the economic prospects of artisans more and more uncertain. The introduction of power-driven machinery in certain sectors increased productivity, but at the cost of displacing workers whose skills were no longer useful. These workers were forced onto a job market which offered an increasing proportion of semiskilled and unskilled positions that required little training and paid low wages.

In industries that became mechanized, workers could no longer hope to own the equipment necessary to do their jobs. They therefore lost some of the independence that craftsmen in many skilled trades had had when they carried both the tools and the knowledge necessary to earn a livelihood with them at all times. Mechanization implied an enlarged scale of production that vastly increased the minimum investment required for efficient operation. This concentration of capital widened the gulf between employer and employee, most obviously in the factory, but even in small shops where egalitarian relations between master and journeymen had been the rule. Where large-scale manufacture was introduced, the division of labor was intensified. The need for coordination among workers performing increasingly specialized tasks reinforced the move toward stricter discipline in the workplace. This translated into a lessening of the control over the pace of work, the taking of breaks, and the patterns of sociability that elite craftsmen had formerly enjoyed. Consequently, there was a decline in the sense of autonomy that had been so central to the craftsman's self-conception.

Thus, the privileged status of highly skilled workers was under continual challenge even when the economy was in an expansive phase. In times of economic contraction, a variety of strategies for reducing labor costsincluding sweated labor, putting out, and subcontractinghelped compound the effects of these long-term trends.12 Most skilled journey-

See William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 160.

"Sweated labor" refers to the practice of forcing poorly paid laborers to work exceptionally long hours to earn a meager livelihood. "Putting out" was a system of production in which an entrepreneur would furnish, either on consignment or by outright sale, raw materials like unspun cotton or unwoven wool to individuals who typically worked in their own homes. When these raw materials had been transformed into a more finished product, the entrepreneur would repurchase the product, paying a modest sum for the labor invested. "Subcontracting" was an arrangement under which a lead worker or foreman assumed responsibility for the completion of a specified task for an agreed-upon price. That subcontractor, or "jobber," was expected to pay the workers from the proceeds, retaining any balance as his personal profit. It was therefore in the jobber's interest to use all possible means of keeping labor costs low. In general, the intended result of these practices was not only to effect labor savings but also to shift a portion of the entrepreneur's risk to the workers themselves.

men continued to cling to aspirations of upward mobility, but increasing capital requirements and the devaluing of skills in many trades meant that the chances of achieving master's status became more remote as the century wore on. To protect their essential skills against dilution, artisans were forced into a defensive posture. The modest success they were able to achieve can be attributed in part to the demographic and economic circumstances previously discussed, but also to the constant struggles they waged to win the rights of political expression and association that made it possible to organize in pursuit of their collective interests.

A Century of Revolution

During the long nineteenth century, France experienced a level of internal conflict greater than any country of comparable size and international significance before or since. Four times in that periodin 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871the government of France was challenged by major revolutionary upsurges, and many additional insurrectionary events of more limited scope were interspersed between those dates. Changes of regime were so frequent that the nation was ruled by three distinct monarchies, three republics, and two empires within a one-hundred-year span.13 It is little wonder that France has become the benchmark by which the contentiousness of modern politics has been judged.

The revolutionary upheavals in France were closely linked to the more active participation of the urban working class in politics. If the French Revolution of 1789 is seen as marking a watershed in world history, it is in part because the direct intervention of the Parisian crowd significantly altered the course of events at several crucial junctures, thus ending the monopoly that traditional elites had formerly exercised over the conduct of public affairs. Barely more than a half-century later, in the February Revolution of 1848, a worker was included in the provisional government that declared universal manhood suffrage and gave France the most broadly

The monarchies were the Old Regime (to 1792), the Bourbon Restoration (1814 or 1815 to 1830), and the Orleanist Monarchy (1830 to 1848). Three republics were declared: the first lasted from 1792 to 1804, the second from 1848 to 1852, and the third from 1870 through the end of the period that concerns us here. The two empires were those of Napolon Bonaparte (1804 to 1814 or 1815) and Louis-Napolon (1852 to 1870).

defined electorate any nation had ever possessed. Yet the progress made by the working class in its quest for political rights and economic betterment was highly uneven. Certain changes of regimeparticularly the Bourbon Restoration and the Second Empireaffected workers adversely because they were accompanied by a sudden contraction of economic opportunity or by repressive social control.

Ironically, even those governments that sought to end the hegemony of the rich and powerful sometimes enacted legislation whose unintended consequences proved disastrous for many ordinary citizens. The Le Chapelier law, passed in 1791, is the most often cited example.14 Consistent with the revolutionaries' objective of striking down privilege in the name of libertymost obviously in the case of the monopolies and exemptions enjoyed by the aristocracy and the clergythe National Assembly also abolished "corporations." These organizations, vestiges of the ancient guild system, united the practitioners of a trade for the purpose of maintaining acceptable standards of workmanship, managing relations between journeymen and masters, and limiting the entry of apprentices so as to project the economic and social status of members. The Revolution declared these corporations to be an illegal restraint on the individual's right freely to choose an occupation. The 1791 law prohibited such groups from naming officers, maintaining records, or adopting regulations, and prohibited any attempt to impose collective agreements on a trade. The Penal Code of 1810 went further by prohibiting the formation of "coalitions" that might attempt to reassert exclusive privileges, whether those of masters or of journeymen.

As a result of this legislation, the individual French worker immediately gained the abstract right to practice any trade at will, but in the longer term, French workers collectively lost the concrete right to organize in pursuit of their common interests. The fact that masters were similarly constrained was small consolation to the majority of workers, as masters were never scrutinized as closely and their smaller numbers and strategic position permitted them to coordinate their activities even in the absence of formal organization. The only workers' associations to survive were those that the authorities judged innocuousmutual aid societies and compagnonnagesor those that operated clandestinely. Mutual aid societies were voluntary associations of workers, most often in a single trade, who made regular payments into a common fund. By thus pooling resources, workers were able to insure themselves against the unforeseeable expenses

On this statute and its predecessor, the d'Allarde law, as well as on the whole subject of working-class organization in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Sewell, Work and Revolution .

associated with the illness, injury, or death of a family breadwinner. These organizations can be seen as the distant precursors of such twentieth-century innovations as public unemployment compensation and health insurance. A compagnonnage, or workers' brotherhood, recruited young, unmarried journeymen (compagnons), most of whom had embarked on a Tour of France as a way of acquiring or polishing the skills of their trade. Such organizations helped to regulate supply and demand in skilled labor as well as to order the lives of these itinerant craftsmen-in-training by placing them in jobs, seeing to their subsistence needs, and serving as guarantor of their prudent conduct during their sojourn in some unfamiliar town. Mutual aid societies and compagnonnages were tolerated by public officials as long as they confined their activities to practical welfare considerations and steered clear of all "political" initiatives, explicitly defined to include any attempt to control wage levels or work conditions through labor organization or collective bargaining.15

Though it took some time for the full implications of these legal changes to become apparent, the working class soon found itself locked in a protracted struggle to win back the right to organize. During the period in which this campaign was waged, French political opinion was divided among at least four major currents: monarchism, Bonapartism, republicanism, and socialism. The politics of the monarchist camp were complicated by the existence of two distinct and sometimes bitterly opposed factions, the Legitimists loyal to the Bourbon kings, and the Orleanist supporters of the rival dynasty which had acceded to the throne in the person of Louis-Philippe as a result of the popular revolution of 1830. Neither could claim widespread and active support among workers beyond the general acquiescence it enjoyed while actually in power. Bonapartism, on the contrary, inspired enthusiastic, even fanatical adherence in a sizable segment of the working class as well as among most French peasants, at least through the first half of the century. Among its supporters were those who had served in Napolon's conquering armies as well as the larger

Cooperative associations, which united either producers or consumers in an effort to increase their combined leverage over markets in labor, commodities, or credit, tended to be viewed less favorably, in part because their impact on the economy was more direct and in part because they were closely associated with certain forms of utopian socialist philosophy that flourished in the middle of the century. Political clubs, intermediate between debating societies and electoral campaign organizations, were prohibited by law except for brief interludes like the short-lived Second Republic. Political parties and labor unions were severely repressed until the Third Republic redefined the nature of civil society in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Under this more liberal regime, trade unionist and Syndicalist movements attempted to secure workers' control and even ownership of key industries through general strikes and direct action.

number who simply remembered with longing the days of glory when France had dominated a continent. The Emperor's legacy proved sufficiently enduring to assure a landslide electoral victory nearly half a century later for his nephew, whose primary qualification for the office of president of France's Second Republic was his last name. Louis-Napolon went on to overthrow the republican constitution under which he had been elected and to found France's Second Empire. However, the fierce repression of workers' causes which took place in the early years of his rule brought to a rapid end the groundswell of Bonapartist sentiment within the urban working class.

