Writing modern selves: literacy and the French working class in the early nineteenth century.

In the closing pages of his memoirs which were written between 1821 and 1830, the carpenter Jacques Etienne Bede directly addressed those he expected would be the audience for his text--both master artisans and journeymen workers. Bede 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 Bede, workers of future centuries would have to wait to read his memoirs until a copy of his manuscript was discovered by the historian Remi Gossez in the 1980s and was subsequently published. (2) Nevertheless, Bede's comments to his imagined audience give us some sense of his possible motivations for writing down his life story. Based on Bede'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, Bede 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 Bede, it was not the sort of introspective, egocentric reflection that one might expect of an autobiographical text. Instead, Bede's reflections focused primarily on external events and situations, and in so doing, he located himself in relation to others, primarily other workers.

Bede'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 Bede 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.

This essay begins the process of evaluating the relationships between literacy and the formation of modern selves by comparing the autobiographical writing practices and the letter writing, reading, and circulation practices of the urban working class in France during the early to mid-nineteenth century. I focus on urban workers in order to develop some initial conclusions about the literacy of the popular classes. While the category of the French urban worker is a somewhat problematic one, I address some of the problems of finding "representative" evidence through an analysis of a range of sources from workers involved in more "traditional" organizations to those involved (some rather weakly) in early socialist groups, particularly in my analysis of letter writing, reading, and circulation. (7) Ultimately, sources for examining popular literacy practices in nineteenth-century France are scarce, and the urban working class left at least a small trail to follow, largely because of extensive police surveillance, the desire of reform-minded and socialist elites who had some contact with the working class to preserve their archives, and the few working-class families who held on to precious documents through the centuries.

The sources that do survive allow us to examine literacy practices most often associated with the personal realm and therefore those practices most likely to cultivate particular forms of selfhood. In examining workers' letter writing, reading, and circulation in addition to autobiographical writing, we see a diversity of practices that mirror the kinds of issues introduced with the brief discussion of Bede's memoirs. Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century, French urban workers developed literacy practices that encouraged socially-oriented forms of self-reflection. These practices demonstrate that literacy, for these workers, tended to cultivate a form of selfhood that placed themselves in relation to others--most commonly family members, friends, and fellow workers--while at the same time developing space for reflection and assertions of authority.

The ways that literacy developed such complex, heterogeneous selves for French urban workers in the nineteenth century challenge claims that have been made about literacy, and writing in particular, and the social transformations that lead to the formation of modern society in France. For example, in the conclusion to their seminal study of literacy, Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf claim that writing "breaks up the group in favor of the individual" and that written culture is "secret and personal" while oral culture is "public, collective." (8) In doing this, they claim that literacy, as a central feature of modern society in France, leads to the formation of the individualist, egocentric self. They further suggest that a very different kind of person, or self, inhabited the world of pre-modern (and also pre-literate) France--a collectivist self rooted in communal ties that were reinforced through forms of oral culture. (9) Ultimately, Furet and Ozouf build their argument about the effects of literacy on society in France around a parallel set of binary oppositions: orality and oral culture/society develop a collectivist (or sociocentric) self, while literacy and literate culture/society develop an individualist (or egocentric) self.

These opposing categories of literacy/orality and individualism/collectivism do not appear to allow for, or at least explain, the kind socially-situated reflections that Bede wrote in his memoirs and the forms of selfhood that French urban workers' writing and reading practices cultivated. This inconsistency between Furet and Ozouf's conclusions about the effects on literacy on personhood and societies and French urban workers' acts of literacy in early nineteenth-century France can be resolved, however, through a more complex analysis of the formation of the modern self. Recent historiography on the modern self suggests that Furet and Ozouf's conceptualization of the individualist self as a creation of modern society--a conception which is prevalent in the work of many historians (going back as far as Jakob Burckhardt), literary scholars, anthropologists, and social theorists--oversimplifies both conceptions of the self and its formation in practice. For example, Jerrold Seigel has recently argued that historical analyses of the self should examine the interrelationships between three dimensions of selfhood--the bodily, the social or relational, and the reflective dimensions. (10) Seigel's multidimensional view of the self gives us a useful heuristic to rethink the concept of modern selves in different societies and at different points in history. Seigel's conception of the multi-dimensional self encourages us to move away from the notion of homogenous forms of self--e.g. individualist selves in modern society--and toward an analysis of the ways that different dimensions of the self might be developed or emphasized through particular historical processes, thereby establishing particular relationships among the different dimensions of the self and cultivating different forms of heterogeneous selves.

This analysis of the historical formation of the self is essentially what Jan Goldstein pursues in her recent book on the self in early nineteenth-century France. (11) Specifically, Goldstein examines how the philosopher Victor Cousin made an explicit, political effort to cultivate a specific form of selfhood in bourgeois males by creating courses in philosophy and psychology in French secondary schools (or lycees). This form of the self was defined by an isolated, autonomous practice of conscious reflection and was therefore an attempt to cultivate a one-dimensional self based in reflectivity and separated from social life and the body. (12) As such, the Cousinian self was close to the individualist, egocentric self suggested in Furet and Ozouf's description of modernity. Goldstein demonstrates, though, that the process of forming bourgeois, male selves based in pure reflection was grounded in French lycees, an institutional (and social) setting.

Goldstein's analysis of how the Cousinian self was inculcated through the French schooling system beginning in the 1830s problematizes the very concept of pure, autonomous reflection, and therefore demonstrates the limits of analyzing the self simply in terms of one dimension. The very abstractness of pure reflection was quite difficult for Cousin and his followers to instill in bourgeois male students--neither Cousin's writing nor the textbooks written by his followers who taught in French lycees gave practical advice for how to cultivate the independent, reflective self. There was no discussion, for example, of using writing or reading as a method for developing reflective consciousness, even though Cousin and his followers exchanged extensive correspondence. Goldstein also points out that even though "Cousin and his followers wrote profusely, they did not ordinarily cultivate the modalities of the diary, the confession, or even the autobiographical reminiscence." (13)

With this statement, Goldstein takes us back to the central problem of this essay--the relationship between literacy and the formation of modern forms of selfhood--and suggests a way of further revising Furet and Ozouf's analysis. In referring to the diary, the confession, and the autobiography, Goldstein implies that writing these forms of texts could be a practical method for developing autonomous, private reflection, in which an "interior" monologue becomes expressed on the written page. More broadly, Goldstein is suggesting that certain kinds of writing practices might be well-suited for developing particular forms of the self. While this is only a minor footnote to her larger argument about the Cousinian self, it dovetails with my analysis and the approach to literacy in this essay. For French urban workers, living during the same era as Cousin and his followers, the literacy practices most often associated with the personal realm--letter writing/reading and autobiographical writing--demonstrate ways that workers cultivated self-reflection in dialogue with a diverse range of social relations and identities. Instead of forming an autonomous, egocentric sense of self, these literacy practices encouraged forms of socially-mediated reflection in which acts of self-disclosure and claims of authority were directly tied to workers' relations with others and their identifications with particular groups--such as their families, friends, and their fellow workers.

Letter Writing and Reading: The Outlines of Continuity and Change in French Workers' Practices

Throughout the nineteenth century, groups of French workers engaged in a variety of letter-writing and reading practices to create and maintain social relations. These practices indicate that workers' relationships with family, friends, fellow workers, and other members of French society were not exclusively face-to-face relationships. Increased rates of migration to urban centers and changes in labor structures were among the historical processes that enlarged the space of French workers' social worlds and created separation between them and their social contacts. (14) Whether separated by social or geographical space or by time, such a distancing of social relations could be seen as characteristic of modern societies and a sign that French society was entering modernity by the early nineteenth century. (15) Indeed, such processes of social distancing might appear to be preconditions for the development of an individualist conception of the person.

The specific letter writing and reading practices of French workers both illustrate the social dislocation they experienced and demonstrate their socially-oriented response to this experience. Workers wrote letters in groups and shared letters freely with their social contacts, including family members, friends, and their fellow workers. Workers sent their letters both via the postal system, which extended throughout France but was still developing into a uniform system in the early nineteenth century, and through personal contacts who happened to be traveling. (16) This variety of different modes of transmission of workers' letters makes it unclear whether a particular mode of transmission encouraged certain kinds of collective writing or reading practices. Certainly the cost of the postal system--to say nothing of paper, ink, and quills--could have led workers to engage in various collective writing and reading strategies. (17) When personal couriers were used to deliver letters, the relative lack of privacy of such letters might have encouraged workers to view them as relatively "open" documents and therefore not the province of unique individuals. Because workers employed both modes of transmission without clear distinctions in their letter-writing and reading practices, the surviving evidence does not allow us, however, to establish clear, causal patterns between the precise mode of transmission and the variety of different collective letter writing and reading practices engaged in by French workers in the early nineteenth century.

Regardless of how such letters were sent, workers' practices of writing letters demonstrate how they formed and reinforced bonds of solidarity. Workers did this by stating a specific relationship between themselves and their reader(s), emphasizing the closeness of that relationship through statements of affection, and representing themselves as members of the same group as their reader(s). Thus, when they wrote letters, French workers represented themselves with specific social markers. While certain kinds of social markers--including dress, physical appearance, body carriage, eye contact, language/dialect/accent, gestures, etc.--appear to be fairly obvious in face-to-face contact, written markers of social status and the relationship between writers and readers were no less significant parts of French workers' letters. The openings and closings of their letters demonstrate how their conventions "[fixed] the terms of the interaction" and "[oriented] the reception of the message," as well as how workers "[visualized] the social distance between the interlocutors." (18) By framing the social interaction between writer(s) and reader(s) of a letter in ways that minimized the social distance between the interlocutors and stressed their closeness, the openings and closings of workers' letters, combined with the contents of the letters themselves, conveyed their solidarity with their family members, friends, and fellow members of associations. In doing this, workers presented themselves as persons embedded in social relationships, identifying themselves as members of particular groups.

