Inventing the Popular

Printing, Politics, and Poetics

Bettina R. Lerner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317113195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written, published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers, poems and prose fiction, these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time, their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture, including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric je, these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.

1 The mysteries of writing

Ôtez les livres médiocres, et l’on ne saura bientôt plus lire ni distinguer les bons.

—Louis-Sébastien Mercier

Part eight of Eugène Sue’s best-selling serial novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842) takes readers behind the thick walls of a Parisian prison – this time, to solve the “mysteries” of readerly taste and writerly talent among some of nineteenth-century France’s most marginalized individuals. In this scene, a group of condemned thieves and murderers have gathered to hear the talented raconteur known as Pique-Vinaigre tell the story of “Gringalet et Coupe-en-Deux.” In tones meant to recall a traditional fireside veillée, the storyteller holds his audience captive with the travails of the eponymous young hero who is tortured and nearly killed by his sadistic guardian Coupe-en-Deux before he is ultimately saved in the most improbable and gruesome of ways, when an enraged ape turns on the villain, slashing his throat with a razor. Pique-Vinaigre’s story clearly draws on the mixed repertory of early nineteenth-century popular culture¹: its cast of characters hails from the carnivalesque world of street performers; its violent sensationalism evokes the kinds of crimes recounted in cheaply printed canards; finally, like most melodrama, the story stages an ultimate return to order and rewards Gringalet for his virtue. Moreover, Pique-Vinaigre’s tale is not just entertaining; it also successfully thwarts a murder plot. By awakening a latent sense of justice and solidarity in this gang of hardened criminals, the story ultimately dissuades them from killing a fellow inmate. As such, the episode functions as a mise en abyme of Sue’s own moralizing novelistic project, which he describes as “a bad book, from the artistic point of view,” but “one which, we maintain, is not bad at all from the moral point of view.”²

Pique-Vinaigre’s success as a storyteller is meant to refract the phenomenon that Sue’s novel had become since its first installment appeared in the Journal des débats on June 19, 1842; over the course of its triumphant sixteen-month run, it entered collective consciousness in unprecedented ways in part by facilitating “the social identification of couches populaires with the working classes,” while also “calling attention to their partial cultural enfranchisement as nouveaux lecteurs.”³ That Sue’s novel attracted a considerable number of working-class readers is well known; what is less often stressed is that some of these readers were writers as well, a phenomenon to which the figure of Pique-Vinaigre alludes, albeit in oblique and distorted ways, when he promises to commit his story to paper for his nieces and nephews: “I will write it for your children,” he tells his sister, “Gringalet et Coupe-en-deux will entertain them.”⁴ Pique-Vinaigre’s promise might just as easily have been read as a threat by critics wary of a seeming explosion of working-class writers who had begun to publish essays, fiction, and poetry, both in newspapers they themselves produced as well as in bound volumes, thanks in part to the support of social Romantics including Sue himself.

In this book, I explore texts produced and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers who entered the literary field at the height of social Romanticism, inflecting the movement’s trajectory and broadening its popular reach in the years leading up to and immediately following the Revolution of 1848. Rather than read them as the by-product of social utopias like Saint-Simonism, or as appendices to works by better-known writers like Sue, Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, and George Sand, I argue that this sizeable corpus of texts, created over more than a decade of concerted effort and interpersonal exchange, constituted a scene of significant cultural relevance and resistance in its own right. This hybrid mix of newspapers, poems, prose fiction, and essays had little in common with predominantly oral popular traditions of the kind that Sue nostalgically evokes and mourns through the figure of Pique-Vinaigre. Instead, these writers openly sought to position themselves within the rapidly changing literary field by publicly engaging with its principal mediatic forms including the press and the serial novel. For Jacques Rancière, who brought renewed critical attention to this archive in the 1980s, these writers came to occupy precarious positions in their drive to transgress boundaries between aesthetic and politics, and labor and literature.⁵ In the process, I argue here, they produced new meanings out of existing discourses and navigated significant practical and theoretical impasses as they tried to construct a community of readers with shared political, social, and cultural goals.

The texts I examine here were thus part of a moment of cultural flux that Sue’s novel carefully tried to contain behind heavy prison walls or push to the margins of its narrative.⁶ Nonetheless, it is precisely at the outer edges of dominant cultural production that interference from these alternative voices and approaches can make themselves heard. One particularly salient example can be found in the actual margins of literary history in the form of a letter that accompanied the very last installment of Les Mystères de Paris in the October 15, 1843, issue of Le Journal des débats. Sue concludes his novel by writing a letter to the newspaper’s editor, in which he praises a modest publication put together by “a few honest and enlightened artisans,” who expressed their views on labor reform in acceptably moderate terms. Created by Saint-Simonian workers in 1839, La Ruche populaire had recently come under new leadership and was beginning to move in a new direction that held obvious appeal for the best-selling novelist. The October 1843 issue, from which Sue quotes at length in his letter, includes a quote from the novel’s protagonist Rodolphe (reprinted on the masthead in subsequent issues): “Helping those who voice their grievances is a good thing […] preventing poverty and the temptations that lead to crime is even better.” The newspaper, while claiming to represent the interests of the working classes, had positioned itself as a vehicle for Sue’s socially-conscious Romanticism and its moralizing philanthropy.