Republicanism was the political strain most clearly in the ascendant during the course of the nineteenth century. At least through 1830, it remained a tendency embraced exclusively by the more progressive segments of the working class; but because its proponents were so actively engaged, they were able to exert an influence far greater than their sheer numbers would suggest. Republican opinion was never unified, however. During the Revolution of 1848, for example, a distinction was drawn between those who had fought for the "democratic republic," whose concerns were focused primarily on the extension of popular political rights, and those who favored the "democratic and social republic," which would have effected a sweeping overhaul of the productive system and of property relations in general. The latter camp, critical of the laissez-faire individualism that had led to unrestrained competition and exploitation, overlapped with the small and eclectic group of followers of such visionary Socialist thinkers as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, and Blanc. Most advocated workers' rights, the reorganization of the economy either along cooperativist lines or with the state assuming greater responsibility for the regulation of production, and certain limited provisions for social welfare. Despite the setback they suffered in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection of June 1848, the progressive republican and socialist factions gradually regained their strength within the working class, partly in reaction to the politics of the Second Empire. In the final quarter of the century, France turned definitively in the direction of republican government.

This equation of political forces was, in sum, an indirect reflection of the economic transformation that France was undergoing. In both the political and the economic realm, the working class had assumed a more prominent role. Yet, despite their acquisition of important individual rights, the situation of workers remained precarious through much of the nineteenth century. A brief sketch of the practical conditions which the French worker confronted on a daily basis will help relate the general trends just outlined to the experiences described in the workers' autobiographies.

To characterize population growth in France as stagnant makes sense only relative to the acceleration observed in other European nations of that era. The birthrate was substantially higher than today's, in part as a response to the high incidence of childhood disease. Jeanne Bouvier begins her autobiography with her earliest childhood memory, the baptism of her younger brother in 1868. Sixteen months later, he would die of measles, an illness which carried off many children in those days. Suzanne Voilquin comments almost matter-of-factly on her mother's loss of three children in infancy. Rearing several offspring was a hedge against the uncertainties that went with a high rate of infant mortality. For the many working-class households that had so recently left behind their parents' rural small-holding, each pair of hands and sturdy back continued to be welcomed for the contribution it would make to the family's well-being. In the urban context as in the rural, children often proved to be a valuable resource, for their earning power could be tapped as early as the age of ten or twelve.

More than it is today, the family in the nineteenth century was a unit of economic production. This was most obviously true in the system of domestic putting out, or cottage industry, where the spouse and children of a weaver like Norbert Truquin might all work side by side in a home that also served as workshop. Especially in small towns and rural areas, the material foundations of the institution of marriage never lay far beneath the surface. Though a tradition of romantic love was well established, the joining of two partners in matrimony was also likely to be seen as the joining of the economic fortunes of two families. Although the prospective bride and groom exercised an ultimate power of veto, their parents often assumed an active role in initiating and negotiating a marital settlement. Through the first half of the nineteenth century at least, the custom of providing a dowry for a daughter offered in matrimony remained widespread among rural families that owned real property, though it had largely died out in the cities. Nadaud's account of successive failed attempts to strike a marriage contract shows to what lengths a young woman's family might go to ensure a favorable match for its daughter, or the young man's to bring in precious resources that might help free itself from debt.

In a substantial proportion of urban workers' familiesperhaps half of all those living in midcentury Paris, for example16 the wife worked

This rough estimate is based on the ratio of male to female workers in the Paris Chamber of Commerce's 1848 survey of the capital's labor force. Due to the limitations of that study (which does not, for example, include domestic service), to the fact that it was carried out at a moment of acute economic crisis, and above all to the absence of information on marital status, this general statement should be taken as no more than a crude approximation. It does not, of course, include women engaged in casual employment or those working outside the cash economy. See Chambre de commerce de Paris, Statistique de l'industrie Paris, rsultant de l'enqute faite par la chambre de commerce pour les annes 18471848 (Paris, 1851).

outside the home, as child-rearing responsibilities permitted and as the household's degree of economic need required, and many more women were likely to have worked for wages before getting married. Women's jobs were concentrated in a few sectors of the economy, especially textiles, clothing, and domestic service. Skill levels in these sectors were generally low, and wages even lower. Though rates of divorce were minuscule by comparison to today, the likelihood of a child losing one or both parents to disease or accidental death was far higher; and problematic relations with relatives and stepparents is a theme that recurs in several of the autobiographies.

The conditions in which nineteenth-century workers were housed and fed contrast sharply with those of our own era. Crowded dwellings and a lack of basic sanitation were the frequent lot of urban workers, though those newly arrived from the countryside, where the peasant family often shared its quarters with the livestock, probably considered their accommodations in the city a distinct improvement, even when they might seem to us to offer few comforts and minimal privacy. The recent migrant might take up residence in a boarding house (maison garnie ), which rented furnished rooms by the month, week, or night. The furnishings often consisted of nothing more than simple plank beds, arranged dormitory-style in rooms that might be shared by a dozen or more workers, sometimes assigned two per bed. Rents consumed what we might see as a modest sharefrom 15 to 20 percentof workers' monthly earnings.17 Most workers new to the city gravitated to one of the boarding houses frequented by migrants from their own native region, for there they could hope to receive a friendly welcome as well as assistance in their initial orientation.

Established workers and their families were more likely to live in an apartment, consisting of one or perhaps two rooms. This too might be shared by more than one family or more than one generation of the same family and, as circumstances required, might serve as a place of work as well as living space. The large stone buildings that were common in that era were poorly lighted and ventilated, and it was exceptional for workers to live in apartments equipped with a fireplace (much less any form of

M. Halbwachs, "Genre de vie," Revue d'conomie politique 53 (1939): 43955.

central heating) to blunt the winter's cold.18 In rural areas, indoor plumbing was almost surely lacking, whereas a well-equipped city dwelling might offer shared water and toilet facilities either on each landing or in the courtyard.

The need to carry water and all provisions to their rooms was quite literally a special burden for members of the working class, who usually lived on the top stories of their buildings. At street level, retail shops and small businesses faced outward to pedestrian traffic, while accommodations which opened onto the building's inner courtyard were likely to be occupied by workshops. The ability of middle-class tenants to pay premium rents allocated to them the choice apartments on the second and third floors. Members of the working class or domestics employed in the apartments of the bourgeois below were forced to make the long climb, sometimes to the sixth or seventh floor, in search of cheaper rents. This inverse relationship between class position and the height above the street at which one lived was among the most consistent patterns of physical and social stratification in the city. As a result, although predominantly working-class quarters existed, there was more mixing of the different socioeconomic strata within neighborhoods than there is in most contemporary American cities.

The worker's diet provides an even more stark contrast between that era and our own. A workday of twelve hours or more of grueling physical labor was frequently sustained on a meager caloric intake which we would today find lacking in both variety and allure.19 The rich foods in which our present diet abounds, sometimes to the peril of our health, were virtually unknown to many members of the nineteenth-century working class. Only those fresh fruits, like apples, when they were briefly in season in the immediately surrounding area, or vegetables that stored well, like potatoes and cabbage, were likely to be within the means of ordinary people. Without the complex system of worldwide transport and distribution we

The lack of light and ventilation was encouraged by a tax assessed on real property according to the number of doors and windows in each habitable structure. (As a National Representative in the 1880s, Nadaud would be instrumental in efforts to repeal this tax.) Data cited in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 18701914 (Stanford, 1976), p. 156, indicate that in 183132, one-third of all taxable buildings in France had one window or, particularly in rural areas, none. This kind of practical detail (with which Weber's wonderful book is filled) further explains why cities were relatively attractive.

The daily intake of the average French citizen hovered around 2,000 calories in the 1830s, but it rose steadily until by about 1880 it approximated the level of 2,800 to 3,000 calories consumed in twentieth-century industrialized societies. See J.-C. Toutain, "La Consommation alimentaire en France," Economies et socits 5 (November 1971): 1909ff.

know today, a food as exotic as an orange might be a once-in-a-lifetime treat for many French workers, while one as perishable as a banana was altogether unknown. A cup of hot chocolate each Sunday was the height of luxury for Bouvier when she was a young textile worker. A very few widely cultivated staples constituted the great bulk of the food eaten, day in and day out. Primarily for reasons of diet, the average Frenchman was some four inches shorter than his counterpart today.20 In general, the daily fare consumed by the working and middle classes respectively was more distinct than it is now, and food represented a much larger share of the typical working-class family's budget, more than one-half of its total yearly expenditures. Bouvier provides the most detailed accounting of such expenditures. As her weekly budget indicates, even late in the nineteenth century the proportion of income spent on food remained high (see table 3).21

In most regions of France, a family's largest single expenditure was for bread.22 Even in the best of times, the worker struggled to maintain a tenuous financial equilibrium. At least through the midcentury, the agricultural sector proved susceptible to periodic crises that might drive the price of the common one-pound loaf up by as much as 50 percent. When this happened, a greater share of the average family budget had to be used to buy basic foodstuffs, and less could be allocated to the purchase of

This figure is based on a comparison of contemporary United Nations data for France and the average height of Parisian Mobile Guard recruits in 1848. The evidence cited by Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen , p. 150, suggests that the difference would have been even greater in the rural districts.

