What do the reports of galley slaves say? XVIIIᵉ century on the judicial and police institution, which describes and classifies dangerous faces ? By comparing administrative archives and personal notes, Arlette Farge shows a story where the identification of bodies also engages the emotion and perspective of the historian.
Historian of the social world, having always taken a particular look at the phenomena of delinquency and crime, Arlette Farge continues her writing work, always with a personal tone, by showing the galley slaves of the XVIIIe century – not as we can imagine them, but as repressive institutions described them. A dive into the archives – those of Arlette Farge as well as those of the monarchy of XVIIIe century – highlights the games of gaze and identification specific to French society of the Age of Enlightenment, but also at work in the work of the historian.
Archival archives
The work, small in format and almost without critical apparatus, does not offer a new history of the galley slaves, these men who were condemned by the courts to a sentence of “ galley » in Marseille and who had to cross France in chains to serve their sentence. It compares the archives of a historian, Arlette Farge, and the archives still preserved today which make it possible to study galley slaves under the Ancien Régime. For this reason, the book does not dwell on their background, their social origins or the reasons for their conviction. The sole reference to the work of André Zysberg should allow the interested reader to find a comprehensive study of these aspects.
Arlette Farge’s remarks here focus on a parallel established between two archival sets. On the one hand, archives classically used by historiansborns, namely a register kept by a concierge of the Château de la Tour Saint-Bernard, where the convicts were locked up, and a register of “ reports of released or escaped convicts “. And on the other hand the notes of Arlette Farge herself, which constitute her archives. The confrontation allows the historian to bring out a more personal part of her work, and this is undoubtedly where the interest of the book lies.
They wrote their faces is thus composed of three parts. In the first, Arlette Farge evokes, by interweaving them, the galley slaves, the question of identification and the passage from description to the construction of “ types » dangerous social conditions, and the emotions which have run through and still run through the historian when reading these/her archives. In the second part, the collection director, Karelle Ménine, explains the editorial project, which consists of “ lean towards the little-heard voices of history » and, for this, to give voice to those who have studied, throughout their career, forgotten themes, while explaining their relationship to their “ archival archives » (p. 75). This ambition determines the third part, which is made up of archive photographs, both those of the administrations mentioned above, and those of Arlette Farge, in which we can see fleetingly and without comment what type of transcription the historian carried out a long time ago. Arlette Farge thus shows how, throughout her career, she copied in full and by hand the archives she consulted, in order, in a certain way, to take them home, in a “ carnal gesture » (p. 17) with a view to diving into it.
Paper beings
The emotional part is therefore essential in They wrote their facesby a dosage between the emotions specific to the Age of Enlightenment and those of Arlette Farge. Despite the repetitive, monotonous and without apparent diversity of the descriptions written at the time, the historian, through the interweaving of her favorite themes, highlights the specificities of the gaze. This concerns what distinguishes individuals, in particular the nose, facial anomalies (scars) and the ailments of which they were the expression (illnesses, blows, etc.). The gendered dimension is obviously present since Arlette Farge recalls how the description of eyes mattered then, in different areas, to describe women, which we find much less in the descriptions of convicts.
Thus appears the mutation of the gaze, which occurs at XVIIIe century, and more precisely the effort made to describe the “ unspeakable » which we mark socially with the seal of dangerousness. This dangerousness is doubly inscribed in the bodies, first of all through the characterization of “ types » dangerous which the descriptions account for, and on the very bodies of the condemned, in particular the galley slaves, marked in their flesh by the power (by the letter G). These convicts are then rejected from humanity, both by the marked difference with the descriptions of women (both objects of suspicion and desire), and by their reduction to a dangerous body. These “ paper beings » (p. 50) are in reality a gateway into the work of Arlette Farge.
Historian emotion
Whether in the small books composed since the 2000s, or in the more academic works of the first part of her career, a real thematic continuity shines through in Arlette Farge’s work. However, They wrote their faces wishes to give an even more explicit role to the emotions of the historian, which is the very purpose of the collection. However, we cannot say that Arlette Farge wrote while absent from her books, and this since a quasi-programmatic text, published in 1979 in The story without quality. She already announced her attention to the people, women, and her desire to “ convey both pleasure and pain, life and death “.
This ambition is pursued until They wrote their facessince Arlette Farge once again works to restore forgotten lives in order to bring them out of invisibility and indifference (p. 18). The reopening of the file devoted to galley slaves, which she had already mentioned elsewhere, allows her to see, as the administration saw them, their faces. This vision gives him the opportunity to grasp and feel the face-to-face between brutality and humanity, and to once again hear the “ so-called “small” words “. Echoing his books on objects or material elements preserved in archives, the theme of the faces of the galley slaves allows him to reconnect with some essential and structuring elements of his work.
The story of Arlette Farge
In They wrote their faces as in all her work, Arlette Farge wants to transmit. The editors of the convict lists, the clerks of the police commissioners or Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of the famous Paris painting that she summons in all her writings, are so many smugglers who, through their papers which have become archives, allow the historian to “ to transmit » a past reality composed of words whose meaning differs. His work therefore consists of reconstituting this reality, interpreting it and showing this sensitive experience of otherness. Arlette Farge has never hidden the emotion that the archive could arouse in her, like Michel Foucault or, more recently, Philippe Artières for whom The Taste of the Archive constituted a moment of rupture and transgression of a prohibition. Arlette Farge thus reaffirms enriching her questions with this emotional expressiveness which is not a “ parasite of rationality “, but on the contrary a new way of considering the otherness of the past through a “ sensitive act in a universe shaped much differently than ours » (p. 70).
Overall, this little book completes the sensualist work of historian Arlette Farge. In fact, she summoned all the senses to shape her work. To the daily touch of the archives, she added the rediscovery of noise, taste, the olfactory apprehension of the city and, in this last little opusfocused his attention on the visual sensation, with reference to the work of Georges Didi-Huberman and the sensualist texts of Diderot. The novelty seems to be for her to include her emotions more frankly not in the work of defining her objects of study, marked by an empathy towards the forgottenes of History and the people, but in the work of interpretation which fully embraces a reflective form of writing history.
They wrote their faces therefore completes the ego-history work of Arlette Farge who, in all her writings on people or mundane things, has never stopped including their emotions, their senses and their reflections to enrich the understanding of the past and transmit its passion for acting in the present. His work is as such the symbol of an era which marked an inflection, even a turning point. A generation of researchers has in fact taken an interest in collective actors, refined and nuanced their knowledge. To do this, it combined, through the reflective approach, the methodical (and objective) dimension ?) of historical science, and the subjectivist dimension of an era of emancipation and promotion of individual affects inscribed in the process of individuation of the social world. In this respect, Arlette Farge’s work fully echoes the Age of Enlightenment, the century of liberalism.