Autobiographies as Sources of Women’s Written Culture

In the nineteenth century, more and more men and women began to write about their lives. What was initially a trend among the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie in Western societies soon spread to the working classes. Given that autobiographical narratives involve “an effort to organize […] memories and turn them into a story of the author’s personality”,Footnote ¹⁶ most such ego documents draw attention to reading practices. This is perhaps even truer for the “new readers”Footnote ¹⁷ of the nineteenth century, such as workers, who were often very eloquent about their reading. Ego documents from this period are therefore useful for moving beyond the limits of normative sources and learning about the contexts in which individuals learned to read (often outside school), the place of written culture in factories or workshops, and the way in which workers situated themselves in relation to “legitimate” or high culture. Indeed, as Martyn Lyons has argued, workers’ autobiographies adopt similar narrative patterns: “[Workers] recounted their successful efforts to acquire a literary culture that was essential to their intellectual emancipation and the basis of their political commitment.”Footnote ¹⁸ In doing so, they demonstrated their social success. Martin Nadaud (1815–1898) is one of the most frequently cited examples in France. The son of modest farmers from the Creuse, one of France’s poorest regions, he went to Paris in 1830 to become a mason. Once there, he became politicized and took part in the revolution of 1848, before being elected a deputy under the Second Republic. In his memoirs, he recounts the conflicts between his parents over his upbringing, his discovery of evening classes in Paris, and his involvement in the militant and socialist circles of the intellectual elite.Footnote ¹⁹

Working-class women, however, have been less studied. The gender and class inequalities that structure individuals’ relationship to written culture explain women’s lower literacy as well as the strong gender asymmetry with respect to ego documents: in the early nineteenth century, far fewer women than men wrote about their lives. For my corpus, I have selected the demi-mondaine Céleste Mogador (1824–1909), who recounted her childhood in the streets of Paris; Élisa Perrotin (1818–1887), the daughter of a tanner; the poet Marie Ravenel (1811–1893), the daughter of a miller; a certain Madame Roussel (1794–1859?), a maid from Champagne; Angélique Vibert (1824–1897), the daughter of a Parisian craftsman; the Saint-Simonian Suzanne Voilquin (1801–1876), an embroidery worker and well-known activist; and finally an Anne (1825–?), about whom little is known other than that she was the daughter of modest café owners in Lyon.Footnote ²⁰ Without discussing here the much-debated issues concerning the scholarly use of autobiographical sources,Footnote ²¹ I would like to highlight two points about these specific reading archives.

Firstly, the narrative patterns in this limited corpus are not identical and reflect different attitudes to what reading meant for the women writers. Many male working-class writers emphasize how they moved beyond the basic skills of reading and writing to acquire a literary culture that testified to their success and social advancement. Voilquin follows a similar path in her Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple, recounting how, as a child in the working-class Parisian district of Saint-Merri, she came to reject traditional Catholic culture through reading the books of her brother, the “family scholar”.Footnote ²² This daughter of a hatmaker began to work as an embroiderer but then pursued higher ambitions, obtaining her midwifery diploma in 1837. Similarly, Ravenel, who worked at her father’s mill and married an illiterate servant, attributed her literary success to reading poetic, rather than philosophical or political, works.

But in a France that was still largely Catholic, other literary models had a very strong influence on the way women wrote about themselves. These included spiritual autobiographies, in which pious women gave an account of their conversion, and diaries, used as pedagogical tools and instruments for young girls to examine their conscience.Footnote ²³ Several of the texts I have cited correspond to these other models. This is the case for Anne, who took up her pen following the advice of her confessor, and Madame Roussel, who recounted her conversion to Protestantism. In these narratives, both women emphasize reading practices that are extremely consistent with the gender norms of their time: they did not read novels, but only devotional books such as The Imitation of Christ, described by Anne as “my blessed book, which was always with me”.Footnote ²⁴