Bouvier specifies expenditures of 15.15 francs; she notes that at the time she was earning more than this, but unfortunately she does not reveal her total income, saying only that she was saving additional money to buy furniture. Elsewhere she indicates that her earnings could rise as high as thirty or even forty francs during the busy season or drop as low as twelve when work was slack. The figures given tend to exaggerate the importance of the midday meal because, she tells us, having recently moved from her cousins' house following a dispute over the amount of money spent on food, she made it the principal meal of her day for fear that word would otherwise get back to her relatives that she was scrimping on meals. Her expenditures on clothes may also have been unusually high because at that time she was trying to build up a stock of underwear. Obviously, these figures can be no more than suggestive of the general proportions among various broad categories of expenditure.

For rural workers, the staple grain might vary from region to region; but most urban workers ate white bread made from wheat flour. Even in rural districts, where subsistence production might be expected to supply a larger share of the family's diet, the cost of bread purchases accounted for nearly 40 percent of the family budget in 1800 and 20 percent in 1850, according to figures cited in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen , pp. 138 and 523 n. 25. Throughout the nineteenth century, bread accounted for more than half of the entire caloric intake of the urban population of France.

manufactured goods. This reduction in the demand for the products of the industrial economy soon resulted in widespread unemployment in the cities. Agriculturally driven crises of this kind, common under the Old Regime, persisted through the first half of the nineteenth century and recurred in particularly acute form between 1846 and 1848, when the Parisian working class, squeezed between the rising cost of living and the declining prospects of earning even a subsistence wage, rose in revolt.

Except when crises threatened, workers ate three meals a day. Breakfast, taken after two or more hours of work, was likely to consist of little more than plain bread accompanied by tea or coffee. (Though part of the working-class diet, sugar and coffee remained minor luxuries, with levels of consumption varying widely according to economic fortunes until late in the century.) Workers ate a second meal in the early afternoon, returning to their place of residence if convenient, purchasing food and drink in a nearby caf or wine merchant's shop if this fell within their means, or bringing along simple provisions that they could consume on the spot at work. The principal meal of the day might be eaten either at midday or, more often, in the late evening after work was done. It might take the form of a thin soup or broth in which vegetables and a small quantity of meat had been cooked, and which was usually poured over stale bread to give it bulk and substance. The menu for the other daily meal was likely to be as simple as bread, cooked vegetables, and wine, supplemented by a bit of meat or cheese as circumstances permitted. Meat thus constituted a modest and at times irregular part of workers' diets.23

Though deficiencies of diet were one major factor, they were by no

Nevertheless, urban workers ate three to four times more meat than peasants. Figures cited in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen , p. 142, give the average yearly consumption of meat as 79.31 kilograms for Paris, 60.39 kilograms for other French cities, and just 21.89 kilograms for the countryside.

means the sole contributor to workers' increased risk of illness. Outbreaks of cholera, a disease spread by a waterborne microbe, were concentrated in (though not limited to) urban areas, where facilities for the purification of drinking water were inadequate. Techniques of sewage disposal remained quite primitive, and raw human waste often coursed in the open gutters of city streets. The reader may be appalled to learn, via the accounts of Nadaud and Bouvier, how rare might be the opportunity for members of the working class to sleep in clean sheets, to bathe, or just to wash their hands and face. All this is a reminder of how recent and how unusual are the standards of hygiene and public health observed in late twentieth-century America.

For many manual workers, the chance of injuries or accidents on the job was a source of genuine anxiety. The risks incurred by Parisian chair turners while performing tasks like storing wood, for which they were not even being paid, figured among the complaints that motivated Jacques-Etienne Bd and his fellow workers to mount in 1820 what was undoubtedly the first major "strike" to be chronicled by an actual participant since the passage of the law against coalitions.24 Work-related injuries are a central concern in the accounts of Voilquin, Nadaud, and Dumay. The high incidence of industrial accidents did gradually give rise to governmental regulations, but even those which applied to women and children remained poorly enforced. Because most workers lived close to the margin, even slight injury to one of the family's breadwinners represented a major reverse, and any lingering disability could condemn the family to slow starvation. No form of governmental assistance or public insurance against such risks was available to the working class. In a few cases, large employers might provide a limited plan of protection like the one which paid Dumay and his mother regular stipends after his father was killed in a mining accident. The only recourse for the great majority of workers not covered by such an arrangement was membership in the voluntary mutual aid societies set up in certain trades, though these were usually intended only to meet one-time or short-term costs like funeral expenses or loss of wages due to temporary illness.

Above all, it was the inability to pay that restricted the urban worker's access to medical care. Nadaud recalls that in his native village the local midwife's knowledge of herbs was the only resource available; but, had it not been for his father's insistence, he might have fared no better in the

Technically, the 1820 action was not a strike at all but a lockout undertaken by employers after workers refused to do unpaid tasks. Note that Bd also describes an earlier and less protracted work stoppage of 1814 that was due to a dispute between workers and certain masters over the price paid per dozen chairs.

capital. Twice, when injured on construction sites in Paris he had to be shamed or coerced into accepting treatment. Private medical care was simply beyond the reach of most family budgets, and too often the worker would wait so long to consult a physician that all chance of remediation was lost.

One alternative was for the worker to seek admission to a hospital. In nineteenth-century France these institutions, generally operated by a religious order of the Catholic Church, specifically ministered to the health needs of those too poor to pay for private medical care. At least through the 1850s or 1860s this was an option which the self-respecting worker would act on only as a last resort. One reason was the stigma attached to accepting any form of charity; another was the belief among many workers that once admitted to the hospital, it was a rare patient who walked out alive. Such concerns were not entirely groundless. Given the state of medical knowledge in the early part of the century, and the difficult circumstances in which the healing art was practiced, the hospital at times helped spread the very conditions it sought to cure. Only with a certain lag did popular attitudes assimilate the great advances which the midcentury brought to our understanding of the sources of infection and disease, and only in the last three decades of the nineteenth century did many workers come to view hospitals in a more positive light, as places where one might expect to be comforted and healed.

It is in the study of evolving popular attitudes that works of autobiography come into their own, for they directly represent the sentiments of workers. Of course, we should not expect greater unanimity in working-class authors' evaluations of the century in which they lived than in those of other segments of the population. One extreme is here represented by Truquin, whose assessment of his chances of securing a decent life for himself and his family in France was so bleak that he decided to emigrate before the drudgery of his daily toil, the lack of opportunity, and the greed of the possessing classes finally ground him down. We may be tempted to share Truquin's dismal view of life in the nineteenth century, because its material conditions compare unfavorably with those of the present day. The bulk of the evidence shows, however, that despite occasional reversals, the standard of well-being of the working class steadily improved, especially in the second half of the century. Moreover, the greater part of the working class, despite some reservations about the distribution of society's resources, appears to have been convinced that progress was the order of the day. This view is exemplified in Nadaud's calm assurance that, despite all the difficulties he himself had faced, the lot of the average worker was rapidly improving.

In illustration of his point, Nadaud cites the changes introduced by the rapid expansion of the French railroad system. In the late eighteenth century, most members of French society led comparatively insular lives. Unless, like Bd, a worker were drafted into the army and swept up in the events of the Napoleonic period, he was unlikely to see much of the world. Indeed, aside from visits to nearby markets, he might rarely travel farther from home than the city limits or, in the case of the rural resident, the valley in which his native village was situated.

