What did the Peasants Read? Written and Printed Culture in Rural France, 1815-1914
Identifieur interne : 000615 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000614; suivant : 000616What did the Peasants Read? Written and Printed Culture in Rural France, 1815-1914
Auteurs : Martyn LyonsSource :
- European History Quarterly [ 0265-6914 ] ; 1997-04.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Agulhon, Alexandre merlaud, Almanac, Anarchistic tracts, Antoine sylvere, Archives nationales, Augustine rouviere, Biblioth6que bleue, Bibliotheque, Bibliotheque bleue, Bibliotheque scolaire, Bleue, Bonapartist literature, Book culture, Business letters, Campagnes, Charles robert, Chartier, Cheap novels, Classe ouvriere, Colportage, Colportage literature, Colporteur, Colporteurs, Commissaire, Countryside, Cultural change, Cultural homogeneity, Cultural life, Culture populaire, Daily press, Daniel fabre, Departmental responses, Early years, Ephraim grenadou, Evening classes, Fabre, Faits divers, First half, First world, French history, George sand, Guillaumin, Henri guillaumin, Henri norre, Henry massoul, Histoire, Histoire sociologique, Ibid, Itinerant, Jules ferry, Jules simon, July, July monarchy, Lending libraries, Literacy, Literary culture, Livre, Local mayors, Local school, Martyn lyons, Maurice agulhon, National culture, Nineteenth century, Occult sciences, Oeuvre, Paysanne, Peasant, Peasant families, Peasant reader, Peasant readers, Peasant reading, Petite histoire, Populaire, Popular culture, Popular libraries, Popular reading matter, Popular titles, Prefect, Primary schooling, Print culture, Quatre fils aymon, Reading competence, Recreational literature, Roger chartier, Roger thabault, Rural areas, Rural culture, Rural france, Rural life, Rural population, Rural readers, Rural reading, Same time, School libraries, School library, Schoolteacher, Second empire, Second half, Second republic, Small towns, Village community, Whole series, Winter veillie.
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DOI: 10.1177/026569149702700201
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ISTEX:A50F1CE08A31FC301450B33BC387727018878504Le document en format XML
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<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>04</month><year>1997</year></pub-date><volume>27</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>165</fpage><lpage>197</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value>165 What did the Peasants Read? Written and Printed Culture in Rural France, 1815-1914 SAGE Publications, Inc.1997DOI: 10.1177/026569149702700201 Martyn Lyons Today's educators frequently complain that we do not read enough. In the nineteenth century, the problem was the opposite: workers and peasants were reading too much. Rising levels of popular literacy aroused concern in Catholic circles, and provoked various campaigns for the production and distribution of 'bons livres' in the countryside. The very devout Eugenie de Gu6rin, on her family's estate in the Tarn, was horrified in 1837 when a labourer dared to argue with the local cure about the significance of the Council of Trent.' The peasant reader was a new phenomenon. He (he was usually a man) constituted a potential challenge to the landowners' traditional perceptions of the social hierarchy, in which the peasant's deference and intellectual dependence had seemed natural and permanent. Then, in the Second Republic, the liberal bourgeoisie registered the alarming progress which socialist, legitimist and Bonapartist literature had made among the newly-enfranchised subordinate classes. The 'excesses' of the 1848 Revolution were frequently blamed on the diffusion of obscene and anarchistic tracts amongst the susceptible masses. Peasant reading had become an important political issue. The question 'What did peasants read?' must therefore be situated within the context of a struggle for control, which engaged Catholics and legitimists, secular republicans, socialists and Bonapartists. Contemporaries in various camps, however, discussed peasant cultural practice from a distant point of observation, as though it was either a closed universe, speaking barbaric and corrupt dialects and much in need of enlightenment, or else a folkloric curiosity soon destined to disappear. Whether they idealized the countryside like George Sand, or saw it rather European History Quarterly Copyright 0 1997 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 27(2), 165-197. [0014-3111(199704)27:2;1-C] 166 as a jungle of rampant greed and violence, as Balzac and Zola tended to do, their discourse remained at one remove from the realities of rural life. The historian, too, is very often obliged to fall back on indirect sources, such as the clues offered by normative texts concerned to prescribe rather than describe peasant reading. Official questionnaires on rural readers like that of 1866 are valuable sources, even though their responses were completed not by peasants, but by schoolteachers, commissaires de police and sub-prefects. Only quite late in the century do peasants speak to the historian with a voice of their own. Rare peasant autobiographers like Henri Norre, Henri Guillaumin, Antoine Sylvere and even later, Pierre-Jakez H61ias, give the historian more direct means of access to the history of cultural practices in the countryside. Even some of these peasant 'autobiographies', however, are indebted to an educated intermediary who initiated, transcribed and edited them. Peasants were more ready to speak their lives to other writers, than to write them themselves. Thus, Alexandre Merlaud allowed G6rard Coulon to collect his reminiscences' and Ephraim Grenadou similarly allowed Alain Pr6vost to make use of their interviews together.3 For the period immediately before 1914, oral historians and ethnographers have assembled oral testimonies which further enrich the store of evidence on French rural culture. A systematic assessment of all such sources is not within the scope of this article. But it seems worth bringing some of this disparate data together, to suggest a few broad conclusions in answer to the question 'What did the peasants read?' The answers to this question are of considerable importance for the ongoing debate about the social and political 'integration' of the peasants. Underpinned by many assumptions of modernization theory, the study of the integration process seeks to elucidate its mechanisms, its precise geography and its timing. It has appeared far less concerned to analyse possible resistance to the process, except perhaps to underline its archaism.4 In its crudest manifestations, modernization discourse outlines the 'dissemination' of literature in the villages, the 'penetration' of rural areas by urban cultural forms and the consequent 'opening up' of the countryside, previously a (virginal?) victim of its own cloisonnement.s The sexual imagery of these concepts would probably have comforted nineteenth-century progressives. The issue nevertheless remains a real and an important one. In 167 studying the peasants' encounters with print culture, we are examining the meeting of peasant civilizations with an expanding national culture. As Roger Chartier has recently reminded us, we should not conclude too hastily that the result of the encounter was necessarily a new and more powerful cultural homogeneity, nor that nationalizing forces left rural culture defeated and in a state of dissolution. Historians have written the obituary of popular culture so often in the past that we must begin to wonder how there could be any of it still left in nineteenth-century France to repress or to integrate. For Chartier, 'Le sort historiographique de la culture populaire est donc de toujours etre etouffee, refoulee, abrasee et, en meme temps, de toujours renaitre de ses cendres'.6 Popular culture rises phoenix-like, adapting to new conditions and formulating new means of expression. Reading is an active process, and the historian must respect the autonomy of the reader, the variety of possible responses to what is read, and the reader's capacity to reject imposed ideologies. Individual readers assimilate what is read into pre-existing interpretive frameworks. As Janice Radway reminds us in a different context, 'opportunities still exist within the mass-communication process for individuals to resist, alter, and reappropriate the materials designed elsewhere for their purchase'.' The changing dynamic of the relationship between peasants and print culture cannot be divorced from broader developments which transformed French agrarian life during the nineteenth century. These include the gradual formation of a national economy and the growth of specialized agricultural production for national and international markets (wine-growing is an obvious example of an agricultural sector with international horizons). As Roger Thabault realized when he summarized the history of his own village, increasing contact with the world of the book was a function of agricultural change and developing connections with a diversified exchange economy.8 The process of industrial concentration also had an effect on rural life: it resulted in the deindustrialization of the countryside, which accelerated the rural exodus, already under way in the July Monarchy. In addition, the advance of minimal standards of reading competence, indicated by the growing number of spouses and conscripts able to sign their name, is clearly relevant. The advance of literacy, however, must not be confused with the spread of primary education, which obeyed a different rhythm as 10168 it responded to local demand. The achievement of mass literacy preceded the introduction, in the 1880s, of Jules Ferry's legislation designed to make primary schooling free, compulsory and universal.9 9 The history of reading in the countryside is inevitably connected to these wider trends. For this reason, it is logical that its basic chronology should reflect the periodization adopted by Maurice Agulhon and his colleagues in their overview of the rural history of France." In the first half of the century print culture remained something largely foreign to the peasant world. Under the Second Empire, however, and the early years of the Third Republic, there is evidence of the increasing presence of books and newspapers in rural France. In this second phase of the century, the growing availability of printed matter coincided with rising anxiety among the elites about their own ability to control and channel the cultural life of the rural population. The presence of print in this period, however, does not necessarily imply that peasant readers always welcomed it, or had learned how to use it for their own ends. Many of them remained on the margins of literacy. In a third phase, however, rural readers began to show a greater mastery of print and written culture. This phase is relatively recent; its origins are to be found in the last 20 years of the nineteenth century. This simple chronological schema obscures regional and gender differences, as well as other aspects of uneven development. As this article argues, however, such generalizations enable us to make sense of documentary traces from a wide variety of sources. From the 1880s onwards, a decisive transformation occurred. The peasant was no longer a stranger to the printed and the written word, and at the same time, he or she was no longer a victim of its all-embracing power. Peasants on the Margins of Book Culture The linguistic diversity of France, together with the difficulty of gaining access to primary schooling, helped to