Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (review)

The new history of the book is no longer new. It is now an established field, with a scholarly literature concerning its own issues, methodologies, and primary sources. The pioneers in French history—Henri-Jean Martin, Robert Darnton, and Roger Chartier, for example—have been joined by enough scholars in other national histories to justify a professional association—the Society for the History of Authors, Readers, and Publishers (SHARP)—with a Website, a newsletter, a journal, and annual meetings. Besides notices on articles and monographs, one sees widely circulated news of research seminars, scholarly panels, and study groups, so it is not surprising to see status reports of work in the field as well as original contributions to it, often both in the same volume, like Martyn Lyons's latest book.

The first chapter provides a useful overview of previous work on the changing context of reading. Topics include growing literacy; increasing production and distribution of printed matter; development of a mass, homogeneous, national literate culture; new public and private institutions to inform the reading public (schools and libraries, most notably); and the fearful commentary on the literate activities of the "new readers" in the nineteenth century: workers, women, and peasants. In this discussion Lyons lays out his principal themes (elite control and popular resistance), whose ambivalence he develops for the rest of the book.

On the one hand, there is the critical, contemporary commentary on the new readers. Conservative officials in the Roman Catholic Church, traditional defenders of French state authority, and patriarchal, property-owning social elites all wrote about the dangers of a rapidly expanding, literate population. Observers decried this phenomenon everywhere, in the cities, in the countryside, and in the household, especially in the wake of social and political unrest. As Lyons states in the conclusion, his book could have taken its title from Louis Chevalier's Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses (Paris, 1958)—"reading classes and dangerous classes" (156)—so widespread was the concern with unregulated reading. On the other hand, there is the equally pervasive discussion of reading by readers themselves. Diaries, correspondence, and autobiographies written by exceptional workers, women, and peasants provide the best firsthand evidence historians have about reading practices. And Lyons makes good use of these sources. Each chapter on hostile commentary about newly literate groups is followed by the voices of actual readers. The contrast is delightful.

In his brief concluding chapter, Lyons qualifies, summarizes, and suggests the importance of his work. He does so by reasserting the agency of these newly literate groups. "The history of reading practices connects with the broad history of class [and gender] relations in the period, as the dominant classes attempted to neutralize social conflict, through reading advice and the creation of appropriate cultural institutions" (157). These cultural-cum-social confrontations occurred when literate activities constituted a central feature of everyday life as well as of social control. The resistance of the new readers, using texts for their own purposes, contributed significantly to the social tensions inherent to the rise of republican politics, a more mobile society, and an industrializing economy.

Lyons's work is a model of its kind. As was true of his earlier books, this study is well grounded in the most appropriate sources, and its judgments are well informed and well reasoned. Lyons's book wrestles with problems familiar in the social history of ideas, particularly, the intractable nature of indirect evidence. Far more is known about readers than about their reading; far more is documented about the titles they read than about the mental act of engaging those texts. Readers' intellectual worlds elude most historians' efforts, however important these changes in mentality are to an understanding of human motivation. To plumb the inner selves of readers in the past, social historians must use the tools and methodologies long used by intellectual...