Les Voix du peuple dans la littérature des XIXe et XXe siècles: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, 12, 13 et 14 mai, 2005 (review)

Political representation of 'the people' is a central theme in the history of France and has fired the imagination of writers. Emerging from the revolutionary drama as the embodiment of national sovereignty 'the people' acquired a mythical heroic status in nineteenth-century Romanticism alongside a more ominous reputation as the volatile 'classes dangereuses' to be feared and kept at a distance. If past works on 'the people' have concentrated on defining its sociological characteristics, democratic ideal or mythology, there remains the question of how to record its manner of speech be it in regional dialect or in slang. More to the point: how does it express itself if by definition it is a silent majority? These are the questions addressed by this work. Thirty-one European scholars, for the most part from French universities, examine the representation of voices of the people in over two centuries of fiction, music, theatre and the press. In chronological order of the works illustrated, the chapters, the bulk of which concern the nineteenth century, are divided into five sections: Voix révolutionnaires et voix romantiques; Polyphonies romanesques;Voix et chants; Légitimité d'une parole populaire; Voix d'en bas. The result is a very cleverly interwoven survey of how authors created a literary work gleaning from an ever-changing 'unofficial' oral language, thereby enriching French culture. It illustrates how literature handles the exclusion of the downtrodden from power, how authors consider themselves as the guardians of the people's culture and how they relate to their subjects, how new literary techniques are required to give voice to the inarticulate, how the growth of literacy in the mid-nineteenth century affected power relations in culture, and how class impacts on cultural output without disturbing the demarcation line between the 'uncultured' excluded and the intellectual 'cultured' classes. Chapters giving detailed literary techniques and linguistic analysis of the grammar idioms used to introduce colloquial or vernacular speech demonstrate how the content of conversations was an equally important factor for denoting class differences and awareness. The inclusion of voices of cultural outcasts coincides with authorial discomfort (Barbusse, Zola, Ernaux). Many of the chapters focus on the technique of this tension where the authors attempt to incorporate without being patronizing the oral expressions of the voices of suffering people into written form. Included are lesser-known playwrights in sympathy with workers, and Barbey d'Aurevilly, antagonistic to the notion of the people as republican hero. The first workers' newspapers of the 1830s provide a vehicle for the people by the people compared with Lamartine's newspaper intended for the people but selling instead to the enlightened bourgeois. Added welcome dimensions are the chapters on music when the people's voices get a hearing in café s and are represented formally in opera. The strength of this book lies both in the coherence of the theme and the breadth of questions addressed in each of the examples presented. It will appeal to historians of literature and of politics alike. The contributions illustrate interesting methodological hurdles for other disciplines concerned with the democratization of culture and with maintaining a cultural record of voices from below.