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  • The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860–1920 by Martyn Lyons
  • Bettina R. Lerner
Lyons, Martyn. The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 288. isbn: 9781107018891

In 1846, Jules Michelet described his historical project as an attempt to lend his voice to “ce grand peuple muet.” The question of how to represent history’s silent majority, [End Page 268] the anonymous lower-class men and women whose names and experiences cannot always be found in official archives, presents unique challenges that historians have yet to resolve entirely. From the Annales school’s attention to mentalités, to the American New Left and the British neo-Marxist historians of the 1960s and 70s, scholars have tried to decenter and turn a top-down history upside down by tracing the collective, political movements that affected laborers, peasants, and marginal classes. While these efforts have yielded important insights into social and political struggles, they have nonetheless tended to reinforce the idea of the masses as largely heterogeneous and anonymous.

More recently, however, a new kind of history from below has turned its focus on the private lives and individual experiences that make up the variegated everyday lives of the poor, working, and immigrant classes. The Writing Culture of Ordinary People, Martyn Lyons’s most recent and very welcome contribution to this new field, explores literacy, war, and emigration as interrelated experiences that marked the lives of Western Europe’s poorest classes and helped them leave their mark on history in the form of writing.

Lyons’s past scholarship on France includes work on nineteenth-century print culture (Le Triomphe du Livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siècle, 1987) as well as on the relative newcomers to this culture in the midnineteenth century (Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants, 2001). The Writing Culture of Ordinary People is thus a logical step in Lyons’s research, taking us to the turn of the twentieth century when climbing literacy rates in Western Europe increased not only the numbers of consumers, but also producers of written texts. The texts that Lyons explores here include letters and various kinds of diaries and memory books penned mostly by peasants and workers forced by the hardships of war and emigration into using their newly acquired writing skills in order to maintain contact with family. In the process, however, they established themselves as modern subjects. “Just at the moment when social evolution made them feel like anonymous parts in an impersonal machine,” Lyons convincingly argues, the lower strata of European society found that writing might help them “re-assert their individuality in a changing world” (16).

After defining his methodology and identifying the archives in which these texts reside, Lyons takes us through a general exploration of the challenges that writers faced and the narrative structures they devised in order to share their experiences. He then devotes two chapters each to writers from France, Italy, and Spain before closing by returning once more to a transnational exploration of diaries and memory books. Lyons draws attention throughout his study to the physical limitations and material constraints these writers faced: finding an appropriate surface on which to write from the trenches or in war-torn villages; the scarcity of paper, pens, ink, leisure, and lighting as well as the writers’ resulting concerns for the grammaticality and legibility of their texts. Lyons’s research does not just yield insights into the [End Page 269] scribal culture of the lower classes, but goes further to examine what these texts tell us about how writers perceived their own identities as soldiers, emigrants, and writers in relation to dominant discourses.

The letters Lyons examines to and from France’s poilus reveals many of the social and regional fractures that belie the argument that France’s army was unified in a sense of patriotism and attachment to Alsace and Lorraine. Lyons’s reading of this correspondence shows that French soldiers were not passive consumers of official propaganda. This is even more clearly the case in Italy, Lyons goes on to argue...

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