Lineages

What beginnings do such theoretical preferences dictate? Les luttes et les rêves opens in 1685 with Louis XIV adopting the Code Noir and revoking the Edict of Nantes. The legal order that resulted formed the basis of modern France – a Catholic monarchy that extended its dominium over the Caribbean Islands, controlling not merely the flow of commodities across the Atlantic to the benefit of continental proto-industries, but also the lives of slaves overseas and Protestants at home. It is to these two social groups, each suffering the violence inflicted by the emergence of a confessional empire in the seventeenth century, that Zancarini-Fournel devotes the first chapter of her book, cataloguing their resistance against colonial exploitation and religious persecution. Noiriel initiates his narrative two centuries earlier with the figure of Jeanne d'Arc, long a symbol of ‘reactionary history’, currently commodified by France's tourism industry alongside the country's châteaux, vineyards and similar relics of a noble past packaged for mass consumption. Yet it was out of the Hundred Years’ War that the royal state was born, not in the spirit of national heroes but rather through the collection of taxes. France, which Noiriel defines as a ‘juridical construct’, first consolidated around the power of the throne to levy taxes while the French people, another legal construct, became the taxpaying subjects of the king. This too was a history of violence replete with revolts against fiscal dues that saw the gradual replacement of the personalised relations of dependence typical of feudalism by the ‘collective dependence’ of the people on the absolutist state. The authors’ different starting-points are not just whims of chronology. Rather, they reflect contrasting plots: while Noiriel tells a history of the people's inclusion within various forms of (state) power, Zancarini-Fournel's popular history is one of people excluded from power.Footnote ¹⁷

These options become manifest in the authors’ divergent treatment of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Zancarini-Fournel's survey of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focuses on the heterogeneity of the people, one segmented by rank, race and class in towns, the countryside and the colonies. This was a world of hierarchy punctuated by uprisings against taxes or the price of grain and presided over by an increasingly coherent state machinery built by the likes of Colbert, Louvois and their successors. We glimpse the contours of this new state through the eyes of those most likely to test its grip: marrons, the itinerant poor and women enacting the logic of ‘communitarian discipline’ in defence of their livelihood. Indeed, it was the moral economy of protests around the juste prix that prepared the ground for 1789 and sedimented the people's claims to representation.

In tracing the development of what he calls the ‘administrative monarchy’ – from Mazarin's Fronde to Turgot's guerre des farines – Noiriel explores how new technologies of power led to the ‘objectivation of the French society’. For it was power, rather than resistance to it, that produced the people as a subject of government: cartography gradually homogenised the sovereign territory; professional bureaucrats, the police and the army centralised the state; and print culture expanded channels of communication. Equally important, the wealth accumulated in the colonies financed the emergence of a banking system feeding a generalised money economy that created interdependence among individuals sharing little in common apart from producing for the market.Footnote ¹⁸ The combined outcome was a form of domination à distance – the sinews of the modern state. Acts of resistance – which Noiriel documents in artisans’ rituals of sociability, bourgeois salons or peasant and slave revolts – showed that ruling from a distance always presupposed a modicum of consent.

Noiriel's French Revolution is thus largely understood as a struggle over two different logics of power-sharing and citizenship – representation and participation – with the former triumphing over the latter by 1794. Richer in detail, Zancarini-Fournel's gendered approach to the topic allocates more space to the revolution in the colonies and pays closer attention to the dynamics of daily life in the metropole. The larger narrative is still one of liberty winning over equality by the time of the Directorate, but the empirical material underpinning it is thicker. For instance, we learn about women upholding vernacular standards of ‘distributive justice’ on the streets of Paris, and about the emancipatory remaking of the family in the early stages of the revolution. By the second half of the 1790s, the conservative backlash reestablished the status of women as ‘citizens without citizenship’ in an effort to erect new forms of exclusion under conditions of freedom. The Civil Code of 1804 was the logical conclusion of this process. Categories of persons deemed ‘dependent’ – say married women or domestic workers – were denied even the spoils of civic equality, let alone political representation. Zancarini-Fournel's reconstruction of the patriarchal order of the empire factors into her view of Napoleon's reign. The military campaigns in Calabria (1806), Portugal and Spain (1807–13) or Russia (1812) are recast as stories of defeat at the hands of the people. For many French officers, the peasants of the Mezzogiorno appeared as a ‘debased race’, much like the slaves of Guadeloupe and Guiana whose revolts other French officers were busy squashing at the time. This was an analogy born out of prejudice. But the comparison could yield compassion as well. Contemplating the working conditions of the Lyon printing industry, one worker likened his condition to that of the slaves in the colonies. This multi-directional approach to the history of revolution contrasts sharply with Noiriel's textbook account, in which Napoleon consolidated small property, militarised society and repurposed the zeal of the sans-culottes in the service of foreign wars, leaving behind a million dead French soldiers.

