The margins of society in late medieval Paris (review)

128 Reviews Geremek, B., The margins of society in late medieval Paris, trans. J. Birrell (Past and Present Publications), Cambridge, C.U.P., 1987; pp.xi, 319; 5 maps; R.R.P. A U S $99.00. In the Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique ofpolitical economy (rough draft) (trans. M . Nicolaus (London, 1973), p.507) Karl Marx wrote of the labour force dispossessed of ownership of its means of production in the late Middle Ages that: ... thenfirstly(for thefirsttime), a mass of living labour powers was thereby thrown onto the labour market, a mass which was free in a double sense, free from the old relations of clientship, bondage and servitude, and secondly free of dl belongings and possessions, and of every objective, material form of being, free of all property; dependent on the sale of its labour capacity or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only source of income. In two outstanding books origindly published in Polish in 1962 and 1971 and translated into French respectively as Le salariat dans I'artxsanat parisien aux XIHe -XV* slides (1968) and Les marginaux Parisiens aux XIV* et XV6 siicles (1976), the great Polish historian and intellectud Bronislav Geremek directed his attention to both of these classes of late medievd society in Paris: the wage labourers (le salariat) and the beggars, vagabonds, and criminals (les marginaux). The second of these works is translated here for thefirsttime, making its brilliant analysis of the twilight world of late medievd Parisian society accessible to Anglophones. As a highly important work of great usefulness for teaching the translation is greatly to be commended. One can only hope that Geremek's even more importantfirstwork will dso find a translator. Geremek was influenced in his historical scholarship by two great intellectud traditions: the Marxism of his native Poland and the Anndism of Paris, where he worked from the late 1950s to 1966. These two influences on Geremek's thought permeate every page of The margins ofsociety. Geremek's world is that of the socially disordered: those groups within society characterized by the ordered establishment as criminally bent or even essentidly criminal in themselves, because they did not meet the qualifications of socidity. They did not participateregularlyin production. They lacked ties of dependence to family or guild. They were mobile without permanent domicile. They were inutile au monde and demeurant partout in the language of the courts. This was the world of les misirables dispossessed by age or infirmity; of pimps and prostitutes; of burglars, pickpockets, foot-loose soldiers, bandits, stand-over thugs and hit men; of domestic servants, journeymen, menials and failed apprentices; of lapsed and false clerics; of students, vagabonds and bohemians, such as the circle of Francois Villon. Aspects of the evidence uncovered by Geremek about the lives of these people shock; for example, the kidnapping and mutilation of children by beggar bands for the purpose of turning Reviews 129 them into compassion-arousing beggars. Yet it is impossible to judge the mordity of the marginaux for, as Geremek shows, for them crime and immorality was not an abenation from some norm but rather a matter of everyday existence. This book verges on a history of crimindity but it is not redly about that The origins of the marginaux lay primarily amongst members of the artisanate, the peasantry, and domestic servants: people dislocated by war, by changing economic circumstances, or by tragic persond circumstances. For them the establishment showed little or no compassion or understanding. The late fourteenth andfifteenthcenturies was an age of changing economic attitudes dl across Europe. In Paris, as in Florence and elsewhere, the rise of a new 'bourgeois', if not 'capitdist', ethos saw work, domicile, and property become the sine qua non of sociality. A weakness of Geremek's book is that he appears to have been unaware of the research which had been done on the development of new socio-economic mores across Europe even before 1971 and which would have provided a comparative framework for the attitudes of the Parisian bourgeoisie and courts. In Paris as elsewhere the mere existence of the disordered and asocid became a crime. Their modes of life done condemned them. Poverty in itself and...