The specific groups with which workers identified, as well as the social relationships that tied writers and readers in workers' letters, varied as widely as the diverse situations in which urban workers found themselves in early nineteenth-century France. Journeyman artisans in a wide range of trades, often experiencing deskilling that resulted from an increasing division of labor, formed the base of manufacturing workers in larger, older urban centers. Some of these artisans continued to participate in an interurban network of trade-based, corporate associations, known as compagnonnages, even though these organizations were outlawed during the French Revolution. (19) Other artisans, such as recent migrants to Paris in the 1820s-1840s, worked in low-skilled manufacturing jobs and were attracted to early forms of socialism, such as Saint-Simonianism. In the first case, it might appear that corporate associations and the workers who participated in them were an archaic vestige of the Old Regime, at odds with the development of modernity in France. In the other case, it might appear that low-skilled workers in Paris, even if also artisans, were harbingers of a modern industrial working class. Examining these two groups who represent opposite ends of the spectrum of the French urban working class in the early nineteenth century, it is striking that such very different groups of workers engaged in very similar kinds of letter writing and reading practices, suggesting a broadly shared conception of the person that was facilitated by these acts of literacy.

The Persistence of Traditional Social Relations and Corporatist Personhood in Compagnonnage Letter Writing and Reading Practices

Compagnonnage associations and the workers who participated in them in the early nineteenth century certainly appear to be holdovers of a "traditional" society, suggesting continuities with Old Regime practices and sociability that persisted after the French Revolution. The collective nature of compagnons' letter writing and reading practices from the early nineteenth century indicate that, in many ways, little had changed in these practices after the Revolution. (20) Because of the relative frequency of compagnons traveling from one city to another, to find work and develop new skills, almost all letters written by compagnons were carried by traveling compagnons and not sent through the postal system. (21) Compagnons' letters were therefore usually either addressed to the entire group of a particular local compagnonnage association, making them collective practices from the start, or to specific individual compagnons at a local compagnonnage association, depending on the contents and purposes of the letter. Some examples of the broadly collective letters written by compagnons in the early nineteenth century from towns like La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Montpellier were written to compagnons in other cities in France to inform them of the reception of new compagnons, of the debts of traveling compagnons, or of the state of work in their town. (22) In most of these cases, the physical act of writing was performed by a single person, most often the local head of the association known as the "first compagnon," (23) but most of these letters used exclusively the first person plural, indicating that letters were composed as part of a collective effort, perhaps including a brief conversation among the senior compagnons. The most common practice for reading such letters was for one of the senior compagnons to read the letter out loud to the group, reinforcing group ties through the shared experience of reading letters.

This solidarity among members of a compagnonnage association was reproduced by the way all such letters, whether addressed to an entire local compagnonnage association or only to individual compagnons, were framed by the conventions used in the openings and closings of such letters. Members of compagnonnage societies used egalitarian and friendly ways of writing their greetings in letters to fellow compagnons, most often some form of "Our/My dear friend/s." (24) In the closings of their letters, compagnons usually signed their letters with their noms de guerre, such as "Avignonnais-la-vertu" (The virtuous one from Avignon). (25) All letters by and to their fellow compagnons were signed in this manner, including such names as "provencal le bien decide" (the determined one from Provence), "Bordeles sen peur" (the fearless one from Bordeaux), and "Langevin la fidelite" (the faithful one from Anjou). (26) By signing their letters with these noms de guerre, workers identified themselves as compagnons and presented themselves as members of the same group as their readers. Thus, the closings and openings of compagnons' letters stressed the closeness between the readers and writers, as members of a compagnonnage society and as "friends," producing a sense of solidarity between writers and readers and situating the writers in relation to the readers, with little that distinguished the two groups beyond their location in different cities.

This distinction was important, however, as compagnons' letters were primarily part of an ongoing exchange of information between groups, i.e. members of the same compagnonnage association in different cities in France. This exchange of information frequently included lists of new members of the association, such as in a letter written by the compagnons of Montpellier on October 15, 1803 to "our very dear comrades and good compagnons," which announced that "it's for you to know that we have received and baptized between 11 o'clock and midnight" several new compagnons. (27) The compagnons of La Rochelle used similar language to announce new compagnons in several letters they sent in July 1805. (28) Similarly, when compagnons needed information, they wrote collective letters to other compagnons to obtain that information, usually pertaining to a specific association member or group of members. On January 26,1806, the compagnons of Bordeaux wrote a letter to the compagnons of La Rochelle requesting information "as promptly as possible" on the "4 affaires" (29) of a compagnon named "contoy san chagrin." (30)

Compagnons also wrote group letters to provide references for individual members of the society. For example, a letter written by four compagnons from Nantes and sent in December 1808 to Monsieur Francois Lalemand, an assistant shoemaker in La Rochelle, requested that Mr. Lalemand receive the bearer of the letter as a good compagnon. (31) The corollary to such letters of reference were letters written to discipline members of their association for dishonorable actions, in which compagnons typically wrote and circulated multiple copies of their letters designating the outcast compagnons. This is illustrated by a letter written by five members of a carpenter's compagnonnage association in Toulouse naming three carpenters (joiners) who were "written as ... renegade[s]" and "never permitted to rejoin" the association. (32) Six copies of this letter were addressed to carpenters who were members of the same association in Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nantes, Marseille, Lyon, and Tours. (33) In writing this type of circular letter, compagnons addressed all association members, located in different cities, as equivalent members of a larger collectivity, all dependent upon each other to maintain the identity of this group.

As indicated in these examples of reference and disciplinary letters, workers' assertions of identities based on compagnonnage associations in their letters tended to overlap and reinforce trade-based identities. Specifically, compagnons who wrote letters in the first three decades of the nineteenth century did so primarily with and to workers from the same trade, as opposed to across trades, demonstrating directly how social ties among compagnons overlapped with ties among workers with shared occupations. While compagnons did not specifically note their trades in most of their letters, they represented themselves as members of particular branches of compagnonnage societies that drew their memberships from a specific trade, or occasionally a group of related trades. By doing this, workers created a sense of solidarity with their fellow compagnons, who were also their fellow workers from a particular trade, while at the same time representing themselves as members of two overlapping groups.

There were practical reasons for this overlap, such as the roles that local compagnonnage associations played in regulating employment in particular trades, helping traveling workers in their association find work when they first arrived in the city. But this overlap also hints at a central problem for compagnons in the early nineteenth century: the intense rivalry among differing compagnonnage groups, including members of the same association but who practiced different trades. While the letters of the shoemakers and carpenters cited above seem to indicate shared practices, carpenters, as well as workers from other trades, viewed the shoemakers as illegitimate members of compagnonnage, a view that often led to violent confrontations. (34) These divisions within compagnonnage raise questions about the extent of uniformity of these associations, and suggest that this vestige of a traditional social order was being transformed in ways that parallel the gradual transformation of the French working class in general--divided into groups of increasingly lower skilled workers who competed for subcontracting jobs or for places in larger workshops.

Yet the uniformity in their letter writing and reading practices indicate that when it came to literacy, there were certain shared practices that continued to be roughly common to workers in all compagnonnage associations in early nineteenth-century France. By engaging in group writing and reading practices and by making collective identity claims in their letters, identities based on trade and on membership in a compagnonnage society, French workers articulated their connections to groups, presented themselves as members of the same group as their readers, and enforced a sense of interdependence among individual workers. Letter writing and reading and the forms of relational selfhood created by these activities appeared to be flexible enough either to be a potential source of unity among a group of compagnons or to reinforce differences based on trade that were central to the conflicts among compagnons in the nineteenth century. Rather than developing a sense of autonomy, or even leading to any acts of self-reflection, compagnons' acts of writing and reading letters created, and in some cases imposed, a form of selfhood defined by one's relations to others.

Against Autonomy: Relational Selfhood in Saint-Simonian Workers' Letter Writing and Reading Practices

By the 1820s and 1830s, membership in compagnonnage associations was in decline, in part due to changes in labor processes that led to the increasing social dislocation of workers, as discussed above. (35) Workers who experienced this uprootedness associated with the formation of modern society, and particularly those workers with lower levels of skill than many compagnons, would appear to be already enmeshed in a process of individualization. Yet, their letters show them engaging in forms of social behavior, with little attempt to carve out autonomous space. Of the numerous letters written by French workers in the 1830s and 1840s, those by workers connected in some way to Saint-Simonian socialism stand out, in part because of the extent of the Saint-Simonian archives but more significantly because of the kinds of workers who were attracted to Saint-Simonian socialism. (36) The core group of these workers lived in Paris, where the more middle-class leaders of the movement began to recruit extensively in the early 1830s. (37) As Jacques Ranciere notes, these workers, "[like] the overall working-class population of Paris," were "for the most part ... immigrants, who generally [moved] to Paris in the course of the last fifteen years." (38) Ranciere argues that these workers were the essence of the modern proletariat, as "individuals whom no family or territorial law rivets to the place where they reside, whom no tradition or vocation has destined for the craft they exercise." (39) In many ways, then, these workers appear to be the exact opposite of workers who were members of compagnonnage associations.

