2003 MMLA
New Histories of Writing IV:
Forms and Rhetorics

Steven E. Rowe
University of Chicago

 Inscribing Power, Revising Power: Everyday Acts of Writing among the Working Classes in Nineteenth-Century France

Historians of European industrialization and modern labor movements have often examined texts written by workers as sources of information on working-class politics, especially militant, radical, or revolutionary political actions.1 In the case of France, social historians have studied the relationships between early forms of industrialization and workers' participation in large-scale insurrections, beginning with the French Revolution and continuing throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century.2 These studies have revealed the overwhelming participation of artisans - more-or-less skilled workers - in the radical political movements of the nineteenth century, rather than the unskilled laborers often thought to represent the modern industrial proletariat. In fact, until the late nineteenth century, artisans working in "small workshop[s] or in [their] own home[s], or (as [laborers]) in more-or-less casual employment in the streets, on building-sites, on the docks" formed the core group of typical industrial workers throughout Europe, and especially in France.3 Many historians have argued that these workers were threatened by changes in work processes brought on by early forms of industrialization, especially an increasing division of labor and frequent use of subcontracting, which led to a growing use of semi-skilled or unskilled laborers. This threat to their livelihoods and identities as workers, these historians have concluded, motivated artisans to engage in various forms of political militancy, from participation in local insurrections - such as the Lyon silk workers' revolt in 1834 - to acting as key players in the Revolution of 1848.4

These conclusions about the link between industrialization, artisanal work, and workers politics have been criticized by Jacques Rancière, who makes extensive use of workers' texts - perhaps more so than most social historians - as evidence of their politics. Specifically, Rancière has argued that militant workers tended to be those who worked in lower-skill professions and had a certain amount of "free time" (disponibilité) due to irregular work schedules and seasonal unemployment.5 The wide-range of workers' writings he examines leads directly to his critique of social historians' arguments about exactly which workers engaged in political action and why. While more precise and careful in his analysis of workers' texts than many social historians, Rancière's overall approach to these texts is fairly similar to most historians' methods: he examines texts for statements of specific motivations behind militant action and ideas, and for a better understanding of the nature of workers' political positions.

The analysis of French workers' political militancy adopted by Rancière and social historians, therefore, suggests a specific (if unstated) view of language, and of written texts in particular. The study of texts written by workers - including broadsheets (posters), newspapers (or newspaper articles), songs, poetry, letters, and autobiographies or memoirs - tends to be abstracted from the texts' production, particularly from the acts of writing and reading such texts, focusing instead on ideas, ideologies, mentalities, or discourses that indicate particular forms of political consciousness.6 Most historians do not completely ignore the contexts in which texts were created, situating statements from workers' texts within an analysis of a particular political movement (such as early forms of socialism and communism), a specific group of workers (often defined by trade or industry), or even an individual worker's experience.7 But regardless of how specific such analyses are, they tend to treat written texts and the practices that produce such texts rather unproblematically. This has not only limited our understanding of these texts, but also of the relationship between workers' writing and politics and, more broadly, of the practices of power and its forms of authority, domination, and resistance.

If, however, we approach workers' texts as the products of specific writing practices, we can develop a more dynamic analysis of the ways that acts of writing inscribed, reinforced, and revised social relations, institutions, and the power dynamics of industrializing societies, such as early nineteenth-century France.8 Specifically, by examining texts as the products of particular literacy practices - acts of writing and reading - we can more precisely analyze the relationships between writing and power.9 In their acts of writing, writers place themselves in specific social relationships with readers and other writers - either symmetrical relationships of relative equality or asymmetrical relationships of relative inequality. Through the inscription of symbolic language, writers also produce and reinforce forms of symbolic authority and domination; similarly, such forms of authority and domination are sometimes challenged through writing, producing acts of resistance.10 Thus, specific acts of writing are forms of social and political action; they are not merely the reflection of thought that motivates political action.11 This paper takes this approach to writing and politics as its starting point by examining French workers' practices of song writing and letter writing in the early nineteenth century.

Before examining workers' specific writing practices, though, it is important to understand workers' politics and power relationships that confronted laborers in post-Revolutionary French society. As discussed briefly above, French workers developed several criticisms of early forms of industrialization and the laissez-faire social order of the post-Revolutionary period. Workers articulated these critiques in conflicts with employers (either master artisans or large workshop owners) over wages (both rates of wages and how wages were paid), an increased division of labor, the use of subcontracting (marchandage), and the instability of employment.12 Most frequently, such conflicts were local, limited to a particular trade in one city, and sometimes resulted in work stoppages, as in the case of Parisian carpenters' strike in 1845. When workers articulated a more extensive critique of industrial labor and a broad-based identity as "workers" (as opposed to workers from a particular trade), they built upon a language of association inherited from the corporate traditions of the old regime.13 Through the 1830s and 1840s, workers increasingly presented such conflicts and critiques in terms taken from early forms of socialism and communism. Of course, this is where the analysis of French workers' critique of industrialization and the laissez-faire social order gets tricky, as shown by the extensive debate in the historiography briefly discussed above. Does this critique indicate some form of class consciousness, and if so, what kind of class consciousness? When did it develop and why? Is this ultimately a politics of resistance based on pride in one's work with the nature of that work under attack, on alienation due to the intense physical demands of industrial work and its psychological consequences, or on a sense of honor challenged by new disciplinary practices in the workplace?14 To further complicate this analysis, workers' politics of opposition to both the regimes of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848) were not solely based on critiques of economic and social changes but were influenced by a continued fascination with Napoleon and by radical republicanism - both inherited from the French Revolution.15

Rather than attempt to further refine and synthesize the historiography on the nature of workers' politics of opposition and resistance in post-Revolutionary France, it is sufficient, for the purposes of this paper, to note that this historiography has demonstrated that workers engaged in complex, multi-layered critiques of the organization and nature of labor in the nineteenth-century France and of the consequences of the laissez-faire social order for workers, i.e. poverty, frequent unemployment, and debt. Much of these forms of workers' politics of opposition and resistance, however, were engaged in by male workers, despite the fact that several significant changes in labor occurred in industries where a large percentage of the labor force were women.16 As Joan Scott, among others, has observed, the identity of "worker" in nineteenth-century France was coded as masculine, while l'ouvrière (working woman) was a repugnant word.17 Scott, in particular, has called for using gender as an analytical category, and not just as a synonym for women, to examine all historical processes.18

In order to understand the dynamics of power in nineteenth-century French society, one certainly has to heed Scott's call. After all, the Napoleonic Code inscribed women's subordination and men's domination into national law: women were declared legal nonpersons (the same as minors); the divorce law limited grounds for divorce to degrading criminal sentences, adultery, and physical abuse (in addition to divorce by mutual consent); married women were denied property rights; Article 213 of the Code required married women to obey their husbands; and the husband's rights over his wife (puissance maritale) included the right to kill her and her lover if the husband discovered them engaged in sexual activity (en flagrant delicto).19 In practice, husbands freely engaged in violence against their wives, often in ways that were legally condoned but occasionally challenged in open court by women seeking marital separation. For elite men, such violence was justified in court through references to a code of honor, and, for working-class men, violence was argued in court as an appropriate way of disciplining one's wife.20

By the late 1840s, the oppositional working-class press also advocated specific forms of male authority. Specifically, the newspapers L'Atelier and La Ruche Populaire argued that working-class men were (and should be) the primary wage earners in working-class families, while working women were (and should remain) economically dependent on their husbands. This argument was part of a strategy to advocate for higher wages for working-class men - a type of "family wage" argument - but, at the same time, women's place in the family and the workshop became subordinated to men's.21 Thus, while working-class men were caught up in and resisted relations of domination and subordination that developed out of early forms of industrialization and the laissez-faire social order in post-Revolutionary France, they also engaged in acts of authority and domination of working-class women. In order to examine the politics of writing of working-class women and men, it is, therefore, insufficient to analyze these literacy practices solely as acts of resistance or opposition.22 Instead, we must analyze the interplay of authority, domination, and resistance in each literacy practice.