Secondly, all these texts provide valuable information about the education and reading practices of girls from the working class. The memoirists emphasize the difficult conditions under which they learned to read. They also detail the numerous situations in which they encountered various forms of written culture: in the street, through a more educated neighbour, or by reading the books of an older brother. But here, again, one of the specific features of women’s autobiographies of the nineteenth century is the emphasis on Catholicism in girls’ education, both in the most affluent circles and in the most modest. Following the exceptional period of the revolution, the authorities left girls’ education to families and the Catholic Church, which opened numerous charitable schools.Footnote ²⁵ Religion therefore permeated all aspects of girls’ education, starting with reading. Lessons continued to be based on religious texts to prepare for First Communion. Girls learned early on that there were good books (devotional and moral books) and bad books (novels).Footnote ²⁶ The spiritual handbook The Imitation of Christ was one of the most widely published books in the middle of the century and was read in all social circles.Footnote ²⁷ Catholic publishers expanded their collections, specializing in books for young people. Vibert mentions reading L’école des mœurs by Abbé Blanchard at the age of eighteen and makes clear she saw it as useful and suitable reading for the young girl she was. Not surprisingly, women’s autobiographies testify to how religious texts framed both their activities and their access to reading.

Élisa Perrotin, a Singular Reader

The autobiography of Élisa (Louise) Perrotin (1818–1887)Footnote ²⁸ brings together these features of working-class women’s relationship to reading. Probably written for a private circle (she dedicates her memoirs to her grandson), this long text of 349 pages covering fifty-five years of life differs from her male contemporaries’ writings in that it does not trace an escape from misery through culture. Even if for her literature constituted a world to be desired, reading was above all a pleasure that was not tied to social and individual emancipation.

The Perrotin sisters (Élisa and Madeleine) grew up in Belley, a large market town surrounded by mountains in eastern France. Like many of the town’s inhabitants, they came from a family of artisans and small traders. Their father was a tanner, their grandfathers were stonemasons and bakers, and the family’s neighbours and friends on Montée Sainte-Marie were butchers, tanners, and cobblers, all belonging to the same community.Footnote ²⁹ During Élisa’s childhood, the Perrotin family enjoyed a certain degree of affluence: the tanning industry was flourishing, and her father, Nicolas Perrotin, was for a time at the head of a small but successful business. Élisa started to attend the charitable school of the Sisters of St Joseph, which specialized in the education of poor girls. The parents then sent Élisa to the Dames Bernardines convent school for three years, where she became friends with Sophie Larochette, the daughter of a doctor. Although boarding schools were expensive, aspiring working- and middle-class families turned to religious boarding schools, whose emphasis on moral and familial duties was reassuring during these decades of social upheaval.Footnote ³⁰ For the Perrotins, the Bernardines convent school offered their daughter an introduction to the best families in the city. The parents themselves had received some education: Nicolas Perrotin could read and write, and Élisa’s mother, Jeanne Marie Duc, owned a few books. The long-term investment of this family of artisans in their daughter’s education provides proof of their own social success.

Élisa Perrotin’s memoirs amply testify to the importance she attached to being literate, and especially to her familiarity with a range of texts. She prided herself on having quickly read all of her mother’s books and claimed she had soon surpassed her mother and all the other pupils in her class: “Listening to the Bible being read made me so curious that I wanted to learn to read as quickly as possible. By the age of seven, I had read all my mother’s books and would go round to our neighbours, begging them to lend me some stories.”Footnote ³¹ After leaving boarding school, she was the one who read to her father and who introduced Alexandre Dumas and other new novelists into their home. Her description of the acquisition of cultural skills shares common features with the accounts of other children from working-class families. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, before mass schooling, the memoirs of working-class people did not hesitate to emphasize, even exaggerate, their literary skills compared to those of their parents. The writers’ aim in these texts was to prove their escape from a modest social background despite the absence of cultural capital. They also reflected a fascination with literary culture. Perrotin mentions, among others, “Fénelon, St Augustine, Schiller, Racine, Molière, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Socrates, Locke, Machiavelli, Livy, Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Alfieri, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Smith, Kant, Hamilton, Pascal, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Corneille, Parny”;Footnote ³² she claims to have read the French classics, some theologians, and also, more surprisingly, ancient literature and numerous philosophers. Perrotin drew most of her classical references from the library of Dr Larochette, the father of her boarding school companion. Later, as a young woman, she worshipped writers of Romantic literature: Staël, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Sand, and Janin. But the comparison with the autobiographies of working men and women ends here. For Perrotin did not recount the path of a woman who became emancipated through reading. She showed little critical distance in her descriptions of her incessant reading, nor did she testify to a disciplined reading programme that separated the “bad” from the “good”.Footnote ³³ Unlike socialist thinkers or educated activists, who in this respect were in line with bourgeois reformers,Footnote ³⁴ Perrotin did not engage in any theoretical reflection on literature and its powers, whether emancipatory or alienating. Far from rejecting fiction, often suspected of seducing the masses and flattering the instincts of the people, she remained fascinated by novels.