And yet, like members of compagnonnage associations from the early part of the nineteenth century, workers involved with Saint-Simonian socialism engaged in various forms of group letter-writing and reading practices, suggesting that such practices cannot be simply written off as the persistence of an archaic social order and its effect on literacy. Granted, such practices were not as broadly communal as those of compagnons, as letters were usually addressed to one person, even if meant to be circulated among a group, and were most often sent through the postal system. In addition, the groups of workers who wrote and read letters together were often significantly smaller in number and less clearly defined than local compagnonnage associations. For example, in February 1832 a group of workers including a locksmith, an indigent worker, and a gardener, wrote to the Saint-Simonian newspaper Le Globe, indicating their support for Saint-Simonian doctrine and their desire to learn more about it: "... Permit us to be called your children because we have the intention to pay respect to you when you will have given us the ability to understand your institutions of which we have heard spoken vaguely by [illegible] when your sermons have taught your humane doctrine ... We directly address you so that you deign to have the kindness for us to facilitate the ways to instruct us in the basis of your doctrine." (40) While the precise relationship among the workers who wrote this letter is unclear, they expressed their interest in Saint-Simonian socialism in this collective act that presented each of them in relation to Saint-Simonian doctrine. Saint-Simonianism united these apparently alleatory workers into a group, as did the act of writing the letter, and the letter they wrote presented each of them as equal in terms of interest in Saint-Simonian doctrine.

A somewhat different form of group letter writing, most frequently practiced by workers and their family members, involved different people writing their own sections of effectively the same letter. A letter by the clockmaker Charles Beranger to the leader of the Saint-Simonian movement, Prosper Enfantin, in 1834, included a short note added on by his wife, Sophie Beranger, a seamstress. (41) Charles Beranger's letter focuses primarily his participation in a meeting of workers in Poitiers to discuss Saint-Simonian philosophy, which he summarizes as a "useful thing in the sense that it was a living demonstration for men who are not completely devoid of intelligence, for hundreds of men and some women, in this number it is possible to find people of special merit." (42) Sophie Beranger's addition to her husband's lengthy description of the meeting in Poitiers primarily expresses her affection for Enfantin and her desire to see him again, also stating "no doubt you have been surprised not to have received a letter from me but I only know how to love you and not how to write to you." (43) Despite Sophie Beranger's modesty, she clearly did know how to write to Enfantin but did so as part of the same letter as her husband. By writing in the same letter, the Berangers created a letter with multiple authors that reinforced their shared identity as members of a particular family, while each writer remained distinct.

The different forms of group authorship of letters practiced by Saint-Simonian workers in the 1830s and 1840s mirrored the diversity of forms of group reading and letter circulation practices. Most workers involved in the Saint-Simonian movement frequently shared letters they received with others, creating a second (and sometimes third) level of transmission of the original letter (or copies of that letter) that had been sent to a particular person. Charles Beranger, in the letter discussed above, refers offhandedly to this practice of sharing letters, simply saying that "we [Charles and Sophie Beranger] have seen a letter in which you [Enfantin] speak of us, [and] we are pleased." (44) Charles does not mention whether he and his wife saw and read this letter in person when they were visiting the person to whom Enfantin wrote, if that person read the letter to them, or if they were sent a copy of the letter or even the original letter. All three of these were certainly possible, given workers' wide range of letter reading and circulation practices.

Several letters written by Saint-Simonian workers in the 1830s demonstrate the variety of ways that workers read and re-transmitted original letters or copies of letters from both their family members and non-family members. An artisan who only identified himself as "C ..." wrote a letter to the director of Le Globe in which he included a copy of a letter written by "a young friend" who had introduced him to Saint-Simonianism, requesting Le Globe to consider publishing his friend's letter. (45) In 1831, while in Brussels spreading the Saint-Simonian doctrine among workers in the Low Countries, the painter Machereau wrote a letter to Pecqueur, in Paris, in which he copied a letter he received from a newly converted Saint-Simonian from Maastricht which discussed the development of his understanding of Saint-Simonian philosophy. (46) In 1834, the butcher Desloges wrote to Enfantin and also included a copy of a letter written by his wife Adelle Desloges in which she discussed a conflict between herself and Mme. St. Hilaire. (47) It is unclear whether Desloges wanted Enfantin to help resolve the conflict between the two women, or if he was only sharing a copy of the letter so that Enfantin would have a first-hand account of the conflict. Copying letters to pass along news was, however, a common practice for Saint-Simonians, among whom letters were often "open" and were expected to be read by many different readers. (48) The letters (with their enclosed recopied letters) by Desloges and Machereau, both active within the Saint-Simonian movement, illustrate this openness, but the letter by the artisan "C ..." (with its enclosed recopied letter) suggests that sharing copies of letters was not limited to workers directly active in Saint-Simonianism in the 1830s but was also practiced by workers whose contact with Saint-Simonianism was relatively limited. The reading and multiple levels of circulation of these letters suggests that these workers did not perceive letter writing and reading as a private practice between two independent and autonomous individuals, even if letters were originally addressed and sent by one individual person to another. Instead, these workers viewed letter writing and reading as a way of reinforcing their places in a larger collective through an informally shared, collective dialogue.

Workers' places in larger groups were further reproduced by the ways that letter writers presented themselves and their relationships with letter readers in the openings and closings of their letters. Workers who were less directly involved in the Saint-Simonian movement, like those writing to Le Globe noted above, presented themselves in their signatures to the letter as either members of a particular trade (Tortain, locksmith; Riaux, gardener; M. Hamelle, carter) or as one of the mass of the impoverished (Villain, indigant). (49) By doing this, they not only defined themselves in relation to a specific group but also identified themselves as poor, manual laborers, people with whom Saint-Simonian doctrine sympathized. For workers directly involved in Saint-Simonianism, their letters were framed with a much more precise relationship between themselves as writers, their readers, and Saint-Simonian doctrine. Their letter openings and closings reinforced the relative positions of letter writers and readers in the Saint-Simonian hierarchy by writing familial titles for both themselves and their readers. (50) For example, Saint-Simonian workers writing to a person who ranked higher in the family hierarchy always opened their letters by addressing their reader(s) by the title "father" or "mother." (51) The conventions that workers wrote to close their letters similarly framed their relationships with readers, as mediated by their relative positions in the Saint-Simonian hierarchy. Josephine Marie Bedouet ended her letter with the following lengthy formula: "My fathers and Mothers / I ask you to receive the assurance of my respect and my gratitude and I am your devoted daughter for life / Josephine Marie Bedouet / wife of Martin Rose." (52) In doing this, Bedouet, like other workers actively involved in the Saint-Simonian movement, presented herself and her readers in precise social relationships, as defined by Saint-Simonian doctrine.

As such, Saint-Simonian workers' letters presented those engaged in this literacy practice as socially-defined persons. This is not terribly surprising, given that Saint-Simonian discourse couched its opposition to the prevailing capitalist order through a critique of individualism (or "egoisme"). Yet Saint-Simonian workers' acts of writing, reading, and circulating letters did not simply reproduce the Saint-Simonian critique of individualism. Instead, Saint-Simonian workers reinforced their places in the social order and created new social relationships among the participants in these practices, developing multi-layered, often overlapping, social relationships that defined a complex, relational form of selfhood.

Friendship Letters and the Production of Modern Personhood: Intimacy and Socially-Mediated Reflection in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

While Saint-Simonian workers' letter writing, reading, and circulation practices in the 1830s and 1840s paralleled those by workers in compagnonnage societies in the earlier part of the century, the letters themselves differed in their levels of intimacy. Saint-Simonian workers' letters tended to be more intimate and emotionally-charged than those by compagnons, something that is particularly evident in letters exchanged among friends. For Saint-Simonian workers, friendships that joined the writers and readers of letters were, at least in part, grounded in the new Saint-Simonian "religion" which organized everyone into a "family" that was formed from shared ties of "love"--"an undefined relationship on the boundary between fraternal friendship" and the stronger claims of kinship. (53) This friendship was often cemented in Saint-Simonian workers' letters with personal statements of one's particular understanding of Saint-Simonianism. (54) In doing this, workers made writing letters to friends a self-reflective activity, socially mediated through the institution of Saint-Simonianism. In other words, workers' letters to friends became acts of intimate self-disclosure, where one's "inner self" was socially defined. (55)

The carpenter Louis-Gabriel Gauny's correspondence with Saint-Simonian workers in the 1830s stressed a friendship based, in part, on such self-disclosure that joined writers and readers. Gauny himself was not directly involved with Saint-Simonianism, but his friends included some of the more deeply involved workers. Two letters written by the floor-tiler Bergier to a group of friends including Gauny, the shoemaker Boileau, and Jules Thierry in May 1832, as well as Gauny's and Bergier's letters between themselves that same month, stressed a friendship among the four men based not only on their fondness for each other but also on a shared fascination in Saint-Simonian doctrine that Bergier developed while at the Saint-Simonian retreat at Menilmontant and that Gauny developed through his discussions with fellow workers. (56) Bergier's and Gauny's strong feelings of affection for each other shaped the way that their letter-writing practices created and reinforced the meaning of their friendship, as Bergier demonstrated in a letter in response to Gauny: "You are wrong my friend, when you wrote to me that I could only listen to the pleasures of your dramatic day; our pleasures and our thoughts are too harmonious for the details which you have described with much poetry not to at least allow me to share them.... I arrive now to speak to you about the expression that was so sweet for me which ends several sentences of your letter ... We miss you. Ah this emptiness which my absence has created in the midst of you, I find in the midst of us in regard to you." (57) The letters exchanged between Bergier and Gauny, with their emphasis on missing each other, grounded their friendship in a sentiment of longing for each other's presence. Bergier and Gauny further framed their friendship in these letters as arising from feeling and avowal of Saint-Simonian doctrine, where intimacy was created through statements that disclosed such feeling and avowal. In their correspondence, Gauny, Bergier, Boileau, and Thierry based their friendship, at least in part, on this self-reflection and the intimacy created by it. Through this process, they formed and reinforced both a relational and reflective sense of self--one that did not imply autonomy but one that also did not subsume the self as simply a part of a group.