Writing Songs for Parisian Singing Societies

Contemporary studies and other later studies by scholars suggest that poetry and song writing was more popular among French workers in the early nineteenth century than we might suspect. Many workers in Paris participated in the singing societies collectively known as goguettes.23 There were approximately forty to fifty of such singing societies in 1820,24 and, by 1827, at least forty-three specific goguettes existed in Paris.25 The numbers of these singing societies continued to multiply between 1830 and 1848, expanding beyond the city and permeating the surrounding countryside.26 Most goguettes had from thirty to two hundred participants, and many workers participated in several different goguettes. In their height during the 1830s and 1840s, there were at least as many as 400 goguettes in Paris and its environs, and the total number of participants reached upwards of 10,000. Between 1815 and 1830, many Parisian goguettes drew their members primarily from workers in a single trade or industry, while some had a membership of workers from multiple trades.27 In 1821, members of the goguettes known as Amis de la constance (Friends of Constancy) and les Admirateurs de la valeur français (Admirers of French Merit) were primarily jewelers,28 while in 1827 l'Anacréon (Anacreon) was made up "of 50 to 60 members ... almost all tinsmith workers" and la petite Goguette (The Little Goguette) was populated solely by typesetters.29

In general, goguettes were fairly simple organizations. Most met one evening per week at a particular location, usually in a room at a wine seller's shop, and participants would drink wine and sing songs throughout the evening. Most participants in goguettes were men, although some working-class women did write and sing songs at goguette meetings, more commonly as the singing societies expanded in the 1830s and 1840s. At the very least, women, as well as children, appear to have been observers at many of the goguettes.30 Many goguettes had a handful of officers, again especially as they became more numerous during the 1830s and 1840s, who did the few organizational tasks necessary. These officers included a president, who would call the meeting of the society to order and preside over the meeting, and a secretary or master of songs, who would keep records of those who volunteered to sing on a particular night. While many goguettes had a specific group of members, almost all were open to visitors, who could also sing their songs at a meeting.

The songs sung at meetings of goguettes were written by members and visitors and by popular song writers, and the most revered and frequently imitated song writer was Jean-Pierre de Béranger (1780-1857).31 In fact, many goguettiers wrote songs specifically to tunes used by Béranger, as well as to similar themes, to such an extent that his songs were viewed as having a particular style.32 Most songs contained approximately four to eight stanzas, usually with a repeated chorus. It is difficult to tell exactly how many different songs were sung on average at a goguette meeting, but since most meetings lasted the entire evening (approximately four to five hours), we can estimate that at least twenty songs were sung at most meetings. Thus, the production of songs by goguettiers was quite numerous, and the published songbooks, pamphlets, and the occasional loose song sheets available today only give us a glimpse of the extent of these literacy practices. In these published texts, songs were written as lyrics only without any musical notation, since they were written to already existing tunes.

Both contemporary observations and scholarly studies have argued that these singing societies were places in which workers engaged in forms of political education and critique. According to one contemporary observer, "the goguette was a school for the people. The songs produced there each reflected the thoughts of its author."33 More recently, Michel Ragon has argued that "the goguette … played an important role in the proletariat's coming to consciousness as a social class."34 Ragon's claim suggests that these singing societies not only facilitated French laborers conceptualizing themselves as "workers" (not just as members of particular trades), but as a particular, subordinate group. Like other analyses of goguettes, Ragon proposes that these singing societies were places of workers' resistance to the class domination of the post-Revolutionary French social order. In his memoirs, Jules Vinçard, a ruler maker and frequent participant in goguettes, went as far as to suggest that these singing societies marked "the first stage in the progression of the intelligence of the people" where one can see "the political spirit of the multitude" and, because of this, facilitated the swiftness of the Revolution of 1830.35

Claims that present goguettes in such romantic terms elide the complexity of both the forms of resistance produced by goguette song-writing practices and their reproduction of authority and domination. This complexity can only begin to be understood by first examining the social relations created by these singing societies, and, especially, by the practices of writing and singing songs. After all, these practices of writing and singing songs at goguette meetings were the principle acts that created the institutions of the goguettes and their social relations.

Beginning with the early goguettes of the Restoration (1815-1830), goguette song writers frequently referred to other members of the goguette as "friends" and expressed the friendship shared by all members of the singing society. In one of the earliest published goguette song collections, edited by the well-known goguettier Emile Debraux and published in 1823, Demailly's song "Réglement d'une société d'amis" (Rules of a society of friends) begins by addressing his fellow goguette participants as friends: "Friends, so that in this enclosure / Peace and cheerfulness reigns /.../ Receive our orders."36 At the end of the song, Demailly gives one last rule for everyone to follow: "And let us always be friends!"37 Demailly framed his statements about friendship in his song with a sense of permanence and mutual equality, based on good feeling. This sense of permanence and mutual equality implied that the friendship of the goguette was not a matter of individual preferences but was a characteristic of all members of the group gathered - it formed the basis for their solidarity as a group and defined the relationships among the individual members. That insistence on the mutual friendship among all participants of a goguette was echoed in another song in that same collection - Dupré's "Le Banquet des Joyeux" (The Banquet of the Joyous). In this song, Dupré described the participants at the goguette as a "Joyful troupe, kind troupe, / Friends of frank cheerfulness," and also claimed that friendship ties motivated participation in goguettes: "It's friendship that brings us to goguettes: / This, this is the banquet of the joyful."38

Song-writers' emphasis on goguettiers as friends in these early goguette songs was further developed by workers writing songs for goguettes during the July Monarchy (1830-1848). M. Lérat, in his song "Le Sans-Souci" (The Care-Free) which was published in a songbook in 1834, addressed his fellow goguettiers as his "dear friends" in the chorus: "Without desire and without envy, / Dear friends, we let the time slip by."39 In his song "La Goguette" published in 1841, Charbonnet invited members to participate in the society meeting and made it clear in the first verse that those to whom he extended the invitation were friends: "Enter, friends, into the depths of the sanctuary / Where Folly constantly lives."40 Gustave Leroy went even further than just referring to the goguette participants as friends in his song "Le Rendez-Vous" (The Meeting), writing that "friendship smiles in our songs."41 Leroy's line articulates that not only were goguette participants linked by friendship but that friendship was reflected, and reproduced, in the writing and singing of goguette songs. Furthermore, the meanings of friendship for goguettiers were also reproduced in their song-writing practices - friendship which produced equality among goguette participants, "peace," "cheerfulness," and gathering together "without envy."

