Teaching the 'People' To Write: The Formation of a Popular Civic Identity in the French Letter Manual

Teaching the 'People' To Write: The Formation of a Popular Civic Identity in the French Letter Manual JANET GURKIN ALTMAN Une grande partie des maux dont nous avons souffert n'auraient pas existé ... si les habitants des campagnes sur lesquels ces maux ont. . . presque uniquement porté avaient été plus instruits, avaient pu lire habituellement les lois bonnes ou mauvaises et rédiger des observations claires sur le bien et le mal qui en résulteraient pour eux. ... Ce serait donc un grand bien public . . . que de mettre les habitants des campagnes en état de lire, d'écrire et de calculer avec facilité. Les longues soirées d'hiver en rendraient plusieurs appliqués et studieux. Ils se communiqueraient alors d'une province à l'autre leurs lumières sur la culture. Dupont de Nemours, Cahier de doléances from Chevannes, 1789. Puissent ceux qui ont chassé de nos murs l'écrivain public mettre l'ouvrier, le villageois, l'homme du peuple enfin à même par l'éducation de pouvoir se passer de ses lumières, un peu bornées parfois, mais peu coûteuses toujours! Larousse: Grand Dictionnaire universel du 19e siècle, 1870. .Dupont de Nemours's dream of an educated peasantry, participating actively in the Republic of Letters and debating the laws that affected them, was far ahead of his time. As Roger Chartier has pointed out, Dupont de Nemours's request for a good schoolmaster in every village did not find much support in the other cahiers de doléances of 1789, which rarely mentioned the topic of education and schooling at all.1 147 148 / ALTMAN Indeed, the basic philosophy that "le peuple" required little or no schooling remained a fundamental principle of the French educational system until the Third Republic.2 And yet, as we learn more about the actual cultural practices and competences of various milieux under the Ancien Régime, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the image of a France dividing along easily defined lines into the illiterate and the literate. The work of Daniel Roche, in particular, presents a much more nuanced view of the initiation of the working classes into the world of written documents and writing.3 In eighteenth-century France, at least in Paris, inventories recorded after death suggest the extent to which the working classes manipulated and preserved written documents such as contracts, wills, account books, and letters as a routine part of their daily life. The presence of these documents among the belongings left by the poorest segments of the servant class doubled during the course of the eighteenth century (Roche, 164-67). Thus, although the working classes did so to a lesser degree than the social elite, they nonetheless participated in the "accumulation paperassière" that had become a sine qua non of civil life. The presence of pens and writing desks in many inventories suggests greater familiarity with writing among the working classes than had been suspected by earlier social histories. Roche interprets the inventories as a sign that all classes were participating in the move from an oral to a written culture in eighteenth-century life.4 By maintaining personal archives, workers—no less than the social elite — shored up their individual and familial identity, even though these archives were not passed on to succeeding generations. Although the "liasses de papiers" mentioned in the inventories have disappeared, unlike the well-preserved archives of more privileged families, we can no longer take the dearth of archival material as a sign that the writing did not take place. Indeed, when the Parisian glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra wrote his autobiography and letters in the late eighteenth century, he did not consider his writing activity as unusual for his milieu. Roche suggests , on the contrary, that the journeyman glazier's milieu, through its Tour de France network and its initiation rites, fostered writing (168-69). Although Ménétra's autobiography remains a rare document from the Ancien Régime, Jean Hébrard's recent research on workers' autobiographies from nineteenth-century France helps us understand how the milieu of compagnonnage encouraged letter writing through its internal postal network and its rituals for carrying, opening, and...