Unlike these letters between Gauny and his friends, Agricol Perdiguier's various circular letters to his friends, written between 1840-1863, did not include such intimate statements of self-disclosure. (58) Like Gauny, Perdiguier was a carpenter (a joiner, specifically), at least until repeated injury and illnesses forced him to give up the trade and open a small boarding house for young workers staying in Paris. (59) Unlike Gauny, Perdiguier was not involved with Saint-Simonianism and had been an active compagnon. (60) In one of his circular letters to his friends in 1849, he explained the need for him to write a such a letter, first discussing all of the letters from friends that he received but did not respond to, and then noting "[it] was as easy, as prompt, to write to everyone as to think about everyone, so that they could frequently receive my news!" (61) Writing a single letter that could be circulated among a group of friends was, therefore, a time-saving (and cost-saving) alternative for Perdiguier, as it was, doubtless, for many workers who employed this practice. This practice implies, however, that Perdiguier saw little difference between addressing each individual and addressing the group as a whole. Rather than treat each reader as a unique individual, Perdiguier addressed his friends as equal members of a collectivity, similarly to how members of a compagnonnage association in one city addressed those in another city in their letters. This might explain the lack of intimate self-disclosure in Perdiguier's circular letters to his friends, but these letters did not entirely lack self-reflection or self-presentation.

In the same letter to his friends in 1849, Perdiguier discussed many of the events of the 1848 Revolution, but did not focus exclusively on politics, stating early in the letter: "I begin by telling you that I am doing fine, that all of my family is as well, and that I cannot complain about any particular concerns." (62) In other letters to friends, Perdiguier primarily passed on information about himself (such as his health), his activities (such as his involvement in working-class politics), and his family. These statements about health, family, and politics--even if they did not replicate the type of feeling and intimacy found in Bergier's and Gauny's letters--were acts of self-presentation that reinforced bonds of friendship, as well as defined the nature of that friendship as one based in the communication of, albeit somewhat limited, self-reflection.

Workers' letters to their friends demonstrate, therefore, ways that this literacy practice facilitated the expression of different kinds of self-presentation and self-disclosure. Given the social dislocation caused by changes in French society in the early nineteenth century, such acts of self-reflection and self-disclosure could be seen as typical of modernity, where social relationships were built and reinforced by statements of intimacy that led to trust. (63) However, it is important to note that these acts of self-reflection and self-disclosure in French workers' letters were mediated by workers' friendships, other social relations, and social institutions (such as Saint-Simonianism). As such, workers' letter-writing practices demonstrate ways that the development of self-reflection did not arise in isolation or separation from workers' relations with others. Indeed, social relations appear to have motivated workers' acts of self-reflection in their letters. The modern self that developed out of French workers' letter-writing practices was, therefore, heterogeneous and multi-dimensional--a synthesis of a relational, interdependent self and a reflective self.

Working-Class Autobiographical Writing: Cultivating Heterogeneous Selfhood

To what extent was this heterogeneous self simply a product of a particular set of letter-writing practices or a form of selfhood that only appeared in these practices? Extrapolating an argument about literacy's relationship to personhood based on these practices alone would remain suggestive. However, by comparing these letter-writing practices with workers' autobiographical-writing practices, we can develop a stronger sense of the forms of personhood that literacy both produced and reinforced in early nineteenth-century France. (64) Writing an autobiography, even a modest one of just a few pages, was a significantly more uncommon practice for French workers in the early nineteenth century than writing or reading a letter. Even if one includes a variety of texts that were either published or unpublished during the authors' lifetimes, only about twenty autobiographical texts that were written by French workers between 1820 and 1860 have survived. (65) Despite this relative scarcity of sources, workers' autobiographical-writing practices can serve as a useful comparison with letter writing and reading, which might be more clearly seen as socially-oriented practices, in examining the relationship between literacy and the formation of the self.

Writing an autobiography is, after all, an inherently self-reflective act, regardless of the form it takes or how it is written. Because of this inherent reflectivity, autobiographical writing is usually thought of as the quintessential writing practice for developing autonomous individuality. Some scholars would argue, in fact, that any writing that does not develop an individualist sense of self and the writer's autonomous personality could not be correctly called an autobiography. (66) But, when one examines the practice of first-person narrative writing by French workers in the early nineteenth century, it becomes clear that these life-stories and the ways that workers wrote them do not always fit neatly into this definition of autobiography. Instead, these autobiographies had much in common with their early modern predecessors--while their narratives usually do have moments where writers posit themselves as individuals, "the individual seldom [loses] sight of the collective." (67)

In writing their autobiographies, workers declared themselves to be typical members of a particular group, often defined by occupation or membership in a workers' association. These declarations were not just claims to a collective identity, though, but were often presented as the author's motivation for writing. They wrote, in other words, to speak as a member of a group and to speak for that group, positing themselves as authoritative representatives of a particular group of workers or of workers in general.

French workers' collective identity claims, however, indicate just the broad outlines of the forms of selfhood that French workers created and reinforced in writing their autobiographies. Much more importantly, they engaged in two practices that fashioned their autobiographies into collective practices and placed their own lives in relation to others. First, workers tended to create their autobiographies from numerous sources, synthesizing other forms of composition both written by them earlier in their lives and also written by others. Second, workers frequently interrupted the narration of their lives with reflections on general themes or issues that related their lives to the social and political conditions in which their lives were embedded. Through both of these practices, workers shaped their autobiographies into dialogic texts where they presented their self-reflections in relation to others' ideas or to their position in the social order--a form of heterogeneous selfhood that directly paralleled what emerged from workers' letter writing, reading, and circulation practices.

In writing their autobiographies as dialogic texts, French workers frequently included not only their own writing but also many excerpts or full texts of writing by other people, most frequently, but not limited to, letters and songs. These texts written by others and synthesized into workers' life-stories served different purposes for different autobiographers. For some, such as the tailor Jean-Claude Romand, the shoemaker Pierre Gerbier, and the baker and compagnon J. B. E. Arnaud, including a few examples of letters written by others primarily served as documentation for the episodes from their lives about which they were writing. (68) On the other hand, none of them needed to quote an entire letter at length to provide a clear narrative, and, by doing this, all of them introduced voices other than their own into their life-stories, making their autobiographies, in effect, a conversation between the voices of the writers and the voices presented by the letter writers. Thus, through the practice of recopying entire letters written by others in their autobiographies, workers did not just document their activities but placed their own lives in relation to the lives of others and transformed their autobiographies into a written dialogue.

This practice of writing one's autobiography as a dialogic text takes on its clearest and most pronounced form in the autobiography of Jacques Etienne Bede, which was introduced at the beginning of this essay. Each of three volumes of Bede's autobiography, each one written in its own notebook in his unpublished manuscript, presented different layers of dialogue. While Bede's first volume of his autobiography--titled "Abrege de la Vie Civile et Militaire de J. E. Bede ecrit par lui-meme" (Summary of the Civil and Military Life of J. E. Bede written by himself)--primarily recounted events from his own life, his narrative shifted towards the end of the section when he began discussing his role in helping found a mutual-aid society for chair-turners in Paris. (69) Shortly after describing the reasons for the creation of this society, Bede included "Excerpts of the Register of Deliberations" of the society for its first three meetings (October 18 & 25, 1818, January 10, 1819), as well as from the meeting of the Executive Council (January 21, 1819). (70) Immediately following these excerpts, Bede wrote a few brief comments on the society and then recopied all nine parts of the governing statutes of the society in their entirety. (71)

Although Bede emphasized his role in the mutual-aid society in the parts of his autobiography that surround these recopied documents, the documents themselves shift the focus of the autobiography from Bede's individual life to his involvement with the mutual-aid society and the history of this group. Indeed, from this point forward, Bede's autobiography is almost exclusively focused on the mutual-aid society and the activities of its members, with Bede presenting his individual life primarily through his leadership role in the organization. Bede filled volumes II and III of his autobiography with copies of society documents (mostly excerpts of reports from meetings), letters exchanged between government officials and society members, songs sung at society meetings, letters written by the society to the masters on the Rue de Clery, excerpts of the trial transcripts for the legal action taken by the masters against the society, and letters from Maria Bicheux (the wife of one of his fellow workers) to him and his fellow society members.