These particular meanings of friendship that defined the relationships among members of goguettes had political implications. First, the equality implied by these ties of friendship created by writing and singing songs contrasted with the rigidly hierarchical social relations that existed outside the goguettes and permeated workers' daily lives. Second, the insistence on friendship based on good feelings, particularly feelings of "peace" and "cheerfulness," suggests that goguette songs, and the goguettes themselves, mitigated against countervailing tendencies in French society that created animosity among laborers and feelings of depression or alienation. Such animosity was most obvious in workers' fights (rixes), usually among workers who were members of different trade-based associations (compagnonnages), but animosity also arose from increased competition for jobs and wages, due to the implementation of laissez-faire reforms.42 In addition, many Parisian laborers were fairly recent migrants to the capital and therefore their social ties to other residents were often weak.43 By asserting and, therefore, creating relations of friendship based on equality, peace, and cheerfulness among participants in goguettes, song-writers resisted a hierarchical, alienating social order that, in most of their daily experiences, placed them in positions of subordination and exposed them to a form of abstract, impersonal domination "mediated by commodity-determined labor."44

Working-class song-writers' production (and reproduction) of concrete social relations among participants in singing societies did not resist all forms of social hierarchy and relationships of authority. Specifically, male laborers' songs often presented women and gender relations in ways that assumed forms of masculine authority and domination. These forms of authority and domination were not explicitly stated as such, suggesting that working-class men, and possibly working-class women who participated and/or attended the goguettes as well, (mis)recognized these forms of authority and domination as natural, a (mis)recognition that was produced and reinforced when they wrote and sung songs in goguettes.45

This production of symbolic authority and domination was most evident when laborers wrote songs that asserted men's right to control women's - particularly wives' - sexuality, an assertion most often expressed in songs that mention female infidelity (a well-trodden subject of literature). Most goguettiers did not, however, write entire songs explicitly on this subject. Instead, it was often integrated into seemingly unrelated songs, a practice that suggests the form of (mis)recognition discussed above. For example, "La Raison," a song by Emmanuel Christophe published in a pamphlet in 1824, was most likely written by Christophe after having been asked to write a song based on a particular word, in this case "la raison" (reason). Such an exercise was a relatively common practice among goguettiers, and the initial verse of the song sets up the focus on the word "raison":

Un mot que tout le monde vante,                    One word that everyone praises,
Dont se moquent beaucoup de gens,               Which many people mock,
Et dont l'acception constante                         And which the constant meaning
Exprime toujours le bons sens;                        Always expresses good sense;
Un mot qui sert à la vieillesse                         One word that leaves comes with old age
Pour donner sa docte leçon;                          To give its learned lesson;
Un mot qui fait fuir la jeunesse,                      One word that flees youth,
Mes chers amis, c'est la raison.46                   My good friends, this is reason.

Christophe ends this opening verse by stating his relationship of friendship with his audience, reinforcing the friendship based on good feelings typically produced by goguette songs. After another verse, however, Christophe's play on this word takes a different turn:

Quand le besoin d'aimer, de plaire,                When the need to love, to please,
Exalte notre amour naissant,                        Excites our nascent love,
Alors le coeur de peut se taire,                     Then the heart can do little,
Il a besoin d'épanchement:                          It needs to pour itself out:
Timide, en voyant notre amante,                  Timid, in seeing our lover,
Nous éprouvons certain frisson,                    We experience true thrill,
Car, près d'une femme charmante                 Because, next to a charming woman
Est-on maître de sa raison?                         Are we masters of our reason?

Basile, dans le mariage                               Basile, in marriage
Croyait trouver le vrai bonheur;                   Thought to find true happiness;
Il sut que sa femme volage                         He knew that his fickle wife
Manquait très souvent à l'honneur:              Very often lacked honor:
Pour surprendre son infidelle                       To surprise his unfaithful wife
Il se fourra dans la cloison:                         He goes into the partition:
Que vit-il? il vit la cruelle                           What did he see? He saw his insensitive wife
Avec Luc perdant la raison.                        With Luke losing her mind.

In these two verses, Christophe places reason and sexuality in symbolic opposition, depicting sexuality as a force that is difficult to control. In both verses, women symbolize this uncontrollable force, as well as being "fickle" and "often lack[ing] honor." This appears to make women, and Basile's wife specifically, able to control men. Through such representations, Christophe evoked humor by presenting himself (as well as his listeners) as an outside observer, critical of Basile's inability to enact the rightful role of any husband by controlling his wife. Thus while the representation of women as unrestrained sexuality might appear to invert women's subordination and place them in control of male reason, the humor of this situation reinforced a (mis)recognition of male authority and control as natural. The naturalization of this form of authority and control was further reproduced by the rest of the song, which continued in a different direction, closing with:

Sur ce mot s'il fallait m'étendre                        On this word I need to dwell
Je ne finirais pas, je crois;                              I'm not yet finished, I think;
Pourtant, lorsqu'on veut bien s'entendre,          Yet, when one wants to be heard clearly,
Il faut s'en servir quelquefois:                         One needs to make use of it sometimes:
Dans le comerce, en politique,                         In commerce, in politics,
En tous lieux, en toute saison,                        In all places, in all seasons,
Contre l'insolent, le critique,                           Against the insolent, criticism,
Employons toujours la raison.                          Always use reason.

This closing verse continued to hide the suggestion provoked by the earlier humorous presentation of sexuality - that men, using their reason, should control women, especially their wives. By not stating this explicitly, though, Christophe inscribed a naturalized relationship of power into a seemingly "normal" goguette song, one that produced good feelings of friendship among goguette participants, and the humorous atmosphere of the goguettes.

This practice of naturalizing male control of female sexuality into humorous songs was somewhat more common in the earlier goguette songs of the Restoration. Despite the wider diversity of songs written the 1830s and 1840s, though, many song writers inscribed masculine authority in more subtle ways. For example, in writing a song about a particular goguette, Eugène Duhoux began by invoking the good feelings shared by participants of the goguette in the beginning chorus:

Dans le plus beau délire,                               In the most beautiful folly,
Par nos joyeux accents,                               By our joyous tones,
Du vrai dieu de la lyre }                                Of the true god of the lyre }
Montrons-nous les enfants! } Bis.47               Children, let's show ourselves! } repeat.

After two verses describing the goguette and inviting singers to participate, young women are specifically invited to participate in the goguette in the following verse:

Venez aussi, fillettes dégourdies,                   Come also, bright little girls,
Aux frais minois, aux regards séduisants,        With fresh little faces, with seductive looks
A qui l'Amour, par ses espiègleries,                 For whom Love, by its mischievousness
Fait palpiter le coeur avant seize ans.            Makes the heart beat before sixteen years.
Sexe charmant, dont l'aspect nous enchante,   Charming sex, whose appearance enchants us,
Notre miroir est toujours dans tes yeux;          Your eyes are always our mirror,
Viens partager notre joie enivrante:               Come share our drunken joy:
Nous nous croirons à la table des dieux!          We believe to be at the table of gods!

Even though Duhoux's song invited women to participate in the goguette, it did not invite them to be equal participants in the meeting. Instead, women were asked to "share in our [i.e. men's] drunken joy," rather than help create the good feelings that were an essential part of the social interaction at goguette meetings. Duhoux' s invitation for women's participation in the goguette, then, was extended from a position of (male) authority and placed women in a position of subordination. In addition, Duhoux represented women as the "charming sex" "with seductive looks" and "whose appearance enchants" men, a representation of women as objects of/for men's pleasure. Like in Christophe's song, Duhoux did not dwell on this gender dynamic but rather continued with other related themes and again reinforced the good feelings among participants in the goguette:

De nos auteurs joyeuse pépinière,                 From our joyous nursery of authors,
Dont le talent brille de jour en jour,               Whose talent shines from day to day,
Sans oublier la Lice chansonnière,                 Without forgetting the Lice Chansonnière,
Viens embellir souvent notre séjour.              Come often to beautify our rest.
Venez, amis, sous notre humble coupole,       Come, friends, under our humble Cupola,
Au nom chéri d'Émile qui n'est plus:               In the dear name of Émile who is no longer:
De la chanson, à votre douce école,             From song, to your sweet school,
Nous deviendrons des émules de plus.           We will become rivals again.
Dans le plus beau délire, etc.                       In the most beautiful folly, etc.

Gais visiteurs, qui de la chansonnette         Happy visitors, who from little songs
Fûtes toujours les zélés partisans,             Always become zealous partisans,
Du dieu des arts, en célébrant la fête,        From the god of art, celebrating the party,
Nous conservons l'égalité des rangs.          We maintain the equality of ranks.
Restons unis, bannissons la licence,           Let us stay united, banish decadence
Souvent nuisible à la franche gaîté:           Often detrimental to true happiness:
Buvons ensemble au soutien de la France,   Let's drink together to the support of France,
Sur les autels de la Fraternité!                  To the honors of Fraternity!

