Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the 19th Century

by Louis Chevalier, Frank Jellinek (Translator)

The description for this book, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the 19th Century, will be forthcoming.

Genres: History, France, 19th Century, European History

505 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1958

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1958 book is seminal for anyone studying 19th century Paris. Any subsequent work of social history focused on Paris, whether having to do with urban design, urban hygiene, prostitution, criminology, or social classes, will rely heavily on it. What's so great about Chevalier's book is that he is equally devoted on the one hand to statistical and demographic evidence, and on the other to the literary descriptive evidence of the era's novelists: Eugene Sue, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Daudet. I read it alongside Zola's L'Assommoir, and it was as if the two books had the same DNA. The laundresses and roofers in L'Assommoir populate Laboring Classes; the illegitimate babies, the muck in the streets, the poverty, the overcrowding, the gritty day-to-day struggle to pay rent, buy groceries, keep your clothes clean and mended, flowed seamlessly from the novel to the history and vice versa. Here's a passage from Chevalier (p. 45) which could just as easily been written by Zola:

In these years Paris looked around and was unable to recognize itself. Another, larger city had overflowed into the unaltered framework of streets, mansions, houses and passageways, piling man on man and trade on trade, filling every nook and corner, making over the older dwellings of the nobility and gentry into workshops and lodging houses, erecting factories and stockpiles in gardens and courts where carriages had been moldering quietly away, packing the suddenly shrunken streets and the now overpopulated gothic graveyards, too, resurrecting and overloading the forgotten sewers, spreading litter and stench even into the adjacent countryside and besmirching the lovely sky of the Ile-de-France with the vast and universal exhalation recorded in medical topographies and official reports. (p. 45)

And here Chevalier explains why the novels are so important to his historiography:

Novels, street ballads and melodramas - or at any rate, the most popular of them - all document this lower-class civilization; but, even more importantly, they actually are the lower-class civilization which they reconstitute so accurately. They transmit a forgotten record, a kind of musical score, as it were, of contemporary beliefs and ideas which formal history seems to have left lying by the wayside or perhaps can no longer decipher; without them we would only be able to get at those beliefs and ideas indirectly by way of descriptions, analyses and eyewitness evidence. (p. 401)

Companion reads could be:

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France
The Mysteries of Paris

[Sarah C · Rating 1 out of 5]

Chevelier tends to write in incomplete sentances and assume that the reader has much more background information then at least with me was the case.