keep peasants on the margins of book culture, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the Guizot Law of 1833 proposed an ambitious plan for a school in every commune, this was only partially implemented. School attendance still depended on its affordability; even when it became 'free', school nevertheless 11169 deprived families of the income of potential young wage-earners. Attendance in rural areas was intermittent, and subordinate to the economic needs of peasant families. At harvest-time, for example, the schools were deserted. In practice, they could only hope to offer tuition in the winter months, when the seasonal demands of agricultural work were less intense. Landowners and employers frequently discouraged the intellectual ambitions of their tenants and labourers. In La Vie d'un simple, Tiennon encountered powerful bourgeois hostility towards his desire to give his children a basic knowledge of reading, writing and accounting." At Le Cayla, Eugenie de Gu6rin thought it her duty to teach Miou, the miller's daughter, to read. As long as peasant reading was supervised, it was presumably innocuous. In other circumstances, the presumption of peasant readers shocked her. She noted in her diary in 1840: 'Il vaut bien mieux un chapelet qu'un livre dans la poche d'un laboureur! Que ceux-ci cultivent les champs, que d'autres cultivent la science."2 Most studies of the presence of books in inventaires apres décès have had an urban location. One investigation in a rural setting was conducted by the anthropologist Suzanne Tardieu for the Mâconnais.13 The result suggests a very feeble presence of books in rural households. Out of 58 inventories analysed between 1790 and 1909, only 7 recorded the presence of books (12 per cent). Four of these private libraries were owned by urban residents of Mdcon, and another by a négoçiant from Lyon, so that only two strictly qualified as rural book-owners. The cultivateur of the Mdconnais had little time or space to read books or to amass a private library. It would, however, be dangerous to conclude from the inventories of deceased estates that the book was a foreign object to the peasant. It may simply have been that the books they owned were not of sufficient value to merit a listing in a deceased estate inventory. We know, from Tardieu again, that peasant homes might contain almanacs which, like other household objects, would hang from the ceiling by a nail.~~ Similarly, in the Rouergue, the bibliothèque paysanne would consist of a piece of wood, suspended over the main table, on which would be stored the family's reading matter: some almanacs, perhaps a newspaper or an old missal." In the centre of France, too, the almanac was an object which would hang in the principal room, like a kitchen utensil, for family use.'6 12170 Newspapers were comparatively rare acquisitions in many areas until the end of the century. Henri Guillaumin recalled that only the bourgeois read newspapers in the Bourbonnais in the 1840s." The almanac, in contrast, features regularly in descriptions of the peasant household, and the fact that it hung in such a prominent position, and in a place used together by the whole family, suggests that it was in frequent use by the family group. Works of piety, too, were essential works of reference in a peasant family but, if the family owned any number of books, they were likely to be stored apart from the rest. The Mdcon cultivateur who left 27 devotional works, and a copy of the Code Napoleon at his death in 1823, stored them in different places. 18 Peasants frequently attributed magical properties to the printed word, which was a symptom of the rarity of the book in the countryside, of the threat that it seemed to pose, and the peasants' failure to master it. The book was frequently associated with supernatural and religious powers. It provided mysterious strength to those individuals who consulted it. These individuals were the local priest and the village wise man (or woman), who might well be the two most literate members of the village community. The book was sometimes considered a source of occult power, Le Grand Albert and Le Petit Albert being perhaps the two most popular magic books, important accessories of the sorcerer." Just as incantations and oft-repeated formulae were invoked in occult magic, so too, written signs and messages were endowed by the illiterate with supernatural strength. The wizard of St Pompon, in the P6rigord, was apparently capable of curing rabies, and his fame spread to the villages of the Lot and the Dordogne. The Acad6mie de M6decine offered him a large sum to reveal the composition of the mixture he prescribed. In spite of the wizard's reluctance to divulge an ancestral secret, the experts did eventually analyse his pills. Inside each one, they discovered a minuscule fragment of paper. His followers, it is reported, were not at all dismayed by this revelation: Ceci n'enleva pas la persuasion aux t6moins des gu6risons. Elle en fut accrue puisque la tradition affirme que les mal6fices étaient communiqu6s sous forme d'6crits, enrobes de cire et aval6s par le patient. Ce qui dans un cas avait nui pouvait, mani6 par une main bienfaisante, avantager!" Henry Massoul remembered another local cunning man, who 13171 read the almanacs of Mathieu Laensberg on his doorstep, and dispensed remedies from a big old book.2' Books were the sources of remedies and curses. In the Berry, some priests would attribute illnesses or accidents to the reading of a mauvais livre, and if they could identify the accused volume, they would bum It.22 Rural priests who felt threatened by 'diabolical' literature sometimes became experts in texts on sorcery and built up substantial libraries specializing in the occult sciences. Magic, like the veillée and colportage literature, was forbidden by both Church and state. Such taboos helped to make books a special attraction for those who were excluded from access to them at school. This exclusion applied particularly to women, who were usually on the margins of school-based literacy until well into the twentieth century. Magical books like Le Petit Albert had a physical effect on their reader, and could induce a trance-like or convulsive state, no doubt intensified by the fact that this was illicit reading. Reading forbidden magical works was a sign of madness and diabolical possession, as illustrated by oral testimony collected by Daniel Fabre in Roussillon: 'Une femme de Laforce, ayant tourné cette fameuse page du Petit Albert, le diable accourut, se logea en elle et lui paralysa les deux jambes. Seul un pelerinage a Lourdes put la gu6rir.' Another interviewee gave the ethnologist a story about Le Petit Albert: 'J'ai entendu dire par mes grands- parents qu'il y avait une institutrice qui le lisait et, quand elle le lisait, elle voyait des petites souris passer avec des bougies allumées' . 23 Both these recollections significantly concerned women readers, the second perhaps conveying a common distrust of an independent woman intellectual. The book's powers could be tamed, however, by copying it. Private peasant cahiers of the pre-war period which survive are anthologies of different kinds of wisdom which could be put to practical use. They typically contain remedies for ailments, recipes, the words of songs and special prayers. The most remarkable author of such a cahier was Jean-Pierre Baylac, the young shepherd from the Hautes-Pyrenees, bom in 1900. He read cheap novels, almanacs and old books he picked up at local fairs. He borrowed Michelet, Proudhon, Lamartine and Ponson du Terrail from the local schoolteacher's library. In the ancient tradition of shepherds, he could read, use and invoke magical signs.24 Before his death from pleurisy at the age of only 20, 14172 Baylac had filled 60 handwritten notebooks, in which he had recorded comments on his reading and his work as a shepherd, news of the First World War, his sexual episodes of masturbation and bestiality. He also recorded the punishments he inflicted on himself when, on his lonely hillside, he gave in to such temptations. Baylac had not merely flirted with literacy but, in spite of his humble social status, he mastered its powers for the most secret purposes." The winter veillie has sometimes been seen as an event where peasants read stories and popular legends to themselves. I have argued elsewhere that there is very little evidence from the nineteenth century to support the contention of Mandrou that collective readings of texts of the Bibliotheque Bleue normally occurred in the veillée. 26 When in 1845, Monseigneur Rendu questioned his curgs in the diocese of Annecy (Savoie du Nord) about peasant cultural practices and superstitious beliefs, only one reply out of 122 made a clear reference to the habit of reading at the veillie (and this was a reference to a catechism).27 The very existence of winter veillie could only be definitely confirmed in about a third of the parishes in Rendu's diocese. A similar episcopal enquiry in 1859 in the Versailles diocese also revealed that the veillee survived in only 35 out of 107 parishes.28 In the very last decade of the century, reading may possibly have infiltrated the veillée, as more fiction (Hugo, Dumas, Verne, Maupassant) was available in the local school library.29 For most of the century, however, the veillée is best seen as a traditional form of peasant sociability, centred on work, which retained elements of collective celebration and in which oral transmission had little need of books. The festive qualities of the veillée were under attack. It was accused of fostering immorality and was suspected by the clergy and others of allowing the unrestrained consumption of liquor, free intercourse between the sexes and the propagation of dangerous superstitions. But its real offence was probably to express the values of an autonomous peasant civilization, impervious to dominant ideological persuasions. The village in late nineteenth-century France is conventionally portrayed as an arena of conflict between the priest and the schoolteacher, the agent of the lay Republican state. This traditional view has tended to obscure all that the priest and the instituteur had in common: as representatives of print culture in the countryside, 15173 they both criticized mauvais livres and what they considered as peasant vulgarity and irrationality. The cultural battle in the village was not simply a duel between two rival partisans of education and print culture. The contest was in fact triangular. The peasants were more than pawns in the struggle; they had distinctive cultural practices to defend in the face of the disapproval of both Church and school. Even those who could not read had access to print culture as listeners. Books would often be read aloud, in the evening and en famille. Not only was reading a family occasion, but for the peasants, listening to the sound of the spoken word was a special pleasure to be relished. Helias, who learned to read with La Vie des saints, found that his services as a reader were in demand in the village. Families asked him to come and read La Vie des saints, or the Fables of La Fontaine, 'pour 6couter le bruit que ga fait'.3° Every farmhouse would have its Lives of the Saints (Buhez ar Zent), and family ritual required the youngest child present to read aloud after dinner.3' Perhaps this is surprising in an area (Basse-Bretagne) which the statistics describe as one of dire illiteracy. Many young Breton readers probably did not attend school regularly in the nineteenth century, and officially, they were indeed illiterate - in French. But official figures take no account of reading competence in Breton. In Eugene Leroy's version of peasant life in the P6rigord in mid-century, the young hero Helie reads La Ruche aloud to his uncle. In the 1860s, his grandfather would occasionally buy a few books at a local fair or auction. They would no doubt have ended up as tobacco-wrappers, if Helie had not rescued them and read them aloud to admiring and astonished rustic companions. 