By ending his song with such calls for unity, happiness, fraternity, and maintaining "the equality of ranks," Duhoux reinforced the social relations that created the solidarity of the goguette and therefore resisted the hierarchical, alienating social order. But, this solidarity was based on a tacit (mis)recognition of masculine authority as natural which was itself inscribed by Duhoux in his song. Duhoux's call for maintaining "the equality of ranks" might have sought to overcome divisions and hierarchy among male workers, but it did not eliminate the gender hierarchy and working-class women's subordinate position within that hierarchy.

This form of political action was not the sort of politics that contemporary observers and scholars have lauded these singing societies for teaching to workers. Even the ways that goguette songs created relationships of friendship and good feelings among participants that resisted the dominant social order were not the forms of resistance that many have claimed were created by the goguettes. Particularly during the Restoration (1815-1830), these singing societies were constantly under surveillance by the police who were concerned about the singing of seditious and overtly political songs - namely, songs that criticized the king and referred positively to the Revolution and Napoleon.48 Some goguettes moved locations to avoid being shut down by the police, and people observed singing, writing, or possessing songs that openly criticized the king were occasionally imprisoned. The struggle of many goguettes for their very existence was, therefore, an act of resistance to the restored Bourbon monarchy and the Parisian police. In addition, by the mid-1830s and into the 1840s, some workers wrote songs for goguettes that articulated a militant worker identity and presented a more overt critique of the injustice of the laissez-faire social order.49

Writing this militant worker identity into songs and the struggles of goguettes against the police are the forms of resistance most apparent in studying these singing societies and their working-class members. But, that does not mean these are the most significant or most representative forms of political action produced by writing and singing songs at goguette meetings. These literacy practices formed and reproduced the social relationships among participants in these singing societies, defining the nature of the societies as social institutions. While writing and singing songs defined the relationships among male participants by equality and good feelings, resisting the hierarchy and alienation of the laissez-faire social order, these literacy practices also produced symbolic forms of masculine authority and domination - placing working-class women in positions of subordination.

Writing Letters to Famous Writers: George Sand and Eugène Sue

French workers' practice of writing letters to famous writers, specifically to George Sand and Eugène Sue, hardly seems to pose similar questions about the politics of writing that song-writing for goguettes does. After all, one would not assume that this letter-writing practice was an act of resistance to the laissez-faire social order of post-Revolutionary French society. In fact, the very idea that workers wrote letters to George Sand and Eugène Sue is striking not for the political implications of this practice but for its peculiarity.50 Nevertheless, an analysis of this letter-writing practice reveals forms of resistance and acts of inscribing authority in ways that remarkably parallel goguette song writing. Who were these workers and why did they write letters to Sand and Sue? In the case of Sand, a handful of workers, all of whom she had met through mutual connections, engaged in an extensive correspondence with her in the 1840s and 1850s.51 For Sue, many workers, as well as people from other social classes, wrote to him in response to his serialized novel set in working-class Paris, Les Mystères de Paris, which appeared in the Journal des Débats from June 1842 through October 1843.52 Workers who wrote letters to George Sand, then, did so as part of an ongoing social relationship, while Eugène Sue's interlocutors likely contacted him for the first and only time in their letters.

While the intentions of these letter writers is not always clear, the workers writing to Sand typically expressed sentiments of affection and friendship, discussing their families and developing a close, personal connection with Sand. Workers' letters to Sue also expressed affection, usually based on a sense the Sue and his writing demonstrated sympathy with the plight of impoverished laborers. In addition to these expressions of affection to both Sue and Sand, many workers requested aid in their letters - sometimes specifically with paying debts, other times with finding work, and occasionally help with writing. By representing themselves as typical workers, through discussions of the details of their poverty and (un)employment, these letter writers produced an implicit critique of the domination of the laissez-faire social order. Workers' letters to Sand and Sue that requested aid were efforts to alleviate (usually temporarily) the domination of wage labor, and therefore constituted acts of resistance. This resistance was based, however, on authority granted to George Sand and Eugène Sue to act as patrons or sources of charity for their working-class correspondents.53 While Sand and Sue were clearly wealthier than the workers who wrote to them and had connections among a certain elite within French society, workers' letters symbolically reinforced their positions of authority within the social order, as well as workers' own positions of subordination.

Workers inscribed this symbolic authority and subordination in the conventions of their letter greetings and closing. As with middle-class letter-writing practices, workers' conventions in letter openings and closings "fix[ed] the terms of the interaction. They orient[ed] the reception of the message, they visualiz[ed] the social distance between the interlocutors."54 Workers' letters to Eugène Sue were almost always addressed to "Monsieur," a formal address that established a clear distance between the working-class writers and Sue. This could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that workers writing to Sue usually did not know him. A similar level of formality and distance, however, was produced in workers' openings to their letters to George Sand, in which workers tended to address her by the more formal "Madame" rather than the slightly less formal "Dame." Agricol Perdiguier, a carpenter turned innkeeper and occasional writer,55 and his wife Lise Perdiguier, a garment worker, always referred to Sand as "Madame" even after she had started addressing her letters to Agricol as "Mon Cher Perdiguier," (My Dear Perdiguier) and even later as "Mon cher ami" (My Dear Friend).56 The weaver Marie Eléanore Magu also addressed his letters to Sand with "Madame," switching to "Ma chère dame" (My dear woman) once in 1844 but quickly returning to "Madame" until 1855 when he addressed Sand as "dame" again.57 Similarly, his daughters Félicie Gilland and Désiré Magu wrote "Madame" as the greeting for their letters to Sand. The one worker who showed the most variation in the greetings of his letters to George Sand was Magu's son-in-law, the locksmith Jérôme-Pierre Gilland. He too, primarily used the greeting "Madame" in his letters to Sand, but, gradually over time, switched to less formal greetings, such as "Chère madame et amie" (Dear Madam and Friend), "Bonne chère madame" (Dearest Madam), "Bonne chère madame et amie" (Dearest Madam and Friend), and eventually the fairly informal "Chère dame."58 Despite the friendships that developed between these workers and Sand during their lengthy periods of correspondence, workers continued to frame these friendships in the greetings of their letters on somewhat unequal, or at least more formal and distant, terms.

Mirroring the greetings of their letters to Sand and Sue that reinforced the social distance between letter writers and readers, workers frequently framed their closings of letters written to Sand and Sue with occupational identity claims, reinforcing their positions as laborers. For example, in virtually all of his letters to Sand, Marie Eléanore Magu included his occupation after his signature: "Magu tisserand" (Magu weaver). This practice was even more common among workers who wrote letters to Sue. These workers almost always included their occupation immediately following their name in the closing of a letter. Sue received letters from workers who signed as "C. Béranger, Autrefois ouvrier en horlogerie" (C. Béranger, formerly clockmaker worker), "Duquenne ouvrier imprimeur" (Duquenne printer worker), "J. Braxel Tisserand" (J. Braxel weaver), "F. A. Lichtenauer portiere" (F. A. Lichtenauer doorman), "Lièvyns fondateur" (Lièvyns founder), and even "Agricol Perdiguier compagnon menuisier" (Agricol Perdiguier journeyman joiner).59 By making these explicit claims of affiliation with occupational groups, workers inscribed their place within French society, particularly since different working-class occupations had varying degrees of prestige, and framed their social interaction with Sand and Sue in terms of their status as manual laborers.60

By opening and closing their letters to Sand and Sue in these ways, workers granted Sand and Sue a degree of symbolic authority, based on their distance from workers' own positions of subordination as wage laborers in the laissez-faire social order. While this relationship did frame the content of workers' letters, it did not prevent workers from critically presenting to Sand and Sue the consequences of this social order. Specifically, their letters frequently discussed the ability - or inability - of their labor to meet their needs. In one of his earliest letters to George Sand, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland noted "Winter is harsh and bread is expensive but I'm not lacking work and my health resists fatigue."61 In later letters, Gilland wrote even more fervently about the potential insufficiency of his wages to pay for his and his family's subsistence. Writing in December 1845, Gilland noted that "I have worked a lot for some time. I have managed to provide bread for six people - something that is not a small task for a worker today."62 In a letter written two and half years later, Gilland was not as optimistic about the ability of his earnings to continue to provide food for his family: "I still have work, but I barely earn two francs per day and I need four in order to meet our needs."63 During his first bout of unemployment in 1849, Gilland, writing to George Sand's son Maurice, stated that he and his family were staying with his father-in-law "until my locksmith work resumes; which could be a while, and, which bothers me a lot … All the workers in my state are practically reduced to begging."64 It is somewhat surprising that, given the upheavals in the French economy between 1830 and 1849, Gilland had not previously been unemployed.65 Regardless, Gilland continually represented himself as a struggling worker in his letters to Sand during this time, developing an implicit critique of wage labor and a social order that reduced workers to such states of poverty.