To be sure, an intrepid minority were prodded by economic circumstance or drawn by a thirst for adventure to journey further afield. Such travelers made use of horse-drawn carts, coaches, and even boats when their meager finances permitted, but they mainly relied on the surest and least expensive of all expedients, travel by foot. This meant that a seasonal migration like Nadaud's from the department of Creuse to Paris required four days of strenuous walking just to reach the two-thirds point in Orlans, while Perdiguier's four-and-a-half-year Tour of France required that he periodically spend several days at a time on the road.25

The great boom in railroad construction that began in the 1840s placed new possibilities within the grasp of the working class. Though it would long remain too costly for merely casual use, rail transport gradually knit together the many regional centers of France, creating national markets in labor and commodities and exerting a homogenizing influence that extended far beyond the economic sphere alone. For example, the locomotive helped change the way people spoke, by hastening the eclipse of the local patois that had been the nearly exclusive medium of communication in many rural communities. These local dialects, sometimes specific to the vicinity of a single small village, were still common in the nineteenth century.26 Perdiguier recalls that his first schoolbooks were all in Latinno special hardship, since he and his schoolmates spoke French little better than the language of the Romans. Nadaud observes that his mother never

As described in chapter 3, the Tour of France was the trip often undertaken by young journeymen as a way of finishing their training in a skilled trade. The French dpartement is the second-order political-administrative unit, analogous in certain respects to an American state.

According to statistics presented in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen , pp. 6769, 310, and 498501, roughly 20 percent of the population did not speak French in 1863. Most of these dialect speakers were residents of rural districts. In the cities, the use of French was general, if only as a lingua franca; but given the rate at which provincials constantly arrived, there was a nearly daily need to deal with persons whose mother tongue was some regional dialect. The rivalries Nadaud describes on the work site between brulas and bigaros (residents of different districts of the Creuse department), make it clear that enclaves of regional population, regional speech, and regional antagonisms persisted in the city.

spoke a word of French in her life. Bouvier tells how, upon returning to her native village as an adult, she encountered difficulty finding her way because she was given directions that referred in French to places she had, as a young girl in the 1870s, known only by their names in dialect. Even more indicative of the tension between the traditional village setting and the more cosmopolitan culture that had grown up in the cities is Bouvier's pretense of understanding the chatter of neighbors who gathered at her mother's home to welcome her back. She was afraid that a frank confession that she had forgotten the local patois would make them think she was putting on airs.

For all the hardships of urban life, few workers ever returned to their region of birth for more than brief visits with relatives and childhood friends. They were held in place partly by the prospect of employment, uncertain though it might be, but also by their attachment to a thriving popular culture. With good reason, our own society might envy the strong and vital sense of community which that culture fostered, for this was one of the most remarkable collective achievements of the millions who streamed into the working-class districts of the great cities. A few forms of professional and commercial entertainment were accessible to the working class. Bouvier, for instance, tells how she would scrimp to set aside the price of admission to the popular theaters of Paris, attending light comedies and, on at least one occasion, the opera. But most forms of distraction for workers were more participatory. In these texts we learn of the parties of boules (the Provenal bowling game) in which Perdiguier engaged with his fellow compagnons, and the informal martial arts competitions which took place in Nadaud's boarding house as well as in the "academies" where these skills were taught. The celebration of saints' feast days frequently became the occasion for the assemblies and parades in which Bd and Perdiguier took part as members of their trades. And whether at work, at home, or in their local caf, workers were always prepared to provide their own entertainment by joining voices in spirited collective renditions of traditional airs and popular ballads.

Although these few, haphazard examples cannot hope to capture the flavor of the culture workers recreated in the cities, there is one setting which, more than any other, suggests how the different elements of workers' lives were integrated. The caf was by all accounts the key institution of working-class culture.27 Its clientele, like the community in which it was

For the sake of simplicity, I have used here the blanket term caf , ignoring the useful distinctions that might be made among inns (auberges ), taverns (tavernes or cabarets ), the shops of wine merchants (marchands de vins ), bistrots, pubs (brasseries ), coffee houses (estaminets ), and singing societies and dance halls (goguettes and guinguettes ), as well as variations of these basic types. My intention is to emphasize what all had in common, as sites for the consumption of alcohol and the sharing of good fellowship. On the culture of the caf and especially on its patterns of sociability, I have relied heavily on the research of Susanna Barrows, especially "Parliaments of the People," in Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds., Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley, 1991), and an earlier, unpublished paper, "Arenas of Eloquence: The Caf and Popular Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France" (Berkeley, 1987).

embedded, was composed of loose groupings of workers united by bonds of common regional origin, occupation, or neighboring relations. Since the typical city quarter was likely to host concentrations of various trades within the space of a few city blocks, there might exist an informally designated spot where the members of each occupational group took their breaks or shared their midday meal. As the only public space where it was possible to assemble in any numbers, the caf was the site from which workers launched whatever labor organization and protest the laws and police repression made possible. It was not by chance, therefore, that Bd and two of his fellow workers drew up plans for a mutual aid society to benefit Parisian chair turners while sitting in the shop of a wine merchant, nor that the members of the trade later returned there to deliberate a proposal that they refuse to carry out the unpaid tasks which their masters had imposed. Through much of the century, the affairs of the working class were conducted in such settings, a pattern of which the authorities were sufficiently aware to create a special branch of the police force charged solely with the surveillance of drinking establishments.

After a long and trying day, most workers returned to rooms that were cramped and unheated. Candles or lanterns, the only sources of illumination, were used sparingly in the working-class household. Little wonder, therefore, that many men would head for the neighborhood caf in search of what their own lodgings rarely afforded: a warm, inviting spot where entertainment and companionship could be enjoyed over a glass of wine, beer, or spirits. Most such establishments attracted a core of regulars along with a sprinkling of occasional customers, all drawn from similar backgrounds.28 During the evening hours, these were largely male preserves. Respectable women were likely to shun them except in the company of family or close friends, on special occasions, or when the establishment was

Cafs or taverns serving a mixed clientele were the exception, according to research based on eighteenth-century judicial records. See Thomas Edward Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1988). His findings indicate that most customers were men drinking in the company of regular associates who might vary widely in age but tended to be of the same social level, same guild, and same neighborhood as themselves. If there was a significant change in such patterns during the nineteenth century, it was toward an increase in contact across trade lines.

one of the dance halls, located on the outskirts of the city, whose very function made the presence of women appropriate.

Alcoholic beverages, formerly a luxury for ordinary workers, steadily dropped in price during the nineteenth century, resulting in a sharp rise in working-class consumption. By the turn of the twentieth century, France led all nations in per capita intake of alcohol, a distinction it has yet to relinquish. Wine remained the standard drink of the working class (as it was not for the peasantry, at least through the midcentury), but the rising incidence of public drunkenness can be traced to the increase in the consumption of distilled spirits, primarily brandy. Activities associated with drinkingparticularly gambling, womanizing, and the general squandering of the family's precious resourcesall contributed to the caf's shady reputation. Most of these authors comment on the excessive drinking habits of some fellow worker who would no sooner collect his Saturday afternoon pay than start on a binge that would sometimes lead to the celebration of "Holy Monday" instead of showing up for work. The toll in lives wasted or destroyed by the abuse of alcohol was considerable.

Yet the caf was not merely a place to drink; it was the point of contact and information exchange for a richly varied working-class community. The recently arrived male worker might come there in search of friends who had preceded him in migrating to the city, paying for his welcome with the news and personal messages he brought from their native region. In return, he might obtain advice as to where a cheap room could be rented. It was here that word was first passed of fresh job openings, and here too that the newly employed journeyman would return to buy the customary round of drinks for his fellow workers as part of the ritual of hiring. Pamphlets and tracts were circulated in the caf, spreading word of public events and entertainments as well as all manner of political causes. For the benefit of those who were illiterate, a well-spoken worker like Nadaud would be called upon to read aloud from a people's newspaper. Indeed, the corner wine merchant's shop was the principal (and in times when restrictions on assembly and speech were tightened, perhaps the only) public space where discussion of current affairs could take place among workers. Jules Vinard, another early-nineteenth-century worker who published his autobiography, aptly refers to cafs as "powerful schools of patriotic education," for it was in such venues that the working class acquired its initiation into civic affairs.29 However, cafs could serve so effectively as sites of political socialization only because workers were already drawn to them as

Jules Vinard, Mmoires pisodiques d'un vieux chansonnier Saint-Simonien (Paris, 1878), p. 26.

entertainment centers, informal housing bureaus, assembly halls, employment clearing houses, and all-purpose havens where workers were in the habit of gathering.

These observations evoke the theme around which this collection of memoirs has been organized: the links that existed between the everyday politics of the working class (including the protest and collective action in which it participated) and the predisposing material and cultural influences that gave the nineteenth century its distinctive character. Before examining this connection, however, we must first confront the interpretive dilemmas raised by the use of autobiographical sources in attempts to generalize about the working-class experience.

