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SECTION II
WORKING CLASS: ACTION AND EXPRESSION
WRITING MODERN SELVES: LITERACY AND THE FRENCH WORKING CLASS IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
| By Steven E. Rowe |
Saint Xavier University |
| In the closing pages of his memoirs which were written between 1821 and 1830, the carpenter Jacques Etienne Bédé directly addressed those he expected would be the audience for his text—both master artisans and journeymen workers. Bédé focused in particular on young journeymen "of future centuries" who were "strangers to our discord" and advised them to learn the lessons of his life and of his fellow carpenters who organized a mutual aid society for chair-turners in early nineteenth-century Paris.1 Unfortunately for Bédé, workers of future centuries would have to wait to read his memoirs until a copy of his manuscript was discovered by the historian Rémi Gossez in the 1980s and was subsequently published.2 Nevertheless, Bédé's comments to his imagined audience give us some sense of his possible motivations for writing down his life story. Based on Bédé's closing comments, it appears that he wrote because he wanted his life and struggles, particularly the struggles he shared with his fellow journeymen in combating the labor practices of the master artisans in his trade, to serve as a lesson for future workers who read his text. In other words, Bédé constituted the meaning of his life—his existence as a person—through a written life-story that emphasized his position within the fabric of social relations that shaped the experiences of many workers in early nineteenth-century France. While the process of writing his memoirs was certainly an act of self reflection for Bédé, it was not the sort of introspective, egocentric reflection that one might expect of an autobiographical text. Instead, Bédé's reflections focused primarily on external events and situations, and in so doing, he located himself in relation to others, primarily other workers. |
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Bédé's memoirs and other working-class autobiographies written in the nineteenth century are not particularly new or surprising sources for current social historians.3 Few historians, however, have examined these texts as evidence of particular writing practices, which could be compared with other kinds of writing and reading practices to develop an analysis of the meaning of literacy and its relationships with particular historical processes.4 This practice-based and comparative approach is precisely what I adopt in this essay, examining French workers' writing and reading practices to analyze the meaning of literacy in the constitution of modern selfhood. In doing this, I follow recent anthropological work on literacy, which argues that we should approach literacy as a set of practices, or particular acts of writing and reading.5 This practice-based approach to literacy allows us to analyze the dynamics of specific acts of writing or reading—like Bédé writing his autobiography—and the formation of particular selves.6 By comparing different kinds of literacy practices, we can then start to formulate broader claims about the effects of literacy on self-formation in specific societies and how this changes over time. |
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