Conventional in periodisation, the authors’ coverage of the long nineteenth century diverges sharply in matters of interpretation and empirical detail. What became of the people after the Battle of Waterloo? Noiriel's mapping of the first half of the century follows the increased visibility of the popular classes, not just during outbursts of protest – the Canut revolts of the 1830s or the Revolution of 1848 – but also through its representation in literature and the ‘moral sciences’. For writers like Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue or Honoré de Balzac, the urban proletariat became a legitimate literary topic at the same time as it attracted the attention (and concern) of medical doctors. Under the July Monarchy and after, this double objectification of the people redeployed state power to issues of sanitation, housing and public morality. But it was Le Play's enquêtes (inquiries) under the Second Empire that did the most to discover the people, this time in the figure of the French peasant. Despite the pessimistic portrayals by Marx or Michelet, the French peasantry welcomed the rural embeddedness of industry as an opportunity to engage in what Noiriel calls pluri-activité, offering in return its support for Napoleon III.Footnote ¹⁹ Two events terminated this compromise, shaping the trajectory of the Third Republic. The first was the Commune, the violent crushing of which made plain the need to integrate the popular classes in the state. The Third Republic was thus committed to the ‘nationalisation’ of French society. The second was the Great Depression of 1873–96 which spelled the end of the worker-peasant switching between agriculture and industry, which in turn transformed French capitalism and opened the door for labour migration. By the turn of the century, the French people were offered two overlapping routes to power: citizenship by way of conscription and suffrage (both male) and nationality through schooling and law.

The coherence of this narrative is underpinned by Noiriel's socio-history approach, which has at its core the relationship between power and the command over public speech. At the heart of his account is the way that ‘those enjoying the power to name others publicly contribute[d] decisively to the fabrication of . . . individual and collective identity’.Footnote ²⁰ The instances of this process are manifold. First, through statistics and legal categories the modern state undertakes operations of classification, distinguishing for instance between citizens and non-citizens or the employed and the unemployed, assigning rights and imposing duties along the way. Second, politicians, journalists, intellectuals and other figures of the porte-parole engage in much the same way, speaking in the name of the people, opting to emphasise some of its traits at the expense of others, symbolically dispossessing their audiences. It is the power to name (captured by Noiriel's triptych ‘nomination-désignation-catégorisation’) that ultimately frames the distribution of life chances. This insight informs Noiriel's entire oeuvre, including the editorial agenda of Genèses – France's most original social science journal of the 1990s – of which he was a founding member.Footnote ²¹ This alone, and not his sociology of interdependence, explains Noiriel's sidelining of experience. Manufactured from above or from without, people's experiences are at best second-hand, even in those cases when they are taken seriously as markers of identity.

The difference with Zancarini-Fournel could not be more striking. Her popular history is motivated by the quest for the voices, as well as the identities, of the people – always plural – in a century of growing literacy. This amounts to tracing the posterity of the revolution, which survived from the Restoration onwards at the level of popular culture, in symbols, rituals and memories. This ambition, however, does not come free of frictions, theoretical and methodological alike, originating in Zancarini-Fournel's appropriation of Gramsci's Ai margini della storia.

