Martyn Lyons

Love Letters and Writing Practices: On Écritures Intimes in the Nineteenth Century:

Recent approaches to the history of nineteenth-century writing focus not on the contents of intimate writing but rather on letters as cultural artifacts. What is important is what their existence tells us about the act of writing as a cultural practice and about what writing meant to those who practiced it. Personal writings are highly coded forms, obeying generally accepted conventions and applying and adapting unspoken formulas. Using examples from France and Australasia, this article suggests the need to unravel the social grammar of private writings in the cultural exchanges of the nineteenth-century middle classes.

A new history from below?: The writing culture of ordinary people in Europe

The ‘Old History From Below’ was dominated by two influential historiographical schools: the French Annales school and the British Marxists. Both tended to view the subordinate classes in collective and anonymous terms, analysing collective activism or collective mentalities. The ‘New History from Below’ is distinctive because it is based on writings from the grassroots and because it focuses on individual experiences of historical change. We can locate the voices of the forgotten and uneducated in the modern period by analysing the explosion of lower-class writings brought about by mass emigration from Europe and World War I. As a result of these events, ordinary people started to write, in order to re-assert their individuality in a changing and unstable world. Theirs was a writing of absence and desire - the desire to return to one’s loved ones, to familiar surroundings and to the stable co-ordinates of a world which was irretrievably disappearing. This article was Martyn Lyons’ retiring presidential address to the AHA conference, ‘(Re)Viewing History’, Perth, July 2010.

The Power of the Scribe: Delegated Writing in Modern Europe

Although historians of modern literacy acknowledge the presence of ‘scribes’, they leave several questions unanswered: Who had recourse to ‘scribes’? For what specific purposes did delegated writing take place? Who were the ‘scribes’? What was their relationship with authors? In offering some answers, I draw on what we already know about delegated writing in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe, supplemented by original research on the writing of ordinary people in the First World War and in the age of mass migration. In identifying the main types of delegated writing – namely, the local notable, the family member or close colleague and the professional writer – I stress the power of the writer. Delegated writing was not a mechanical process of dictation, but a collaborative project, in which the ‘scribe’ deployed stock phrases, censored and gave advice. Calling on a ‘scribe’ inevitably implied a partial surrender of authorial autonomy. In conclusion, I outline ways in which the ‘scribe’ has made a comeback since the late twentieth century.

The end of the annales? Some thoughts on the so‐called death of the French historical school

(1996). The end of the annales? Some thoughts on the so‐called death of the French historical school. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 8-13.

The 9 Thermidor: Motives and Effects

For generations of French historians, and for generations of syllabus-setters in English universities, the French Revolution ended on 9 Thermidor II. French history then went through an embarrassing hiatus, only to resume again with Bonaparte’s seizure of power on 18 Brumaire VIII. It is not my purpose here to try to fill this gap, but merely to suggest that in regarding 9 Thermidor as the end of the Revolution, we have taken for granted an interpretation of the Revolution which has perhaps overstated the role of Robespierre and the Terror. The elements of continuity which link the various stages of the history of the First Republic need re-emphasising.l Orthodox French historiography has seen 9 Thermidor as a break in

The Future of the History of Writing

This concluding chapter underlines two themes of the book: the importance of the materiality of writing, and that of the power relationships in which it is embedded. The chapter’s main purpose, however, is to point the way forward to a future research agenda, concentrating on the history of correspondence and postal services, on sites of writing (the street, the prison, the ship) and on the field of historical socio-linguistics.

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into womens lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim ...

The New Readers of Nineteenth-Century France

On the eve of the French Revolution under half (47 per cent) of the male population of France, and about 27 per cent of French women, could read. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, functional literacy had become almost universal for both French men and women.1 The statistics of literacy, based on the ability to sign one’s name on a formal document, are only one way of measuring the enormous expansion of the reading public experienced by French society between the July Monarchy and the First World War. This expansion, as we shall see, was underpinned especially in its later stages by changes in the provision of primary schooling. It was supported by technological changes which revolutionized the production of print culture, especially the production of cheap fiction and the newspaper press. A mass culture of print was emerging, in which new categories of readers became consumers of print for the first time, and in which publishing strategies evolved to exploit new clienteles.

The Audience for Romanticism: Walter Scott in France, 1815-51

The French audience for literary romanticism has usually been assumed rather than proved. The array of literary talent that emerged in France in the 1820s and 1830s, with the young Hugo, De Vigny, Lamartine and De Musset, has been crowned by posterity as representative of an ’Age of Romanticism’. Perhaps this title has been too easily earned. The precise extent of the popularity of these illustrious authors amongst their contemporary audiences remains too often a question of guesswork. It is difficult, of course, for the historian to measure exactly the readership of any author. The success of one or two individual works, such as Lamennais’ Paroles d’un Croyant, is very often quoted,’ but we need to know more, from publishing records and histories, about the reception of literary romanticism by the mass of French popular readers. Much of the evidence for the commercial success of romantic authors is indirect and circumstantial. James Smith Allen believed that the prosperity of the publishers Ladvocat and Renduel made it clear that romantic literature was good business In addition, the vogue for romantic literature in France in the 1820s and the 1830s coincided with the expansion and commercialization of the whole book trade. The expansion of the French reading public in the early nineteenth century, from which romanticism benefited, was the product of several interconnected factors. Rising literacy rates gradually increased and democratized potential readership, while the decline of patois and the spread of the French language in the provinces helped to develop a nationwide market for cheap popular fiction.’ The introduction of new, mechanized printing processes enabled first the press, and then the book trade, to print faster and in greater quantities, to take advantage of expanding opportunities.

The Jacobin Elite of Toulouse

as a collective group, and as a popular movement. This study is concerned to widen discussion geographically, by looking at the Jacobin leadership in one provincial town, Toulouse, and it attempts at the same time to alter the focus of discussion. The social background of a group of militants will be analysed to determine the complex motives which turned them into militants, but they will be analysed individually rather than collectively, in the belief that neither their professional status, nor the rhetoric of political orthodoxy, can adequately explain their revolutionary commitment. The source of this commitment lay instead in their particular personal experience, conditioned of necessity by the environment in which they lived. Before looking at the Jacobins in more detail, however, and examining the nature of the individual’s commitment to Jacobinism, their immediate environment, the city of Toulouse, must first be briefly described. Toulouse achieved a notoriety in eighteenth-century France which few towns have since equalled. The attacks of Voltaire, and the Calas affair, made Toulouse a byword for intolerance and religious prejudice.