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Nineteenth Century French Studies 31.1&2 (2002) 155-156



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Book Review

Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835


Jeremy D. Popkin. Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 2002. Pp. 329. ISBN 0-271-02153-5

Two different accounts of the Lyon insurrection of 1831 illustrate the importance of the periodical press during the revolutionary crisis which began with the "Three Glorious Days" of the July Revolution of 1830, an event which Jeremy Popkin argues was of key significance in the articulation of the categories that defined "bourgeois society." The first of these accounts, by Saint-Marc Girardin in the well-known Parisian paper, Le Journal des Débats, warned readers that "the barbarians who threaten society" were to be found in the suburbs of France's manufacturing cities; the second, published in Lyon's local working-class paper, L'Écho de la Fabrique, suggested that the threat workers posed to the bourgeois world was not one of blind violence, but of using the communications media to transform society. The emer-gence of a modern bourgeois identity in the 1830s was closely linked to the emergence of new identities among workers and women. In this innovative study, Jeremy Popkin shows that the papers published during the period which began with the Restoration government's attack on the opposition press and ended five years later with the imposition of the new "September Laws" governing the press played an important role in defining these new social identities.

Popkin studies the press not just from the point of view of its role in national politics, but also as one of the period's important cultural institutions. He argues that the press of the early 1830s, and principally that of France's second-largest city, Lyon, must be seen as "a prime force in defining the conflicts that shaped the early years of [End Page 155] nineteenth-century bourgeois society" (3). Since the late 1820s, Lyon had a lively and independent newspaper press. Unlike Paris, where news was disseminated in a variety of media, including caricatures, plays, intellectual journals, books and pamphlets, in Lyon papers were the dominant print medium, the only one able to intervene and comment immediately on the insurrections which took place in that city in 1831 and 1834.

In the first half of the 1830s, Lyon had newspapers representing all the major tendencies of French politics and culture: pro and anti-regime varieties of liberalism, democratic republicanism, Catholic and royalist legitimism. Lyon was also home to the first solidly established working-class newspapers in France, as well as to a feminist periodical and a radical, satirical press. Popkin argues that Lyon's press system is both unusually well documented, and representative of the major cultural movements involved in the Revolution of 1830. As such, it is an important com-ponent of a cultural studies approach to history.

Newspapers serve the same purpose as other forms of literature; they generate meanings and frame events according to their own internal logic. Unlike other forms of printed text, however, the newspaper is both fixed and periodical. It is precisely the newspaper's timeliness and ability to transform its readers into collectivities that makes it so important for the understanding of the cultural dimension of revolution. For as Popkin shows, all revolutions involve a redefinition of identities, in which passive subjects learn to recognize themselves as active citizens, institutions become discredited, and previously revered rulers are seen as tyrants or oppressors. The media of mass communication plays a central role in the proposal and dissemination of new definitions of identity, in the framing and labelling of a sequence of occur-rences that gives them their status as an event.

Through a close - although perhaps too strictly monologic - reading of journalistic texts produced in Lyon in the 1830s, Popkin shows the emergence of new discourses aimed not entirely at the conquest of political legitimacy, but rather at a redefinition of the notion of the public, particularly the notion of a unified public opinion. The...

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