At the same time, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland inscribed his authority as a male head of household in his letters to Sand by representing his locksmith work as the sole source of wages for his family. In his letter to Sand in 1846, Gilland presents the idea of the (extended) family as an economic unit by explaining that he was supporting his aging parents financially after they lost their jobs as domestic servants: "I have taken my parents in as I already did last winter and we share the fruits of my labor that thank God suffices for all, as long as the season is mild and work abundant."66 In a letter three years later, Gilland continued to emphasize his parents' need for his financial support: "My wife's father and mother and mine are still living. The first don't need us, but the others are unfortunate doorkeepers who earn almost nothing in their station and who without us would have died in the hospital a long time ago, and that after having always been the most honest people and the best workers in the world." In both of these letters, Gilland indicates that his parents worked as servants, in the second letter even calling them "the best workers in the world,"67 demonstrating the potential contribution of both working women and men to the family economy. In the first letter, however, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland completely effaced the work of his wife Félicie Gilland, whose employment as a seamstress later supported her and her children after her husband's death, and represented "the fruits of [his] labor" as the sole income for the household.68

That does not appear to have been an isolated omission, for Jérôme-Pierre Gilland continually represented Félicie Gilland's role in their family solely as the children's caretaker, not as a fellow wage earner, in his ongoing correspondence with George Sand.69 This is most apparent in a series of three letters written when Félicie Gilland and the children went to stay with her parents in Lizy-sur-Ourcq, while Jérôme-Pierre Gilland returned to Paris to work. The language he used in his first letter explaining this situation to Sand is particularly telling: "i have left my wife and my children to spend the winter at Lizy because in Paris we could not live."70 In a letter written three months later, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland emphasized his family's debts, but at the same time, again portrayed himself as the sole wage earner, or the one responsible for paying the debts: "my wife and my children are still in Lizy. … As soon as I get a little work it's used to pay the most pressing debts."71 In describing his wife's and their children's return to Paris two months after this last letter, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland used similar language to the letter when he described them first going to Lizy: "i was in Lizy last week, everyone is well. i have taken my wife and my two sons in good health back to Paris. Work is always difficult to find; i don't earn enough for our food but the sale of my book is a temporary resource."72 Jérôme-Pierre Gilland's statements that he "left [his] wife and [his] children" and that he "[took his] wife and [his] two sons in good health back to Paris" inscribed his position of authority within his family - a form of authority based on his responsibility for making decisions for the entire family. In doing this, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland defined his status as a male head of household and the representative of his family in which his wage work and his decisions subordinated his wife to him.

In contrast to Jérôme-Pierre Gilland's representation of his wife's role in their family, French working women often represented themselves through their letter-writing practices as both caretakers of their families and as wage earners, resisting attempts to subordinate their productive work to men's. Lise Perdiguier's letters to George Sand in the 1840s, for example, frequently discussed her work as a seamstress and its importance for supporting her family.73 For example, in a letter in October 1846, Perdiguier discussed her family's financial difficulties and then asked Sand "if you would permit me … to receive the price for making your curtains despite what I owe you."74 One of the purposes this letter, like several of her letters to Sand, was to update Sand on the seamstress work she had contracted from Sand and to request payment even though she (or her family) was already in debt to Sand. While Lise Perdiguier did not claim the same position of authority in her family that Jérôme-Pierre Gilland did in his, she did reinforce her status as a wage laborer and her wage contributions to the family economy, challenging the male head of household model expressed by many male workers.

Both Lise Perdiguier's and Jérôme-Pierre Gilland's letters, though, also described their family's debts, with Perdiguier's letter recalling a specific debt to Sand. In fact, as briefly mentioned above, most workers who wrote to Sand requested various forms of aid from her in their letters. For example, in a letter written in June 1846 Jérôme-Pierre Gilland requested Sand's help to find his aging father a job and listed possible jobs which his father might be capable of:

Now, I make an appeal to your kindness to ask you to recommend my father to your friends; they could possibly procure a job for him on their properties either as a concierge, or as a servant. since he was in the army for a long time and was in the cavalry he understands perfectly how to care for horses, one could also employ him inside the house because he is very clean and very tidy, unfortunately he is very old but when courage is supplied in plenty one can still be useful, especially when one is hard working and well-intentioned.75

Gilland, as well as other workers like the weaver Magu, requested other types of assistance from Sand in later letters, including help with publishing their poetry and obtaining money to pay off debts. These workers' ongoing pleas for aid through their correspondence with George Sand resulted in their letter-writing practices being more than just temporary attempts to resist the domination of the laissez-faire social order. Through this extended correspondence, these workers endeavored to effect a more permanent change in their position in the social order, through which Sand would continually provide them with enough support to prevent them from altogether experiencing the domination of wage labor. Sand seems to have been quite willing to provide this support and act as a patron to this small group of workers. These workers with whom she developed friendships were fortunate that she had both extensive personal resources and social connections that provided her with wider-ranging resources than were available to her worker correspondents.

Although Eugène Sue had a much-less substantial correspondence with the workers who wrote to him, workers' letters to him that requested aid were still acts of resistance to the laissez-faire social order, albeit usually singular acts of resistance. For example, Charlotte W. requested help with her father's debts by affirming her status as a worker and as a wage contributor to the family economy. W. began her letter by describing the hope she felt after reading Les Mystères de Paris and continued by asking whether Sue might help her family with its debt:

I no longer thought about dying from the inspired moment that I [realized] that the spirit capable of this council would not hesitate to save a family from the sum of 200 francs cash owed by my father who will be put on trial and imprisoned if this debt is not paid by the last day of this month.76

Later in her letter, W. notes that "I am a native of Paris but I live in Nancy where I embroider whenever my health allows me but I have come with poor father to Lunéville to try to escape from our creditor, but he will discover our residence."77 Through her letter, Charlotte W. developed an implicit critique of the social order, where she, as an embroiderer in poor health was responsible for alleviating her family's debts. At the same time, her written request to Sue for financial assistance was her attempt to resist the insufficiency of her wage labor for paying her family's debts and the consequences of this insufficiency - her father's imprisonment.

Similarly, the jeweler turned engraver (ouvrier-ciseleur) Lacquet wrote a letter to Sue in August 1843 asking for his help in finding a job. In his letter, Lacquet told Sue the brief story of his life - how he became an engraver, how he immigrated from Belgium to Paris to find work, and how he fell sick and was unable to find work again after he recovered - and ended the letter with his request from Sue:

If, Sir, I write so many words before telling you the motive of my letter, it's to prove to you that I think I am convinced of the canker that reigns in commerce, it's because I don't have any friend or acquaintance who speaks to me to ask for a small place to live with my wife and my children outside of this circle which corrupts daily. It is finally that I think that one word from you, Sir, could accomplish that which I ask for in vain.78

Lacquet, then, presented a direct critique of the laissez-faire social order, where his unemployment was due to "the canker that reigns in commerce." His letter requesting Sue's help was his only hope for escape from the domination of wage labor. Unfortunately, Sue's response did not survive to tell us whether Lacquet received the assistance he needed. In similar requests made in others' letters, though, Sue appeared to have done his best to help workers when he could,79 suggesting that such written pleas to Sue could be effective acts of (temporary) resistance.

