According to the historian Deborah Cohen, the elites of XVIIIe century would have characterized the people by a set of features “ natural ». She confronts this discourse implicated in the middle of the century with the way in which the people represent themselves. The proposed journey raises interesting method questions.
In tales, if a peasant is beautiful, it is necessarily a forgotten, hidden, lost princess. In the speech of the elites at the beginning of XVIIIe Century, the people was characterized by a nature, a set of qualities of order not only physical but also emotional, behavioral, cognitive. Resuming a Foucauldian term, Deborah Cohen talks about a episteme naturalizing, which constitutes the base of a system of order and discourse. Before tackling the questions raised by his methodological choices, let us summarize the main features of his thesis.
We are what we were born
The gaze on the people remains trapped in prior knowledge on a social world populated by essences, where the divisions of the social reflect an order wanted by God. Poverty cannot have a social but only natural cause: biological cause for real poor, crippled, abandoned and old blind children, psychological cause for false poor simulators, lazy or corrupt spirit. All social mobility is suspect. If in the novel by Marivaux, Marianne manages to climb over the mediocre environment where she grew up, it is because she is in fact of noble origin and had immediately equipped qualities specific to her class: “ It has to be in the blood ». No subjectivity either in the people but “ only masses, groups, aggregates, most often in riot (P. 51).
Behind the people, individuals ?
Around the middle of the century, a growing taste for observation, linked to the new sensualist philosophy which bases all knowledge of the senses, makes this look evolve on the people, where we see emerging individuals. While a Castillon, winner of the Berlin Academy competition in 1780, said that we should call people “ all those who left their reason in fallow (P. 91), whatever their social origin, literature ofexempla Exalt, in the line of emerging sentimentalism, emotion in the face of real individuals. In their more theoretical vision, the physiocrats stand out from the moralist condemnation of a people who should his poverty to his natural inclination to laziness to prefer a purely functional definition: the people are the one who consumes, produces, pays Tax.
But the author shows the ambiguity of this evolution. In the literature ofexemplapopular individuals are “ glorified against the background of contempt (P. 119): they are all the more virtuous since they evolve in a fundamentally corrupt environment. When riots broke out in the 1770s against the laws of liberalization of the grain trade which they had advocated, the physiocrats see the spectrum of an ignorant multitude resurface.
How does the people represent themselves ?
Faced with this discourse of the elites, how do the people represent themselves ? The author occupies a median position between the vision of a people who have internalized the norms of the dominant discourse and the vision of a resistant people.
The people conceive as hard as the elites social mobility, the poor enriched manifesting their discomfort when they multiply in the stories of their own journey the excessive marks of modesty, the wonderful explanations. Rather than seeking in hidden places far from the justice of the Châtelet words of resistance, as James Scott suggests, according to Déborah Cohen must be emphasized the absence of a discursive configuration making possible a political word in the people, A linguistic and intellectual tools allowing the articulation of a general -reaching discourse.
However, there are various ways to resist or be out of step in relation to the dominant discourse. In the absence of an articulated political word, popular voices are expressed from the bottom of their fragility in the “ misdire (Arlette Farge) through the anecdote, the popular story, the rumor. Above all, the people are distinguished from the naturalizing discourse of the elites by a “ pragmatic culture Linked to the precariousness of life (in terms of profession, migration, income, meetings), where interactions between people can only exist in a probabilistic and fluctuating framework. We drink easily with strangers, we offer them hospitality without being wary too much, we easily pass on a package menu. In the events of theft, the recovery of the stolen object has more than the recognition of the guilt of the thief, and we rarely go so far as to file a complaint, even if this repair justice regresses during the century with development of the inquisitory procedure, which moves the cursor to the culprit to punish.
Method issues
The most original passage of the book is undoubtedly “ interlude That the author proposes in the fourth chapter, which claims to be as non -scientific. She makes a parallel with our time when we are witnessing a “ Renaturalization of the people “, Particularly in the stigma of certain groups in media discourse: assimilation of the suburbs to a zoo, praised against the backdrop of contempt for the” Arabic who succeeded », Which recalls the ambiguous vision of exempla of XVIIIe century. Note that this is only a parallel, the work not covering the XIXe And XXe centuries, contrary to what the title (XVIIIe–XXIe centuries) might suggest.
We can only delight the attention paid to popular bodies and voices. Crusted body and abrupt gestures, voice characterized by brutality in tone and the way of speaking are embodied in stereotypes like the fish (fish merchants), earthy figures of the theater of the same name.
By this anthropological sensitivity and by its use of the Parisian judicial archives, Déborah Cohen is part of the continuity of the work of Arlette Farge. Nevertheless, the angle of attack she chooses is somewhat different since it is above all a question of seeing how the practices echo or not to the speeches of the elites on the people. This primacy granted to discourse is justified according to her by the fact that, to interpret practices, we need to understand “ What social logic they fall under (P. 11) and that it is in the text that we are most likely to find this logic. The observation of real practices only intervenes in a second step, to see if they diverge or not from the general conception that the text represents. In this mirror game between discourse and practices, Deborah Cohen also chooses to leave aside an area it is true gigantic and studied by other historians: the extremely complex reality of the social hierarchy of an old regime.
The author’s desire to rebuild a epistemeTHE “ base of a system of order of discourse and thought (P. 161) asks a fundamental methodological question. This method borrowed from Michel Foucault has often been criticized in this author because it does not suppose in an explicit principle of selection of texts. Déborah Cohen does not want to be limited to a pre-established study field and refuses to define the concept of people beforehand, preferring to leave “ Themes and words trace themselves the space of their relevance (P. 10). Should not at least distinguish, starting from the Latin equivalents of the term, a social definition (fullthe lower part of society) and a political-legal definition of the people (populusall men living in the same country, governed by common institutions) ? One wonders if this lack of definition does not pass the author next to certain important aspects of the concept of people, especially in its political sense. It thus devotes only half a page (p. 150) to the debate, however capital at the XVIIIe century, on the sovereignty of the people – direct expression of the general will in Rousseau, English model at Voltaire or Montesquieu etc.
The fields of the speech on which Deborah Cohen chooses to concentrate (literature ofexemplapolitical economy) are however treated very convincingly and very detailed. It shows how the issues of the notion of people are transformed according to the challenges specific to the fields studied. Déborah Cohen makes a fascinating contribution to a prehistory of the human and social sciences by raising the debate, promised to a bright future, between the proponents of a hard science supported on abstract and mathemal models like the physiocrats, and their adversaries who reproach to reason “ by a deluge of x and y », Without taking into account passions, and advocate a practical science, empiricist, inspired by medicine or history. Through this story of the gaze on the people, Deborah Cohen gives us a study on several levels of reading: mirror game between the discourse of the elites and popular practices, prehistory of social sciences, militant and controversial work finally, which dares the parallel Between the people of XVIIIe century and young people in the suburbs, between the abstraction of physiocratic science and indifference to the concrete realities of neo-liberal doctrine (p. 244).