For the editors at the rival working-class paper L’Atelier, this quid pro quo was as blatant as it was intolerable: La Ruche populaire gave Sue further access to working-class readers and lent him an aura of authenticity, while the paper’s new editor, the printer François Duquesne, could capitalize on the famous novelist’s patronage to sell more copies of his paper. L’Atelier, some of whose founding members had briefly worked on La Ruche populaire when it was first founded in 1839, was ruthless in calling out a competing publication for what they saw as a shameless and mendacious publicity stunt amounting to a fawning apology for Sue’s novel.⁷ Even before Marx and Engel’s comments on Szeliga’s review of Les Mystères de Paris appeared in their attack on the group of young Hegelians in The Holy Family (1845), the Parisian newspaper L’Atelier had already taken Sue’s novel to task in markedly similar terms. The November 1843 issue of the artisan-owned and written newspaper denounced the novel for its “philanthropic mystification,” warning readers not to buy into the “false pretense of Christian charity permeating this so-called humanitarian novel.” In their view, Sue’s depiction of the lower classes didn’t so much lack veracity as honesty. Sue was less interested in social change than in entertaining his readers. Because of this, the scenes of poverty and misery that he painted fell flat and felt false. However, “If the author had bothered to visit our industrial cities, or even just the outer edges of Paris’s faubourgs, he would have seen that reality is at least as bad as the suffering his novel only imagines.”⁸ L’Atelier argued that the time had come to replace the novel’s fantastical modes of representation with the kind of in-depth reporting and cultural critique that they themselves had been publishing since 1839.

L’Atelier and La Ruche populaire thus represent two vocal poles in the working-class reaction to Sue’s rise as a best-selling author. Still others, like the shoemaker and poet Savinien Lapointe, took a more nuanced approach. His two-hundred-line ode, “De mon échoppe à M. Eugène Sue” appeared in the inaugural issue of L’Union, another working-class newspaper created that same year by former members of La Ruche populaire who were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken under Duquesne’s directorship. On the surface, Lapointe’s ode is true to its genre, delivering high praise for the novel and its author. Nonetheless, from its opening stanza, Lapointe’s lyric voice calls attention to itself just as much as to the famous author he purports to lionize, using the novel as a pretext for shedding light on his own experiences as a poet who, born into the working classes, feels excluded from the world of literature: “Those yapping basset hounds bit me/Telling me, in bloated haughty terms, /That smocks weren’t allowed in the world of art.” In spite of his critics, whom he depicts here as guard dogs bent on keeping the worker-poet from entering the literary sphere, he nonetheless perseveres: “Besides, I sing out in the open, /Whoever wants to can hear me on my iron branch.”⁹ Lapointe is pointedly less invested in the fictionalized portrait Sue paints of the lower classes than he is in the room he hopes the novel has made for writers from these classes like himself to intervene in a newly inclusive literary field. His particular take on the well-worn metaphor of the poet as bird is particularly telling in this regard. His personal resilience and the strength of his words are evoked by the branch of steel on which he sits, but it is the reference to singing “out in the open” [en plein air] that stands out as especially significant. Lapointe had indeed claimed a public persona as a poet, since his poems, articles and later on, his stories, circulated in working-class newspapers and in book-length collections like the Poésies sociales des ouvriers (1841) and his own Une Voix d’en bas (1844). While the panorama of popular culture that Les Mystères de Paris exploits through characters like Pique-Vinaigre is consistently situated underground and behind jail walls, a very different kind of popular expression thrived in the 1840s, albeit precariously, as newly resonant voices made themselves heard in the public sphere.

Working-class newspapers (including L’Atelier, La Ruche populaire, and L’Union) and the voices of working-class writers whom they helped to promote (like Lapointe) contributed throughout the second half of the July Monarchy to a popular movement whose cultural forms were entirely distinct from the oral folktales, age-old chapbooks, sensational broadsides, and salacious songs that academics like Charles Nisard would come to both privilege and police in the 1850s and 1860s as the mythological origins of a culture populaire nationale.¹⁰ Some of the writers from the lower classes whose works I explore in this book conceptualized their approach to journalism and literature in ways that connected with social Romantics like Hugo, Lamartine, Sand, and Sue himself, with whom some of these self-described worker-poets corresponded and collaborated. Others within this same generation of working-class writers were more skeptical and critical of social Romanticism, seeking to position their works against the kinds of moralizing melodramas and best-selling serial novels that made up a significant part of France’s literary production in the first half of the nineteenth century. Read alongside one another, these texts lay out the aesthetic, social, and political tensions that shaped emerging critical approaches to high and low culture.

My primary aim here is to show how these writers created alternative systems of literary and journalistic discourse and debate that openly contested the structure and limits of the dominant bourgeois public sphere that had emerged in France in the late eighteenth century and continued to grow. I approach these texts in terms of what critical theorists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge as well as feminist scholars like Nancy Fraser and Lauren Berlant have identified as variants of this dominant bourgeois public sphere. I will return to the theoretical stakes at work in the conceptualization of these alternative spaces as proletarian public spheres, subaltern counterpublics, or intimate publics in more detail below, but I want to note for now that this generation of working-class writers and their readers created a space of popular production that was at its most active during the second half of the July Monarchy and fed into the revolutionary fervor leading to the Revolution of 1848 before ultimately receding during the Second Empire. One of the principal goals of this book, then, is to examine the traces of a sphere whose contours have been blurred but whose discourses reveal much about Romanticism’s waning years. In particular, this alternative sphere drew on and reorganized socialist utopian discourses and narrative modes, most notably sentimentality as (oftentimes problematic) frameworks in their att...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Beyond popular culture
• 1 The mysteries of writing
• 2 The worker press, 1830–48
• 3 Béranger’s step-children: Social poetry in Jules Vinçard, Savinien Lapointe, and Charles Poncy
• 4 The ideal companion: Friendship and fraternity in George Sand and Agricol Perdiguier
• 5 The poet and the seamstress, or on the destiny of poetry
• Epilogue: After the Fall
• Selected bibliography
• Index