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

The short title of this book – Les Voix du peuple – which is all that is revealed on its militant red cover, is deceptive. I had hoped to find here traces of proletarian voices, expressed in the writings, grumblings and correspondence of ordinary working people. But this is not an excursion into working-class realities. It offers instead only the muffled and distant echoes of plebeian lives, mediated through the writings of authors and playwrights, some canonical, some déclassés, a few of genuinely humble origins. The contributors are not concerned with popular voices, but with how those voices have been represented and constructed in literary fiction. "Le peuple chez Stendhal," "Le peuple vu par Zola" sums up the style of most of the contributions to this collective work. How much more interesting and new it would have been, in my view, to turn the formula on its head, and investigate "Stendhal chez le peuple," "Zola vu par le peuple"?

In their first paragraph, the editors suggest through Proudhon's words that the voices of the people have been condemned to silence. Nothing could be further from the truth. They can always be heard if one takes the trouble to listen. They come through loud and clear in workers' autobiographies and militants' memoirs, in the correspondence of the peasants in the trenches of the First World War, in graffiti, songs and ephemeral writings, and more recently in oral testimony gathered by enterprising historians. The "hidden transcripts of the poor" cannot be so easily dismissed.

This collection represents 28 contributions to a conference hosted in 2005 by the Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg–II. It analyses attempts by various authors, many of them close to popular life, to give the working-class a literary voice. They follow in the wake of Nelly Wolf's Le Peuple dans le roman français de Zola à Céline, which is a constant point of reference. The usual suspects are on parade, including George Sand, Murger (for his treatment of bohemian language), Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, Barbusse, Aragon, and Vallès. Several lesser-known writers of the later twentieth century are also discussed, although they will be of less interest to readers of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Michelet is constantly hovering in the background, although he is never the main focus of attention, and the same could be said of Céline. Maupassant is absent, and so is Eugène Sue, condemned in passing for his 'argoto-pittoresque' style. Henry Poulaille, on the other hand, gets two whole chapters to himself.

Although the presentation is not strictly chronological, a coherent view of relations between writers and popular speech certainly develops. We begin with the émigrés who returned to France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who deplored the vulgarization of the language which had taken place in the revolutionary years. Florence Lotterie records the hostile reactions of Mercier, for whom the Revolution had unleashed a dreadful cacophony of voices. The Revolution installed an orator at every street corner, released an avalanche of rhetorical monstrosities, and allowed the sounds of the street to invade polite discourse.

Chapters on the romantic period, in contrast, predictably emphasize the idealization of folk culture by the democrats of 1848. According to Michel Brix, collections of folk ballads were inspired by Herder and Walter Scott, and inherited a Rousseauist notion that the people's poetry was authentic and close to nature. Until 1848, however, enthusiasm for folk literature was entirely uncritical, and indiscriminately mixed together pagan elements, medieval songs which were not of popular origin and contemporary compositions.

The canonical novelists of the nineteenth century could not successfully incorporate lower-class voices in their texts. They were incapable of representing a plurality of voices...