Perrotin’s memoirs also differ from many women’s memoirs in that they do not recount the journey of a woman who found fulfilment in motherhood or marriage, the two main social models of female success in the nineteenth century. Neither a docile wife, a devoted mother, a pious spinster, nor a women’s rights activist, Perrotin was an ordinary woman who might have left the modest background of her birth behind her for good if the sexist attitudes of her society had not led to her descent into poverty. While working in her father’s business as a young woman, she was raped and became pregnant. Rejected by her family after the birth of her son Marcel in 1853, she had to find a way to support herself. She took the initiative of writing to the novelist Alphonse Karr and the critic Jules Janin to appeal to their generosity. The latter gave her enough to start a small railway station library in Belley, like the many that opened under the Second Empire.Footnote ³⁵ Later, Perrotin decided to open a reading room. Women of modest origins had opened such places in cities in the first half of the century, thereby gaining both a small income and an important social role, as Françoise Parent-Lardeur has described.Footnote ³⁶ That may have been Perrotin’s aim. But the typology of reading rooms varied greatly, and her initiative was very modest and, ultimately, a failure. Forced to close up shop, debt-ridden, and pursued by the law, she died in 1887 in dire poverty.

Perrotin’s memoirs are priceless in many ways. Although, as we have seen, they are far removed from the narrative patterns generally attributed to workers’ autobiographies, they challenge historians to reconsider the relationship of this modest woman to literate culture, highlighting in the process the depth and diversity of the texts that fashioned this relationship. Perrotin’s style is not sophisticated but emphatic and marked by orality. She makes heavy use of exclamation marks, capital letters, and dialogue, with little regard for the sort of narrative conventions and rules of style that girls were introduced to in boarding schools. Her spelling is often deficient. Still, her memoirs demonstrate the importance her family attached to giving her a “proper” education, as well as the regular presence of the printed word, whether in the form of books or newspapers. More striking is her decision to write to Karr and Janin, which testifies to the pull of literate culture in this artisan milieu. In the end, even if she never mastered all its codes, literature remained a guiding thread in Perrotin’s life. Her decision to take up her pen at the very end of her life, despite her descent into poverty, reads like a final tribute to literature: “Literature has always been a refuge for me, a consolation in adversity.”Footnote ³⁷ In recounting her life as a reader, she offers a narrative in which literature provides comfort and dignity, without insisting on the gendered and social mechanisms that led to her fall from grace.

Naming Injustice

Alongside autobiographies, historians have frequently used correspondence to study reading practices. Less literary and more spontaneous than autobiographies – even if models of letter writing did exist – letters are often seen as providing more conclusive evidence of actual reading practices.Footnote ³⁸ Letters by workers are, however, scarce for the early nineteenth century, with the possible exception of the labour elite.Footnote ³⁹ Lyons attributes the later development of working-class letter writing to two major phenomena – the great waves of migration and World War I.Footnote ⁴⁰ But there are exceptions. Two letters dating from the early 1840s preserve the voices of working-class women. What makes them especially rare is that they are addressed to two well-known writers, Étienne Cabet and Flora Tristan (Figure 2), and do not come, as is the case with the female readers studied by Judith Lyon-Caen, from women who were unhappily married or experiencing social decline.Footnote ⁴¹ Rather, they are from young working women outside the militant movements, who were self-confident and critical readers.

