REPRESENTATIONS OF ;;LE TRAVAIL” UNDER THE JULY MONARCHY (1830-1848)

labor;nineteenth century;France;literature;work;travail;discourse;culture;French

Powers, Rebecca TereseKwass, Michael ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: labor;    nineteenth century;    France;    literature;    work;    travail;    discourse;    culture;    French;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/39556/POWERS-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This project traces the definition of a social reality of labor under the July Monarchy.More specifically, it investigates how the ubiquitous but elusive term travail – understood as manual, non-agricultural work – operates at different levels of discourse in the 1830s and 1840s. To underline this specific cultural context, I employ the French travail rather than the English ;;work” or ;;labor.” French workers expected improved social conditions after their contribution to the 1830 Revolution, but were promptly denied this by the new Constitutional Monarchy. Their frustration came to a head in 1848, when they again revolted, demanding the right to work – le droit au travail. This moment is often considered the dawn of the French labor movement, but I contend that it is in the years leading up to 1848 that travail undergoes its most dramatic definition and consecration as a modern value.In order to better understand how the term took on such significance, I examine a variety of cultural documents, both literary and what we would today consider paraliterary. The corpus includes novels by Honoré de Balzac and George Sand; moralist inquiries by René Villermé and Honoré-Antoine Frégier; Jules Michelet’s historiography of the French people; and writings by the workers themselves, whose first-hand accounts of physical labor were becoming increasingly influential. In considering this multiplicity of voices as part of a more-or-less society-wide conversation, I am indebted to Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse formation as well as Marc Angenot’s social discourse theory which allows me to analyze interactions between discourses. I found two general trends in the way July Monarchy authors talked about work: one which changed over time, the other remaining stable. Chronologically, I found a progression in the modalities of representation: le travail shifts from an object of observation in Balzac, to an object of discourse in Sand and the moralists, and finally to a political imperative in the workers’ press. Throughout the period, however, and even as authors strove to represent labor as an observed reality, the use of the imaginary types and tropes of literature remained constant, highlighting the centrality of literature in the formation of a social conscience.The dissertation was completed under the direction of Professor Jacques Neefs of Johns Hopkins University. Professor Dominique Kalifa, Professeur d;;histoire contemporaine at Université Paris 1 Panthéon, was the second reader. It was successfully defended on May 5, 2015 to a committee including Professors Jacques Neefs, Dominique Kalifa, Elena Russo, Derek Schilling, and Michael Kwass at Johns Hopkins University.