'C'est comme ga', the author remarked, 'que, chez nous, au fond d'une campagne du P6rigord, on avait appris a connaitre les Grecs et les Romains, dont les paysans, d'ordinaire, n'ont seule- ment point oui parler, bien loin de se douter quels gens c'était'.32 Reading aloud, among friends and family, was an important means through which officially illiterate, or semi-literate peasants, came into contact with books. In this way, the printed word was assimilated into oral forms of communication and culture. There were other occasions, too, when the written word reached a much wider audience than circulation figures might suggest. During the Second Republic, the authorities were 16174 greatly disturbed by the ease with which socialist doctrines were being propagated in the countryside. Their dissemination was limited neither by illiteracy nor by the expense of a newspaper subscription. In small Provenral towns, La Voix du peuple was read aloud 'sur la place publique'. In St Gaudens (Haute- Garonne), in 1849, L'Emancipation was read publicly, and local mayors would subscribe out of public funds to make this possible.33 In the chambries of Provence, group readings occurred in the framework of a social institution which officials gave up hope of transforming. As one report from Aix-en- Provence complained in 1851, 'tous les mecontents s'enrolent dans les chambrees. Les membres de ces chambrees s'abonncnt a un journal d'opposition dont la lecture se fait a haute voix pour les paysans illettrés'. 34 Testimony of this kind underlines the danger of relying on the statistics of literacy as a guide to reading and writing in the countryside. Although the evidence of the signature test has immense value as a national benchmark of literacy in French, the historian of reading must adopt more subtle procedures to analyse the uses of reading and writing in rural society. Distinctions must be maintained as far as possible between, for example, reading-and-writing literacy and reading-only literacy, which was more widespread but at the same time less visible. In addition, those who could neither read nor write still had opportunities to develop a creative contact with the world of print. Even those who listened to their texts were involved in what De Certeau called a process of silent production." Rural Readers Confront the World of Print and of Writing After mid-century, and increasingly during the Second Empire, the rural population became familiar with the ubiquitous demands of printed and written culture. Even if peasants were themselves illiterate, there were always intermediaries in the village who could read and write: the local mayor might read newspapers to villagers, or write letters for them to higher authorities. For instance, when, in 1855, a policeman's widow from Loupiac (Gironde) wanted to exempt her son from paying school fees, she approached the mayor to draft the necessary petition.36 Rural teachers, too, were involved in extra-curricular 17175 activities which included mediating between the local population and written culture. Many of them were town clerks, in which capacity they might give advice on mortgages and wills, or write letters for local inhabitants. They often gave agricultural advice, distributing pamphlets on the treatment of animal diseases, like the instituteur at Piriac (Loire-Atlantique) who was secretary of the local farmers' co-operative, the mutuelle de bétail. Other teachers offered evening classes on writing business letters, as did the instituteur at La Regrippière (Loire-Atlantique) in 1895." In this phase, the rural population became increasingly familiar with the world of print, although it was often dependent on literate mediators, like the mayors, teachers and postmen of village society. The well-known surveys of lower-class households organized by Fr6d6ric Le Play in the 1850s included a few peasant families, and several of them possessed books and writing materials. Often the peasants' books were limited to catechisms, works of devotion and school texts, as in the case of the Provengal peasant-soap worker observed in 1859.38 Perhaps his status as a worker-peasant was exceptional, as he was a member of the 'urban peasant' communities peculiar to lower Provence with which the researches of Maurice Agulhon have familiarized us. The Basque peasant, however, observed by Le Play's disciples in 1856, also owned some school books, and the family budget of peasants in Lavedan (Beam) in 1856 included an item for their daughters' writing materials.'9 Even Le Play's bordier from Champagne owned an Almanach Liégeois, and could handle his accounts competently - another form of (arithmetical) literacy on which statistics are silent.4° These are isolated examples, but they suggest the existence of a peasantry which, by the 1850s, was no longer a stranger to written culture. During the 1850s traditional colportage literature went into decline, partly because the government took steps to suppress it. First novels entered the sack of the colporteur alongside the almanacs, and the railway and local bookshop made the colpor- teur himself redundant. The accessibility of cheap popular newspapers like Le Petit Journal, and the spread of the bookshop network reinforced the presence of print in the countryside and helped to transform the cultural geography of France. Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the itinerant colporteur had been a familiar and regular visitor to most parts of 18176 rural France. The typical long-distance professional came from the Pyrenees and travelled up to 30 kilometres a day on foot, carrying a spare shirt and a basket of 40 kilograms of books/' On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, over 3000 colporteurs were authorized in France. Their trade supported several specialist publishers, and they put into circulation over 9 million volumes of pamphlets, brochures and almanacs. Among their wares were the chapbooks which made up the Bibliotheque Bleue, so-called because of the coarse blue sugar-paper in which they were often bound. The Bibliotheque Bleue contained a traditional literary corpus which had sustained the popular imagination of rural France for centuries. A large proportion of popular titles were on religious subjects - over a quarter of them, according to Mandrou.`2 They included catechisms, Christmas carols, works of piety and devotion, lives of the saints and meditations on death which had a medieval origin. The Bibliotheque Bleue also included almanacs, prophecies, tales of chivalry and romance and historical legends. Stories like Les Quatre Fils Aymon romanticized a social universe in which the leading role of a chivalrous aristocracy was never questioned. But popular reading was not all piety, chivalry and fantasy. It had a spontaneous if coarse sense of humour, based on farce and burlesque. Parodies of confessions, wills and drunken sermons recurred constantly, ridiculing cuckolds, hypocrites and pedants. Their taste for vulgar celebration and orgiastic horse- play continued a long tradition dating from the Middle Ages, which Bakhtin identified as a specifically medieval comic idiom.43 Such literature did not have an exclusively popular origin. Its anonymous authors and editors plundered learned texts by authors like Boccaccio and Quevedo, adapting them for a popular audience, as Chartier has demonstrated.44 The Biblio- theque Bleue was composed for the people, not by the people. The main target for nineteenth-century publishers of the Biblio- th6que Bleue, however, were those who read a little and rarely. The geography of colportage in the Second Empire suggests that itinerants may have deliberately avoided areas where the population was illiterate or else ignorant of French. Itinerant peddlars rarely penetrated the interior of Brittany, or the Massif Central. The north-east was also forbidden territory to them, perhaps for the opposite reason, namely that this was a very literate area. 19177 Between these two extremes of high literacy and illiteracy lay the chosen realm of the colporteur, Normandy, the centre, south-west, south-east and the Mediterranean Midi." In the nineteenth century, the readership of the Bibliotheque Bleue had for the first time become almost exclusively rural. The peasant consumer of almanacs and catechisms was the last remaining bastion of popular literary traditions, abandoned by nobility, bourgeoisie and urban readers as a whole. The Biblio- th6que Bleue had catered for a world on the margins of book culture itself. As the book spread its influence, socially and geographically, through serialized novels and illustrated magazines, the world of colportage literature correspondingly shrank. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it disappeared altogether. It did not, however, disappear of its own accord. It was the victim of active suppression in the early years of the Second Empire. It had always been officially regarded as a dangerous medium, which might encourage the politicization of the masses. Under the Restoration, officialdom had blamed colportage for disseminating subversive Voltairean doctrines. One administrator of the department of the Mayenne complained in 1828 that: Les livres impies et obsc~nes se multiplient d'une mani6re effrayante, on les imprime par milliers et on les colporte partout. Avant la Revolution, les oeuvres de Voltaire et autres impies étaient rares et d'un prix 6lev6: sous le regne de l'usurpateur, meme, ces livres se r6pandaient peu.... Sous le regne du fils aim6 de I'Eghse, si admirable par ses vertus, il est affligeant que le poison de 1'impiete se d6bite a vial prix dans toutes les parties de la France." A certain amount of Bonapartiana and royalist literature had been absorbed into colportage literature, but in the 1850s there was a strong reaction against any kind of politicization in the literature of the Bibliotheque Bleue. Critics like Nisard reacted with moral revulsion against brochures on the occult sciences, or against the obscene humour of much popular entertainment. 47 The dissemination of obscene and anarchistic tracts among the masses, it was thought, had created support for the Revolution of 1848. Thus, colportage literature had to be purged for political reasons. The almanac had indeed become politicized in 1848. Plon produced an Almanac phalanstérien, and Schneider an Almanac de l'ami du peuple, a title with a Maratist echo. There was an Almanac democ-soc, an Almanac du proscrit, an Almanac des 20178 opprimis, not forgetting the splendidly defiant Almanac de la vile multitude. In publicizing the Jacobin calendar of 1793, this literature helped to sustain a tradition of revolutionary radicalism. The radical almanacs, however, were ephemeral and had very small print-runs. Only the Almanach populaire de la France, which survived from 1840 to its suppression in 1851, with a print-run of 25,000 in 1847, seems to have been destined for a widespread rural sale.48 The songs of Beranger, and miniature versions of Eugene Sue had found their way into the basket of the colporteur, which reinforced official suspicion of the itinerants. Agulhon has suggested that official repression was also motivated by the need to stamp out copies of the Belgian-produced editions of Hugo's Napoleon le Petit.49 After 1849 the machinery of censorship and control was set in motion. Prefects were empowered to issue permits to colporteurs in 1849, and, since the permits were only valid in the department where they were issued, itinerants were compelled to seek a whole series of prefectoral authorizations to complete their joumeys.10 This exposed the colporteurs to police and bureaucratic harassment. In 1852 a censorship commission was established, and its stamp of approval was necessary to legalize the sale of colportage literature. The critic Nisard was one of its early members. These measures effectively ruined the publishing industry of Troyes, which had been the main provincial production centre for the Bibliotheque Bleue. Production declined and the number of colporteurs declined too as hundreds every year were condemned for infringing the regulations in the 1850s.