Following the belated reception in France of the Subaltern Studies historiography, Zancarini-Fournel picks up Quaderno 25 for the injunction to rescue any trace of autonomous initiative from below as well as for the equivalence, bequeathed by the global success of the Prison Notebooks, of subaltern groups across empire.Footnote ²² Discarded in this reading is Gramsci's dialectic of autonomy and hegemony, and their joint import for the history of the modern state and its novel forms of subordination.Footnote ²³ Instead, two other concepts are called upon to emplot the empirical material: moral economy and subjectivity. On the surface, their combined analytical power does the job equally well. Zancarini-Fournel charts in detail a wide array of protests driven by the people's appeal to the legacy of the revolution. Under the Restoration, peasants defended the fair price in the language of natural law; under the July Monarchy the Canuts opposed their own notion of freedom to that inscribed in the Civil Code; and, on the brink of the 1848 Revolution, peasants demanded for grains to be taxed as in 1793. Finally, there was the moral economy of the Commune itself, disbanded by mass shootings and papered over by the cultural counter-revolution of the Third Republic's leading minds. For each of these cases and many more, Zancarini-Fournel's historical act of recuperation brings to light what was subsequently pushed aside or forgotten – namely, the popular customs of the vanquished.Footnote ²⁴ But what are we to make of the author's use of the same framework to analyse the xenophobic protests of French workers against Italian immigrants around the turn of the century? Zancarini-Fournel suggests that a petition addressed by some workers to local authorities calling for the expulsion of the Italians is evidence of a shared belief in a living wage, but was this then subverted by cheap labour crossing the Alps? Likewise, what standards of ‘distributive justice’ should we use to analyse the killing of Italian immigrant workers in Aigues-Mortes of 1893? Here Noiriel's alternative explanation seems adequate: these events were the product of the diffusion of xenophobic sentiment via wide circulation newspapers, combined with the Third Republic's regulation of labour markets along national lines, all against the shock of economic crisis. In this context, being French acquired a new political dimension, with workers now able to claim the protection of the state against foreigners.Footnote ²⁵

Much like the study of French colonialism, the focus on subjectivity has ranked high in the pages of Clio – France's leading gender history journal – of which Zancarini-Fournel was a founding editor.Footnote ²⁶ It is the synthesis of this research agenda in the narrative form of histoire incarnée – stylistically adding empathy to explanation – that provides the striking originality of Les luttes et les rêves. In practice, this amounts to a reconstruction of individual portraits. These are based on different ego-documents that recreate ordinary people's sense of self, outlook and social trajectory. For the first half of the nineteenth century, the attention falls on the gallery of artisan poets rediscovered by Rancière and Faure, with the wood joiner Louis-Gabriel Gauny standing out as something of a revolutionary vegetarian preaching décroissance.Footnote ²⁷ After the second abolition of slavery in April 1848 and its replacement with a system of unfree labour, the same technique gives us a glimpse into ‘the othering of equals’, practices that informed the constitution of a post-slavery citizenship, imposing levels of inferiority on liberated slaves. In the metropole, after the enfranchisement of male citizens in 1848, inferiority was reserved for French women, in an identical process of exclusion from power lasting to the middle of the twentieth century. Not unlike similar exploits in literature, ethnography or experimental history writing, Zancarini-Fournel's aim is not simply to record agency but to illuminate macro-developments.Footnote ²⁸ Subjectivity here offers access to structure, such as the transformation of the world of work in villages and towns or the centrality of war in the conquest of Africa. These are neglected in Noiriel's treatment of colonialism, which largely dispenses with the embodied history of the colonised. In his view, European domination should not be confused with the domination of Europeans. Colonialism was an extension into the world of forms of domination first developed in Europe – like the invention of borders or of ethnic identities – that ultimately planted the seeds for the conflicts in the post-colonial Global South.