For conveying the ambiance of life in the nineteenth century and documenting workers' impressions of this period of tumultuous change, memoirs constitute a peerless source. However, when we attempt to use them to understand the systematic processes that give social life a semblance of order, we confront an apparent contradiction. Autobiography is a distinctive and useful form of evidence precisely because it captures those elements that are decisiveoften uniquein the unfolding of an individual life. Even if we set aside the extreme case in which a worker's memoirs constitute virtually the only surviving record of his or her existence, there are likely to be few opportunities to verify the personal recollections the author offers. There are, moreover, few points of comparison to help separate those elements of the story that are merely idiosyncratic from those that speak faithfully to the experience of an occupational group, a social milieu, or a style of life, especially when they may have since disappeared.

A further difficulty is that the information imparted by such texts is typically framed within a set of conventions that influence whether and how various aspects of the worker's existence are portrayed. These narrative strategies help the author to assemble the disparate events of a lifetime into a seemingly coherent whole. But like any managed form of self-presentation, they inevitably privilege certain bits of information and lead to the concealment of others.30 Among the most common conventional forms adopted in such works are those we might call (a ) the legacy to

In the discussion of these issues, I have borrowed freely from M. J. Maynes, "Autobiography and Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Methodological Considerations," forthcoming in Social Science History; and from the always illuminating comments of my colleague, Jon Beecher.

posterity, in which the author passes on a personal and family history nominally addressed to his or her heirs; (b ) the picaresque adventure, in which the author comments on the curious quality of human nature and of life in general by stringing together a series of loosely connected vignettes or episodes; (c ) the success story, detailing the worker's climb within the social hierarchy and his or her conquest of social respectability (often signifying acceptance by or even ascension into the middle class, the principal audience for most working-class autobiographies); (d ) the plea for the defense (plaidoyer ), in which an author such as Bd, who feels he has been unfairly judged, attempts to vindicate his conduct and character as if before a jury of his peers; and (e ) the conversion experience, in which the author relates his or her awakening after being exposed to a novel world view that reveals a new meaning in life and the potential for personal or social transformation, usually through militant activism.

One additional genrethat of the representative lifedeserves special mention because it is so frequent among working-class autobiographies and so pertinent to the methodological issues raised here. All seven of these authors aggressively assert their working-class status by referring to themselves in the titles or subtitles of their memoirs as a worker (Bd), daughter of the people (Voilquin), compagnon (Perdiguier), mason's assistant (Nadaud), proletarian (Truquin), militant worker (Dumay), or working woman (Bouvier).31 In so doing, they implicitly claim to be just like others of their classan interesting inversion of the practice in the autobiographies of members of the elite, where the value of the narrative is established by the distinctiveness of the author's role as a key actor in the events recounted. A rhetoric of authenticity pervades the genre, leading most authors to affirm the unerring truth and candor of their testimonyeven when the claim involves a self-evident naivet and is little more than a ploy for introducing views on how people should live or society should be organized. This stance leads to statements like this one by Perdiguier:

I am initiating my reader into my entire past. I am showing myself just as I was, just as I am. My life is linked to the lives of workers in general. When I speak of myself, I speak of them.32

The title is, of course, particularly subject to an editor's or publisher's influence. In each of these cases, however, the text makes it clear that the identification as a worker is the author's own. It would be possible to cite another dozen cases of autobiographies of nineteenth-century French workers, in the titles of which the authors refer to themselves as compagnon, travailleur, ouvrier, militant , etc.

Agricol Perdiguier, Mmoires d'un compagnon (Moulins, 1914), p. 215.

Though it may be valid as a statement of intention, Perdiguier's self-evaluation cannot be accepted at face value.33 We might weigh it against the following highly critical assessment which Amde Saint-Ferrol (Perdiguier's fellow Deputy in the 1849 Legislative Assembly and fellow exile in 1855) offered after reading a portion of his autobiography:

Perdiguier claims to have portrayed the worker in his memoirs. In reality, all he has portrayed is himself. Gazing into the mirror of his memories, our former colleague sees himself in the best possible light and describes himself as seen, believing that everyone must be interested in the petty details of his life, even in the tears in his pants . The framework within which the author of Memoirs of a Compagnon was working was quite broad and therefore would have lent itself to the propagation of useful truths, precious information, socialist theories concerning the lives of workers or the organization of work. Perdiguier has completely failed in his task. Basically, he only talks about himself.34

In taking issue with what he saw as Perdiguier's self-absorption and obsession with detail, Saint-Ferrol believed he had isolated a crucial flaw. Yet, had Perdiguier followed Saint-Ferrol's advice, the result would doubtless have been one more abstract, prescriptive treatise (no less conventionalized or subject to the author's personal predilections), and the literature on nineteenth-century workers would have been deprived of the classic account of the Tour of France and journeymen's associations that Perdiguier was uniquely qualified to write. Distorted though it may be by

To state only the most obvious objections: The literal attempt to record any person's entire past would be an overwhelming and impossible task; autobiographies are necessarily selective. As to Perdiguier's claim to show himself just as he was, the level of self-knowledge that this assumes is not given to us all. The author of an autobiography may be best placed to inventory the subject's attributes, but he or she also has the strongest motives to conceal certain facets of personality or dissemble any less than admirable aspects of personal history. Moreover, Perdiguier's statement implies that the person he was when he lived the events and the person he is when he writes about them are continuous if not identicala problematic assertion for anyone to make, but especially so for one who had undergone the dramatic changes that Perdiguier experienced in the interim. Finally, while it is surely true that his life was linked to the lives of workers in general, the link was convoluted and operated in part through the contrasts and oppositions that were inevitable in one whose personal odyssey took him so far from the workshops where he began.

Amde Saint-Ferrol, Impressions d'exil Genve , quoted in Jean Briquet, Agricol Perdiguier, compagnon du tour de France et reprsentant du peuple, 18051875 (Paris, 1981), p. 331.

his foibles and preoccupations, Perdiguier's insider's view of the shoproom floor, the compagnons' assembly hall, and the corner caf has instructed as well as delighted generations of readers, in large part because it tells us in an authoritative voice about not only the "tears in his pants" but a thousand other particulars of the worker's daily life. It is Saint-Ferrol's vision, not Perdiguier's, that seems short-sighted today, for it fails to recognize that the very traits he criticizes are those that have caused these reminiscences to be treasured by so many.

From the point of view of the social historian, narrative conventions can be a problematic influence when their effect is to filter out information that is inconsistent with the organizing principle which the author has adopted for making sense of his or her life. Yet such biases are not different in kind from those inherent in other forms of evidence. Official statistics, for example, apply universal categories that shape and channel information, giving it the appearance of consistency and comparability.35 In the process of aggregating individual cases and arriving at a manageably simple version of an irreducibly complex human reality, experiential and contextual information may be jettisoned. Yet if, in reaction to these shortcomings of summary statistics, one seeks to restore the subjective dimension through reliance on, for example, literary sources, the methodological difficulties may merely be compounded. Rarely do fictionalized accounts provide a clear sense of the evidence on which their representation is based or any acknowledgment that such factual information as they present has been filtered through the sensibility of an author whose experience of the reality described is indirect and whose artistic or aesthetic preoccupations are potentially distorting.

One potentially distorting influence that frequently intervenes between the experience as lived and the experience as recounted is the retrospective bias that results when autobiographies are written long after the events described. In addition to suffering from the author's lapses of memory, such accounts tend to present the views of an older person, writing about the experiences of the younger person he or she once was, and adding many elements (of information, of opinion, of moral judgment) that were not actually present at the time. The narrative acquires an orderliness that has been superimposed on the circumstances of the author's life only long after the fact. Yet accounts written contemporaneously with the events in question, especially in the form of a diary or journal, are just as problematic. Insofar as these experiences are still unfolding at the moment they are

Compare John I. Kitsuse and Aaron V. Cicourel, "A Note on the Uses of Official Statistics," Social Problems 11 (Fall 1963): 13139.

recorded, the author's initial impressions or spur-of-the-moment reactions may prove inaccurate or misleading in the light of subsequent events or ripe reflection.

Retrospective embellishments tend, however, to be easier to recognize and discount than the purposeful omissions that just as frequently occur. To take one obvious example, the broad outlines of courtship and marriage are commonly related in these texts, from the awkward stages of match-making and first encounters through the actual decision to marry. We may learn a few details concerning the wedding ceremony or the establishment of the new household, but rarely are we offered insight into the private or sentimental side of the married couple's relationship, much less the practical details of sexual mores or any considerations of family planning.36 Typically, the next allusion to the author's family life is the announcement of the names and dates of birth of children.

Such reticence may seem hardly surprising in an age of greater modesty than our own More curious is the fact that while most authors recount their childhoods, whether happy or miserable, in lavish detailincluding their relations with parents and siblings, the trials they had to overcome, their moments of decision, the influence of role models, and much morethey rarely have much to say about interactions with their own children.37 Our knowledge of the nineteenth century suffers from this lack of parents' testimony about their children's socialization and occupational training.

