Madeleine Rebérioux’s work will no longer suffer from its dispersion. A rich anthology brings together some forty of her texts, including a series of little-known contributions on literature and the arts, which show how this specialist in the long XIXe century has been able to reconcile social and cultural history.
This large volume, published a little over 10 years after the death of Madeleine Rebérioux (1920-2005), allows us to (re)discover the work of this historian of the left, engaged in the life of the city. Director of the scientific journal The Social Movement From 1971 to 1982, professor at the University of Vincennes (now the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis) which she helped to found, she chaired the Society of Jaurèsian Studies from 1982 until her death and actively participated in the Dictionary of the French workers’ movement launched by Jean Maitron.
An intellectual activist
In their presentation of For history to live onGilles Candar, Vincent Duclert and Marion Fontaine rightly point out that Madeleine Rebérioux had a “complete academic career at a time when women’s access to higher education remained an exception” (p. 10), although her career path can be compared to that of another historian of labor and workers: Rolande Trempé. M. Rebérioux’s activity was never limited to teaching and research. A trade unionist, she was involved in the Algerian War and chaired the Human Rights League from 1991 to 1995. A specialist in socialism, she was also very interested in cultural history and was vice-president of the Musée d’Orsay between 1981 and 1987. Within the academy and outside, M. Rebérioux never stopped campaigning; She valued collective work (conferences, collaborations, writing of numerous accompanying texts) and ensured that an open body of work was built, combining scholarly work with general lectures and popular works that are still a reference. She certainly did not publish the “great” biography of Jaurès that many expected, but her Jaurès: Words and Actionspublished in the “Découvertes” collection by Gallimard in 1994, remains one of the best introductions to the work of the great tribune.
Socialisms
Collecting texts by Madeleine Rebérioux, which are sometimes difficult to find, is an initiative that is all the more salutary because she preferred the short format – the article, the intervention text, the paper for a conference or a collective volume, the critical report – to writing books. The forty or so contributions gathered here allow us to better understand the paths opened up by this historian with a diverse and original work. Above all, we are confronted with a very free writing whose style provides a real pleasure to read.
The book is organized into 3 main parts, the titles of which were chosen by the author herself before her death: “Committed Journeys in Contemporary France”; “The Republic of Rights”; “Shared Arts and Culture”. The first two have already been published, the third is unpublished in the grouping of the proposed texts (and the introduction by Pierre Georgel who presents it).
The volume first brings together texts devoted to socialism, Jaurès and workers. Far from any epistemological proclamation, we see Madeleine Rebérioux move from the individual to the collective, from the local to the international, and tackle subjects rarely addressed at the time she wrote: history of reformism, history of women, history of health at work. It is therefore a non-ideological history of socialism, very open to little-known archival funds and printed sources (such as the journal of a group of socialist peasants living in Saône-et-Loire in 1905-1906 or The Socialist Encyclopedia de Compère-Morel) and several of whose texts remain relevant in the face of developments in historiography (those on Albert Thomas, on George Sand and Flora Tristan or on the trade union movement and health in France between 1880 and 1914, for example).
Madeleine Rebérioux’s texts on Jaurès have been published over nearly 40 years. While some of the themes on his subject are fairly classic and marked by the debates of the 1960s and 1970s (his relationship to Marxism, the nation, the party, the proletariat), the articles on Jaurès faced with the “problem of industrial growth at the beginning of the XXe century” or on his involvement in the Dreyfus affair remain very current.
Places of memory of the French left
The collection of studies entitled “The Republic of Rights” devotes a large part to the Dreyfus Affair, a crucial moment for the Republic still in formation, which so fascinated the historian. M. Rebérioux is interested in the involvement of historians in the Affair and does not hesitate to explain in the first person the founding character of this crisis for republicans and defenders of human rights:
The Affair has not run its course. The moral choice, the exaltation of the first Dreyfusards – one was born anti-Dreyfusard through love of the Army and Order, one became Dreyfusard – have not ceased to touch us. Periodically, the Republic draws its strength from the Affair. (p. 412-413)
The volume also republishes the important contribution on the wall of the Fédérés given by Madeleine Rebérioux to the collective of Places of memory led by Pierre Nora, and published in 1981 in the first volume of the series. It traces the history of this part of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, and studies with finesse the evolutions of the militant memory attached to it, from the Commune (which saw its last hopes die there) to November 14, 1983, when the wall was classified as a historic monument. The part ends with a text returning to the confrontation of the Second International with the colonial question, in a few penetrating pages which restore well the scale of the debates carried by socialism on a global scale at the turn of the XIXe And XXe centuries, avoiding the belief that the theoretical and political debates of the International only concerned Europe.
A social history of culture
But it is probably the last part of the volume that may surprise the reader the most, as Madeleine Rebérioux’s reflection on the arts and culture has sometimes been somewhat forgotten. The first texts proposed deal with the history of intellectuals, to which the author often returned, while maintaining a questioning marked by social history. Different approaches therefore echo each other in her research, as in this text on the links (and oppositions!) between the aesthetic avant-garde and the political avant-garde in French socialist and socialist circles between 1890 and 1914 or this other one, on literary criticism and socialism (where we find Jaurès, of course). Crossing the history of the arts and the history of work, M. Rebérioux also writes on the representations of the worker in art and literature.
The latest texts collected in a subsection “Art and Society” are particularly interesting and deserve to be read by both “generalist” historians and aesthetics specialists. The first, written for an exhibition catalogue, concerns “these young ladies” of Avignon, in reference to the famous painting by Picasso dating from 1907. Without calling into question the achievements of in-depth research in the history of art, Madeleine Rebérioux opens up a rich complementary avenue of analysis on the question of the “venereal peril”. Originally published in The Debate In 1987, the article “Orsay, another XIXe century. History in the museum” is of a different register. Written with a lively pen, this text hides nothing of the lively controversies that surrounded the beginnings of the Musée d’Orsay, where Mr. Rebérioux played a certain role. The article would doubtless still be debated by certain museum curators… In any case, in terms of the writing of history, we remember a sentence that sums up part of his approach:
the future lies in cultural history grasped in its social dimensions. (p. 685)
A moving and fair postface is given by Michelle Perrot, who recalls some of the experiences shared with Madeleine Rebérioux, the most famous of which undoubtedly remains the collection of sources during May-68, which gave rise in the autumn of the same year to an issue of the Mouvement social: “La Sorbonne par elle-même. Mai-juin 1968”.
The wealth of archives deposited by Madeleine Rebérioux’s family (largely at the Musée de l’histoire vivante de Montreuil) has already allowed several historical studies, including a thesis in English. This militant and scientific work deserves to be discovered or reread, and we can be pleased that new generations of academics find there objects of reflection and debate. Mixing erudite rigor and a taste for writing, all informed by a political commitment, Madeleine Rebérioux’s texts have for the most part “aged” remarkably. They remind us that beyond the effects of historiographical fashion, research work of this type allows us to better understand our contemporary world. At a time when the French left is questioning itself, not without difficulty, about its projects and even its futures, the detour through history is not superfluous, and Madeleine Rebérioux remains an enthusiastic guide.