Bede's inclusion of letters written by Maria Bicheux, in fact, demonstrate another way his autobiography became a dialogue that presented his life in relation to that of others. Indeed, the original title of Bede's manuscript was "Etienne and Maria or the Triumph of Friendship," (72) emphasizing Bicheux's role in helping Bede gain release from prison, where he had landed due to his work with the journeyman chair-turners' mutual aid society and their conflict with their masters. In Volume III of his autobiography, Bede copied three letters written by Bicheux that he received while in prison, (73) two letters written by Bicheux in response to the mutual-aid society's desire to name her a "friend of the society," (74) a speech Bicheux wrote to accept this honor, (75) and a letter by Bicheux resigning yet another honorary title because of the negative response from certain members of the society. (76) As in the autobiographies of Gerbier, Romand, and Arnaud, Bede introduced a new voice in his autobiography by reproducing the letters by Bicheux. This new voice created an additional layer of conversation in Bede's autobiography--between his life-story and the writings of his friend Bicheux--and shifted his narrative yet again. In Volume III, Bede integrated the focus on the mutual-aid society and his role in the organization, that he developed in Volume II, with his relationship with Bicheux and the effects of that relationship on the mutual-aid society. Bede presented his own life, therefore, through these different layers of relationships, at times positing himself as the authoritative representative of the mutual-aid society.

As with the ways that Bede integrated others' writings in his autobiography, other workers' practice of interrupting their life-story narratives to comment on social and political issues both defined their senses of self relationally and presented themselves as authoritative representatives of a particular group. Unlike the integration of other people's writings into the autobiography, commentaries on social and political issues did not introduce additional, specific voices. Instead, they connected the writer's reflections on his/her experiences with (either actual or potential) matters of public debate and therefore demonstrated the relevance of the experiences of the writer to that larger conversation. One such example occurs towards the end of the tailor Durand's short autobiography written in the late 1830s, which contains lengthy reflections on poverty and social inequality, that immediately followed the description of his inability to find work in either Montpellier or in the neighboring town of Cette:

  It is nevertheless unjust that the rich overflow with superfluous
  goods and that the poor are deprived of necessities.... Moreover, our
  interests are not theirs; and as long as our interests are divided, we
  will be exploiting each other in subjugating ourselves. I do not know
  what type of pleasure is felt by the opulent class in seeing us
  reduced to serve their caprices. I do not know how they keep from
  blushing in being the vile murderers of their fellow human
  beings. (77)

Durand generalizes his personal life-story by extrapolating lessons and comments about workers and the poor from his own personal experiences. In doing this, he shifts the focus of his narrative from the story of his own life to the lives of many workers who had similar experiences. Thus, workers' practice of including reflections on social and political issues in their autobiographies, of which Durand is merely an example, positioned the narrative of the individual life of the writer in relation to the lives of many workers in similar social conditions. (78) At the same time, workers posited themselves as particularly well-qualified to comment on the lives of other workers, since they were, after all, representatives of this group.

Durand also asserted this authority by claiming the identity of a worker throughout his autobiography. Unlike workers who wrote autobiographies after 1848, Durand did not refer to himself as a worker in his title--he simply titled it Vie, pensees et voyages de D. D. (Life, thoughts and travels of D. D.). (79) Throughout the main text of his autobiography, though, Durand repeatedly referred to himself as a "worker" (ouvrier). Durand notes that he "traveled as a worker" and stayed in lodging houses "where workers of my trade lodged" where, upon his arrival, "[his] friends greeted [him] in the custom of workers." (80) In making these statements, Durand not only presents himself as a typical worker, but he defines his identity as a worker by engaging in practices which he represents as typical for traveling workers.

In addition to making these overt identity claims, Durand framed the narrative of his life-story with his personal struggles--his travels as a worker, periods of unemployment, poor health, and conflicts with other workers--and presented himself as a worker who persevered and overcame these obstacles. Through this particular narrative framework, Durand reinforced his personal connection to a series of struggles that French workers faced in the mid-nineteenth century. (81) This connection between the personal and the collective led Durand to represent himself as a typical, or even exemplary, member of a particular group of workers and to define himself through his precise relationship with this group.

Towards the end of his autobiography, Durand notes that he wrote his life-story "to make known that I experienced abuses, errors which fall on many people." (82) The abuses and errors that he describes in his autobiography were not, however, just those experienced by any "people." They were particular to traveling workers: unemployment in particular cities, conflicts with innkeepers over money owed, and hunger and fatigue from travel with scant resources. Durand's statement here does not, however, solely provide further evidence of ways that he connected the personal with a specific collectivity. It also suggests that his imagined audience for this autobiography was a public that was largely unfamiliar with such abuses--a broadly-defined, and perhaps a reform-minded, bourgeoisie. Such an imagined audience might explain, at least in part, Durand's efforts to represent his life-story as typical of many other workers, as opposed to writing about himself as an entirely unique, autonomous individual. Similarly, Bede's claim in the last few paragraphs of his autobiography that he wrote for "young workers" who were "strangers to our discord"--discussed at the beginning of this essay--could explain his extensive focus on the events surrounding the mutual-aid society.

But the possible audiences that workers imagined for their autobiographies do not explain the act of writing an autobiography, as opposed to some depersonalized treatise on working-class struggles. (83) And, even though most workers' autobiographies focused on the experiences of a group and introduced writings and voices of people other than themselves into their narratives, in no case did the writers of these autobiographies completely lose track of themselves. Workers presented themselves as important representatives of groups and as central actors in the conversations that their autobiographies produced. In doing so, they claimed a certain level of authority to write about issues that affected the group, presenting their self-reflections in ways that explicitly positioned themselves in relation to others and to the social order. As such socially-defined, reflective individuals, French workers continued to cultivate forms of heterogeneous selfhood through their autobiographical-writing practices that paralleled those developed through their letter writing, reading, and circulation practices.

Conclusion

These heterogeneous conceptions of the person, developed through French workers' correspondence and autobiographical writing, gave a particular set of meanings to working-class literacy in early nineteenth-century France. On the one hand, they connected literacy with forms of relational, even corporatist, personhood from the early modern period and suggested a certain degree of continuity between pre- and post-Revolutionary France, between tradition and modernity. On the other hand, heterogeneous conceptions of the person linked literacy to practices of introspection, self-reflection, and assertions of authority, in the face of forms of social dislocation brought on by migration to cities, increasing division of labor, and the instability of wage labor characteristic of modern French society.

Tied to both continuity and change, working-class literacy in early nineteenth-century France also demonstrated more parallels with practices of oral communication than many might assume. (84) In fact, such continuities between orality and literacy can be found in the oft-stated ideal, found in many letter-writing manuals throughout the nineteenth century, of using letter writing to reproduce conversations. (85) Further evidence of the overlap between oral communication and letter writing can be seen the practice of reading letters aloud, either by oneself or in a group. (86) While a full-scale study of practices of oral communication is outside the bounds of this essay, the forms of heterogeneous personhood cultivated by French working-class literacy practices further suggests that socially-defined (or collectivist) personhood that Furet and Ozouf associated with orality was not entirely transformed or overcome by literacy. The question that remains to be answered, though, is whether particular literacy practices altered the relationship(s) between the relational and reflective dimensions of the self, perhaps in response to conditions particular to French modernity, when compared with practices of oral speech from pre-modern France.

Naomi Andrews argues that French socialists in the 1830s and 1840s saw France as "a fragmented and troubled society" and "articulated their critique of capitalism and the politics it spawned through their analysis of individualism." (87) By cultivating forms of heterogeneous personhood, French working-class literacy practices could be seen as acts of resistance to the fragmentation and individualism that these socialists observed. Unlike a stereotypical, or abstract, form of resistance, these acts of literacy did not simply oppose individualism with its opposite, collectivism. Furthermore, workers' literacy practices were not simply a form of resistance to bourgeois forms of the self, even if they do present a counter-narrative to Goldstein's analysis of the inculcation of Cousinian selfhood in bourgeois male students in French lycees. (88) While many workers discussed in this essay were involved in various forms of militant activity, the surviving evidence demonstrates that a diverse set of social relations and identities were reinforced in workers' literacy practices. Sometimes writing and reading reinforced ties with fellow workers. On other occasions, though, writing and reading created and maintained networks of personal relations, such as family and friends, in a way that suggests an attempt to maintain these relations in the face of social dislocation, such as migration in order to find work. Ultimately, French workers' correspondence and autobiographical-writing practices demonstrate a form of resistance that navigated the path between the limits of individualism and collectivism, where they developed self-reflection and claims of authority in dialogue with their relations to others and with their collective identities. (89) Such a path only becomes apparent, however, if we examine the role of literacy in the production of modern personhood through a comparative analysis of specific practices.

This essay only scratches the surface of such a comparative analysis of literacy practices, as a way to re-examine the issue of the place of literacy in the formation of modern selves in France and in modernity more broadly. A more definitive analysis would require examining a broader range of literacy practices, including those of members of other classes that could have developed different forms of selfhood. This broader analysis would then be able to examine whether given practices within specific genres were class-bound or not, and whether the forms of selfhood that such practices cultivated were also class bound. In doing this, we might come to the conclusion that no literacy practices helped to form the autonomous, egocentric individual of the sort that Furet and Ozouf suggest in arguing that literacy leads to individualism.