~ The arrival of the railway, which brought newspapers like Le Petit Journal into the heart of the countryside, pushed the remaining colporteurs into the remotest rural areas of France. Le Petit Journal, founded in 1863 as a cheap, small-format daily, selling for 5 centimes, was the first daily newspaper to conquer a provincial readership. By 1887, it had a print-run of 950,000, which made it the largest daily in the world." In contrast to its predecessors, Le Petit Journal had very few subscribers: it sold directly to readers through a national network of outlets. It was sold at Hachette's new railway kiosks, and distributed from depots set up in small towns. Itinerant vendors on bicycles, who were paid employees of the paper, collected it from station depots, then took it into the countryside. The rise of Le Petit Journal was contemporary with the 21179 emergence of the press magnates like Solar, the Pereire brothers and Mires, the model for Saccard in Zola's L'Argent. These changes in the press and its readership are attributable not to some vague, impersonal process of modernization, but to the investment priorities of such entrepreneurs. The daily press extracted huge revenue from selling space to banks and financial consortia, who aimed to tap the savings of gullible small investors. Links between banks and the press were such that by 1880, Soubeyran, vice-governor of the Credit Foncier, controlled the financial copy of 64 provincial newspapers.53 Le Petit Journal relied on a regular dose of romans-feuilletons by authors like Ponson du Terrail, and devoted considerable space to non-political faits divers, like the exploits of the notorious murderer, Troppman. Sales shot up almost three-fold to 594,000 on the day of Troppman's execution in 1869.s4 If Le Petit Journal did venture into politics, as in the Wilson affair of 1887, it was only because it saw a chance to slaughter a rival: Wilson, son-in-law of President Gr6vy, implicated in a scandal over the sale of medals and decorations, was the owner of the regional daily, La Petite France, which was forced into liquidation in 1889. By this time, sophisticated distribution methods had made the itinerant peddlar obsolete. In reporting events like Troppman's execution, the daily press absorbed one of the staple genres of colportage literature. The retail bookshop allowed even the peasants to buy literature on market days in small towns. By the 1870s, colportage literature included illustrated versions of novels by Paul de Kock, Dumas and Sue.ss To describe what kinds of literature were available to rural readers, however, is only to answer half of the question. It is equally important to suggest the uses which readers made of this material, to try to outline the interpretations and responses which determined the reception of such texts in the countryside. The scarce autobiographical material available suggests that rural readers were looking above all for practical knowledge which would improve cultivation and the performance of familiar agricultural tasks. Henri Norre, for example, was a peasant-autobiographer from the Allier, bom in 1859. The son of illiterate peasants, he filled several notebooks with details of crops, agricultural implements and instructions to his fellow-peasants. While he was ill with consumption c. 1891, his reading 22180 introduced him to the wonders of super-phosphate. As he wrote, 'J'appris, par la lecture d'un almanach publie a Limoges, le role des engrais chimiques. Je m'abonnai ensuite a la Gazette de Village of je trouvai beaucoup de renseignements utiles.'S6 He went on to establish a shortlived Syndicat des Agriculteurs in his commune. For Norre, reading had an essentially utilitarian purpose; it provided information on prices, land for sale and agricultural improvements. Norre's severely utilitarian approach was echoed by Alexandre Merlaud in the Berry, who attended evening classes in 1907 at his local school, without being completely convinced that they were worthwhile. His scepticism was dispelled, however, when he realized that book-knowledge could teach him how to estimate the weight of a bull, from a few simple measurements. 57 Such pragmatism was one of the hallmarks of late nineteenth-century peasant approaches to reading. Such examples of respect for books, and in a few cases of the mastery of the written word, become more frequent after mid-century. They should balance the image of archaic traditionalism which has too frequently conditioned our appreciation of rural culture in the nineteenth century. One source of interest in Helias's popularly-acclaimed autobiography was indeed the tension between an old rural world and the forces of change which inevitably undermined it. As Helias recalled his childhood near Plozevet, Finistere, during the early years of this century, he was well aware of the contrast between two cultures. He told us, for example, that the Lives of the Saints was always regarded as part of his mother's trousseau. He wrote of his early experience of books at home: A la maison, outre le paroissien de ma mere et quelques receuils de cantiques, il y a deux livres importants. L'un, qui reste a demeurer sur l'appui de la fen6tre, est le dictionnaire fran~ais de M. Larousse.... L'autre est enferm6 dans 1'armoire des noces de ma mere, que nous appelons la presse. C'est la Vie des Saints, redig6e en breton. 58 A whole series of dichotomies intersect here. For La Yie des saints is not just a female preserve; mother's cupboard, or chest, is also a store of religious knowledge, as opposed to Larousse's famous treasury of lay wisdom. One book typified Catholic France, the other secular Republicanism; in addition, mother's trunk was Breton space, whereas the windowsill was a kind of altar to the use of the French language. Here gender, religion and 23181 the use of language are all identified as important media through which the meeting of the countryside with national culture was articulated. Attempts to Control Peasant Reading and the Questionnaire of 1866 After the Second Republic, liberal and secular reformers increasingly perceived peasant reading as a political problem. They fought on several fronts at once: first, against the diffusion of socialist tracts, which seemed to have had a pernicious influence, especially in the insurrection of 1851 in the south-east. For Michelet, on the other hand, the main problem at mid-century consisted in trying to wean the masses away from Bonapartism,59 and reformers like Jules Simon were always anxious that new libraries should escape the close surveillance exercised by the imperial police. 61 It was just as urgent for both bourgeois republicans and liberal imperialists to counter clerical influences. For in the dissemination of improving works through lending libraries, the Catholic Church had stolen an early lead. Catholic organizations had been mobilized to spread bons livres to rural readers ever since the Bourbon Restoration. If religious associations could propagate good works in their own interest, asked Jules Simon in 1863, why could not lay associations do the same?6' Thirty years after the Guizot Education Law of 1833, complained Simon in his campaign to expand lending libraries, one child in five still received no education, and many of those who did so only acquired a rudimentary literacy. Those who had no books or writing materials at home needed the encouragement of a bibliotheque pop ula ire . 62 The odds were that the classes laborieuses would continue the reading habit beyond their school years, and fall into the many traps which awaited the unwary reader. 'Le peuple est avide de lecture', wrote Louandre in 1846, 'mais il lit au hasard, au rabais, des rapsodies qui l'abetissent ou le dépravent'. 63 The dangers which popular libraries could counteract were outlined in a prize essay produced by a teacher for the Société Académique de la Marne in 1857.64 The essay was a long diatribe on the progress of immorality in the countryside since 1789, and especially under the July Monarchy. The advance of irreligion, argued the author, 24182 had been furthered by the diffusion of Volney, Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire, and abetted by the roman-feuilleton of Eugene Sue. The spread of novels in the countryside had been a social and religious disaster, corrupting the young, especially inexperienced females, encouraging idleness and libertinage, emptying the churches and breaking up the family. The best remedies were stronger laws against prostitution, laws to compel workers to save for a pension, and better popular education. Most polemical literature of the mid-century in favour of popular libraries echoed these paternalistic concerns for thrift and morality. Their main arguments can be summarized as a twin attack on the two scourges of democracy, colportage and the cabaret. For L6on Curmer, the colporteurs were 'les messagers du mal'.6s When Charles Robert analysed the replies of 1200 schoolteachers to a questionnaire on the need for popular libraries in the countryside, the most common answer was that libraries would undermine `1'influence des mauvais livres', and this was usually accompanied by an attack on colportage literature.66 Colportage was dying out in the 1860s, but mauvais livres had not been eradicated. Charles Robert summarized thus his replies from the Seine-et-Oise: Si au fond d'un placard enfum6, vous rencontrez quelques vieux bouquins, vous g6missez de voir que ce sont les plus immoraux qui existent; le colportage 6ffren6 du dernier regne a inond6 nos campagnes de ces 6crits impurs qu'on rougit de nommer et qui composent toute la bibliotheque du cultivateur. La lecture des romans a bon march6 p6ndtre aujourd'hui partout et d6truit les bons sentiments des populations rurales. Les feuilletons a bas prix, les livraisons periodiques inondent et empoisonnent nos campagnes. 61 From the Charente came complaints that colportage was a dangerous leprosy, and that an instituteur who had seized copies of Paul de Kock and the story of Mandrin from his students had almost come to blows with their parents The attack on the cabaret and popular drunkenness was almost uniform among middle-class reformers. Charles Robert's analysis of the schoolteachers' questionnaire showed that reducing the popularity of cabarets was a very high priority indeed. In the Haute-Vienne, one teacher felt that 'par les bibliotheques on combattrait les cabarets et les cafes, les deux plus fatales institutions de la pretendue civilisation des classes ouvrières'. 