Presents

Triangulated by war, welfare and crisis, how should a people's history of the twentieth century unfold? Speaking to present concerns, an appealing scenario would be to place the people in a secular history of inequality – curbed by war, trimmed by welfare and revived by crisis. Such is largely the structure of another example of the popular history genre, Selina Todd's The People, which is a social history of Britain's past century in which ‘the working class became “the people”’ and its interests ‘synonymous with those of Britain itself’.Footnote ²⁹ But Noiriel has little to say about inequality. The topic pops up late in his book, ushered in by the crisis of the 1970s which turned unemployment from conjunctural to structural and set off de-industrialisation, all against the backdrop of a peaceful restructuring of capitalism under Mitterrand. The motor of twentieth-century France was politics rather than the economy. Here, according to Noiriel, the Third Republic served as a matrix for everything that ensued: the Dreyfus Affair split the political field into two opposing poles, each vying for control of the state via elections and each looking to enlist the support of the people for rival visions of the future derived from diverging assessments of the present. Overlapping with no single political party at a time, these two poles – la droite nationale-sécuritaire and la gauche sociale-humanitaire – designate larger political alliances underpinned by their ability to generate a favourable rapport de force: The Popular Front, Liberation and May 1968 for the left; much of the rest for the right, Vichy included. The Third Republic was an original mould for France in the twentieth century in yet another sense: already before the First World War, labour law had become the ultimate proof of the government's commitment to improve the lot of the many, backed by the statistics produced by the Office du travail (created in 1891) and the infrastructure of a new Ministry of Labour (1906). Even during the war, the two poles collapsed in the union sacrée, legislation in the realm of labour relations endowed French workers with the institution of the union delegate and the minimum wage.

It was this wartime experience of capital, labour and state aligned under the banner of l'union sacrée that proved of lasting influence for the reformist wing of the French labour movement, more so than Clemenceau's concessions of the collective convention and the eight-hour workday in the revolutionary context of 1919. The exception was, of course, the Popular Front which debuted, one day after Blum took the premiership in June 1936, with the Matignon Agreements – the largest package of labour legislation of the interwar epoch. Noiriel spends some time describing the society that made the Front possible, as well as the forces of the right that mobilised to bring it down. Tight labour markets in the wake of the war coupled with virtually no rural exodus pushed capital to recruit over two million foreign workers during the 1920s, mostly for large-scale industries. This new working class came under the control of the PCF and its trade unions, which, much like Guesde's Parti ouvrier français at the turn of the century, Noiriel sees as a democratising force in French political life.Footnote ³⁰ But the left coalition that won the elections in May 1936 was likely to trigger the discontent of the middle classes, in addition to that of the captains of industry, in a society where nearly half of the workforce was still employed in firms with less than ten employees. Carried by Doriot's newly founded Parti populaire français and François de La Rocque's much larger Parti social, the mobilisations against Blum's government focused on immigrants, shifting the balance of political forces to the right. Daladier's laws of November 1938 rolled back the Matignon Agreements, buttressed small and big business alike, and clamped down on immigration.

Such was the political cycle that shaped the Third Republic's final decade. Vichy, however, was hardly a rupture. Pétain was equally interested in creating a corporatist class compromise between capital and labour and committed an enlarged body of public servants to build on the social policies of the 1930s. The Charte du travail was too conciliatory to survive Liberation but, in the domain of social security, Vichy's legacy was notable. What, then, of the postwar welfare state? Unlike more recent work on the topic, Noiriel downplays continuity after 1945 at the expense of a class struggle explanation for the postwar remaking of the French welfare state.Footnote ³¹ Sacrifices in the resistance movement, factory occupations and a massive wave of strikes up to 1948 shifted power to the pole of la gauche sociale-humanitaire, all leading to the nationalisation of key industries, Keynesian policies and extensive social security. Typically, Noiriel reads the Parodi-Croizat classification scheme of wage earners not as an invention of bureaucrats but rather as a consequence of popular pressure from below, which, much like in 1936, forced the state to find a new language for assessing work and allocating rights. Whatever the merits of this argument, the lesson Noiriel draws from the experience of the Popular Front and Liberation is this: only an appropriate balance of power can turn people's demands, customarily derided as utopian or called out as dangerous, into social rights. Politics alone, not the ups and downs of the economy, brought welfare to the French people, first after the Great Depression and then amidst postwar scarcity.