Ultimately, workers' letters to George Sand and Eugène Sue demonstrate a series of complex ways that workers simultaneously criticized the domination of wage labor under the laissez-faire social order of post-Revolutionary France, resisted that domination, and inscribed forms of symbolic authority. As acts of critique or resistance, these letter-writing practices could hardly be described as radical. After all, they reinforced workers' positions of subordination and Sand's and Sue's positions of authority and placed them in relationships of patronage and/or charity. These relationships were not, however, characterized entirely by deference or social distance but were also based affection, friendship, and on a sense that Sand and Sue were sympathetic to the plight of the laboring poor.

These forms of resistance through written charitable appeals, regardless of the exact nature of the charitable relationships, hardly seem modern or what we might consider typical working-class oppositional politics. But, since there were no pre-established relations of authority (i.e. compared with old regime relationships of subjects and nobility) between these famous writers and their working-class correspondents, we should not assume these were merely archaic acts that somehow made their way into workers' writing practices.80 In fact, these acts of writing letters to elicit material support from famous writers were based on a shared critique of the social order among these writers and their working-class interlocutors. Thus, these letter-writing practices were more modern than might be initially apparent - part of a developing criticism of industrialization and working-class poverty that emerged in the nineteenth century.

A similar argument holds for writing songs for Parisian working-class singing societies. While these writing practices appear to bear some resemblance to practices of carnival or charivari, they inscribed a peculiarly modern set of social relations among members of these singing societies. As ties of friendship defined by good feelings and equality, these social relations resisted the alienation and competition of the post-Revolutionary social order. In addition, workers' acts of writing and singing songs in goguettes inscribed symbolic forms of masculine authority and domination. These forms of masculine domination cannot merely be interpreted as the persistence of patriarchy but must be seen within the context of the goguettes themselves - sites of working-class solidarity in response to the social dislocation caused by laissez-faire labor reforms and the domination of the wage labor relationship. Masculine domination inscribed in workers' songs, and in some of their letters to famous writers, was very much part and parcel of the development of a modern social order and in modern practices of resistance.

French workers' writing practices in the nineteenth century reveal, therefore, the multiple connections between writing and politics. Their acts of writing were acts of resistance, but also acts of authority and domination. The interplay of these forms of power and acts of writing demonstrates that a more complex understanding of workers' politics in industrializing societies, like that of nineteenth-century France, is needed. Historians analyzing gender have further problematized our understanding of the processes of industrialization,81 and we now need to apply their insights to analyzing workers' political practices. Different forms of writing are one set of such political practices, and this paper has attempted to present an analysis of some writing practices as political practices.

Notes

1 See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966); Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Joan Wallach Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century Toulouse, France (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981); Donald Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Michael P. Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

2 See Georges Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) and Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en l'an II: Mouvement Populaire et Gouvernement Révolutionnaire, 2 Juin 1793 - 9 Thermidor an II (Paris: Librairie Clavreuil, 1958) for an examination of the role of urban workers in the French Revolution.

3 Thompson, 234. All of the studies cited above for France discuss the persistence of artisans as the core labor force in industrial production throughout most of the nineteenth century.

4 See, for example, Bezucha on the Lyon silk workers' revolt and Sewell on 1848.

5 Jacques Rancière, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History, " International Labor and Working Class History 24 (1983), 3. More specifically, Rancière argues that the organization of specific trades is not the best way to understand workers in early industrial France as a group, defining proletarians by the "aleatory character of a situation daily put into question." (Quoted in Donald Reid's "Introduction" to the Nights of Labor, xxxiii.)

6 See Sewell, 9 for his statement on the use of the concept of discourse since "the coherence of the thought lies not in particular texts or in the 'work' of particular authors, but in the entire ideological discourse constituted by a large number of individually fragmentary and incomplete statements, gestures, images, and actions." In his article on worker poets in the 1830s and 1840s in France, Edgar Leon Newman makes it clear that the issue he explores is the "working-class mentality" and "what (workers) thought." See Newman, "L'arme du siecle, c'est la plume: The French Worker Poets of the July Monarchy and the Spirit of Revolution and Reform," The Journal of Modern History 51 (1979 suppl.): D1201-D1224.

7 Sewell certainly does this, and Rancière does this even more specifically. His precise contextualization is, in fact, part of Rancière's critique of French historians' argument about workers' political militancy: he argues that one should carefully examine each text and its writer's (or writers') place in French society, especially in relation to other workers.

8 This dynamic approach to literacy practices and the social is suggested by James Paul Gee in "The New Literacy Studies: From 'Socially Situated' to the Work of the Social," in Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, ed. David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanic (London: Routeledge, 2000), 190-91.

9 This focus on literacy practices has been developed by several scholars, most notably anthropologists, since about 1980. The two best early examples of this approach are Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). For an argument for this focus on literacy practices as a way to analyze literacy, as opposed to analyzing literacy as one-half of a binary opposition (literate/illiterate), see Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Street, "Introduction: The New Literacy Studies," in Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, ed. Brian V. Street (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-22. For a more nuanced approach to developing this theory of literacy practices, see Niko Besnier, Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

10 My emphasis on both producing and reinforcing power and well as resisting it through one's literacy practices is an attempt to address the argument presented in Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Romance of Resitance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women," American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41-55. On symbolic authority and domination, see Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

11 This somewhat fine distinction certainly depends upon the particular writing practice in question. One can conceive of literacy practices carried out solely for reflection, but such practices (diaries, notes, etc.) would be those whose audience is limited to the individual writer her/himself. For a more complex analysis of the link between practice and thought, see the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of the habitus, as in Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

12 Michael Sonenscher has raised some questions as to what extent these labor practices were new to nineteenth-century industrial production, arguing that many of these practices were widespread in eighteenth-century France. See Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). More recently, Leora Auslander has raised some questions about Sonenscher's critique in her work on furniture making, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

13 See Sewell, Work and Revolution.

14 The first of these is argued for by Sewell and others, the second by Rancière, and the third in William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 154-96.

15 See Edgar Leon Newman, "The Blouse and Frock Coat: The Alliance of the Common People of Paris with the Liberal Leadership and the Middle Class During the Last Years of the Bourbon Restoration," The Journal of Modern History 46 (1974): 26-59 [see p. 33, n. 37 on workers' fascination with Napoleon] and Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830-1852 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

16 This is particularly the case in the textile industries, and several historians studying this industry have led the way for analyses of understanding changes in the sexual division of labor and gendered meanings of work. The most significant include Gay Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Tessie Liu, The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). See also Laura S. Strumingher, Women and the Making of the Working Class: Lyon 1830-1870 (St. Alban's: Eden Press, 1979); Katherine A. Lynch, Family, Class, and Ideology in Early Industrial France: Social Policy and the Working-Class Family, 1825-1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Routledge, 1989); Elinor Accampo, Industrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint-Chamond, 1815-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Judith C. Coffin, The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750-1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

17 See Joan Wallach Scott, "'L'ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide...': Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-1860" in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 139-63.

18 See Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History, 28-50.

19 See James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 36-41. For an analysis of gender and economic life, see Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

20 See William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65-114 (103-111 for his analysis of working-class marital violence).

21 See Victoria Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace, 62-72. Thompson does point out that this position was not universal among working-class radicals, as Saint-Simonian feminists advocated a society where both women and men were free from material concerns. See Tilly and Scott and Accampo for further discussions of the conception of a "family wage" and how working-class family economies changed in nineteenth-century France.