69 In the Saone-et-Loire, one correspondent painted an envious picture of 25183 peasant evenings in Scotland and Switzerland, where leisure time was allegedly spent reading, rather than in the local bar. 70 Such attacks on drinking were predictable and often repeated. They were in part politically motivated, for the cabarets were much more than village centres of male sociability. They were also meeting-points where newspapers might be read and political news discussed. In the south, as Maurice Agulhon has shown, the local bar might have been a focus for Provenral radicalism, the chambrée. 71 The dissemination of cheap popular fiction had made great inroads into the countryside by the 1860s, although not all Charles Robert's correspondents regarded this as an irreversible process. The demand for recreational literature was increasing much faster than the reformers' ability to direct it into safe channels. The masses knew how to read; popular libraries had to show them what to read, in the interests of social and political harmony. The attempt to establish social literacy thus took the form of an attack on two of the most familiar characters in the world of popular culture: the colporteur and the cabaretier. As Jean H6brard has shown, governments between 1860 and Jules Ferry placed their hopes in the local school library as a source of books for adult readers in the countryside.72 By the end of the Second Empire, 25 per cent of all primary schools had a library, and by 1882, this percentage had risen to 37 per cent. In spite of this expansion, school libraries were small, and their contents paternalistic. In the long run, the cost to the government of renewing and maintaining a stock of books in every French commune made the notion unrealistic. The bibliotheques scolaires were therefore an imperfect instrument of the state's attempt to 'acculturate' the peasant. The government questionnaire on rural reading habits, organized by the Ministry of Education in 1866, was motivated by the push to develop a framework of school libraries. 13 The Minister asked all prefects to list the works most popular with their readers, so that schools could acquire those titles with a guaranteed readership. In addition, the Minister's circular specifically asked what works were distributed locally by the colporteurs. This official attempt at market research is potentially a very revealing document, informing us of what peasant readers all over France were actually reading in the 1860s. Once again, 26184 however, the historian of popular culture is reliant on secondhand assessments, this time from the prefects. As a result, we must moderate our enthusiasm. The prefects gathered their information from a variety of local sources: sub-prefects, commissaires de police and local mayors were asked to contribute information, and occasionally a prefect would consult schoolteachers and local bookshops. Their reports, digested by the prefect, were then relayed to Paris. The archive of responses to the questionnaire therefore consists of third- or even fourth-hand information, sifted through several layers of the administrative hierarchy. It would be risky to regard it as a fresh and immediate sondage of peasant reading. The government received a mixed response. There were geographical deficiencies in the replies: there are important lacunae in the Massif Central and the extreme west, Burgundy and parts of the north. The prefects realized the purpose of the questionnaire, and adapted their responses accordingly. Rather than report what peasants were reading, they tended to give their own views of what a bibliotheque scolaire ought to stock. Prefects' replies fell into four categories. First, there were those who reported that no popular reading matter whatsoever was worthy of a place in a school library, and consequently, they gave no details at all about peasant reading. In Tours, for example, the prefect felt that it was hardly worth enquiring what the peasants read, since: On lit peu dans les campagnes, les paysans ne poss6dent gu6re que des almanachs. 11 n'en est pas ainsi dans la classe ouvriere, ou le gout de la lecture est tr6s r6pandu, et o4 on lit de mauvais romans et des livres souvent immoraux que les colporteurs trouvent moyen de faire échapper 4 1'estampille.'° Second, and only marginally more helpfully, some prefects agreed that what the peasants read was completely worthless, but they nevertheless condescended to give their own suggestions as to what a good local library should contain. This attitude was adopted by the prefect in Perigueux, who deplored the fact that ignorance et le mauvais gout president trop souvent au choix de ces livres, et l'administration doit plutot s'attacher a reformer ce gout qu'a s'y conformer'.7s Third, a few prefects argued that some popular reading matter could safely be included in a school library, and they therefore provided the government with a 27185 partial list of peasant readings from which undesirable titles had been carefully 'purged'. This was the strategy adopted for example by the prefect of the Creuse. A fourth and very helpful group of prefects took the view that what peasants read was deplorable, gross and immoral, but like obedient fonctionnaires they decided to give the minister a list of it anyway, as he had requested. The prefects' replies illustrate the decline of colportage during the Second Empire. From Blois, the prefect reported that colportage sales had fallen in the last few years, and that colporteurs sold only almanacs, songs, fairy tales, and works of piety. 'Les petits joumaux illustres', he added, `a 5 ! 10 centimes, ont fait une concurrence desastreuse a la librairie ambulante', and colporteurs were even selling 'brochures insignifiantes' made up of reports of faits divers cut from newspapers.'6 The local police commissaire from Montereau (Seine-et-Marne) reported that no colporteur had been sighted there for over two years, and similar reports were received further away from Paris." In Bourges, the public was avid for new newspapers like Le Petit Journal, and all were familiar with 'toute la serie de romans plus ou moins futiles en renom d'Alexandre Dumas pere et fils, de V. Hugo, G. Sand, Sue, Gauthier, etc., etc.'78 In some areas, colportage literature was already extinct. Newspapers and cheap novels had already won over the urban populations and were spreading quickly into the countryside. From the Eure, the Ardennes, the Indre, the Loire and elsewhere, came reports of the popularity of cheap illustrated novels sold by instalment, as well as of 'petits ouvrages' celebrating the military campaigns of Napoleons I and III. Where colportage literature was still sold, the most popular titles were the 1001 Nights and the Quatre Fils Aymon, together with La Clef des songes and L'Oracle des dames. Prefects were nearly unanimous in deploring the bad taste of readers everywhere. There was one exception to this. They suggested that Bonapartist literature was very popular with the reading public of the 1860s, and here it is particularly hard to decide how far the prefects were suggesting titles which they considered politically correct, rather than reporting what was actually read. In Meaux, the police commissaire did make this distinction, recommending that the study of French history up to 1815 should become compulsory, 'afin de maintenir la generation actuelle dans les senti- 28186 ments d'affection et de sympathie que les populations manifes- tent pour la dynastie de I' Empéreur' .79 In the Puy-de-Dome it was clearly the population, and not just the prefect, who valued stories of the First Empire.80 The commissaire of Fontainebleau also reported that the Crimean and Italian wars had made history books popular in the countryside. 81 No fewer than 24 reports mentioned the popularity of Loudun's Les Victoires de l'Empire, and others mentioned the Histoire populaire de Napolion ler (23 mentions), Souvenirs du ler Empire by Kermoysen ( 19 mentions), the Oeuvres of Napoleon III (19 mentions) and the Campagnes de la Crimje et d'Italie ( 19 mentions). Perhaps there was an element of sycophancy in these reports, and perhaps the police commissaires were doing what they have often tended to do, namely tell the authorities exactly what they thought they wanted to know. Twenty-one reports mentioned the popularity of Duruy's Petite histoire de France, which would certainly have pleased the Minister for Education, who was none other than the author! The prefects' reports suggest the enduring popularity of the classical playwrights of the seventeenth century, and also of LaFontaine's Fables (24 mentions), which has been identified elsewhere as one of the French bestsellers in the longue durée. 82 Preferences for the works of the eighteenth century also seem to have varied little over time. The prefects mention old favourites like Paul et Virginie ( 18 mentions), Lesage's Gil Bias (13 mentions) and the Fables of Florian (14 mentions), as though they were reading the bestseller lists of the 1820s. They resorted to recommending standard school texts like Tilgmaque, Lhomond's Grammaire or Hachette's histories. Their ideal libraries for the people excluded potentially controversial authors like Rousseau, George Sand or Voltaire, except in carefully selected morceaux choisis, just as they ignored the popularity of works of piety in the countryside. In their resume of the popularity of nineteenth-century fiction, however, the emergence of a new brand of popular novelist can be seen. Leading the field by a clear margin was Alexandre Dumas (23 mentions), followed by Paul de Kock (13 mentions), Eugene Sue (15 mentions) and Victor Hugo (10 mentions), together with the surprising addition of Chateaubriand (16 mentions). Here the prefects were probably reporting accurately since, except for Chateaubriand, these were novelists which they almost universally deplored. In the field of foreign literature, however, tastes were again very 29187 traditional, for the two most popular foreign novels, according to this source, were Robinson Crusoe and Don Quichotte (not forgetting Swiss Family Robinson, which apparently had a large Protestant readership).83 Works of history were popular, according to the prefects, including those relating to the First Empire already listed. Various versions of the life of Joan of Arc, by Michelet, Lamartine and others, had a considerable readership. Thiers's Histoire de la Rivolution française was mentioned in 14 reports, and it was particularly popular in the East and the Parisian region. One report, however, described it as a work chiefly for bourgeois consumption. 