Traveling lessons: Norbert Truquin’s Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaire

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Bettina Lerner is the author of Inventing the Popular (Routledge 2018). Her research focuses on popular culture in nineteenth-century France. She teaches at The City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Notes

1 First published in 1888, Truquin’s memoir was reedited in 2006 with a shortened title, Mémoires d’un prolétaire. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2 According to Mark Traugott, around forty such memoirs penned by nineteenth-century French workers are extant (1993, 33); he has anthologized translated excerpts of several of these autobiographies, including chapters from Truquin’s Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaires, in The French Worker (2006, 250–308).

3 The bookstore was called La Librairie des deux-mondes. Perrot notes that his journal, La Tribune des peuples: revue internationale du mouvement social dans les cinq parties du monde, showed “libertarian tendencies” (1986, 297, n.1). Bouriand also published Un Programme social (1887) by Frédéric Tufferd, a socialist living in New York and a regular contributor to La Revue socialiste. Tufferd is mentioned in passing as a member of the International Association in the United States, a group mainly composed of French exiles adhering to various different kinds of radical, utopian and socialist thought (Bernstein 1962, 9–10).

4 I use the terms “memoir” and “autobiography” interchangeably since, as even the earliest theorists of autobiography have long since noted, the distinction between the two is often blurry at best. Roy Pascal’s attempt to distinguish between “autobiography proper,” in which “attention is focused on the self” and memoir, where the focus is turned on others, proves of little help in reading Truquin: while Truquin’s Mémoires do focus on people and events external to himself (and, in particular, a careful accounting of wages, cost of living, etc), his attention also often turns inward, thus constructing what Pascal would define as an autobiographical “shaping of the past” that “imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story” (Pascal 1960, 5, 9).

5 Compared to England, where working-class autobiography flourished in the nineteenth century, French workers were evidently more reluctant or restricted when it came to publishing accounts of their lives. In The Autobiography of the Working Class, John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent provide an annotated list of around 800 autobiographies written by British authors born before 1895 who identified as working-class. Traugott puts the number French examples published during the nineteenth century at only 40 (1984, 33).

6 Le L. du compagnonnage, to which Perdiguier refers to in the title to his Biographie, was first published in 1839 as a manual and manifesto intended for other journeymen that included both traditional and original songs, chapters explaining key principles of geometry and arithmetic as well as narrative parables calling for the end of the brawls and violence associated with competition between rival journeymen’s associations known as devoirs. Perdiguier’s manual became a surprise hit among social romantic writers including George Sand and Eugène Sue who praised its pacifist message. For more on Perdiguier’s works in relation to social romanticism see Lerner 2018.

7 As Michelle Perrot puts it, “at the end of his apprenticeship, Truquin was acquainted with a number of occupations but he did not identify with any of them” (2006, 307).

8 William Sewell affirms that by the 1830s the Lyonnais canuts were “the most intellectually and organizationally advanced of all workers” (1983, 18).

9 Marx writes in Grundrisse “Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself” (1973, 173). See also Harvey 2018, 78.

10 As Harvey argues, “it would be very unlike Marx to formulate a key concept such as value without incorporating within it the possibility for its negation” (2018, 72).

11 The majority of these immigrants came from Italy, followed by Spain and Portugal. The fourth-largest group hailed from France, making up around 4% of migrants who arrived in Argentina between 1856 and 1924. See Mörner 1985, 56.

12 In this regard Truquin’s account is worth comparing to Suzanne Voilquin’s Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple, ou la saint-simonienne en Egypte (1978). One of the few female working-class memoirists from this century, Voilquin was also an avid traveler who wrote about her experiences in Egypt, the United States and Russia.

13 As Goebel explains, it was not after 1900 that the gaucho was slowly transformed into a key figure of Argentine national identity (2017, 145).