Figure 2.

The French activist Flora Tristan, 1838.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

One is a letter written by a 25-year-old linen worker from the city of Lyon, Éléonore Blanc, toÉtienne Cabet, one of the earliest theorists of communism, in May 1842. Won over by Cabet’s work The Voyage to Icaria (1840), the young reader penned a perfectly written letter in which she thanked the author for having “helped me understand the misfortunes of the common people, what they suffer and what they must do to achieve a better life”.Footnote ⁴² Cabet’s objective in his book, namely to expound his communist and utopian doctrine through fiction in order that it would reach women in particular, seems to have been fulfilled.Footnote ⁴³ Blanc went even further, asking Cabet to put her in touch with the novelist Auguste Luchet, who in Le nom de famille (1842) delivered a violent critique of marriage, Catholicism, and the nobility. The young laundress’s enthusiasm for the novel stemmed from Luchet’s realistic descriptions of contemporary society.

How did Blanc acquire such reading skills? She grew up in a family of shopkeepers. Pierre Guyot, her father, a small trader who frequently changed his line of business, had limited literacy. He did not sign his daughter’s birth certificate, and later he clumsily spelt his name as “Guiot”. The young woman probably received a basic education at a religious charity school, since Lyon had an excellent network, mostly run by the Sisters of Saint-Charles.Footnote ⁴⁴ But her education ended there. It is therefore less Blanc’s family environment than the social and cultural world she subsequently inhabited that can account for her literary skills. The Guyot family moved to Rue Luizerne, in the heart of the Lyon printing district.Footnote ⁴⁵ There she met her future husband, the lithographer Étienne Blanc. In 1838, the witnesses at their wedding were a lithographer and a printer.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the city, the book workers’ milieu formed an elite among the proletariat, something described by Eric Hobsbawm as the “aristocracy of labour”:Footnote ⁴⁷ engravers, typographers, bookbinders, and the like were more highly skilled and better paid than other workers, and they exhibited strong group cohesion. The book workers had a tradition of mobilizing.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, Lyon, as well as being a major centre of the book industry, had a strong political identity. The “Canuts” revolts – a series of large-scale uprisings by silk workers in the early 1830s – took place there, and right from the outset Saint-Simonianism and early socialism took root in this social and political context.

Blanc did not work alongside her husband; she was a laundress. However, her contact with workers in the book industry undoubtedly nourished her political consciousness and made her familiar with the written word, as evidenced by the letter to Cabet. The relationship she formed with the socialist and feminist activist Tristan provides further proof of this. In May 1844, Tristan was passing through Lyon on her “tour de France” of working-class towns. Among all the workers, male and female, that she met, Blanc immediately stood out to Tristan, who decided to mentor her and fashion her as a “creature of the mind”.Footnote ⁴⁹ In a detailed letter entitled “list of the books that Madame Blanc should read”,Footnote ⁵⁰ dated 6 July 1844, Tristan drew up a demanding programme of political education for her pupil, based on specialized readings in history and political writings covering a vast period, from Greek history to the Saint-Simonian doctrine, including the Revolution of 1789. Emancipation through reading was at the heart of Tristan’s political thinking; she herself was self-taught and highly erudite. As she told Blanc: “You don’t need to write much – because before writing, you need to know. Get into the habit of asking yourself why about everything. Seek the answer with perseverance and you can be sure you will find it”.Footnote ⁵¹ In her manifesto L’union ouvrière (1843), she prescribed what workers should read and how.Footnote ⁵² But she had higher ambitions for her young pupil: she wanted her to read not only books about the misfortunes of workers but also works of broader scope. The objective, suggested Tristan, was to study all political systems historically in order to take “possession of the political domain”.Footnote ⁵³