84 Prefects recommended a wide range of titles of a didactic nature, on personal hygiene, horticulture, popular science and the individual's obligations to the Patrie. Raspail's health manual was recommended by just three prefects; their colleagues tended to prefer the many works of Barrau, author of Conseils moraux et hygiiniques aux ouvriers des villes et aux habitants des campagnes, Les Devoirs des enfants envers leurs parents and La Morale pratique, among others. The Appendix lists the 30 titles most favoured by responses to the 1866 questionnaires, together with the number of departmental responses in which they were mentioned. It remains difficult to distinguish prefects' preferences from peasant practices, but responses give the impression that these practices were changing. Colportage literature was almost extinct, now replaced by cheap, illustrated novels and magazines. Rural readers liked military memoirs, works on agriculture and the romans-feuilletons of Sue and Dumas. Through the bibliotheque scolaire, the imperial government hoped to provide a secular mixture of modern novels and classics of French and European literature. The government clearly wished to make available to rural readers works which presented a Bonapartist view of French history, and manuals offering practical advice and lessons in civic duties. c.1880-1918: Peasant Readers Make Independent Use of the Medium A multitude of sources therefore illustrate the frequency of contact between rural France and the print medium in the second 30188 half of the nineteenth century. Rural readers did not need to be book-buyers in order to be consumers in the expanding world of illustrated magazines and cheap mass fiction. Peasant women in the Ardeche, for example, described to Anne-Marie Thiesse how, in the 1890s, they and their parents cut out the roman- feuilleton from the newspaper and sewed the instalments together to fashion a continuous home-made book." Some dailies even provided a cheap binder to encourage this improvised literary culture. Such personal feuilleton-booklets were the subject of everyday conversation between the women, and they were lent and borrowed through informal female reading networks. As the daughter of a Vaucluse cordonnier, born in 1900, recalled: Je d6coupais et je reliais les feuilletons du journal. On se les passait entre femmes. Le samedi soir, les hommes allaient au cafe, et les femmes venaient jouer aux cartes chez nous. Surtout on 6changeait alors nos feuilletons, des choses comme Rocambole ou La Porteuse du Pain.86 Of the peasants interviewed by Thiesse, only one in five came from a household where the newspaper was purchased daily at the turn of the century, 87 but buying the paper was only one way of obtaining access to the news. Antoine Sylvere, recalling life in and around Ambert in the 1890s, remembered Le Petit Journal. He didn't have to buy it, or even borrow it, because its pages were spread out on display in the windows of local marchands de tabac.88 Local borrowing networks could be exploited by rural readers. According to Augustine Rouviere, even the novels of Tolstoy were read in the peasant heartland of the Cevennes when a keen institutrice decided to share her literary enthusiasm with local pupils.89 As Rouviere put it, this `representait une veritable revolution dans les moeurs' in her village of Sainte-Croix-Vallee- Frangaise. In Eugen Weber's controversial study of the assimilation of French peasants into national life, he argued that the early Third Republic ( 18 70-1914) was the crucial period in the transformation of rural culture. The disparate evidence presented in this short article suggests that the 'revolution dans les moeurs' probably happened sooner than this. As we have seen, rural readers of the Second Republic and Second Empire were no longer 'on the margins of literacy'. Rather, they enjoyed an expanding range of possible means of access to print culture. 31189 Government concern in the 1860s to channel and control rural reading practices was one important sign that peasants were already familiar with book culture before 1870. Weber drew heavily on sources from the more remote areas of France - Brittany, the Pyrenees and the Massif Central - a selection which gave an inevitably partial view of the persistence of traditional cultural practices. In this article, I have been able only to present the broad national outlines of cultural change, without developing such regional nuances. Chronological and geographical distortions apart, however, Weber's approach is open to a more fundamental criticism. His view of cultural change in rural France over-emphasizes the instrumentalities of the state - roads, railways and military conscription - in realizing the aims of nationalist ideology. This perspective condemns the peasants to one of two stereotyped roles: they are cast either as the passive objects of assimilation or as stubborn, archaic recalcitrants. What is missing here is a consideration of the many possible forms of interchange and negotiation between rural France and the forces of cultural homogeneity. It is not sufficient merely to register the frequency of contact between rural readers and written culture; we need to study the ways in which peasants began to make use of their long-established familiarity with print and with writing. They were becoming less dependent on intermediaries, and more able to adapt written culture for their own ends. These ends might be purely personal, as in the growth of personal correspondence, or they might be more collective, as in the use of journals to organize the first syndicats des agriculteurs. It was no coincidence that the schoolteacher who lent Augustine Rouviere Tolstoy's Anna Karenina also introduced her to the local Mutualité. The study of private correspondence organized by Roger Chartier and his colleagues shows that whereas rural areas were hardly touched by written culture in mid-century, they were much more accustomed to writing and receiving letters by 1914- 18. Even the introduction of a universal 20-centime postage stamp in 1849 did not alter the fact that letter-writing was still chiefly an urban phenomenon and that the channels of epistolary communication tended to run in one direction only: from the towns to the countryside. The postal enquiry of 1847 showed that in rural communes outside the chef-lieu du canton, individuals received on average under one letter per day 32190 Increasingly, however, there were occasions when peasants needed to correspond with friends or family members in writing. Migration was one such occasion. Migrant workers from the Limousin needed to send money home and to keep in touch with the management of their farms while they spent a season or more on the building sites of the capital. As a result, seasonal migrants were much more familiar with letter-writing than those who stayed behind in the village.9' Above all, the two wars of 1870 and 1914-1918 made letter-writing an essential skill for peasant conscripts. In the First World War, 4 million letters circulated daily between the front and the rear. 92 Sometimes peasant soldiers still needed to enlist one of their number to act as a scribe. Alexandre Merlaud wrote letters home for his fellow-conscripts in 1903, even though they knew they were very unlikely to receive a reply. 13 Repeatedly using a third party to write letters was risky: the writer enlisted tended to recycle a small stock of conventional phrases and he might also censor the text dictated to him. Thus when Antoine Sylvere wrote for his family to his father, absent cutting wood as scieur de long, he was not prepared to transcribe all the insults that his mother wanted to heap upon her husband.94 In spite of the use of intermediaries, younger peasants, forced by the necessities of war and conscription, gradually mastered the art of correspondence. Augustine Rouviere even recalled that her younger sister Anna received love letters from the young man who courted and married her in 1916.95 Reading and writing had important uses in the growth of peasant syndicalism. The peasant-autobiographer Henri Norre was the founder of a syndicat des agriculteurs in his commune in the Allier. Reading was also linked to militancy in the better- known case of Henri Guillaumin, whose reading trajectory is worth considering more fully. Guillaumin's experience suggests that rural reading had diversified enormously. On one level, his reading was that of any peasant interested in local affairs, which he learned of through the local press, the Journal de l'Allier. At the same time, his reading reflected his interests as a militant unionist. He recommended to his fellow-peasants militant periodicals such as Le Paysan, the monthly paper of the Federation des Travailleurs Agricoles du Midi, Le Travailleur de la Terre, La Voix du Peuple and Les Annales de la Jeunesse Laique. 16 He urged young readers 33191 to educate themselves by reading a selection of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, which he described as 'livres de documentation sur la classe ouvriere et paysanne'. These included Zola's Germinal, Nadaud's memoirs, Eug6ne Leroy's Jacquou le Croquant and Le Moulin du Frau, as well as George Sand's François le Champi. As well as the peasant reader with regional horizons, and the reader as militant, the model of the schoolboy reader also exerted an influence on Guillaumin's literary culture. It was school that introduced him to Mayne Reid, Dickens's David Copperfield and the almost universal La Case de l'Oncle Tom. Finally, there was also in Guillaumin the model of the discriminating reader of national literature, in touch with new publications, journals and novels. The colporteur was no longer the medium through which the peasant acquired his or her limited reading matter. By the turn of the century, as has been shown, there were other means of obtaining access to sources of general literature. There were local study groups and reading circles, even in Guillaumin's small community at Ygrande.97 Nothing now prevented the young rural reader from making direct contact with Parisian literary culture. In 1890 Guillaumin spotted an advertisement in the local paper for Challeton's L'Abbesse de Montauger. He wrote to the publisher who sent him, not only the book, but also a copy of his catalogue, which put a whole undreamed-of array of recreational literature within Guillaumin's reach. He saved up to order more novels, including Notre-Dame de Paris, and in 1891, aged 18, he took out a subscription to Annales Politiques et Littiraires. He had become a member of a national reading public. His father did not know what to make of his son's progress. 'Tes lectures', he warned, 'je ne sais pas si, a la fin, ra te rendra fin ou bete'.98 Conclusion After the 1880s, then, to take an approximate date, a younger generation began to make more use of reading and writing than their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers had ever been able to do. The young Antoine Sylvere read the feuilleton from the Moniteur de Dimanche to his illiterate mother.99 In Guillaumin's memoirs, old Tiennon would buy a 34192 newspaper at the local fair in the 1880s for his grandchildren to read aloud to him.'Oo New skills acquired by the young were a valuable family resource. Thabault traced the change at a microscopic level in his home village of Mazieres-en-Gatine. Here was a closed economy, and a patois-speaking community, which the postman visited on foot once a week. The first primary school, established prematurely in 1835, had not been a success. After the 1850s, iron ploughs started to win the struggle against gorse and bracken. More land was cleared for pasture, which meant that there was more manure available as fertilizer. Cereal production started to accelerate. By the 1890s new crops like Jerusalem artichokes had been introduced, a co-operative dairy had been formed, and local produce travelled by rail to be sold in Paris.'