As a brief, preliminary examination of this issue, we can look at bourgeois correspondence in nineteenth-century France. An analysis of a French bourgeois family's substantial archive of letters, exchanged over the course of several generations between 1795 and 1933, suggests that bourgeois letter writing, reading, and circulation practices shared much in common with the working-class practices analyzed in this essay. (90) Whether through forms of address, practices of writing or reading letters together, copying or passing along others' letters, this bourgeois family's correspondence "reinforced the solidarity and the fabric of family life" while also presenting the life, "the point of view," and "the individual designs" of family members. (91) This suggests that forms of heterogeneous selfhood were cultivated through French bourgeois family letter writing, reading, and circulation practices, similar to those produced by French working-class practices in the early to mid-nineteenth century. While further research remains to be done to determine the extent of the parallels between French working-class and middle-class literacy practices and the forms of selfhood produced by those practices, we cannot dismiss the working-class literacy practices discussed in this essay and the forms of heterogeneous selfhood created by them as merely exceptions in the development of the modern self. Instead, we must recognize that the relationship between literacy and the formation of modern selves is quite complex, possibly crossing class lines but also possibly leading to the formation of different kinds of selfhood. The literacy practices of French workers in the early nineteenth century provide us with a window through which to glimpse this complexity and begin to explore the broader history of literacy and modern selves.

Department of History and Political Science

Chicago, IL 60655

ENDNOTES

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France at the University of Chicago and at the Social History Society 2004 Annual Meeting in Rouen, France. Thanks to the participants in each forum for their helpful comments, especially Jan Goldstein, Paul Cheney, and Peter Caterall. I would also like to thank Jennifer Smiley, Holly Swyers, Michael Steinberg, Donald Reid, Malachi Hacohen, William Reddy, and the reviewers at the Journal of Social History who read various versions of this article and provided helpful feedback and support.

1. Jacques Etienne Bede, Un Ouvrier en 1820, ed. Remi Gossez (Paris, 1984), pp. 385-86. Chair-turning was one of the furniture-making trades and involved the use of a lathe to spin parts of a chair (legs, spokes for the back, etc.) so they could be shaped.

2. Bede's original manuscript is now located at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Manuscrits, Nouvelles Acquisitions des Fonds Francais (n.a.f.), no. 25033.

3. There have been several studies of working-class autobiography in modern Europe, revealing that this practice was more widespread than might at first be apparent. In particular, see Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995) and David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981). In addition, Mark Traugott has edited a volume of selected translations from French workers' autobiographies, including some excerpts from Bede's autobiography, titled The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley, 1993). The details of Bede's discussion of the Parisian furniture-making trades have also been the subject of debate in Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (New York/Cambridge, 1989) and Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996).

4. One of the few historians who examines popular autobiographies as evidence of particular writing practices is James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 1998), and I use a similar approach to Amelang in my analysis of French working-class autobiographies in this essay. Amelang does not, however, do any of the broader comparative analysis of literacy practices that I suggest here.

5. This practice-based approach to literacy has been developed by several scholars, most notably anthropologists, since about 1980, as a direct critique of viewing literacy in terms of a binary opposition (literate/illiterate or literate/oral). The two best early examples of this approach are Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (New York, 1983) and Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1981). For an argument for this focus on literacy practices as a way to analyze literacy, as opposed to analyzing literacy in terms of the literate/illiterate or literate/oral oppositions, see Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (New York, 1984) and Street, "Introduction: The New Literacy Studies," in Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, ed. Brian V. Street (New York, 1993), pp. 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, 1995). In this book, Besnier also argues for the importance of analyzing the relationship between literacy practices and personhood, claiming "that, in all social groups, personhood as a sociocultural category plays a particularly important role in the process of giving literacy a specific meaning. This meaning piggy-backs, as it were, on local definitions of personhood, which itself is closely tied to political and economic processes." (p. 187) Besnier initially developed this theme in "Literacy and the Notion of Person on Nukulaelae Atoll" American Anthropologist 93 (1991): 570-587.

6. Several French historians have developed extensive analyses of particular literacy practices, such as reading books, writing letters, etc., particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See, for example, Roger Chartier, Lectures et Lecteurs dans la France d'Ancien Regime (Paris, 1987); Roger Chartier, ed., Pratiques de la Lecture (Paris, 1993); Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Roger Chartier, ed., La Correspondance: Les Usages de la Lettre au XIXe Siecle (Paris, 1991); and Cecile Dauphin, Pierrette Lebrun-Pezerat, and Daniele Poublan, Ces Bonnes Lettres: Une Correspondance Familiale au XIXe Siecle (Paris, 1995). While I am deeply indebted to these analyses, I am arguing here that we need to recuperate the concept of literacy through a comparative analysis of literacy practices, as the anthropologists cited above discuss.

7. There is an extensive literature on the category of the "worker" in France, in particular focusing on issues of class consciousness. For examples of two very different analyses of the category of the French worker, see William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York, 1980) and Jacques Ranciere, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History" International Labor and Working Class History 24 (1983): 1-16. In addition to letters analyzed in this essay, I have also looked at workers' letters to the writers George Sand (in the 1840s-60s) and Eugene Sue (in the 1840s) and the communist publisher Etienne Cabet (in the 1840s). These letters to Sand, Sue, and Cabet indicate further evidence of similar kinds of letter writing, reading, and circulation practices to the ones I analyze in this essay. They are located in the Bibliotheque Nationale, n.a.f. 24811, Papiers George Sand; Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) CP 3935, Correspondance d'Eugene Sue a propos des Mysteres de Paris; and BHVP MS 1052, Papiers Etienne Cabet.

8. Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et Ecrire: L'Alphabetisation des Francais de Calvin a Jules Ferry, 2 Vols. (Paris, 1977), 1:358. While this claim is not the central argument of their larger study, it is used to argue for the broader significance of their previous examination of measuring (quantitatively) the spread of literacy in France from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

9. This typology of selfhood--individualist and collectivist--has also been used by anthropologists to suggest a fundamental distinction between the modern, Western self and the concept of the person held by other peoples in the contemporary world. This is part of the analysis of the conception of the person in Clifford Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Local Knowledge (New York, 1983), pp. 55-70 and Richard A. Shweder and E. J. Bourne, "Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally," in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine (New York, 1984), pp. 158-99. Claudia Strauss points out that this distinction continues to be maintained by many cultural psychologists, even if most of her fellow anthropologists reject this division today. See Claudia Strauss, "The Culture Concept and the Individualism-Collectivism Debate: Dominant and Alternative Attributions for Class in the United States," in Larry Nucci, Geoffrey Saxe, and Elliot Turiel, eds., Culture, Thought, and Development (Mahwah, NJ, 2000), pp. 85-114. In addition, many cognitive anthropologists rely on the concepts of egocentrism and sociocentrism in relatively recent analyses, even if they problematize these concepts to some extent. For example, see Katherine P. Ewing, "The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency," Ethos 18 (1990): 251-78 and Dorothy Holland and Andrew Kipnis, "Metaphors for Embarrassment and Stories of Exposure: The Not-So-Egocentric Self in American Culture," Ethos 22 (1994): 316-42.

10. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York/Cambridge, 2005), pp. 3-32. Seigel specifically deals with Geertz and anthropologists discussed above on pages 25-26.

11. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

12. Goldstein, p. 160.

13. Goldstein, p. 170. See pp. 218-228 for her discussion of Cousin and his followers' correspondence, and pp. 182-232 for the general problem of institutionalizing Cousinian selfhood in French schools.

14. Long-term or permanent migration to cities became increasingly common in the nineteenth century. See Louis Chevalier, La Formation de la Population Parisienne au XIXe Siecle (Paris, 1950) and Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France (London, 1983). The literature on changes in labor processes in manufacturing and industrial work is too numerous to cite, but for some examples that focus on class-formation see Elinor Accampo, Industrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint-Chamond, 1815-1914 (Berkeley, 1989); Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871 (Princeton, 1993); Michael P. Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, 1989); William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900 (New York, 1984); Gay Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Tessie Liu, The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750-1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Donald Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge, MA, 1985); and William H. Sewell, Jr., Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820-1870 (New York, 1985).

15. See Anthony Giddens' discussion of the separation of "space" from "place" and processes of "disembedding" of social systems that he argues are characteristic of modernity in The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990), pp. 18-21.

16. In their extensive study of the French postal survey of 1847, Cecile Dauphin, Pierrette Lebrun-Pezerat, and Daniele Poublan argue that letters carried by personal contacts were only a very small percentage of the total letters circulating in nineteenth-century France. See Dauphin et. al., "L'enquete postale de 1847," in La Correspondance, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris, 1991), p. 36. One of the examples that they mention of such personally-carried letters was letters by migrant workers and members of compagnonnage societies, which I discuss below.

17. Prior to 1849 in France (1839 in England), the postal system did not have a uniform rate for sending a letter. The 1847 postal survey was motivated, in part, by a desire to determine a national postal rate, and this eventually led to the production of the first national postage stamps in France. See Daupin et. al., "L'enquete postale de 1847," pp. 21-22.

18. Dauphin et. al., Ces Bonnes Lettres, p. 102.

19. Compagnonnage associations were highly-organized groups of journeyman artisans throughout France that were organized by trade. See Sewell, Work and Revolution in France and Cynthia M. Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, NY, 1994).

20. See Truant, The Rites of Labor, especially pp. 172-80 for her discussion of letter writing. While Truant's book includes some analysis of compagnonnage in nineteenth-century France, her analysis of compagnons' writing practices is largely confined to sources from pre-Revolutionary France. Truant's book is particularly important for dispelling the myth that necessarily links "traditional" organizations in the Old Regime, like compagnonnage, with orality, as opposed to literacy.

21. The fact that the Revolution had made compagnonnage associations illegal could have contributed somewhat to this practice, but pre-Revolutionary compagnonnage letters also were transmitted directly by traveling compagnons.