Blanc’s exchanges with two great thinkers of socialism require careful consideration. They force us to question the intellectual and political training of a young worker under the July Monarchy. Her relationship with Tristan in particular offers an exceptional insight into the forms that the intellectual “master/disciple” relationship could take between two women, a relationship quite distinct from the more commonly studied ones between men from scholarly backgrounds. Moreover, the example of Blanc reveals the gap between daily reading practices and theories. In the early 1840s, socialist thinkers, as well as philanthropists, moralists, and bourgeois reformers, were alarmed by the popular success of novels. Critics feared the effects on “ignorant” common people of what they disparagingly referred to as “industrial” or popular literature, a label intended to emphasize the barrier that separated it from legitimate literature.Footnote ⁵⁴ Bourgeois reformers sought to regulate the reading habits of the working class. The leading thinkers of French socialism were also great prescribers of reading: Tristan and Cabet both wrote about workers’ reading.Footnote ⁵⁵ In everyday life, many workers took these warnings to heart, but others ignored them. The young laundress Blanc chose her readings carefully and with discernment. That is why she did not refrain from reading novels, provided that, she wrote to Cabet, they exposed injustice.

In Tristan’s archives, a second letter, received by the activist in May 1844, provides another significant example of the critical abilities of a working woman.Footnote ⁵⁶ Signed by a certain A. Daniel, this long letter (Figure 3) compares L’union ouvrière, Tristan’s manifesto, to Eugène Sue’s novel Les mystères de Paris. Like those who wrote letters to Sue, Daniel told the story of her life through the prism of her reading, as if to better overcome her circumstances.Footnote ⁵⁷ The twenty-eight-year-old woman was originally from Brittany, a poor and Catholic region in western France. “I am what is called in every sense of the word a girl of the people [fille du peuple]”,Footnote ⁵⁸ she wrote proudly. As an orphan, she lived alone in the French capital, where she had worked since the age of fifteen. Her many lovers had earned her the reputation of a grisette. Penniless and abused by men, she sought only freedom, which she defined as the possibility of living from her work with dignity. She did not hesitate to boldly develop her thoughts on the power of literature and the emancipation of the people through reading. She pointed out a fundamental contradiction: how can you find the time and money to read when you are a worker? In 1840, the daily wage for labour ranged from 1.5 francs for the workers of Mâcon, whom Tristan met, to four francs or even a little more for the best-paid Parisians.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, two major innovations profoundly transformed the print sector and removed some of the material obstacles to working-class people’s access to reading: in 1836, Émile de Girardin launched his low-cost newspaper La Presse, which enjoyed phenomenal success with the introduction of serialized novels (romans-feuilletons); two years later, the bookseller Gervais Charpentier proposed a new book format at 3.5 francs, half the usual cost.

Figure 3.

Letter from A. Daniel to Flora Tristan, 13 May 1844.

Figure 3 Long description

Two pages of a handwritten letter are displayed side by side. Both pages are written in dense cursive French script using dark ink on aged, yellowish paper. The date line at the top of the first page reads 13 mai 1844. The handwriting is consistent and closely spaced across both pages, with no visible illustrations, tables, or printed text. Paragraph breaks are present but narrow and text runs close to the page edges with minimal margins. No ruled lines are visible beneath the script. A closing section and what appears to be a signature are present at the bottom of the second page, though the individual words throughout both pages are not reliably legible at this resolution. No postscript is clearly distinguishable.

Source: AM Castres.

