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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2001)

THIS SHORT but stimulating book is an extension of Martyn Lyons's earlier essay, "New Readers in the Nineteenth Century; Women, Children, Workers," in A History of Reading in the West, edited by G. Cavallo and R. Chatier (1999). Aside from switching from an international to a French focus and elaborating upon the reading practices of French women and workers, Lyons has chosen to omit children and include peasants in the book. Each of the three groups is treated separately, in relation to issues particular to that social group. There are, however, common themes.	1
One theme is the prevalence of fears about losing control of the reading, and hence the moral and political beliefs, of most of the French population on the part of the Catholic Church and of political leaders from monarchists to radical republicans, and ultimately on the part of patriarchal, property-owning bourgeoisie, in 19th century France. The final chapter not unreasonably compares the book to Louis Chevalier's monograph on bourgeois fears of the new working class in Paris in the first half of the 19th century (Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes). Along these lines, Lyons notes that bourgeois and clerical anxieties about new readers peaked in post-revolutionary periods such as 1817 to 1830, when the Church campaigned against "mauvais livres," launched "Bibliothèques des bon Livres," and dispatched missionaries who organized autodafès (ritual book burnings). They peaked again after the introduction of universal manhood suffrage during the Second Republic, when the Second Empire severely restricted colportage, the system whereby itinertant peddlers sold cheap chapbooks in rural areas. Although the section on women readers does not refer to conventional reactionary periods, it does discuss Catholic responses to Flaubert's Madame Bovary and "bovaryisme" or apprehensions about women's receptivity to romantic fiction. These responses were Monsignor Dupanloup's reading model for women and subsequent Catholic lists of approved and forbidden works of literature. Partly in reaction to these lists, feminists put out a periodical with their reading advice for girls and women.	2
Another theme is the relatively modest role of formal education in the acquisition of literacy. Lyons excuses his inattention to the educational system by referring to the existence of numerous studies of the French system of education and, in particular, to Raymond Grew and Parick Harrigan's study of enrolments showing that elementary education was well developed before the Ferry laws of the 1880s introduced free, secular and universal primary schooling (School, State and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in 19th Century France). Yet Lyons is not just "filling a gap." Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France documents alternative means of accessing literacy and literature through "social reading" or reading aloud in family or group settings such as bourgeois homes, farmhouses, workers' cafés, in cabinets de lecture (on-site lending libraries), and study circles. Lyons infers considerable growth in size of the reading public from data on the falling prices and rising supply of popular literature and the burgeoning number and wider distribution of workers' newspapers and women's magazines. He cites early sociological studies of book ownership among workers and peasants showing that, as early as the 1850s, many workers and peasants owned at least a few books other than ubiquitous almanacs. Although Lyons recognizes that the decade of the 1880s was a turning point for the peasantry, he does not attribute increasing peasant familiarity with print culture solely to the introduction of public school teachers but also credits commercial dissemination of cheaper books and newspapers through railway bookstalls and local retail stores. Countering Eugen Weber's thesis about modernization of passive peasantry, he contends that peasants remained independent of cultural mediators. His main sources for this contention are letters written by soldiers during World War I. More evidence, from more peasants, would be more persuasive.	3
The third theme in Readers and Society is the resistance of new readers to the literary canon. The argument rests upon Bourdieu's theory about the influence of the habitus or everyday patterns of behaviour on, in this case, new readers' receptivity to reading material, or, in Bourdieu's jargon, the acquisition of cultural capital. Unfortunately, relationships between the habitus and receptivity to literature and the acquisition of cultural capital are hard to establish. Perhaps most innovatively, Lyons attempts to "interrogate the audience" by analyzing autobiographies by workers and women and official questionnaires about rural readers. Lyons analyzes 22 autobiographies and workers, most of whom, he acknowledges, were autodidacts whose reading lists showed considerable deference to the literary canon. He notes that this kind of autobiography has been used by right-wing ideologues to claim embourgeoisement, but he contends that these autobiographers were active readers who appropriated what useful to fashion a reading culture of their own. Here Lyons draws upon Stanley Fish's concept of an "interpretive community of readers." Unfortunately, Lyons, or perhaps his documentation, does not offer much information about this interpretive community beyond some resistance to fiction and preference to nonfiction. Lyons himself divides the workers' autobiographical genre into three sub-genres: stories of self-made men, militant memoirs, and the literature of compagnonnage. One is left wondering if there were not several interpretive communities of work-readers.	4
The chapter on "Reading Women," which analyzes autobiographical records of reading by several women from different social classes over the course of the century, does not make a case that women's romance reading was a mild form of resistance — a temporary refusal to devote themselves to domestic duties, an escape into a space of their own, as Janice Radway has argued about romance readers in mid-west America. Happily, Lyons also notes that reading introduced some women to a political and revolutionary life. Of equal interest are his findings about how women accessed fiction: they happened upon a relative's library, or they cut out and sewed together installments of feuilletons (serial novels) from popular newspapers and magazines; these findings constitute proof that some workers, peasants, and women sought to read, and through reading, to establish some degree of autonomy.	5
Mary Lynn Stewart Simon Fraser University

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