Au tombeau des secrets: Les ecrivains publics du Paris populaire; Cimetiere des Saints-Innocents, XVIe-XVIIIe siecles (review)

Métayer follows in the footsteps of Roche, Farge, Garrioch, and others in pursuit of the Paris of "the people" during the Old Regime-the rough and ready world of neighborhoods, streets, and plazas where the lower classes of the capital worked, played, celebrated and fought.¹ To this list of venues she adds the cemetery, which turns out to have been a lively and popular place for tradesmen and merchants to ply their wares and offer their services. Among them was the "public writer," whose favorite haunt was the Saints-Innocents cemetery near Paris' central market. These Ecrivains des charniers, who set up their makeshift shops wherever they could find space, constituted a relatively privileged group, insofar as they occupied a recognized spot where others of their trade congregated and where customers could seek them out.

Though privileged in terms of venue, the public writers fell well beneath the "master writers" (maîtres Ecrivains), whose corporate status ranked them among the truly elite. A public writer may have only escaped his working or peasant origins by dint of a smattering of education, or he might have begun life with greater expectations, only to have fallen to this modest profession, which at least spared him the indignity of physical labor. In any case, he was constantly reminded of his precarious position and his lowly place in the social order. Master writers complained about them; their clients were from the lower class; their livelihood was uncertain. Public writers were marginal figures on the cultural landscape; their knowledge and skill, however minimal, placed them on the frontier that divided the literate from the unlettered. They served as cultural intermediaries, linking two milieus normally thought of as separate.

In this sense, Métayer's study raises expectations that she will follow the path pioneered by Chartier, who, along with others, has explored the byways of the book and of literacy as the cultural practices of reading and writing became more widespread.² Her efforts in uncovering the extent to which public writers operated as an integral part of popular culture certainly demonstrate that ordinary people had easy access to the instruments of written communication, and thus were not relegated strictly to the oral culture to which historians have often consigned them. In this sense, Métayer contributes to the blurring of the lines between oral and written cultures. Her use of the records of the commissaires de police, so fruitfully exploited by the historians mentioned above, yields impressive returns, especially in allowing her to assemble a census of the public writers who operated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But beyond uncovering the extent of these characters, she is unable to say much about them as writers. Clearly, they were called upon for a range of purposes-from drafting love letters to forging documents-but a sense of what role they played in the lives of ordinary people is largely lacking in her book.

Au Tombeau des secrets is more a contribution to the popular culture of Old Regime Paris than a study of an obscure, yet clearly important profession. Striving to add to the new field of the study of writing, it merely confirms many of the findings of earlier historians.