°' As a result of the introduction of cash crops and expanding opportunities for the sale of local produce in distant markets, cultural life changed too. Peasants already knew the uses of literacy. They needed to calculate the value of goods and transactions, and they needed occasionally to write contracts and business letters. Sometimes they wrote down useful recipes. But after 1880, their contacts with the printed word expanded dramatically. In 1880, a local cafe started a newspaper stall, and between 1884 and 1895 the school library expanded its stock to an all- time maximum of 400 volumes, where children borrowed Dickens, About, Erckmann-Chatrian and Uncle Tom's Cabin.102 Print culture was present in the village from the Second Empire onwards, even if many still lived on its margins. Newspapers were available to the villages of Roussillon studied by Daniel Fabre, such as Le Courrier de laude and the more left- wing Fraternité. By 1900 villagers' horizons were wider still and they could read Le Depgche de Toulouse, and even Parisian magazines like L'Illustration.103 At first, there was a limited elite of rural readers, consisting of the schoolteacher, the postman, the garde-champêtre. Villagers would seek the advice of this elite of readers on legal and other matters. After the 1880s, they were increasingly able to exploit print and literacy for their own ends. Weber underestimated the degree of familiarity with print culture which rural readers had acquired before 1870. Moreover, the 'impact' of print cannot be fully understood without some analysis of the uses of literacy in the countryside. Only from this perspective can rural readers be rescued from modernization 35193 theory, which condemns them to a passive or merely obstructive role. Peasants were not helpless creatures on which outside forces - the forces of nationalizing and Parisian print culture - made a fatal 'impact'. They reacted to, and interacted with, the world of print. At first, perhaps, they saw print as an instrument of the powerful, to be respected and revered. By the last 20 years of the century, however, they were taking control of the medium, as it was absorbed within a dynamic and ever-changing rural culture. Appendix: Thirty Works for Peasant Readers This list consists of the 30 most-cited titles taken from prefects' responses to the Ministry of Education questionnaire on rural reading, 1866. The prefects were asked the following question by the Minister: Le choix des livres destines a composer les biblioth6ques scolaires est en ce moment de ma part l'objet d'etudes approfondies et minutieuses. 11 m'importe beaucoup, au moment ou je fais dresser la liste des ouvrages qui semblent le mieux r6pondre aux besoins des populations urbaines et rurales, de savoir quels sont les livres qui jouissent aujourd'hui dans nos campagnes surtout d'une vogue et d'un succ6s assures. Je vous prie donc de vouloir bien me faire connaitre le plus t6t possible les principaux ouvrages qui, offerts par les colporteurs ou 6tal6s dans les foires sont achet6s en grand nombres. [Archives Nationales Il 7.9146, Ministerial Circular to Prefects, 27 June 1866]. Robinson Crusoe mentioned in 28 departmental responses LaFontaine, Fables 24 Loudun, Victoires de /'Empire 24 Histoire populaire de Napoleon 1 er 23 Alex, Dumas p6re, novels 23 Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson 22 Duruy, Petite histoire de France 21 1 Kermoysen, Souvenirs du 1 er Empire 19 Napoleon III, Oeuvres 19 Campagnes de la Crimee et d'ltalie 19 St Pierre, Paul et Virginie 18 8 F6n6lon, Telemaque 16 Chateaubriand, Oeuvres 16 Moliere, Oeuvres 15 5 Eugene Sue, novels 15 5 Berthoud, Les Soirees d'hiver 15 5 Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française 14 36194 Mulloid, Histoire de Napoleon III I 14 Florian, Fables 14 Mille et une nuits 14 Barrau, Le Morale pratique 14 Barrau, Conseils aux ouvriers 13 3 Barrau, La Patrie 13 3 Les Quatre Fils Aymon 13 3 Don Quichotte 13 3 Paul de Kock, Oeuvres 13 3 Lesage, Gil Blas 13 3 Racine, Oeuvres 13 3 Corneille, Oeuvres 12 Dessieux, Entretiens sur I'hygiene 12 Notes 1. Eugènie de Guérin, Journal (Albi 1977), entry of 7 mai 1837. 2. Gérard Coulon, Une Vie paysanne en Berry de 1882 à nos jours (Buzançais 1979). 3. Ephraim Grenadou et Alain Prévost, Grenadou, paysan français (Pans 1966). 4. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France, 1870-1914 (London 1977). But see also Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852 (Oxford 1992). 5. In Maurice Agulhon et al., Histoire de la France rurale tome 3, De 1789 à 1914: apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne (Paris 1992), rural France is pene trated twice by the railways (171 and 172), is further penetrated by ideas of social revolt (494) and experiences a fourth penetration by the city, 'ses institutions, ses exemples, ses appâts' (490). 6. Roger Chartier, Culture populaire: retour sur un concept historiographique (Valencia, University of Valencia, Eutopias, Documentos de trabajo Vol. 52), 1994, 4. 7. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill 1984), 221-2. 8. Roger Thabault, Education and Change in a Village Community: Mazieres-en- Gâtine, 1848-1914, trans. P. Tregear (London 1971). 9. F. Furet and J. Ozouf, eds, Lire et Écrire: l'alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, 2 vols (Paris 1977). 10. Agulhon et al., Histoire de la France rurale, tome 3. 11. Henri Guillaumin, La Vie d'un simple (Paris 1979), 171-2. 12. Guérin, Journal, entries of 13 mai 1837 and 11 février 1840. 13. Suzanne Tardieu, La Vie domestique dans le Mâconnais rural pré-industriel (Paris 1964), 358 and annexes. 14. Ibid., 232. 15. Roger Béteille, La Vie quotidienne en Rouergue au 19e siècle (Paris 1973), 78. 16. Ulysse Rouchon, La Vie paysanne dans la Haute-Loire (Le Puy 1933), 24. 37195 17. Guillaumin, op. cit., 126. 18. Tardieu, op. cit., 67-70, inventory of Claude D., propriétaire at Pouilly. 19. Daniel Fabre and Jacques Lacroix, La Vie quotidienne des paysans du Languedoc au 19e siècle (Paris 1973), 388. 20. Georges Rocal, Le Vieux Périgord (Paris 1927), 131. 21. Henry Massoul, Au bon vieux temps. Souvenirs du Gatinais et de la Brie (Paris 1944), 43-4. 22. Claude Seignolle, Le Berry traditionnel (Paris 1969), 269-71. 23. D. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', in Roger Chartier, ed., Pratiques de la lecture (Marseille),191-2. 24. On the special association of shepherds with magic, see D. Fabre, Ecritures ordinaires (Paris 1993), 269-313. 25. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 200-3. 26. Martyn Lyons, 'Oral Culture and Rural Community in Nineteenth-Century France: the veillée d'hiver', Australian Journal of French Studies, 23, 1 (1986), 102- 14. 27. Roger Devos and Charles Joisten, Moeurs et coûtumes de la Savoie du Nord au XIXe siècle: l'enquête de Mgr. Rendu (Annecy and Grenoble 1978), 261 (see response from St Nicholas-la-Chapelle). 28. Archives Départementales Seine-et-Oise 2V25/26, visites paroissiales, diocèse de Versailles, 1859. 29. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 185. 30. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, Le Cheval d'Orgeuil: mémoires d'un Breton au pays bigouden, 2 vols (Geneva 1979), Vol. 1, 169. 31. Yann Brekilien, La Vie quotidienne des paysans en Bretagne au 19e siècle (Paris 1966), 90-1. 32. Eugène Leroy, Le Moulin du Frau (Paris 1905), 330-1 33. Archives Nationales, BB3o.370, report from procureur-général du cour d'ap pel, Aix, 14 March 1850; AN BB 3o.388, report from cour d'appel, Toulouse, 4 January 1850. 34. AN BB3o.370, report from arrondissement of Aix, 5 June 1851. 35. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien — 1. Arts de Faire (Paris 1990). 36. Barnett Singer, Village Notables in Nineteenth-century France: Priests, Mayors, Schoolmasters (Albany, NY 1983), 39. 37. Ibid., 114-15. 38. Frédéric Le Play, Les Ouvriers européens: études sur les travaux, la vie domestique, et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l'Europe, 6 vols (Tours 1877-9), Vol. 4, Ch. 7, 401-28. 39. Ibid., Vol. 5, Ch. 5, 207; Vol. 4, Ch. 9, 474. 40. Ibid., Vol. 5, Ch. 7, 337. 41. Jean-Jacques Darmon, Le Colportage de Librairie en France sous le second Empire. Grands colporteurs et culture populaire (Paris 1972), 49. 42. Robert Mandrou, De la Culture populaire au 17e et 18e siècles: la Biblio thèque Bleue de Troyes (Paris 1964). See also Geneviève Bollême, Les Almanacs populaires au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, essai d'histoire sociale (Paris 1969), and G. Bollême, La Bibliothèque Bleue, littérature populaire en France du 17e au 19e siècle (Pans 1971). 43. M. Bakhtin, L'Oeuvre de Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen age et sous la Renaissance (Paris 1970). 38196 44. Roger Chartier, Figures de la Gueuserie (Paris 1982), 11-106. 45. Darmon, Colportage, 126 and 301. 46. Archives Nationales, F18.567, dossier 124, procès-verbal du conseil- général du dept de la Mayenne, 13 September 1828. 47. C. Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires ou de la littérature du colportage, 2 vols (Paris 1864, reprinted New York 1971), Vol. 2, 232-8. 48. Ronald Gosselin, Les Almanachs Républicains: traditions révolutionnaires et culture politique des masses populaires de Paris (1840-1851) (Paris 1992), 218-19. 49. Maurice Agulhon, 'Le problème de la culture populaire en France autour de 1848', Romantisme, 9 (1975), 63. 50. Darmon, Colportage, 102-5. 51. Ibid., 105. 52. Ibid., 104. 53. Michael B. Palmer, 'Some Aspects of the French Press During the Rise of the Popular Daily, c.1860 to 1890', DPhil thesis (Oxford University 1972), 381. 54. Ibid., 45. 55. Darmon, Colportage, 266. 56. Henri Norre, Comment j'ai vaincu la misère: souvenirs et refléxions d'un paysan, présentés par Emile Guillaumin (Paris 1944, first published in 1914), 44. 57. Coulon, Vie paysanne, 119-20. 58. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, Le Cheval d'Orgeuil, op. cit., Vol. 1, 167. 59. Agulhon, 'Le problème de la culture populaire', 60. 60. Jules Simon, 'L'Instruction primaire et les bibliothèques populaires', Revue des Deux Mondes, 47 (15 September 1863), 360. 61. Ibid., 364 ff. 62. Ibid., 356-7. 63. Charles Louandre, 'La Bibliothèque Royale et les bibliothèques publiques', Revue des Deux Mondes, 13 (15 mars 1846), 1055. 64. François-Florentin Bosquet, De la moralité dans les campagnes depuis 1789 (Chalons-sur-Marne 1860). 65. Leon Curmer, De l'établissement des bibliothèques communales en France (Paris 1846). 66. Charles Robert, 'La Lecture populaire et les bibliothèques en 1861', Bulletin de la Société Franklin, 4, 45 (1er avril 1872), 101-2. 67. Ibid., 103-4. 68. Ibid., 104-5. 69. Ibid., 105. 70. Ibid., 107. 71. Maurice Agulhon, 'Les Chambrées en Basse-Provence: histoire et ethnolo gie', Revue historique, 498 (1971), 337-68. 72. Jean Hébrard, 'Les bibliothèques scolaires', in Dominique Varry, ed., Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 4 vols, tome 3 (Paris 1991), 546-77. 73. Archives Nationales, F17.9146. 74. Ibid., prefect of Indre-et-Loir, 31 July 1866. 75. Ibid., prefect of Dordogne, 27 July 1866. 76. Ibid., prefect of Loir-et-Cher, 23 July 1866. 77. Ibid., commissaire de Montereau, 12 July 1866. 78. Ibid., prefect of Cher, 6 July 1866. 79. Ibid., commissaire de Meaux, Seine-et-Marne, July, 1866. 39197 80. Ibid., report from Clermont-Ferrand, 13 July 1866. 81. Ibid., commissaire de Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, 15 July 1866. 82. M. Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siècle (Paris 1987), Ch. 5. 83. Ibid., commissaire de Beaume, Doubs, 23 July 1866. 84. Ibid., commissaire de Beaume, Doubs, 23 July 1866. 85. A.-M. Thiesse, 'Imprimés du pauvre, livres de fortune', Romantisme, 43 (1984), 91-109; see also by the same author, 'Mutations et permanences de la culture populaire; la lecture à la Belle Epoque', Annales-économies, sociétés, civilisations, 39 (jan-fév, 1984), 70-91 and Le Roman du Quotidien: lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque (Paris 1984). 86. Thiesse, 'Mutations et permanences', 75. 87. Thiesse, Roman du Quotidien, 18-19. 88. Antoine Sylvère, Toinou, le cri d'un enfant auvergnat, pays d'Ambert, with Preface by P.-J. Hélias (Paris n.d.), 215. 89. Raymonde Ana Rey, Augustine Rouvière, Cévenole (Paris 1977). 90. R. Chartier, ed., La Correspondance: les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle (Paris 1991), 336. 91. Ibid., 73-4. 92. Ibid., 280. 93. Coulon, Vie paysanne, 102-3. 94. Sylvère, Toinou, 153-4. 95. Rey, Rouvière, 108. 96. Daniel Halévy, Visites aux Paysans du Centre, 1907-34 (Paris 1978), 76. 97. Ibid., 119-24. 98. Ibid., 393—5 — reminiscences collected in 1900 by La Quinzaine Bour bonnaise. 99. Sylvère, Toinou, 41. 100. Guillaumin, op. cit. 101. Thabault, Education and Change, 137-40. 102. Ibid., 224-5. 103. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 181-206. Martyn Lyons is Associate Professor in History at the University of New South Wales, and the author of Triomphe du Livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siecle. His most recent book is Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 1994).</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes>