There is no similarly optimistic lesson in Les luttes et les rêves. Zancarini-Fournel's gendered analysis offers no pedagogic balance-sheet of the first half of the century. The sacred union of the First World War was doubled by a union sacrée of sexes which reinforced traditional gender roles even as women entered industrial employment. The experience of factory work was often demeaning rather than liberating, oppressive more than emancipatory. Moreover, the French state mobilised women only in 1916, after it had drained the pool of men, young and old, as well as colonial subjects, half a million of whom were imported to the metropole to keep production running. Nor did demobilisation bring much hope. Two laws passed quickly at the beginning of the 1920s criminalised contraception and penalised abortion, signalling a return to normal, followed by the Senate refusing to grant women the right to vote. In narrating the interwar epoch, Zancarini-Fournel covers much the same terrain as Noiriel. However, her assessment of the PCF or the Popular Front is anything but positive. The party did serve as a school for the likes of Ho Chi Minh and Messali Hadj, but it was Maurice Thorez who claimed in 1939 that Algeria was part of France. The communists did support women's right to vote, but was this not, Zancarini-Fournel asks, a mere tactical ploy coming from a party subservient to Moscow? As for the Popular Front's record in office, it too denied women the right to vote and left untouched the pro-natalist laws of the early 1920s. If not even the left at its peak in 1936 could break with the demographic obsession of the Third Republic, let alone with its empire, Vichy is far from a parenthesis in France's history. Many of Pétain's social policies targeting the family were mere responses, radical no doubt, to the country's alleged population decline, a natural prolongation of the previous decades.

Zancarini-Fournel is equally downbeat about the post-war period. The end of the Second World War leaves little room for celebration: the killing of Senegalese Tirailleurs in Dakar in November 1944 followed by the massacre of Algerian protesters in Sétif and Guelma in May 1945 and the bloody repression of an independence uprising in Madagascar two years later are reasons enough to darken the event. France remained an empire at war well into the postwar epoch, first in Indochina and then in Algeria. To be sure, progressive policies in the metropole were indeed implemented in the wake of the war: nationalisations, tax reform, social security and the generalisation of the family allowance, now made available to all French residents irrespective of nationality. But these did not, she argues, lay the groundwork for the post-war boom. In what is arguably the most remarkable section of her book, Zancarini-Fournel sets out to debunk the image of a modernising and affluent postwar France. It is neither the statistical data assembled (e.g. that in 1954, 42 per cent of the housing stock had no running water), nor the events (e.g. strikes by dockers, civil servants or miners; Charonne, 1962) that are likely to impress the reader. Rather, it is Zancarini-Fournel's ingenious use of sources – fiction, film and painting, all accessible to the general public – to capture aspects of the social change unfolding during France's golden age.Footnote ³² Many of France's current problems – ecological, urban or sanitary – date back to this epoch, which Zancarini-Fournel describes as one of ‘authoritarian management of populations’.Footnote ³³ To assess them, we are well advised to revisit the political legacy of May 1968. For it was in the aftermath of this event, with the rise of feminist and gay social movements, that the universalism of the French political model was first questioned. In organising around such causes as prison reform or immigration, radical intellectuals ceased to speak in the name of a universal subject – the people or the proletariat – and repurposed their energies to service the needs of specific social groups. Les luttes et les rêves is thus to be read as the latest instalment in this genealogy, a plea for pluriversalisme, attentive to the ‘principles and values’ of marginalised groups long masked by the Republic's promise of formal equality.Footnote ³⁴

Noiriel is less interested in contesting the myth of the post-war boom. Presided over by the pole of la droite nationale-sécuritaire, the first two decades of the Fifth Republic fit into his analysis of France's political traditions. Here, too, labour law provides the evidence. Shortly after coming to power in 1958, de Gaulle called for the reform of the unemployment system in an effort to restore the ‘dignity’ of French wage earners. Under Pompidou, the Grenelle Agreements boosted the minimum wage by 35 per cent, in due time indexed to prices. The multiplication of fixed-term contracts under Giscard was accompanied by restrictions on immigration. Even under Mitterrand, the pole shifting to the left in a period of economic crisis, the Auroux Laws of 1982 empowered workers. In spite of recent setbacks, the consensus between the two poles to legislate in the realm of labour relations make the French workers of today some of the best protected in the world.

