Writing Modern Selves: Literacy and the French Working Class in the Early Nineteenth Century

Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century, French urban workers developed literacy practices—specific acts of writing and reading—that encouraged socially-oriented forms of self-reflection. By examining the letter writing, reading, and circulation practices and the autobiographical writing practices of several distinctly different groups of French urban workers, this essay presents a comparative analysis of forms and practices of writing and reading most often associated with the personal realm. In these literacy practices, French workers cultivated forms of socially-mediated reflection in which acts of self-disclosure and claims of authority were directly tied to their relations with others and their identifications with particular groups—such as their families, friends, and their fellow workers. The ways that literacy developed such complex, heterogeneous selves for French urban workers in the nineteenth century ultimately challenge the argument that links literacy, and writing in particular, to the formation of an individualist self, as part of the social transformations that lead to the formation of modern society in France.