<p>1. Eugènie de Guérin, <italic> Journal</italic> (Albi 1977), entry of 7 mai 1837.</p>
<p>2. Gérard Coulon, <italic>Une Vie paysanne en Berry de 1882 à nos jours</italic> (Buzançais 1979).</p>
<p>3. Ephraim Grenadou et Alain Prévost, <italic>Grenadou, paysan français</italic> (Pans 1966).</p>
<p>4. Eugen Weber, <italic>Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France,</italic> 1870-1914 (London 1977). But see also Peter McPhee, <italic>The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French</italic> Countryside, <italic>1846-1852</italic> (Oxford 1992).</p>
<p>5. In Maurice Agulhon et al., <italic>Histoire de la France rurale tome 3, De 1789 à 1914: apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne</italic> (Paris 1992), rural France is pene trated twice by the railways (171 and 172), is further penetrated by ideas of social revolt (494) and experiences a fourth penetration by the city, 'ses institutions, ses exemples, ses appâts' (490).</p>
<p>6. Roger Chartier, <italic> Culture populaire: retour sur un concept historiographique</italic> (Valencia, University of Valencia, Eutopias, Documentos de trabajo Vol. 52), 1994, 4.</p>
<p>7. Janice A. Radway, <italic> Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature</italic> (Chapel Hill 1984), 221-2.</p>
<p>8. Roger Thabault, <italic> Education and Change in a Village Community: Mazieres-en- Gâtine, 1848-1914,</italic> trans. P. Tregear (London 1971).</p>
<p>9. F. Furet and J. Ozouf, eds, <italic>Lire et Écrire: l'alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry,</italic> 2 vols (Paris 1977).</p>
<p>10. Agulhon et al., <italic> Histoire de la France rurale, tome 3.</italic></p>
<p>11. Henri Guillaumin, <italic> La Vie d'un simple</italic> (Paris 1979), 171-2.</p>
<p>12. Guérin, <italic>Journal,</italic> entries of 13 mai 1837 and 11 février 1840.</p>
<p>13. Suzanne Tardieu, <italic> La Vie domestique dans le Mâconnais rural pré-industriel</italic> (Paris 1964), 358 and annexes.</p>
<p>14. Ibid., 232.</p>
<p>15. Roger Béteille, <italic> La Vie quotidienne en Rouergue au 19e siècle</italic> (Paris 1973), 78.</p>
<p>16. Ulysse Rouchon, <italic> La Vie paysanne dans la Haute-Loire</italic> (Le Puy 1933), 24.</p>
<p>17. Guillaumin, op. cit., 126.</p>
<p>18. Tardieu, op. cit., 67-70, inventory of Claude D., <italic>propriétaire</italic> at Pouilly.</p>
<p>19. Daniel Fabre and Jacques Lacroix, <italic>La Vie quotidienne des paysans du Languedoc au 19e siècle</italic> (Paris 1973), 388.</p>
<p>20. Georges Rocal, Le Vieux <italic> Périgord</italic> (Paris 1927), 131.</p>
<p>21. Henry Massoul, <italic>Au bon vieux temps. Souvenirs du Gatinais et de la Brie</italic> (Paris 1944), 43-4.</p>
<p>22. Claude Seignolle, <italic> Le Berry traditionnel</italic> (Paris 1969), 269-71.</p>
<p>23. D. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', in Roger Chartier, ed., <italic>Pratiques de la lecture</italic> (Marseille),191-2.</p>
<p>24. On the special association of shepherds with magic, see D. Fabre, <italic>Ecritures ordinaires</italic> (Paris 1993), 269-313.</p>
<p>25. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 200-3.</p>
<p>26. Martyn Lyons, 'Oral Culture and Rural Community in Nineteenth-Century France: the <italic>veillée d'hiver', Australian Journal of French Studies,</italic> 23, 1 (1986), 102- 14.</p>
<p>27. Roger Devos and Charles Joisten, <italic>Moeurs</italic> et <italic>coûtumes de la Savoie du Nord</italic> au <italic>XIXe siècle: l'enquête de Mgr. Rendu</italic> (Annecy and Grenoble 1978), 261 (see response from St Nicholas-la-Chapelle).</p>
<p>28. Archives Départementales Seine-et-Oise 2V25/26, visites paroissiales, diocèse de Versailles, 1859.</p>
<p>29. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 185.</p>
<p>30. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, Le Cheval d'Orgeuil: <italic>mémoires</italic> d'un Breton au pays bigouden, 2 vols (Geneva 1979), Vol. 1, 169.</p>
<p>31. Yann Brekilien, <italic> La Vie quotidienne des paysans en Bretagne au</italic> 19e <italic>siècle</italic> (Paris 1966), 90-1.</p>
<p>32. Eugène Leroy, <italic>Le Moulin du Frau</italic> (Paris 1905), 330-1</p>
<p>33. Archives Nationales, BB<sub>3o</sub>.370, report from <italic>procureur-général</italic> du cour d'ap pel, Aix, 14 March 1850; AN BB<sub> 3o</sub>.388, report from <italic>cour d'appel,</italic> Toulouse, 4 January 1850.</p>
<p>34. AN BB<sub>3o</sub>.370, report from arrondissement of Aix, 5 June 1851.</p>
<p>35. Michel de Certeau, <italic> L'Invention du quotidien — 1. Arts de Faire</italic> (Paris 1990).</p>
<p>36. Barnett Singer, <italic> Village Notables in Nineteenth-century France: Priests, Mayors, Schoolmasters</italic> (Albany, NY 1983), 39.</p>
<p>37. Ibid., 114-15.</p>
<p>38. Frédéric Le Play, <italic> Les Ouvriers européens: études sur les travaux, la vie domestique, et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l'Europe,</italic> 6 vols (Tours 1877-9), Vol. 4, Ch. 7, 401-28.</p>
<p>39. Ibid., Vol. 5, Ch. 5, 207; Vol. 4, Ch. 9, 474.</p>
<p>40. Ibid., Vol. 5, Ch. 7, 337.</p>
<p>41. Jean-Jacques Darmon, <italic> Le Colportage de Librairie en France sous le second Empire. Grands colporteurs et culture populaire</italic> (Paris 1972), 49.</p>
<p>42. Robert Mandrou, <italic> De la Culture populaire au 17e et 18e siècles: la Biblio thèque Bleue de Troyes</italic> (Paris 1964). See also Geneviève Bollême, Les Almanacs <italic>populaires</italic> au <italic>XVIIe</italic> et <italic>XVIIIe siècles, essai d'histoire sociale</italic> (Paris 1969), and G. Bollême, <italic> La Bibliothèque Bleue, littérature populaire en France du 17e au 19e siècle</italic> (Pans 1971).</p>
<p>43. M. Bakhtin, <italic>L'Oeuvre de Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen age et sous la Renaissance</italic> (Paris 1970).</p>
<p>44. Roger Chartier, <italic>Figures de la Gueuserie</italic> (Paris 1982), 11-106.</p>
<p>45. Darmon, Colportage, 126 and 301.</p>
<p>46. Archives Nationales, F18.567, dossier 124, procès-verbal du conseil- général du dept de la Mayenne, 13 September 1828.</p>
<p>47. C. Nisard, <italic>Histoire des livres populaires ou de la littérature du colportage,</italic> 2 vols (Paris 1864, reprinted New York 1971), Vol. 2, 232-8.</p>
<p>48. Ronald Gosselin, <italic> Les Almanachs Républicains: traditions révolutionnaires et culture politique des masses populaires de Paris (1840-1851)</italic> (Paris 1992), 218-19.</p>
<p>49. Maurice Agulhon, 'Le problème de la culture populaire en France autour de 1848', <italic>Romantisme,</italic> 9 (1975), 63.</p>
<p>50. Darmon, <italic>Colportage,</italic> 102-5.</p>
<p>51. Ibid., 105.</p>
<p>52. Ibid., 104.</p>
<p>53. Michael B. Palmer, 'Some Aspects of the French Press During the Rise of the Popular Daily, c.1860 to 1890', DPhil thesis (Oxford University 1972), 381.</p>
<p>54. Ibid., 45.</p>
<p>55. Darmon, Colportage, 266.</p>
<p>56. Henri Norre, <italic>Comment j'ai vaincu la misère: souvenirs et refléxions d'un paysan,</italic> présentés par Emile Guillaumin (Paris 1944, first published in 1914), 44.</p>
<p>57. Coulon, <italic>Vie paysanne,</italic> 119-20.</p>
<p>58. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, <italic> Le Cheval d'Orgeuil,</italic> op. cit., Vol. 1, 167.</p>
<p>59. Agulhon, 'Le problème de la culture populaire', 60.</p>
<p>60. Jules Simon, 'L'Instruction primaire et les bibliothèques populaires', <italic>Revue des Deux Mondes,</italic> 47 (15 September 1863), 360.</p>
<p>61. Ibid., 364 ff.</p>
<p>62. Ibid., 356-7.</p>
<p>63. Charles Louandre, 'La Bibliothèque Royale et les bibliothèques publiques', Revue des Deux Mondes, 13 (15 mars 1846), 1055.</p>
<p>64. François-Florentin Bosquet, De la <italic>moralité dans les campagnes depuis 1789</italic> (Chalons-sur-Marne 1860).</p>
<p>65. Leon Curmer, <italic>De l'établissement des bibliothèques communales en France</italic> (Paris 1846).</p>
<p>66. Charles Robert, 'La Lecture populaire et les bibliothèques en 1861', <italic>Bulletin de la Société Franklin,</italic> 4, 45 (1er avril 1872), 101-2.</p>
<p>67. Ibid., 103-4.</p>
<p>68. Ibid., 104-5.</p>
<p>69. Ibid., 105.</p>
<p>70. Ibid., 107.</p>
<p>71. Maurice Agulhon, 'Les Chambrées en Basse-Provence: histoire et ethnolo gie', Revue historique, 498 (1971), 337-68.</p>
<p>72. Jean Hébrard, 'Les bibliothèques scolaires', in Dominique Varry, ed., <italic>Histoire des bibliothèques françaises,</italic> 4 vols, tome 3 (Paris 1991), 546-77.</p>
<p>73. Archives Nationales, F17.9146.</p>
<p>74. Ibid., prefect of Indre-et-Loir, 31 July 1866.</p>
<p>75. Ibid., prefect of Dordogne, 27 July 1866.</p>
<p>76. Ibid., prefect of Loir-et-Cher, 23 July 1866.</p>
<p>77. Ibid., <italic>commissaire</italic> de Montereau, 12 July 1866.</p>
<p>78. Ibid., prefect of Cher, 6 July 1866.</p>
<p>79. Ibid., <italic>commissaire</italic> de Meaux, Seine-et-Marne, July, 1866.</p>
<p>80. Ibid., report from Clermont-Ferrand, 13 July 1866.</p>
<p>81. Ibid., <italic>commissaire</italic> de Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, 15 July 1866.</p>
<p>82. M. Lyons, <italic>Le Triomphe du livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siècle</italic> (Paris 1987), Ch. 5.</p>
<p>83. Ibid., <italic>commissaire</italic> de Beaume, Doubs, 23 July 1866.</p>
<p>84. Ibid., <italic>commissaire</italic> de Beaume, Doubs, 23 July 1866.</p>
<p>85. A.-M. Thiesse, 'Imprimés du pauvre, livres de fortune', <italic>Romantisme,</italic> 43 (1984), 91-109; see also by the same author, 'Mutations et permanences de la culture populaire; la lecture à la Belle Epoque', <italic>Annales-économies, sociétés, civilisations,</italic> 39 (jan-fév, 1984), 70-91 and <italic>Le Roman du Quotidien: lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque</italic> (Paris 1984).</p>
<p>86. Thiesse, 'Mutations et permanences', 75.</p>
<p>87. Thiesse, <italic>Roman du Quotidien,</italic> 18-19.</p>
<p>88. Antoine Sylvère, <italic> Toinou, le cri d'un enfant auvergnat, pays d'Ambert,</italic> with Preface by P.-J. Hélias (Paris n.d.), 215.</p>
<p>89. Raymonde Ana Rey, <italic> Augustine Rouvière, Cévenole</italic> (Paris 1977).</p>
<p>90. R. Chartier, ed., <italic> La Correspondance: les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle</italic> (Paris 1991), 336.</p>
<p>91. Ibid., 73-4.</p>
<p>92. Ibid., 280.</p>
<p>93. Coulon, <italic>Vie paysanne,</italic> 102-3.</p>
<p>94. Sylvère, Toinou, 153-4.</p>
<p>95. Rey, <italic>Rouvière,</italic> 108.</p>
<p>96. Daniel Halévy, <italic> Visites aux Paysans du Centre, 1907-34</italic> (Paris 1978), 76.</p>
<p>97. Ibid., 119-24.</p>
<p>98. Ibid., 393—5 — reminiscences collected in 1900 by <italic>La Quinzaine Bour bonnaise.</italic></p>
<p>99. Sylvère, Toinou, 41.</p>
<p>100. Guillaumin, op. cit.</p>
<p>101. Thabault, <italic>Education and Change,</italic> 137-40.</p>
<p>102. Ibid., 224-5.</p>
<p>103. Fabre, 'Le Livre et sa magie', 181-206.</p>
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