But is present-day France still caught in the dynamic between left and right? Noiriel doubts it. The final chapter of his book sketches the contours of a new political formation – une démocratie sécuritaire – that neutralises any trace of class struggle. Much of this can be traced to the Mitterrand years (1981–95). Catapulted to office by May 1968, which forced the Socialist Party to reinvent itself at Épinay and facilitated the formation of the Union de la gauche during the 1970s, both the socialists and the communists embraced neoliberalism in the following decade. With it, however, came the abandonment of class as the defining marker of political identity. In its place, a new consensual political language emerged around ideas of religion, ethnicity or sexuality, an identitarian logic that multiplied the number of victims in the public sphere. The consequence was the marginalisation of the working-class, workers opting to vote with their feet ever since the 1990s. In Noiriel's view, in the absence of any new political force on the horizon that can mobilise the people around larger issues of class, the public sphere is likely to remain a cacophony of self-enclosed discourses, each talking past each other.Footnote ³⁵ Again, the contrast with Zancarini-Fournel is revealing. Les luttes et les rêves ends on a celebration of plural identities, whereas Une histoire populaire de la France blames the pluralisation of identities as cause and consequence for the country's malaise.

To understand this difference in emphasis, it is instructive to explore the authors’ points of agreement, which essentially concern two topics: the European Union and the gilets jaunes. Inspired by Zinn's bestseller, the absence of the EU from these two histories might be attributed to the limitations of the model itself, for no matter how wide the espace-temps of a particular country gets stretched, it inevitably remains national. To be sure, both books place empire, immigration and class struggle at the core of the story they tell. But neither Zancarini-Fournel nor Noiriel have much to say about France's pledge, from the 1950s to this day, to erect a united Europe. Just like no history of rural France can dispense with the Common Agricultural Policy and the myriad protests of French wine-makers or dairy farmers, no history of domination along the lines sketched by Noiriel can afford to ignore the EU's topography of power: Brussels, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the latter home to the European Central Bank. One might even see the failed referendum of 2005 as a people's moment. This blind spot is all the more surprising in a post-Brexit Europe where it is again legitimate to wonder, as some commentators have sensibly done, to what extent France might be willing or able to impose its own vision on the future of the union.Footnote ³⁶

What, then, of the authors’ breakdown of the gilets jaunes? True to his socio-histoire methodology, Noiriel approaches the protests by dispelling any false analogy imposed on them by the media. They were neither a jacquerie nor a replay of Poujade's anti-tax movement of the 1950s. Nor were the people protesting particularly concerned with immigration, as some pundits feared. As in most such cases of revolt in the history of modern France, protesters were motived by feelings of social justice. The problem was that no political force could claim a monopoly over such feelings. In the twentieth century, the left only succeeded in appropriating popular expressions of injustice for the cause of progress because it benefitted from structuration et discipline, and was able to impose a convincing theodicy for the ills of society.Footnote ³⁷ In the absence of any such infrastructure and protocol, it is the right that seems best placed to channel the discontent of the gilets jaunes. Writing for Le Monde, Zancarini-Fournel repeated many of the same observations. She concluded her article by warning that, with the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe, the fate of the movement in France was up for grabs.Footnote ³⁸

Such unanimity of opinion casts light on the two books under review here. It is not so much the authors’ assessment of the present that makes them very different historiographical contributions; rather, it is their relationship to wider ideological developments over the past several decades. To situate each text in the force-field of the French left today, we would do well to recall the emergence, ever since the 1980s, of what Emile Chabal calls ‘neo-republicanism’, a consensual political language permeating France's entire political spectrum that has served to address a number of issues of public concern such as social integration or secularism. Seen against this background, the contrast between Zancarini-Fournel and Noiriel's versions of a people's history of modern France becomes clear. Unlike gender or race, both of which long served as challenges to the Republic's colour-blind universalism, the emphasis on class has always entertained a more ambiguous link with the current neo-republican consensus.Footnote ³⁹ It is this ambiguity that finally cements the opposing conclusions of these two remarkable histories, each arguing for or against the relevance of identity politics in contemporary France. How adequate a response to populism is the longing for the continuing relevance of class and the celebration of diversity is anyone's guess.