Jacques Rancire has remarked on another pointed omission in the autobiographies of nineteenth-century workers, perhaps in part a function of their assertive identification with the working class. He finds that they present a somewhat idealized image of the life of the worker and the redeeming potential of manual labor. The tedium, risk of injury, and cumulative physical toll exacted by many of these occupations are often

Voilquin's memoirs teach us a great deal about the realm of private behavior and feelings, but not much about sex or marriage. She mentions such details as the delay in her sister's first menstrual period ("the healthy crisis that makes a child into a young woman") and reproduces, as if verbatim, her mother's revealing account of the emotional bonds that tied her to her husband; but she says little about her own premarital affair or her failed marriage. Similarly, the male authors are much more forthcoming about their mothers than their wives.

Nadaud, for example, alludes to what can only be called discussions of strategy between his father and mother concerning how best to keep himand his growing earning powerfrom deserting the family before its debts had all been paid off. (He never makes clear when and how he learned of these conversations, from which he presumably was shielded at the time they occurred.) Not one of these authors offers a report of such an exchange with his or her spouse concerning the character and conduct of their own sons and daughters, the dilemmas of parenthood, or the dynamics of family solidarity.

understated or unvoiced. Thus, the reassuring picture of the skilled artisan's sense of competence and fulfillment that emerges from Perdiguier's Memoirs of a Compagnon has a dark side that is disclosed only if one chances upon the same author's far less often read Biographie de l'auteur du livre du compagnonnage (Paris, 1846), which dwells in considerable detail on "the splinters that have entered his body, the falling wood that has injured him, the lung diseases caught breathing sawdust and, finally, his suicidal thoughts."38 Rancire sees these as expressions of hatred for manual labor felt even by the author considered the greatest eulogist of the nineteenth-century artisanal tradition.39 Here, as so often in such works, the matter-of-fact stoicism that was so strong an element in the character of the nineteenth-century worker is often indicated only by what has been left out.

Perhaps the most important source of bias in an anthology such as this is the set of criteria applied in selecting and editing the texts. In this case, consideration has deliberately been restricted to the first-person accounts of authentic workers who spent their years of childhood and early adulthood in France during the long nineteenth century which ran from the demise of the Old Regime, around 1789, to 1899. By "authentic workers" I mean those whose livelihood was primarily derived from manual labor in the production of nonagricultural goods and services. The autobiographies themselves, however, show how difficult or misleading it can be to apply such an abstract definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, most members of the working class were no more than a single generation removed from the soil, and a considerable number maintained ties with their villages of origin long after moving away. Especially among residents of provincial towns, or those in transitional categories, like Nadaud's

Jacques Rancire, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History," International Labor and Working Class History , no. 24 (Fall 1983): 6.

Ibid. Memoirs of a Compagnon actually seems less one-sided than Rancire implies, especially in the sections dealing with Perdiguier's illnesses and injuries; his abrasive, stingy, incompetent, or quirky employers (starting with his overly demanding father); and fellow workers who were incompetent, lazy, drunk, or larcenous. It is surely the case that some aspects of working-class existenceand typically those which the authors themselves perceive to be most negativeare self-censored from specific accounts; but the complement to Perdiguier's upbeat view is in any event to be found in such texts as Bd's A Worker in 1820 , which, though also positive in tone, relates skilled workers' failed attempts to obtain relief from their masters' exploitation; or in Truquin's Memoirs and Adventures , which retraces a series of degrading, unrewarding, and stultifying jobs and presents an almost unrelievedly negative vista of the fate of the unskilled or semiskilled worker. Although the lack of balance is an important defect of individual works, the genre as a whole does present a multifaceted picture of working-class life.

seasonal migrants who returned home each fall to help with the harvest, it might be difficult to tell peasant from worker.

In similar fashion, the demarcation between skilled artisan and petty bourgeois was often blurred, since the successful master or entrepreneur had almost surely started out as a journeyman and often continued to put in his hours at the workbench or on the construction site alongside his employees. Moreover, the working class remained so internally diverse with respect to source of livelihood, level of skill, standard of living, and sector of economic activity that it is difficult to arrive at a consistent definition capable of embracing domestic servants, elite craftsmen, carters, common laborers, factory operatives, and all the seemingly endless variations the category comprised. It is in dealing with such diversity that autobiographical sources display their special virtues, for they have the capacity to reveal the textures of working-class life, which the convenient categorical shorthand robs of its intrinsic vitality and complexity.

The total number of French workers' memoirs is quite restricted: perhaps forty such texts have survived.40 They are rare because key resourceseducation, leisure, and the social connections to get a book publishedwere themselves rare among nineteenth-century workers. As a result, the intrinsic likelihood of a skilled artisan recording his life story for posterity was so remote that on a priori grounds alone one would have to question whether those who did so could ever be considered representative. And if circumstances proved so limiting even for the skilled elite of the working class, how much more powerfully must they have acted on women or the unskilled?

But however real these obstacles, there were also circumstances that fostered the impulse to write one's autobiography, even within the working class. First, there was the individual's active involvement in some organization. For the seven authors presented here, the organizations in question were variously utilitarian (the mutual aid society that Bd helped found), professional (Perdiguier's compagnonnage), political (the republican clubs and the precursors of political parties and labor unions with which Nadaud, Dumay, and Bouvier were associated), or social-reformist and philosophical (the circle of Saint-Simonians to which Voilquin belonged). Membership in such an organized group appears to have made resources available

This number, though small, continues slowly to grow. Jacques Etienne Bd's A Worker in 1820 , completed around 1830, was not published until 1984, nearly four decades after it had resurfaced in manuscript form in the hands of a Paris bookseller. Of course, any estimate of the number of working-class autobiographies is somewhat arbitrary because it depends on how one defines the category; the texts differ markedly in length, content, and intended audience.

and provided practical and psychological support. It also seems to have been a key factor in convincing the author that he or she had a story of more than personal significance, to which a larger audience might be receptive.

A second spur to recording one's life history appears to have been the experience of exceptional social and geographical mobility. It is no accident that much of what we know of the daily lives of manual workers has been told by individuals who began but did not end their lives in that status. Of the seven authors represented here, all spent their early adulthood as members of the working class, yet all but Bd were led by circumstance to suspend or abandon their careers as workers.41 The dramatic upward mobility which most of these authors experienced seems, on the one hand, to have convinced them of the exemplary character of their personal histories and, on the other, to have enhanced the appeal of those lives to publishers and public alike. The changes of status which, almost without exception, they underwent again raise questions about the representative character of the testimony these memoirs provide.

Sources of these kinds are invaluable for illustrating relationships or trends that have been independently established through the use of more systematic forms of evidence. Because autobiographies convey their information with greater immediacy and power, they are ideal complements to those analytical works in which historians and social scientists have demonstrated causal relationships with the help of sources of documentation less accessible to nonspecialists, such as administrative statistics, demographic compilations, and archival records. The use of multiple sources can

Both Perdiguier and Nadaud were elected to the National Assembly under the short-lived Second Republic, only to be forced into exile after Louis-Napolon's coup d'tat. Perdiguier subsequently earned his living as a bookseller and teacher as much as in woodworking. Nadaud would later resume his political career, serving briefly in 187071 as prefect of his native department of Creuse, and for thirteen years as a Deputy to the National Assembly. After his own return from exile, Dumay was elected Conseiller Municipal for Paris and subsequently Deputy to the National Assembly under the early Third Republic. Voilquin became a midwife and traveled to both Egypt and Russia before departing for the United States in 1848. Truquin definitively left France after the Paris Commune and eventually settled in Paraguay, where he tried his hand at farming, with mixed success. Bouvier, through her involvement in the syndicalist and feminist movements and her work in the French Office du Travail Domicile, became a historian of women and work, publishing three books in addition to her memoirs. As for Bd, we simply know nothing of his later life.

In an age when travel was either difficult or expensive for a member of the working class, this group of authors moved about a great deal. Every one of them saw Paris, virtually all traveled extensively throughout their native country, and at least four lived for a time outside France.

help bring our historical vision into focus because it allows us to effect small shifts of overall perspective. This process of triangulation is still more effective when the historical sources are diverse, so that their mutually corrective influence is compounded.