22 Rancière recognized problem of male workers' power over wives/women that might be ignored by historians who want to see male workers' texts solely in terms of political critique. See Donald Reid's introduction to The Nights of Labor, xxvii-xxviii, which is based on articles by Rancière in the journal Les Révoltes logiques.

23 Similar song-writing clubs existed in at least some provincial manufacturing towns as well. For an analysis of song-writing practices by participants in singing societies in Lille during the Second Empire (1851-1870) see William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture, 253-88. For an interesting study comparing goguette song writing with German workers' song writing, see Axel Körner, Das Lied von einer anderen Welt: Kulturelle Praxis im französischen und deutschen Arbeitermilieu, 1840-1890 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1997).

24 AN F7 6700, dossier 28, Rapport sur les Sociétés Lyrico-Bachique (31 Mars 1820).

25 AN F7 6700, dossier 28, Rapport de la Préfecture de Police de Août 1827.

26 See Robert Balland, "Les Goguettes Rurales autour de Paris au Milieu du XIXe Siècle," Ethnologie Française 12 (1982): 247-60.

27 Several police surveillance reports of goguettes simply describe the participants as "ouvriers" (workers), presumably because the agents could not tell what trade(s) the participants worked in, saw those distinctions as unimportant, and/or the participants represented many different trades. See AN F7 6700, dossier 28.

28 AN F7 6700, dossier 28, rapport du 24 août 1821.

29 AN F7 6700, dossier 28, rapport de août 1827.

30 See Balland, "Les Goguettes Rurales."

31 Béranger's name indicates that his family had some pretensions to nobility, but his social status is probably best described as petit bourgeois. Béranger's grandfather was a tailor, his father was a notary in the provinces and then a bookkeeper in Paris, and his mother worked for a grocer. Béranger himself worked as a typographer, a banker, and in lending library - vacillating between working-class and bourgeois status.

32 This imitation of Béranger's songs is one reason why Jacques Rancière argues that goguette songs were not the products of an autonomous working-class culture but were a sort of intermediary cultural phenomena - a form of popular culture with ties to the working class and to a dominant culture. See Rancière, "Ronds de fumée (Les poètes ouvriers dans la France de Louis-Philippe)" Revue des Sciences Humaines LXI, no. 190 (1983), 35-36 and "Good Times or Pleasure at the Barriers," in Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, eds., Voices of the People (New York: Routlege, 1988), 49-51. This argument about songs written for the goguettes, though, is part of his larger argument about working-class writing, most fully developed in The Nights of Labor.

33 Eugène Baillet, "Préface ou Extraits de l'Histoire de la Goguette" in Chansons et Petits Poèmes (Paris: L. Labbé, 1885), xx.

34 Michel Ragon, "Introduction," in Alphonse Viollet, Les Poètes du peuple au XIXe siècle (Paris: libr. française et étrangère, 1846; facsimile reprint, ed. Michel Ragon, Geneva: Slatkine, 1980), ii-iii.

35 Vinçard aîné, Mémoires épisodique d'un vieux chansonnier saint-simonien (Paris: E. Dentu, 1878), 24-27.

36 "Amis, pour qu'en notre enceinte / Règnent la paix, la gaîté /.../ Recevez notre arrêté." Demailly, "Réglement d'une société d'amis," in Le Nouvel Enfant de la Goguette (Paris: Le Couvey, 1823), 198-201. [Located at the BNF, YE-29073]

37 "Et Soyons Toujours Amis!" Ibid.

38 "Troupe joyeuse, troupe aimable, / Amis de la franche gaîté ... C'est l'amitié qui vous met en goguettes: / Voilà, voilà le banquet des joyeux." Dupré, "Le Banquet des Joyeux," in Le Nouvel Enfant de la Goguette, 83-85.

39 "Sans désir et sans envie, / Chers amis, coulons le temps." M. Lérat, "Le Sans-Souci," in La Goguette, chansonnier de table et de société (Paris: Les marchands de nouveautés, 1834), 244-45. [Located at the BNF, YE-23411]

40 "Entrez, amis, au fond du sanctuaire / Où la Folie habite constamment." J. Charbonnet, "La Goguette," in La Goguette, Receuil de Toutes les Bonnes Chansons des Sociétés Chantantes; Publiée par Guillaume et Benard, ouvriers typographes (Paris: Guillaume et Benard, 1841), 129-30. [Located at the BNF, YE-23412]

41 "Et l'amitié sourit à nos chansons." Gustave Leroy, "Le Rendez-Vous," in La Voix du Peuple! Oeuvres Complètes de Chansons Populaires, de Gustave Leroy (Paris: Eyssautier, 1844), 21-22 (1er volume, 6e livraison). [Located at the BNF, YE-3391]

42 There are some parallels here between goguettiers insistence on good feelings in their songs and other workers' uses of farce in songs. See William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture, 280.

43 See Louis Chevalier, La formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siècle (Presses Universitaires de France, 1950) for a detailed study of migration to Paris and Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France (Sage Publications, 1983) for an excellent study of regional migration.

44 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126.

45 Pierre Bourdieu calls this form of authority and domination doxa, in his theory of symbolic power. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 159-71 and Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 163-70. For other significant elements of Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, see Language and Symbolic Power, 43-65, 95-97, 105-116).

46 G.-J.-Emmanuel Christophe, "La Raison" in L'Ami de la goguette, chansons par G.-J.-E. Christophe (Paris: impr. de A. Bobée, 1824), 39-41. [located at the BNF, YE-18627]

47 Eugène Duhoux, "Les Enfants de la Lyre," in La Goguette, Receuil de Toutes les Bonnes Chansons des Sociétés Chantantes; Publiée par Guillaume et Benard, ouvriers typographes (Paris: Guillaume et Benard, 1841), 325-327. [located at the BNF, YE- 23412]

48 Pierre Brochon claims that "le moins que l'on puisse dire, c'est que les goguettes ont toutes les apparence d'un champ de bataille entre l'opposition démocratique et la police." Brochon, Le Chanson Française (I): Béranger et son Temps (Paris: Editions sociales, 1956), 17. The extent of police surveillance during the Restoration is evident in the archival records, which have been collected into one dossier in the Archives Nationales. AN F7 6700, dossier 28. Dossier concernant les SOCIÉTÉS CHANTANTES, DITE GOGUETTES, établies à Paris ou aux environs: 1816-1828.

49 One of the best examples of this is E. Garnier, "Ouvriers, Associez-Vous!" in La Goguette, Receuil de Toutes les Bonnes Chansons des Sociétés Chantantes (1841), 22-24. In this song, Garnier developed the rhetoric of association analyzed thoroughly by Sewell in Work and Revolution.

50 French workers also engaged in a somewhat similar practice of writing letters to socialist leaders, namely Étienne Cabet and Prosper Enfantin. See the collections at BHVP, MS 1052, Papiers Etienne Cabet and Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin 7601 - 7608, 7624 - 7631, and 7679 - 7792.

51 Sand invited Agricol Perdiguier to dinner in May 1840 after having read his recently self-published Le Livre de Compagnonnage, where he proposed reforms in the journeyman trade-based associations known collectively as compagnonnage. She appears to have met other workers through him, including his wife Lise Perdiguier (a seamstress), Jérome-Pierre Gilland (a locksmith), Félicie Gilland (a seamstress), Marie Eléanore Magu (a weaver), and their families. Their correspondence is part of Sand's papers at the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand.

52 What remains of Sue's correspondence is at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugène Sue à propos des Mystères de Paris. These letters have recently been published in Jean-Pierre Galvan, ed., Les Mystères de Paris: Eugène Sue et ses Lecteurs, 2 vols. (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998). For ease of reference I have noted the letter number in the Galvan volume in parentheses for each letter cited in this paper, following the citation from the BHVP collection. Of the 345 letters at the BHVP, 50 were written by working-class people. Only a few of these people wrote two letters, the rest wrote only one.

