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People's History in the Age of Populism
Review products
MichelleZancarini-Fournel, Les luttes et les rêves: une histoire populaire de la France de 1685 à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2016), 995 pp. (pbk), €28, ISBN 978-2355220883.
GérardNoiriel, Une histoire populaire de la France: de la guerre de Cent Ans à nos jours (Marseille: Agone, 2018), 829 pp. (pbk), €28, ISBN 978-2748903010.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2022
Extract
Why write people's histories in our age of populism? Much of the original appeal of the genre derived from the marginality its subject once occupied in public life. Ordinary lives were hardly mentioned in school textbooks; popular culture was assigned to the bottom of the nation's hierarchy of values; and popular politics was either criminalised or disciplined to fit national voting patterns in states ruled by bullet and ballot alike. Defining the people naturally set the fault lines between liberal, conservative and socialist practitioners of the genre. J.R. Green's late nineteenth-century prototype – A Short History of the English People – presented a liberal story of social change, from the landing of Hengist to the battle of Waterloo. It incorporated the entirety of social life mushrooming beneath the deeds of kings, in all its evolutionary splendor. On the continent, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, the people would often feature in ethnic garb, in histories of national liberation or imperial projection. Yet it was Marxism, broadly conceived, that provided the most enduring template for people's histories, at least in the Anglosphere, from A.L. Morton's pioneering A People's History of England onwards. Extended beyond strictly national boundaries to topics such as modern Europe or even the world, two recent people's histories written in this vein, both taking their motto from Brecht's Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, filter their subject through class struggle and offer a narrative of freedom from want in which a vast labouring multitude toils, suffers and rebels across ages. However, political outlook and epistemological commitments aside, for the past century people's history has claimed to restore to the people its own past, often one of misery at the hands of elites yet one all the more dignified for that reason. Do any of these coordinates still obtain today? Is not the current glorification of ordinary lives, popular culture and politics the bread and butter of populism?
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Special Issue 4: European Histories of the Economic and Environmental , November 2022 , pp. 645 - 655
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Still the best panoramic overview of the genre is Raphael Samuel, ‘People's History’, in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), xv–xxxix.
2 Famously, Green opened his book with a statement of method, capsizing the traditional focus of Victorian historiography: ‘I have preferred to pass lightly and briefly over the details of foreign wars and diplomacies, the personal adventures of kings and nobles, the pomp of courts, or the intrigues of favorites, and to dwell at length on the incidents of that constitutional, intellectual, and social advance in which we read the history of the nation itself. It is with this purpose that I have devoted more space to Chaucer than to Cressy, to Caxton than to the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the Poor Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Methodist revival than to the escape of the Young Pretender’. J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878), v. First published in 1874.
3 One example among many was the great Romanian historian David Prodan (1902–92), who devoted his entire life to the study of serfdom in Transylvania because, as he confessed, this was the best way to tell the history of his own kin, in a region where land (hence wealth and power) was traditionally concentrated in the hands of the Hungarian minority; David Prodan, Memorii (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1993), 104.
4 Written with the Spanish Civil War raging in the background, Morton's history was shaped by the Popular Front. It ended by calling upon the people, and ‘above all the working people who form the overwhelming majority of the population and who are always the wort sufferers in any war’, to unite and force the British government into an alliance with France and the Soviet Union against the fascist threat; A. L. Morton, A People's History of England (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 527.
5 William A. Pelz, A People's History of Modern Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2016) and Chris Harman, A People's History of the World (London: Verso, 2017).
6 For Zinn, history had to be socially relevant, ‘presentist’, and value-laden: ‘we need to become the critics of our culture rather than its apologists and perpetuators’. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 13.
7 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 686.
8 Eric Foner, Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 164.
9 Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (New York: The New Press, 2012), 228.
10 Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 269.
11 For the wider context of Zinn's reception in France, see Ivol, Ambre, ‘“Faire peuple” aux États-Unis: Réflexions sur l'histoire populaire de Howard Zinn’, Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, 2, 67 (2020), 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Noiriel, Gérard, ‘Le “populaire” comme relation de pouvoir’, Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, 2, 67–2 (2020), 66Google Scholar.