The life stories of workers may also suggest hypotheses worthy of systematic investigation. To take just one example, the late-twentieth-century reader will likely be struck by how many of these seven authors lost one or both parents in childhood or adolescence.42 Not only in the texts collected here but in the literature of nineteenth-century workers' autobiographies generally, such loss is so frequent as to raise the suspicion that it gave rise to a sense of marginality that predisposed these individuals to take up their pens, perhaps as a means of asserting or restoring their sense of who they were. Fortunately, the exacting research required to explore the nature of this association between loss of a parent and authorship has been undertaken by the historian M. J. Maynes. Working from a set of fifty-eight nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographies written by French and German workers, she compiled data on the survival of authors' parents. She then compared these data with the parents' expected survival, calculated from the rates of mortality observed in the general population. Twenty-eight percent of those included in her subsample of French authors were found to have lost one or both parents by the age of fourteen.43 This is actually less than the 40 percent one would expect from what we know of life expectancy in the period.44 In this case at least, the systematic relationship initially suggested by the texts is disconfirmed; yet the demonstration is instructive in another respectit emphasizes the fragility of the family unit and the tenuousness of life itself in this period and lends a certain historical perspective to our contemporary concept of the single-parent family.

Finally, the observant reader will glean from autobiographical sources insights that it would be difficult to obtain in any other way. What, for

Bd's father died when he was nine, Truquin's mother died when he was six, and Dumay's father perished in a mining accident before he was born. If we include instances of a parent absent due to abandonment or the breakup of a marriage, then we must also add Bouvier. Voilquin was nearly twenty-one when her mother died.

The proportion rises to 34 percent if one counts parental abandonment as parental loss.

Maynes made a comparable calculation for a subsample of German workers' memoirs; in this population, the rate of parental loss was somewhat greater than that predicted by actuarial tables. See M. J. Maynes, "The Contours of Childhood: Demography, Strategy, and Mythology of Childhood in French and German Lower-Class Autobiographies," in Louise Tilly, John Gillis, and David Levine, eds., The Quiet Revolution: Western Europeans in the Era of Declining Fertility (forthcoming).

example, seems more improbable than to recover the firsthand, written testimony of an illiterate worker living in the mid-nineteenth century? Yet that is, after a fashion, just what we find in the narrative of Truquin, who learned to read and write only in his middle age. In reviewing his life, he therefore includes vignettes that are all the more precious because, by their very nature, they are among the least likely ever to have been documented. Through these memoirs, we share his feelings of helplessness and dependency when, after his employer granted him time off to attend classes in preparation for his First Communion, he was forced to beg his often reluctant fellow workers to help him master the catechism he was unable to read for himself. We are caught up in the mix of reticence and defiance he felt in declaring his illiteracy to the students who had engaged him in heated political debate at the school of silk manufacture where he was employed. And we begin to appreciate the sense of vulnerability of the illiterate as we observe him, as a child, before a house on the door of which was mounted a sign he was unable to decipher. Upon entering to ask for a scrap of bread, he discovers that he has blundered into the home of the local mayor, who threatens to lock him up in the house of correction for having violated the laws against begging.

In such passages, the adaptive strategies (including prodigious feats of memory) with which the unlettered managed to compensate for their disability can be communicated only because the genre of autobiography imposes a longitudinal perspective on the author's life and thus can capture a state of being, illiteracy, from which he had to escape in order to record his experiences. Since most sources of historical data seriously underrepresent that substantial segment of the working class which could not read,45 in this instance the autobiographical genre has helped complete our picture of nineteenth-century life by documenting experiences otherwise unlikely to be preserved. It is because the individual autobiography is unique, in form as well as content, that it can round out our picture of the working

According to the 1848 survey of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, 87 percent of the male, 79 percent of the female, and 84 percent of the total labor force of the capital was literate. The figure is misleading, however, for at least two reasons. First, the elite corps of skilled workers that was concentrated in Paris contained a smaller proportion of illiterates than the French working class in general. Second, the standard of literacy used in the survey was whether an individual could sign his or her own namethe most common but also the most limited measure of mastery over the written word. See Chambre de commerce de Paris, Statistique de l'industrie Paris . It should also be noted that the ability to read and the ability to write were far more distinct in the nineteenth century than today, and many people were capable of one but not the other.

class by conveying information systematically excluded from other forms of evidence.

Autobiographical sources were presented at the outset of this introduction as a window on the world of the French working class. On closer examination, they have turned out more nearly to resemble the panes of glass still sometimes found in houses that date from the nineteenth century: the traditional techniques of manufacture leave them flawed by irregularities, so that they transmit a somewhat deformed image of what lies beyond. These memoirs likewise show signs of having been hand crafted, for they bear the marks of their authors' individuality. Yet even memoirs which can make no claim to being representative perform two further, vital functions when considered as a group. First, they suggest the range of variations that existed within the working class, variations which more systematic sources, because they frequently present their evidence in aggregated form, tend to truncate or obscure. Second, they allow us to discern gradually emerging trends that could never be detected through consideration of single sources. To see how a strategy of selection and interpretation can elevate autobiographical sources, initially fascinating for the insights they offer into the subjective world of a particular individual, into a tool for understanding large-scale changes which affected the lives of the great mass of society's population over time, let us turn our attention to the transformation of popular collective action which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century.

The seven autobiographies in this anthology have been selected to achieve as balanced a distribution in terms of gender, skill level, occupational sector, region of origin, and degree of urbanization, as the limited array of sources permits. But above all, these worker-authors were chosen as members of successive cohorts, so that their active careers span the entire length of the nineteenth century. With such a chronological spread, we are able to observe the processes set in motion by industrialization. We can begin to distinguish those tendencies that shaped the experience of the working class as a whole from the more ephemeral forces responsible for the contours of the individual authors' lives.

By reference to such large-scale processes we are able to place in context, for example, the fact that just two of these memoirs were written by working women. This underrepresentation of women relative to their proportion in the general population is the combined result of the scarcity of such texts and the requirement that the manuscripts included here deal

centrally with issues of occupational socialization, in a period when female participation in the labor force was relatively restricted.46 Note, however, that the authors' reports of their mothers' or spouses' efforts to supplement the family income help complete our image of the contribution made by women, particularly through activities outside the formal economy (activities that other, more frequently consulted sources typically ignore).

Similarly, these seven authors' primary occupations represent only five sectors within the thirteen-sector scheme frequently used to describe the mid-nineteenth-century French economy. This coverage appears the more limited because the standard classification system considers only the production of goods and leaves out agriculture, transportation, mining, and service occupations of all kinds. But because these seven texts have been selected for their coverage of the authors' years of childhood and young adulthood, some introduce bits of their parents' occupational histories while others detail the authors' protracted search for an occupational niche, during which they tried a number of different jobs. If we include the early or secondary occupations of the authors as well as the mentions made of their fathers' and mothers', ten of the thirteen standard categories are accounted for, as well as occupations not covered by the standard classification schemesuch as maid, miner, miller, navvy, railroad worker, and salesclerk.

By reading these texts in chronological order, we glimpse the changes taking place in the organization of work during the age of industrialization. Neither the statistical summaries generated by the government's periodic surveys of industry nor the bare facts of the authors' lives as displayed in table 1 can convey with such immediacy the gulf that separated the tiny chair-turning shops in which Bd, the earliest of these authors, perfected his skills, from the huge Schneider ironworks in which Dumay, nearly the last of the seven to live and write, was employed. In Bd's account we are introduced to an intimate assembly of a half-dozen of the most skillful practitioners of the craft that France had to offer. They lived and worked in an informal community which, though it was threatened by the spread of more highly rationalized capitalist relations, they still viewed as their collective creation and sought actively to protect. In Dumay's memoir, we encounter a vast industrial establishment in which single departments might number workers in the hundreds, relations between employers and

It could be argued that for the specific purpose of examining the link between political participation and work life outside the household, equal numbers of male and female authors would amount to an overrepresentation of women, who constituted perhaps one-third of the urban labor force, with the proportion gradually rising as the century advanced.

employees had become distant and based exclusively on the exchange of labor for wages, and the strong sense of identification with one's trade had become secondary to a relatively undifferentiated self-conception as a worker.

Opportunities for training, as well as the form which it might take, changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. Perdiguier recounts the four-year tour of French towns he undertook in the 1820s to polish his skills as a joiner and master regional variations of technique. By the midcentury, the compagnonnage system had fallen into disrepair. Even a highly qualified worker like Dumay, attempting his Tour of France in 1860, was often forced to rely on relatives or on the informal networks of those who came from the same native region in order to find jobs, most of which did little to advance his knowledge of the trade. As for unskilled and semiskilled workers, especially those living in the second half of the century, the situation was significantly worse. A formal apprenticeship was rarely required. Bouvier's career as seamstress required practical training, but her initial probationary period was measured in weeks rather than months or years, even though she was hired with no previous experience. Of her earlier stint in a silk-throwing factory in 1876, she tells us that she learned the essentials necessary to perform her duties in the span of her first morning's work. Even if we make allowance for the powerful forces which shunted women into less skilled and lower-paying jobs, the contrast indicates the general direction in which the industrial economy was evolving.