53 One could argue that this made workers' letters to Sand and Sue yet another practice of seeking charitable aid that was a relatively common experience for most workers at some point in their life. See, for example, Rachel G. Fuchs, "Charity and Welfare," in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 155-94 and Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

54 Cécile Dauphin, Pierrette Lebrun-Pézerat, and Danièle Poublan, Ces Bonnes Lettres: Une Correspondance Familiale au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 102.

55 Agricol Perdiguier was forced to stop his work as a carpenter due to a series of illnesses (primarily lung infections related to sawdust exposure) and injuries. He and Lise Perdiguier opened a small inn catering to traveling laborers in Paris.

56 BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand. These letters have also been published, along with other letters by Perdiguier, in Agricol Perdiguier, Correspondance Inédite avec George Sand et ses Amis, ed. Jean Briquet (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1966).

57 BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 90, letter from Magu dated April 17, 1844, f. 102-04, letter from Magu dated February 5, 1855.

58 BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 39-40, Gilland to Sand, July, 19, 1848, f. 41-42, Gilland to Sand, August, 1848, f. 43-44, Gilland to Sand, November 24, 1848, and f. 58, Gilland to Sand, February 8, 1849. After 1849, Gilland most frequently used "Chère madame et amie" as his greeting in his letters to Sand.

59 BHVP CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugène Sue à propos des Mystères de Paris.

60 One contemporary study emphasized the differences among workers in mid-nineteenth-century Paris who were in different trades as one of the central analytical tools for understanding their attitudes and actions. See Pierre Vinçard, Les Ouvriers de Paris. Études de Moeurs (Paris: Michel, ed., [1851]).

61 "L'hiver est rude et le pain cher mais l'ouvrage ne [manque] pas dans ma partie et ma santé résiste à toutes les fatigues." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 26, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, n.d.

62 "J'ai beaucoup travaillé depuis quelques temps. j'ètais parvenu à donner du pain à six personne-ce qui n'est pas peu faire pour un ouvrier d'aujourd'hui." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 27-28, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, December 20, 1845.

63 "j'ai encore de l'ouvrage, mais je gagne à peine deux francs par jour et il m'en faudrait quatre pour subvenir à nos besoin ." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 35-36, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, June 18, 1848.

64 "jusqu'a ce que mon travail de serrurerie repeine; ce qui peut être long, et, ce qui m'inquiète beaucoup … Tous les ouvriers de ma partie sont presque réduit a la mendicité." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 45, J.-P. Gilland to Mr. Morice, January 2, 1849.

65 Many skilled workers went through periods of unemployment during these two decades. J.-P. Gilland claimed in this letter, though, that his experience in 1849, at the age of 34, was the first time he had been unemployed.

66 "J'ai repris mes parents près de nous comme j'avais déjà fait l'hiver passé et nous partageons le produit de mon travail qui Dieu merci suffira à tout, tant que la saison sera douce et l'ouvrage abondant." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 29-30, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, June 10, 1846.

67 "Les père et mère de ma femme et les miens sont encore vivants. Les premiers n'ont pas besoin de nous, mais les autres sont de malheureux portiers qui ne gagnent presque rien dans leur place et qui sans nous seraient depuis longtemps déjà allés mourir à l'hopital, et cela après avoir été toujours les plus honnêtes gents et les meilleurs travailleurs du monde." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 54-55, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, January 18, 1849.

68 Félicie Gilland's work after her husband's death is noted in several letters in the mid-1850s by both her and her father, Magu, to George Sand. For example, in a June 1855 letter to Sand, Magu notes that Gilland "has so much work that she is obliged to spend part of the night, and very often the entire night, in order to satisfy her numerous clientele." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 105-106, Magu to Sand, June 4, 1855. While no direct evidence indicates the Félicie Gilland was working as a seamstress during her husband's life, it would have been very unusual for her not to engage in some wage work to help support the family (as most working-class women did at this time).

69 This is also the same form of argument presented by the working-class press (L'Atelier and La Ruche Populaire) discussed above.

70 "j'ai laissé à Lizy ma femme et mes enfans pour passer l'hiver parcequ'a Paris nous n'aurions pas pu vivre." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 43-44, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, November 24, 1848.

71 "ma femme et mes enfans sont encore à Lizy. … Dès qu'il me vient un peu d'ouvrage c'est pour payer les dettes les plus pressées." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 56-57, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, February 5, 1849.

72 "j'ai été à Lizy la semaine dernière, tout le monde y va bien. j'ai ramené à Paris ma femme et mes deux garçons en bonne santé aussi. Le travail manque toujours; je ne gagne pas seulement notre nouriture mais la vente du livre me fait une ressource momentanément." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 59, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, April 25, 1849.

73 See the fifteen letters written by Lise Perdiguier to George Sand at BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand and published in Perdiguier, Correspondance Inédite avec George Sand et ses Amis.

74 Lise Perdiguier à George Sand, 14 octobre 1846, in Perdiguier, Correspondance Inédite, 87-88.

75 "Maintenant, je fais appel à votre bonté pour vous prier de recommender mon père à vos amis; ils pouraient peut-être lui procurer un emploi dans leurs propriétés soit comme concierge, soit comme serviteur à d'autres conditions. comme il a été longtemps militaire et cavalier il s'entend parfaitement à soigner les chevaux; on pourait l'employer de même à des services intérieur car il est très propre et très rangé, malheureusement il est bien agé mais quand le courage supplée à la force on peut encore se rendre utile, surtout quand on est laborieux et bien ententionné." BN, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand, f. 29-30, J.-P. Gilland to Sand, June 10, 1846.

76 "Je ne pensais plus à mourir pour le moment inspirée que j'étais que l'esprit capable de tel conseil n'hésiterait pas à sauver une famille pour la somme de 200 [f. en] billet souscrit par mon père qui va être mis en jugement et de là emprisonné si cette dette n'est acquittée le dernier jour de ce mois." BHVP, CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugène Sue à propos des Mystères de Paris, f. 535-36, Charlotte W. to Eugène Sue, November 20, 1843 (Galvan letter #301).

77 "Je suis native de Paris mais j'habite Nancy où je brode lorsque ma santé me le permet mais je suis venue avec mon pauvre père à Lunéville pour essayer de me soustraire à notre cruel créancier, mais il finira par découvrir notre demeure." Ibid.

78 "Si, Monsieur, j'écris tant de mots avant de vous dire le motif de ma lettre, c'est pour vous prouver que je crois être convaincu du chancre qui règne dans le commerce, c'est parce que je n'ai ni aucun ami ni connaissance à qui m'adresser pour demander une petite place de quoi vivre avec ma femme et mes enfants hors de ce cercle qui se corrompt de jour en jour davantage. C'est enfin que je pense qu'un mot de vous, Monsieur, pourra faire ce que je demande en vain." BHVP, CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugène Sue à propos des Mystères de Paris, f. 364-65, Lacquet to Sue, August 29, 1843 (Galvan letter #187).

79 For example, the typesetter Paul-Nicolas Dufour begins his November 1843 letter to Sue thanking him for the letter he wrote and for his help. See BHVP, CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugène Sue à propos des Mystères de Paris, f. 549-51, Dufour to Sue, November 25, 1843 (Galvan letter #308). Unfortunately, Dufour's first letter to Sue (where he made the request for help) did not survive (or at least not in this collection), so it is difficult to tell the exact nature of his original request.

80 Maurice Agulhon makes an argument akin to this in his study of the peasantry in Southern France in the post-Revolutionary period. Agulhon examines folkloric practices and ceremonies that became "contaminated" by politics, seeing these still as essentially "archaic." See Agulhon, La République au Village: les populations du Var de la Révolution à la Seconde République (Paris: Plon, 1970).

81 See works cited in note 15.