13 Gérard Noiriel, Sur la ‘crise’ de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 340–2.
14 Noiriel, ‘Le “populaire” comme relation de pouvoir’, 68.
15 Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle and Jollet, Anne, ‘Décentrer le regard: l'histoire populaire des luttes et des résistances’, Cahiers d'histoire. Revue d'histoire critique, 134 (2017), 155–73Google Scholar.
16 Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle, ‘Écrire une histoire populaire de la France’, Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine 2, 67–2 (2020), 47–62Google Scholar.
17 This contrast derives from the primacy of gender in structuring political life. From the Civil Code onwards, the exclusion of women from political participation was constitutive of French democracy; Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Histoire des femmes en France. XIXe–XXe siècle (Rennes: P.U.R., 2005). Tellingly, for Noiriel, the exclusion of the ‘foreigner’ – in state practice and public discourse – presupposed the previous inclusion of the French people via citizenship and nationality, Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset française: Histoire de l'immigrations XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1988).
18 A gloss on Durkheim's ‘organic solidarity’ in light of Weber, Elias and Bourdieu, the notion of interdependence is key for Noiriel's understanding of power and its modern transposition in forms of domination à distance – via law, money, printing, etc. For a concise exposition see Gérard Noiriel, État, nation et immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 13–37.
19 Omitted from Une histoire populaire de la France, the wider implications of this analysis for the Sonderweg of French capitalism are examined in Gérard Noiriel, Les ouvriers dans la société française. XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002 [1986]).
20 Gérard Noiriel, Introduction à la socio-histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 44. Or, in a crisper formulation, one of the tasks of socio-history is to examine ‘quels sont les effets sociaux du travail public de désignation des personnes’; Gérard Noiriel, Dire la verité au pouvoir. Les intellectuels en question (Marseille: Agone, 2010), 134. This approach can be traced back to Noiriel's militant past within the PCF and his involvement – as broadcaster for radio Lorraine-Cœur d'acier – in the steelworkers’ strikes that seized the town of Lonwgy and its surroundings in 1979 and 1980. Noiriel's first book already contained the rudiments of an analysis of the power of the ‘médiocrates’ to shape the representation of the strike in the country's press, at odds with how the workers themselves, muted by the lack of resources to reach larger audiences, understood their own struggle; Gérard Noiriel and Benaceur Azzaoui, Vivre et lutter à Longwy (Paris: La Découverte, 2017 [1980]), 54–82. See also Laacher Smaîn and Simon Patrick, ‘Itinéraire d'un engagement dans l'histoire. Entretien avec Gérard Noiriel’, Mouvements, 3, 45–46 (2006), 212–13.
21 For reflections on the early history of the journal by its founders, see Susanna Magri, Gérard Noiriel, Michel Offerlé and Christian Topalov, ‘Au départ’, Genèses, 3–4, 100–101 (2015), 72–107.
22 Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle ‘À propos du “retard” de la reception en France des Subaltern Studies’, Actuel Marx, 1, 51 (2012), 150–64Google Scholar. Under the spell of Gramsci and Carlo Levi, Ernesto de Martino reclaimed this equivalence as early as 1949, calling for the study of colonial and metropolitan subaltern groups beyond ‘the confines of Eboli’; Ernesto de Martino, ‘Intorno a una storia del mondo popolare subalterno’, Società, 5, 3 (1949), 411–35.
23 Put briefly, for the Gramsci of Ai margini della storia, the specificity of the modern state was the substitution of the autonomy of social groups with the hegemony of the ruling class, a process that counted among its possible outcomes, in Italy and beyond, fascism; Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Volume terzo. Quaderni 12–29 (Torino: Einaudi, 1977), 2287.
24 Here Zancarini-Fournel follows the reinterpretation of the notion of ‘moral economy’ offered by Cerutti, Simona, ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 70, 4 (2015), 931–56Google Scholar.
25 In August 1893, dozens of Italian immigrant workers recruited by the Compagnie des Salins du Midi to harvest sea salt were killed by rioting French workers, some of whom were unemployed. For more on this, see Gérard Noiriel, Le massacre des Italiens. Aigues-Mortes, 17 août 1893 (Paris: Fayard, 2018).