I do not mean to suggest with these few examples that the pattern of changes taking place in the productive process in the course of the nineteenth century was simple and unilinear, nor that it could be faithfully distilled from the experiences related in these or any seven individual workers' autobiographies. Though a number of crucial transformations were already under way, most did not become fully apparent until well into the twentieth century, and it is only thanks to our privileged vantage point one hundred years later that we are able to discern them clearly. During the nineteenth century, the changes were less visible, in part because the artisanal economy which predominated in the first half of that century persisted with considerable vigor through the second half, despite the challenge from a growing industrial sector. Nevertheless, the picture drawn by historians of the economic development of the period is consistent with the workers' narratives anthologized here: gradual, though uneven, erosion of traditional skills; an increase in the scale and capital requirements of production that closed off avenues of mobility for workers, distancing them from their employers and depriving them of ownership of or control over

the means of production; and the consequent loss of artisanal autonomy in favor of new forms and higher levels of work discipline in the factory.

These changes in work life can be related to changes in popular protest. Here again, the contrast between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century is imperfect. Our frame of comparison would need to be extended into the twentieth century in order to show that contrast more clearly. But the testimony of these seven authors, most of whom participated actively in the political movements of their day, is illuminating. Let us consider first the four authors who wrote about the earlier part of the century. Bd led the chair turners of the Rue de Clry in a collective refusal to perform the unpaid tasks which their masters had imposed. This effort remained highly local and, despite some initial success, was quickly isolated, its organizational base dismembered, and its leaders jailed. Perdiguier's memoirs celebrated the bonds uniting the members of workers' brotherhoods, even as he called attention to the intense and often violent conflicts that pitted different trades or different brotherhoods of compagnons against one another. Voilquin formed such strong ties with a group organized around the communitarian ideals of Saint-Simon that her entire adult life was powerfully redirected as a consequence. Nadaud, a ringleader in an 1840 attempt to mount a strike among construction workers, saw the efforts of its organizing committee collapse the first time workers were challenged by the authorities, who sent troops to break up the initial public meeting. He notes how strongly public opinion was biased against striking workers. Each of these earlier authors, in short, was an energetic participant in a relatively small-scale and homogeneous community of workers whose members interacted on a familiar, firsthand basis and whose outlook was shaped by strong personal bonds of solidarity.47

For the three later authors, on the other handthose whose work years were situated mainly in the second half of the centurythe pace, the tone, and the tenor of working-class life had started to change. Truquin was involved in an 1867 wage dispute organized citywide by Lyon silk workers in a variety of related trades. The dispute was settled in the workers' favor and brought real relief to a variety of job categories in the industrythough the lack of improvement in his personal economic position, coupled with the disillusionment he felt at the failure of the short-lived Commune

Though faithful to the way these particular authors lived (or wished to portray their lives), this statement may exaggerate the extent to which skilled artisans formed vital and stable communities, as the work of Michael Sonenscher and Jacques Rancire reminds us. There is nonetheless a discernible difference of degree between the experiences of skilled and of semiskilled workers, especially in the later part of the nineteenth century.

of Lyon, convinced Truquin a few years later that his only hopeful prospect lay in emigration to South America. Dumay assumed a prominent role in organizing efforts in his native Le Creusot and went on to a career in politics, punctuated by participation in the 1871 Commune and subsequent exile to Switzerland. His experiences appear to parallel those of an earlier generation, to which Perdiguier and Nadaud belonged; but with the difference that Dumay was motivated by the ideal of a classwide and even cross-national alliance of workers. Nadaud, though later active in politics at the national level, even then identified with the interests and outlook of his native department of Creuse and with the informally organized but densely integrated networks of seasonally migrant masons that he depicted in his autobiography. Dumay, by contrast, ran for election as a workers' candidate in three different regions of France and was identified with a set of labor issues that were truly national in scope. Dumay's affiliation with the Syndicalist movement was shared by Bouvier. It is true that the daily experiences she relates in part 1 of her autobiography, covering the period through 1900, were confined to her largely individualistic efforts to achieve what modest mobility and security her situation permitted. However, she went on to become active in the trade unionist and protofeminist movements in France and abroad. All these later authors differed, if only in degree, from the earlier four because they associated themselves with groups in which dense networks of personal contact were less salient than an organizational style emphasizing inclusiveness of membership and large-scale mobilization.

At the risk of overstating the degree of discontinuity between them, it is possible to discern two styles of collective action that began to diverge in the course of the nineteenth century. In the earlier decades, protest in the work arena was likely to involve relatively small numbers of highly skilled workers, who saw themselves as members of a closed community defined in terms of trade or subtrade groupings and not as members of an economic class. Often their objective was to resist, in the name of communitarian or corporatist ideals, the advance of impersonal market relations. These artisans tended to see their economic concerns as inseparable not only from the organization of work but also from larger social issues like the right of non-elites to participate in political affairs through voting, association, and public debate. When economic and political preoccupations converged, as they did in each of the four major revolutionary events of the period, the mixture could prove highly volatile. The essentially defensive stance adopted by these artisans, premised on a rejection of many elements of the rising capitalist order, made their spontaneously mobilized actions appear capable of effecting a radical break with existing institutions. It succeeded in

introducing a new vocabulary of political protest and liberation; but precisely because they were opposing the powerful forces of economic and social rationalization that have broadly defined the modern era, the gains achieved often proved short-lived or illusory.

By comparison, the styles of collective action that began to emerge in the later part of the nineteenth century and firmly took hold only in the twentieth, involved a higher degree of formal organization, exhibited greater continuity, and typically operated on a more than local scale, even when they adopted a narrower economistic focus. Once rights of popular participation had been guaranteed by the Third Republic's more open and stable constitutional regime, the politics of insurrection began to give way to the politics of the ballot box, and protest was aimed increasingly at swaying public opinion. The revolutionary barricade all but disappeared in the last three decades of the century, the general strike and the demonstration were introduced, and social movements gradually took on the form with which we are familiar today.48 Though continuing to rely on the leadership of highly skilled workers to a degree disproportionate to their numbers, this new style of protest came to be associated with the industrialized segment of the French labor force, which figured more and more prominently in such actions. The dominant ideologieswhether generically Socialist, Marxist, Syndicalist, or otherframed their appeals in terms of class and sought to unite all workers regardless of distinctions based on trade, skill level, regional origin, or even nationality. Rather than reacting to crises, workers' movements became more proactive and aimed at preemptively shaping social policy in directions that would serve the interests of the working class. Despite an often defiant rhetoric of revolution, most of the actions in which large numbers of workers participated adopted pragmatic goals and stopped short of challenging the industrial order itself. They aimed instead at capturing an increased share of power and influence within the existing institutional structures. The Paris Commune of 1871 may have been the last serious attempt to overthrow the government of France by popular insurrectionbut this by no means implies that the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw fewer meaningful changes. On the contrary, if we measure its achievements in terms of lasting improvements in the material well-being of the working class, this

Charles Tilly has introduced the concept of "repertoire" to characterize the relatively stable and well-defined set of practices on which participants in collective action in any given time and place typically rely. In his view, during the nineteenth century a more traditional repertoire with roots deep in the Old Regime was displaced by a newer one that has persisted into our own era. The argument is most comprehensively stated in The Contentious French (Cambridge, 1986).

period of strident but less overtly insurrectionary action produced important cumulative gains in the conditions of work and life and in this respect might be judged more successful than the revolutionary outbursts that had dominated the earlier period in such spectacular fashion.

It is unlikely, of course, that any of the authors represented in this volume would have recognized these shifts in just the terms described. Each lived to see only a segment of this more than century-long progression, and all were denied the benefit of the retrospective point of view that allows us today to interpret the early age of industrialization in the light of late-twentieth-century understanding. In any event, these author-workers, as self-evidently astute and perceptive as they were, have not been chosen for their command of the abstract issues of political economy or the theory of collective action. They were chosen for the detailed and circumstantial accounts they provide of the trades they plied and the events they witnessed. Their testimony concerning the attitudes, beliefs, and values as well as the everyday activities of ordinary laborers is invaluable because it constitutes as direct and unmediated an account of the life experiences of the French worker as any we possess. In their own words, the epochal transformations which social historians and social scientists continue to debate are concretized as the personal recollections of individuals who were not just the products of those changes but their active agents. The following pages offer the reader the rare opportunity to see the world in which these workers lived, as if through their own eyes.

Excerpted from The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era by Mark Traugott, editor, translator, & introduction Copyright 1993 by Mark Traugott, editor, translator, & introduction. Excerpted by permission.
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