22. Archives Nationales (AN) [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10. This dossier contains many examples of letters written by different groups of compagnons between 1803 and 1813. Police copies of compagnons' letters and discussions of letters by compagnons in police reports from 1821-1825 are in AN [F.sup.7] 9786 in dossiers organized by department. These dossiers contain approximately 31 letters written by compagnons.

23. The "premier compagnon" (first compagnon) was the head of a local compagnonnage society, chosen from among the senior local members. The other main officerwas the "rouleur" (keeper of the roles) who maintained lists of compagnons currently located in their town, those compagnons' work assignments, and debts owed by compagnons to the local society.

24. Most workers who were friends tended to open their letters with just the last name of the intended reader of the letter, or sometimes "My Dear," followed by the last name--as in Agricol Perdiguier's letter to Louis-Marie Ponty which began "My Dear Ponty." See Agricol Perdiguier, Correspondance Inedit avec George Sand et ses Amis, ed. Jean Briquet (Paris, 1966), pp. 61-62, A. Perdiguier to L. M. Ponty, January 1, 1842. For other examples of similar greetings in workers' letters to friends, see Perdiguier, Correspondance Inedit and Louis Gabriel Gauny, Le Philosophe Plebeien, ed. Jacques Ranciere (Paris, 1983).

25. Compagnons were given their noms de guerre when they were initiated into the society. These names included the city/town where the compagnon was from (e.g. Avignon) plus some personal quality (e.g. virtue).

26. AN [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10.

27. "Cest pour vous faire & savoir que nous avons recu et bastiset antre les onzeure et minuij," AN [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10, letter from compagnons de montpelliers an langedoc, October 15, 1803.

28. AN [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10, letters dated July 6, 1805, July 7, 1805, July 14, 1805 from compagnons de la rochelle.

29. Compagnons used the word "affaires" to mean both registers or archives of a compagnonnage society or the passport of an individual compagnon. In this case, it appears that they are asking for Contoy san Chagrin's passport and other documents.

30. AN [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10, letter addressed to Charon deumuron dan la rue de Steteruie no 15 a la Rochelle aremon de la Charente; pour remettre a tous compagnons Charon qui son en ville a la Rochelle; a Madame Voisin Mere des compagnons from compagnons de Bordeaux en guienne le 26. jeanvier 1806.

31. AN [F.sup.7] 4236, dossier 10, letter from Noumans le desside, Bausseron Laprudansse, Breton la prudance, Bourguignon legenie du devoir to Monsieur francois lalemand garcon cordonnier, December 28, 1808. This letter also suggested that either Mr. Lalemand should come to Nantes to be received as a compagnon or the compagnons of Nantes could come to La Rochelle.

32. AN [F.sup.7] 4236, Dossier 10, f. 9, Analise d'une procedure instruite par monsieur le juge d'instruction pres le tribunal de premiere instance de l'arrondissement de toulouse contre plusieurs garcons menuisiers residans a toulouse.

33. All copies of the letter were seized by police when the members of the Toulouse association were arrested in 1811, so the letters were never sent.

34. Jacques Ranciere discusses the shoemakers' status in compagnonnage in "The Myth of the Artisan," pp. 2-3. But, the violent confrontations (called "rixes") between rival compagnonnage groups is a theme of both contemporary observers and later scholarly studies on compagnonnage in the early nineteenth century.

35. See Truant, The Rites of Labor, pp. 331-334.

36. The largest collection of Saint-Simonian archives are the Fonds Enfantin, located at the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris.

37. Efforts to recruit workers outside of Paris began shortly after the Saint-Simonian movement organized these Parisian workers. And, in fact, many of the Parisian workers were involved in trips to Lyon or other cities in the 1830s, to spread the Saint-Simonian doctrine.

38. Ranciere, The Nights of Labor, p. 146.

39. Ranciere, The Nights of Labor, p. 144.

40. "Nous vous permetons de vous dires vos Enfants car nous avons l'aintention de Nous En rendre digne. quand Vous nous aurez donne La facilite de connaitre vos institutions duquel nous avons Entendu Parler vaguement par[?] quand vos predication ont Enseigne vos doctrine humaine.... C'est de nous adresser directement a vous pour que vous deniez avoir la complaisance de nous faciliter les moyens de nous instruire sur les Basse de votre moral." Fonds Enfantin 7607, Correspondance du Globe, f. 201, letter from Tortain, serrurier, Vilain, indigant, Riaux, jardinier et. al., February 20, 1832. Similarly, the leather-workers at the Defroment workshop wrote a letter to Michel Chevalier, the editor of Le Globe, requesting that he send a copy of the newspaper to their workshop. Fonds Enfantin 7607, Correspondance du Globe, f. 218, atelier Defroment to Michel Chevalier, n.d.

41. Fonds Enfantin 7626, Correspondance des Principaux Saint Simoniens de 1832 a 1845, f. 16, Charles Beranger to Enfantin, October 9, 1834.

42. "chose utile en ce sens quils tout une demonstration vivante pour les hommes qui ne sont pas completement denu6s d'intelligence, des cents hommes et quelques femmes, dans ce nombre il devait se trouver des gens d'un merite special incontestable." Ibid.

43. "vous avez sendoute ete surpris de ne pas resevoir une lettre de moi mais je ne sait que vous aimez et non pas vous acrire." Fonds Enfantin 7626, Correspondance des Principaux Saint Simoniens de 1832 a 1845, f. 16, Sophie Beranger to Enfantin, October 9, 1834.

44. Ibid.

45. Fonds Enfantin 7607, Correspondance du Globe, f. 242, letter to M. Chevalier, April 17, 183n. (The last number of date is illegible.)

46. Fonds Enfantin 7605, Correspondance du Globe, f. 4, Machereau to Pecqueur, December 16, 1831.

47. Fonds Enfantin 7626, Correspondance des principaux Saint Simoniens de 1832 a 1845, f. 37, Desloges to Enfantin, October 22, 1834.

48. Philippe Regnier, "Usage Saint-Simoniens de l'Epistolaire," in La Lettre a la Croisee de l'Individuel et du Social, ed. Mireille Bossis (Paris, 1994), pp. 95-96. Regnier notes that, among Saint-Simonians, the first reader of letters were frequently "charged to communicate to one or several other readers his knowledge" gained from those letters.

49. Fonds Enfantin 7607, Correspondance du Globe, f. 201, letter from Tortain, serrurier, Vilain, indigant, Riaux, jardinier et. al., February 20, 1832.

50. The Saint-Simonian hierarchy first emerged in 1828 through the transformation of Saint-Simonianism from an economic and political philosophy into a (type of) religion. This transformation was accompanied by a rapid expansion in the Saint-Simonian "school" from a relatively small group of highly educated and mostly wealthy individuals, including Olinde Rodrigues, Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, and Saint-Amand Bazard, to a much larger and broader organization that incorporated, within a few years, manual laborers from cities throughout France. In organizing themselves as a religious group, Saint-Simonians not only began to speak of certain members as "priests" but also created a hierarchy of "fathers," a "college," a "secondary degree of initiates," and "a third degree of aspirants and teachers," and, by late 1829, also a "workers' degree." Beginning around 1830, Saint-Simonians began to speak of themselves as the "Family," and addressed each other with familial titles, such as "father" and "sister," that indicated their relative positions within the hierarchy/family. Prosper Enfantin, the sole leader of the movement after his split with Bazard, referred to himself as the "Supreme Father." See Georg G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians A Chapter in the Intellectual History of Totalitarianism (The Hague, 1958); Robert B. Carlisle, The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore, 1987); and the entry for "Enfantin, Barthelemy, Prosper" in Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Francais. Premiere Partie: 1789-1864, 3 Vols. (Paris, 1965), 2:153-56.

51. The only exceptions to this in the Saint-Simonian workers' letters that I collected are a handful of letters written in the mid-1840s to early 1850s, after the Saint-Simonian family had largely dissolved (although some members, particularly the more active ones, still maintained contact).

52. "Mes peres et Meres / Recevez je vous prie l'assurance de mes respect et de ma reconnaissance et suis pour la vie votre devouee fille / Josephine Marie Bedouet / femme Rose Martin." Fonds Enfantin 7608, Correspondance du Globe, f. 80, letter by Josephine Marie Bedouet, femme Rose Martin, October 1, 1831. Martin Rose was a tailor, but Josephine Marie Bedouet's occupation is unknown.

53. Ranciere, The Nights of Labor, pp. 159-60. On the Saint-Simonian family, see note 50.

54. Such a practice was similar to the Saint-Simonian practice of making a "profession of faith," which all new official members of the movement had to make. See Ranciere, The Nights of Labor, pp. 164-91 for his detailed analysis of some examples of these professions of faith.

55. In Friendship in the Classical World (New York, 1997), David Konstan argues that "one aspect of friendship universally emphasized in modern discussions is the need for self-disclosure as the basis for intimacy and trust between friends." (pp. 14-15) This concept of "self-disclosure" is similar to Jacobins' emphasis on self-criticism and self-exposure, as discussed by Patrice Higonnet in Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 81-82. For a discussion of modern friendship, see Anne Vincent-Buffault, L'Exercice de I'Amitie: Pour une Histoire des Pratiques Amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siecles (Paris, 1995).