And so it was through the press that Daniel discovered Les mystères de Paris. This social novel, published between June 1842 and September 1843 in the Journal des débats, depicted the Parisian underworld in a raw and unidealized manner. The success of realistic novels in the early 1840s was due to the ability to represent the social world and to tackle the social question head-on. Daniel believed that Sue had succeeded in describing misery and suffering while remaining accessible to ordinary readers. However, the young woman thought Tristan’s work would have more impact because it was written by someone who came from the working class.Footnote ⁶⁰ Sue, on the other hand, observed it from the outside, although the thousands of letters sent to him by his readers initiated a real dialogue with the author, who actually adapted his writings in response.Footnote ⁶¹ Another difference, according to Daniel, was that Tristan was a woman of action – she set out to meet the workers in her “tour de France” – while Sue remained a man of words, or of the pen. Without prioritizing one over the other, she drew from them the two things she needed: the emotion of recognizing herself in the descriptions of the misery of the people in Les mystères de Paris, and the power of Tristan’s call to emancipate women from male control. “I am glad to have read your book, and I am especially glad that it is a woman who has conceived the ideas that resonate so deeply with me. No, ma’am, your book is not an illusion, nor is it a utopia, but rather something achievable – and something that will come to pass,” Daniel wrote.Footnote ⁶² She immediately grasped the feminist significance of Tristan’s work; the author was the first to consider the equal place of men and women in her project of universal association. Despite her modest origins and difficult daily life, Daniel used reading to reflect on her own condition as a woman and a worker. In doing so, this young woman demonstrated a rare reflexivity.

Developing a Feminist Culture

Similar feminist reading practices from proletarian women are evident in the reading recommendations of the newspaper La femme libre. The press, as we know, played a leading role in the construction of European working-class identity. It flourished after the revolution of 1830:Footnote ⁶³ L’écho de la fabrique, published by the workers of Lyon; the Globe, published by the Saint-Simonians; the Ruche populaire, a “workers’ newspaper published and written by them”, and many others. On the other side of the Channel, The Crisis relayed the ideas of the socialist Robert Owen. In France, these newspapers gave little space to female writers.Footnote ⁶⁴ On this point, La femme libre (Figure 4), which appeared under various names between 1832 and 1834, was an exception.Footnote ⁶⁵ Founded by two young Saint-Simonian working women, the seamstress Désirée Véret and the linen worker Marie-Reine Guindorf, it also counted among its editors the embroiderer Suzanne Voilquin and the linen worker Jeanne Deroin. The editors did not intend to write a newspaper “for ladies” like those published at the time, in which articles about fashion, society, gossip, and education appeared alongside literary news or book reviews. They did not have the time, they said, thereby adopting a position of distrust towards reading literature, which was considered a leisure activity. From the outset, the Saint-Simonian editors intended to make La femme libre a “serious” publication, dealing with politics, work, and above all the emancipation of women.

Figure 4.

The first issue of La Femme libre, 1832.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The attitude of the female Saint-Simonian editors was typical of the workers’ press of the July Monarchy. At the height of the Canuts revolts,Footnote ⁶⁶ the Lyon weekly L’écho de la fabrique denounced the falsehoods of the mainstream press, written by “men of fear” who made the “masses” appear barbaric.Footnote ⁶⁷ From its very first issue, L’Atelier warned against “the odious scheming of these corrupting writers who, by claiming to educate us, actually corrupt us”Footnote ⁶⁸ and denounced the waste of time involved in reading serialized novels. The workers’ press saw itself as a tool for the education of the working class. To counteract the influence of contemporary literature on the workers, L’Atelier set out what workers’ education should include: the French language first, then history, classical literature, some law, and technology.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although ideologically close, La femme libre distinguished itself from the rest of the workers’ press by the place it gave to literature. Despite the reservations of the editors, almost every issue included either a report of recent publications or book reviews, ranging from a few lines to several pages. Soon, these recommendations were brought together in a “Variety” section. Studying this section reveals less about the newspaper’s readers than it does about what the editors were reading.

The Saint-Simonians read three types of printed works: first of all, the press, with which they often engaged in dialogue through their columns; secondly, brochures, pamphlets, and the like emanating from the Saint-Simonian movement or related to it, which they regularly reported on; and thirdly, certain types of novels or plays. All the novels and plays were contemporary: the oldest from 1831, the most recent from 1834.Footnote ⁷⁰ They all aimed to reveal a situation of injustice through fiction, most often relating to the status of women. The editors of La femme libre chose them not for their style or romantic plot, but because they defended the cause of women. At least, that is how the Saint-Simonians used them, for the authors of some of these works – such as Angèle, a minor drama by Dumas, and Le monde nouveau by Antoine Rey-Dussueil, a fairly popular novel at the beginning of the July Monarchy – did not describe themselves as feminist.

