Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants. .

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants. By Martyn Lyons (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. xi plus 208pp.).

Three paradoxes run through the historiography on reading. Whereas historians all acknowledge its importance, few have much more to say. Nearly always listed among the sources of modern change, reading is usually written about either as a by-product of, or a precondition for, something else: schooling, commerce, leisure; spreading knowledge, opening political debate, a growing audience for literature and journalism. Although the reading public grew more in size and importance in the nineteenth century than at any other era, the historical literature is richer and deeper for the early modern period. Our awareness of multiple reading practices that may carry diverse meanings comes largely from that literature. In the last generation or so, a number of historians have sought to redress that balance, applying theories and questions developed with regard to earlier periods.

One of these historians is Martyn Lyons, who here builds on his previous study of the publication and circulation of books in nineteenth-century France, turning to the groups of readers that have been the least studied: workers, women, and peasants. He wants to find out not merely what they read but something more amorphous, the effect their reading had on them. Knowing the most relevant literature well, Lyons seeks with a nice balance of caution and daring "to encounter individual readers," probing not only their reading but their intimate responses to it.

The difficulties begin, of course, with the sources, limited in number and not easy to interpret. Lyons uses memoirs, biographies, and correspondence; and he takes them where he finds them, early or late in the century. This perhaps necessary conflation of chronology weakens one's sensitivity to particular moments within the general pattern of increased reading. Although Lyons is careful to provide dates, the sense of change emerges more from his frequent comments and summaries than from the examples themselves. Lyons is careful, too, in reminding us that memoirs may be designed to convey a certain impression, that biographies omit much, and that correspondence is incomplete. Specialists will even think of favorite works that Lyons does not cite--a little-known novel here, a local history there, or a rare memoir. Most of us will be humbled, however, by the wealth of printed and archival material Lyons considers and will recognize that such additions would be unlikely to alter the reasonable picture that emerg es here.

Context is attended to throughout, beginning with the short first chapter in which Lyons summarizes his expert knowledge of expanding readership across the century. There and throughout the study, his sense of the topic's importance as well as its difficulties tends to carry the day. His comments on available reading matter through colportage, book stores, and libraries, are interesting and helpful; and he is alert to theoretical work, Roger Chartier's most notably, supplemented with references to many others, including Pierre Bourdieu and even Stanley Fish. Theory, however, appears as an occasional overlay; for this work of synthesis, as Lyons calls it, puts forward no strong theoretical interpretation of its own. Its distinctive element remains rather Lyons' effort "to encounter individual readers" and consider their responses to the printed page.

The belief that classes were distinct and distant from each other, which undergirds the entire project, logically leads to two chapters on workers. The first treats the attempts to control what workers read in Catholic campaigns for bons livres and in secular programs on behalf of selective libraries for workers (and the general public). The account stresses the heavy role of government through censorship and official pressure in determining what was published and what libraries should contain (leaving records that are now a principal source of information about what was available and what was popular). All this is prelude to the following chapter on the workers themselves. Using 22 autobiographies (14 from before 1851), newspapers aimed at the working class, and the activities of workers' clubs, Lyons constructs brief accounts of hardships overcome through the efforts of compagnonnage, militants, and intellectuals. Eloquent on workers' aspirations, Lyons retells their stories, creating a flowing account of t heir tastes in literature and growing awareness of their own interests. He contrasts what workers really read with what others, including their own leaders, thought would be beneficial; and, although not surprised at the preference for novels and patriotic histories (the temptations of "bourgeois" fiction that worried workingmen's clubs), Lyons appears not to have expected the persistent respect for classical high culture. His interesting comments on the style and sense of self in workers' writings ironically underscores the distance between those who wrote and read a lot and the working class as a whole, a separation that persisted even as literacy and the available reading matter increased.

Discussion of women is similarly divided between a chapter on contemporary opinions of women readers (emphasizing warnings from prominent men about the potentially dangerous effects of reading on the female psyche) and one on women's responses to what they read. Here Lyons' categories of social class and elite fears function more awkwardly than they did with regard to workers. Most women readers, after all, were middle class, and their dominant censors were fathers and husbands. Women's reading was primarily in religious works and romantic novels, as commentators supposed; and the accusation that they formed romantic attachments to fictional characters turns out to have had some basis. The limited evidence pushes Lyons to a series of microhistories based on memoirs, the correspondence of two friends, and some later interviews, That gives him space for some rewarding speculation about reading as an expansion of women's constricted lives. Peasant reading, in contrast, is presented as more straightforward. Saint s' lives and almanacs, to be sure, but also pamphlets and newspapers, gleaned for practical information about markets and farming techniques. Very much, in short, what advocates of universal schooling had thought would happen.

Stimulating and knowledgeable, these chapters contain few surprises. The interpretive framework is the essentially familiar one of nineteenth-century change and broadening horizons. Rather stark categories propel an emphasis on the "bourgeois" fears and paternalism of reformers, the Second Empire, and the Catholic Church that slights the more optimistic proponents of universal literacy and education (both Catholic and republican). At the same time, a welcome emphasis on the capacity of workers, women, and peasants to use the printed pages available to them autonomously for constructing independent views of the world has a liberating effect. (One of the few instances in which Lyons directly criticizes a specific author comes with his rejection of Eugen Weber's picture of more passive peasants.) Like nineteenth-century readers, historians will find multiple ways of their own to draw lines of connection between the information here and what they know already.