56. Gauny, Le Philosophe Plebeien, pp. 147-61. The four letters from May 1832 are: (1) Bergier to Gauny, Boileau, and Thierry, (2) Gauny to Bergier, (3) Bergier to Gauny, and (4) Bergier to Gauny, Thierry, and Boileau.

57. "Tu t'es trompe mon ami, quand tu m'as ecrit que je ne pouvais qu'ecouter les plaisirs de votre journee dramatique; nos plaisirs et nos pensees sont trop harmoniques pour que les details que tu m'en fais avec tant de poesie ne me les aient au moins fait partager.... J'arrive maintenant a te parler de I'expression si douce pour moi qui termine plusieurs phrases de ta lettre ... Tu nous manquais. Eh bien ce vide que mon absence faisait au milieu de vous, je le trouve au milieu de nous par rapport a toi." Ibid., pp. 155, 156, letter from Bergier to Gauny, May 1832. The first ellipsis is mine, the second is in Bergier's letter.

58. Jean Briquet has collected Perdiguier's letters from several different private and public archives, some of which he published. In his index of all of the letters that Perdiguier wrote, Jean Briquet notes six total circular letters that Perdiguier wrote between 1840 and 1863. See Agricol Perdiguier, Correspondance Inedit avec George Sand et ses Amis, pp. 23-29. Unfortunately, Briquet only reproduced three of these circular letters, and it is unclear why he claims that one of these three is a circular.

59. Perdiguier also gave drafting lessons and published his autobiography and books on compagnonnage to supplement his income, and his wife Lise Perdiguier supported their family through her work as a seamstress. For more details on his life, see his two autobiographies--La Biographie de l'auteur du livre de compagnonnage (Paris, 1846) and Memoires d'un compagnon (Paris, 1854)--as well as the biography by Jean Briquet, Agricol Perdiguier, compagnon du Tour de France et representant du peuple, 1805-1875 (Paris, 1981). His first autobiography gives a particularly vivid narrative of the various accidents and illnesses that befell him due to his work as a carpenter.

60. Calling Perdiguier an active compagnon might be somewhat of an understatement. His publications on compagnonnage, particularly his Livre du Compagnonnage (Paris, 1839), were part of his active efforts to try to reform the associations. He opposed any divisions within compagnonnage and argued actively for the potential benefits of the associations for bringing together manufacturing workers in France.

61. Agricol Perdiguier, Correspondance Inedit, pp. 107-08 (Perdiguier to his friends, September 1849). It is unclear whether Perdiguier wrote one copy of letters like this, which was then circulated among friends, if he wrote multiple copies of the same letter, or some combination of these.

62. Perdiguier, Correspondance Inedit, p. 107.

63. See Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, pp. 120-24 for a broader discussion of these links between self-disclosure, intimacy, and reflection as part of the development of modernity.

64. On the significance of the comparative method for studying literacy practices and formulating generalizations about literacy, see Besnier, Literacy, Emotion, and Authority, especially pp. 6-10.

65. Studies that specifically focus on working-class or popular autobiographies have worked around this source scarcity problem by analyzing such texts from a wider geographical area and over a broader time span than I do in this essay. For example, in Taking the Hard Road, Mary Jo Maynes located over 300 autobiographies by French and German workers who lived from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The twenty texts that I refer to here were primarily written by male workers, a source problem that Maynes also notes in her own work. Since the actual act of writing is the central problem in this essay, I have limited myself to discussing texts when they were written, as opposed to texts by workers who lived during the time period discussed in this essay that might have been written significantly later in the nineteenth century.

66. These are some of the essential characteristics given to autobiography in Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris, 1975). Lejeune's more recent work, such as Moi Aussi (Paris, 1986), has moved away from such a strictly formal definition of autobiography to also emphasize the importance of the writer's social background.

67. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus, p. 234. Amelang makes this argument for writers of early modern popular autobiographies, but I am arguing that it also applies to nineteenth-century workers' autobiographies.

68. See Jean-Claude Romand, Confessions d'un Malheureux. Vie de Jean-Claude Romand (Paris, 1846); Pierre Gerbier, Memoires d'un ouvrier. Confessions de Pierre Gerbier (Paris, 1850); and J. B. E. Arnaud, dit Libourne-le-Decide, Memoires d'un compagnon du Tour de France (Rochefort, 1859).

69. A mutual-aid society was a flexible type of workers' corporation, in some cases quite similar to compagnonnage. During the Restoration (1815-1830), mutual-aid societies could be legally registered with the police (since in theory they were only supposed to provide aid to unemployed or sick members), while compagnonnage associations were illegal. For more on mutual-aid societies, see William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France.

70. Bede, Un Ouvrier en 1820, pp. 165-67.

71. Ibid., pp. 169-75.

72. The full original title of the manuscript was Etienne et Maria ou le triomphe de l'amitie Recit historique des ouvriers tourneurs en chaises de la Ville de Paris au dix neuvieme siecle par Jacques Etienne Bede ouvrier tourneur fondateur et delegue a vie de la Societe des Secours Mutuels precede d'un abrege de sa vie civile et militaire ecrit par lui-meme.

73. Letters written on March 9, 1821, May 3, 1821, and May 5, 1821. Bede, Un Ouvrier en 1820, pp. 325, 333, 336.

74. Letters written on May 8, 1821 and July 30, 1821. Ibid., pp. 358-59, 360.

75. Ibid., pp. 372-73.

76. Ibid., pp. 380-81. Bicheux's title had been changed from "Amie de la Societe" (Friend of the Society) to "La Premiere Dame Honoraire de la Societe" (The First Honorary Woman of the Society). Both of these titles caused conflict among society members, particularly the second one. Ibid., p. 380.

77. "Il n'est pourtant pas juste que le riche regorge de superflu et que le pauvre soit prive du necessaire.... D'ailleurs, nos interets ne sont pas les leurs; et tant que nos interets seront divises, nous nous exploiterons les uns les autres en nous asservissant. Je ne sais quelle genre de plaisir eprouve la classe opulente en nous voyant reduit a servir leurs caprices. Je ne sais comment ils ne rougissent pas d'etre les vils meurtriers de leurs semblables." D. Durand, Vie, pensees et voyages de D. D. (Saint Etienne, 1837), pp. 62-63.

78. Other examples include Bede, Un Ouvrier en 1820; Romand, Confessions d'un Malheureux; Perdiguier, Biographie de I'auteur du "Livre du Compagnonnage" and Memoires d'un Compagnon; Gerbier, Memoires d'un ouvrier; and P. Deruineau, Souvenirs d'un ouvrier (Angers, 1850).

79. In contrast, almost every worker who published an autobiography between 1848 and 1860 referred to himself in the title as "ouvrier" or a "compagnon." The importance of workers in the Revolution of 1848--as participants and as symbols of the social problems facing France--no doubt played a role in autobiographers' choices of their titles during this later period.

80. Durand, Vie, pensees et voyages de D. D., pp. 34, 51, 56.

81. What I am calling the narrative framework, Mary Jo Maynes refers to as the "sub-genre" or "life trajectory" created in an autobiography. See Maynes, "Autobiography and Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Methodological Considerations" Social Science History 16 (1992): 526-31.

82. Durand, Vie, pensees et voyages de D. D., p. 90.

83. Unfortunately, there is little evidence on the precise readership and its extent for the workers' autobiographies that were published in the nineteenth century. In his first autobiography, Agricol Perdiguier lists a group of several hundred subscribers that preordered, and financed, its publication. See Perdiguier, Biographie de l'auteur du "Livre du Compagnonnage, pp. 148-175. Other published autobiographies do not, however, contain such information. In addition, as of the summer of 2004, possible publishers' records at the Archives Nationales were not accessible because of their fragile condition.

84. On the persistence of orality throughout the early modern and modern periods, albeit the context of highly-educated elites, see Francoise Waquet, Parler comme un livre: L'oralite et le savoir, XVIe-XXe siecle (Paris, 2003).

85. See Cecile Dauphin, "Les manuels epistolaires au XIXe siecle," in La Correspondance, pp. 229-31 and Dauphin, Lebrun-Pezerat, and Poublan, Ces Bonnes Lettres, p. 102.

86. See Chartier, ed., Pratiques de la lecture and Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'Ancien Regime.

87. Naomi J. Andrews, "Utopian Androgyny: Romantic Socialists Confront Individualism in July Monarchy France," French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 457, 437. One of the more interesting texts cited by Andrews is Pierre Leroux, "De l'individualisme et du socialisme," Oeuvres (1825-1850) (Geneva, 1978). Leroux was involved in the early stages of the Saint-Simonian movement in the 1820s and 1830s.

88. Goldstein discusses another counter-narrative to the Cousinian self, that of phrenology, which was aimed at the popular classes and also welcomed women. See Goldstein, pp. 269-315. As Goldstein points out, phrenology also articulated a very different view of the self from Cousinian psychology, where reflection was tied the body in the form of "[embedding] the mind in the brain." Goldstein, p. 272.

89. This discussion of resistance is inspired by Lila Abu-Lughod's critique of an oversimplified approach to the analysis of resistance in "The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women," American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41-55.

90. See Dauphin et. al., Ces Bonnes Lettres, especially pp. 161-82. In addition to an interesting analysis of these letters and the family practices of writing, reading, and exchanging them, this book also includes reproductions of 120 of the letters (written between 1857 and 1873), out of a total of 2,955 letters in the Froissart family archive.

91. Dauphin et. al., Ces Bonnes Lettres, pp. 161, 179.

By Steven E. Rowe

Saint Xavier University