26 For the origins and aims of this editorial project, see Françoise Thébaud and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, ‘Clio, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés: naissance et histoire d'une revue’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, 16 (2002), 9–22.
27 Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière, La parole ouvrière, 1830/1851 (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976). For Gauny's writings, see also Jacques Rancière, Le philosophe plébéien (Paris: Maspéro, 1983). For a parallel, if not always convergent, effort to excavate the voice of a late nineteenth-century Parisian artisan, see Alain Cottereau's introduction to his reedition of Denis Poulot, Question sociale. Le Sublime ou le travailleur parisien tel qu'il est en 1870, et ce qu'il peut être (Paris: Maspéro, 1980), 7–104.
28 For the call to explore individual working lives as a necessary corrective to hasty conclusions about the erosion of the collective identity of the French working-class in the 1980s, see Weber, Florence, ‘Nouvelles lectures du monde ouvrier: de la classe aux personnes’, Genèses, 6 (1991), 179–89Google Scholar. Predating this assessment, François Bon's Sortie d'usine – a novel published in 1982 – plunged the reader into the quotidian of a single metalworker, days passing by ‘sans particulier ni mémoire’, meaningful work debased to mere emploi. The achievements of Perrot's exploration of the life of Lucie Baud (1870–1931) – worker, feminist and trade-union militant – offered the model for Zancarini-Fournel's vignettes; Michelle Perrot, Mélancolie ouvrière (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2012). Noiriel himself is no stranger to this historiography. Yet neither the narrative technique nor the epistemology informing his investigation of the lives of Raphael – former slave and domestic worker turned comedian in the Paris of the Belle Époque – make it into the book here under review; Gérard Noiriel, Chocolat. La véritable histoire d'un homme sans nom (Paris: Bayard, 2016).
29 Todd, Selina, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London: John Murray, 2015), 1Google Scholar.
30 This assessment extends to the post-1945 epoch as well. Once removed from government in 1947, the PCF, according to Noiriel, assumed not only its fonction tribunicienne down to Mitterrand's victory in 1981 but it also helped integrate the postwar wave of immigrant workers.
31 Philip Nord, France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
32 Some examples, including the transformation of agriculture, are introduced through Georges Rouquier's twin documentaries, Farrebique (1946) and Biquefarre (1983); the segmentation of the labour market established by the Parodi-Croizat system is gleaned through Martine Sonnet's reconstruction of her father's social trajectory in Atelier 62; domestic exploitation, migrant work, sexual oppression and the habit of large working-class families to spend family allowance money on acquiring household appliances are all topics explored in Christiane Rochefort's 1961 novel Les Petits Enfants du siècle; new practices of popular leisure are immortalised in Fernand Léger's Partie de campagne (1954); finally, the centrality of the Algerian war for any biography of the mid-century is revealed through Annie Ernaux's Les Années (2008).
33 This description, however, is too vague to serve as a new periodisation of postwar French history. More recently, Chapman proposed to recast the epoch stretching from Liberation to the Evian Accords as the ‘long reconstruction’, not entirely overlapping with the trente glorieuses, but still taking away half of its glamour; Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
34 Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, ‘Généalogie de l'intégration des categories de classe, genre, race dans la discipline historique hexagonale’, 20 & 21. Revue d'histoire, 2, 146 (2020), 27.
35 For an up-to-date exploration of this public sphere in the age of the round-the-clock news channel, and an indictment of the country's most notorious Islamophobe, see Gérard Noiriel, Le venin dans la plume. Édouard Drumont, Éric Zemmour et la part sombre de la République (Paris: La Découverte, 2019).
36 Most recently by Emile Chabal, France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 161–7.
37 Gérard Noiriel, Les Gilets jaunes à la lumière de l'histoire. Dialogue avec Nicolas Truong (La Tour-d'Aigues: Le Monde/Éditions de l'aube, 2019), 52.
38 Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, ‘Le movement des “gilets jaunes” favorise la cohesion intergénérationnelle des milieux populaires’, Le Monde, 10 Dec. 2018.
39 For an assessment of Noiriel's pioneering Le creuset française (1988) along these lines, see Chabal, Emile, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 83–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.