Voilquin, who wrote most of the reviews, explained that these works were selected based on their ability to bring readers into a community of ideas and feelings that we might today call feminist. Reading was essential for the first feminists, since it enabled them to become aware of their alienation and gave them tools to fight patriarchy. And the fight for girls’ education became the central cause of the early feminist movement. As Tristan wrote: before writing, you need to know. Journalists writing for La femme libre therefore emphasized the themes or situations that allowed a feminist reading. Such is the case with James H. Lawrence, an English novelist censored in France during the First Empire, whose work Voilquin discusses at length: his novel L’empire des Nairs (1793) begins with a virulent critique of marriage as the enslavement of women, before describing a utopian matrilineal society in which free love has replaced marriage.Footnote ⁷¹ Voilquin, who herself was separated from her husband, praised the “change of principle, the family based on motherhood”, proposed by Lawrence, as “the only way to put an end to the struggle, jealousy, in a word the exploitation of women”.Footnote ⁷² Admittedly, Voilquin was referring to the abridged version of the novel, Les enfants de Dieu, in which the erotic passages were toned down. But she was also familiar with the original, which we now know circulated in the early feminist networks in England and France.Footnote ⁷³

The Femme libre editors’ reservations about novels, which the rest of the workers’ newspapers widely criticized, testify to the difficulty of following reading instructions in daily practice. To avoid being criticized on this point, journalists scrupulously selected novels in line with their values. All of the novels they chose addressed the issue of gender equality and the balance between the interests of the people and those of women. In doing so, they built up a coherent base of reference and, issue by issue, we can follow the development of their ideal library. Like many readers from the popular classes, they displayed eclectic tastes while remaining attracted to classical and legitimate culture:Footnote ⁷⁴ they quoted Cicero and Shakespeare but also enjoyed the most contemporary literature, appreciating the Romantic poets Lamartine and Mélanie Waldor. While we know almost nothing about the education they received, the newspaper does provide us with essential information about their relationship to literary culture, which was central to their reflections and the development of their militant identity.Footnote ⁷⁵ La femme libre went far beyond merely prescribing books for its readership; it became a tool for the self-education of its editors.

In November 1833, female workers from Nancy opened a benevolent athénée where working-class girls could learn “reading, writing, and arithmetic” for free.Footnote ⁷⁶ At the same time, Eugénie Niboyet, a Saint-Simonian, announced the creation of a women’s athénée in Lyon, where working-class women could meet, learn, and train for a profession.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1835, as part of her project to create a “society to welcome foreign women”, Tristan planned to open a free library:Footnote ⁷⁸ this pioneering feminist sought to give a category of women who were often invisible and denigrated, namely migrant women, access to printed matter. All these projects from the early years of the July Monarchy suggest real demand: ordinary women did not want to be left out of the cultural and political transformations taking place. They knew that, to escape ignorance, they had to educate themselves and therefore learn to read.

But these projects, like most of the popular readers discussed in historical studies, emanated from the most politicized working-class circles: the Saint-Simonians were among the most active in the early 1830s, and again during the revolution of 1848. In their letters, memoirs, and newspapers, they shared their male counterparts’ reverence for literary culture but also a great capacity for critical thinking, in addition to an early feminist consciousness. For these reasons, they deserve a place in the intellectual history of the labour movement.

The other women studied in this article came from outside politicized working-class circles. There were undoubtedly many more who could read, although no sources document their practices and uses of books. Thanks to a few rare but valuable autobiographies, however, we can gauge the extent to which reading permeated these women’s daily lives, at school, in the family, in the neighbourhood, and so on. In the early nineteenth century, France experienced its golden age of print culture, and ordinary women were not totally excluded from it. Nevertheless, the diversity of attitudes encountered reminds us that the movement for the emancipation of women, for which reading was one of the essential triggers, was only in its infancy.