Proletarian Nights

The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France

Jacques Rancière

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677788
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689608
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: French History

Proletarian Nights, previously published in English as Nights of Labor and one of Ranci?re's most important works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Ranci?re reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor.
This updated edition includes a new preface by the author, revisiting the work twenty years since its first publication in France.

Part I

The Man in the Leather Apron

It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron, although there certainly is nothing ignoble about that calling. Far from it! From the anvil come the warrior’s sword that defends the liberty of peoples and the plowshare that feeds them. Great artists have caught the ample, manly poetry of our bronzed faces and our robust limbs, sometimes rendering it with great felicity and energy: our illustrious Charlet, above all, when he sets the leather apron alongside the grenadier’s uniform and tells us: “The common people are the army.”

—Jérôme-Pierre Gilland

CHAPTER 1

The Gate of Hell

You ask me what my life is like right now. It’s pretty much the same as always. At the moment I look at myself and weep. Forgive me this bout of puerile vanity. It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron.¹

IN THIS MONTH OF SEPTEMBER 1841, La Ruche populaire presents its usual face. The article on apprenticeship, bizarrely titled in Gothic letters, offers us another sigh of complaint rather than a documented study. That approach certainly fits in with the stated aim of a monthly that proposes to be “the mirror of this person’s thoughts and that person’s feelings, with no literary consistency or coherence; a modest album of the poor and a simple review of the needs and realities of the workshop.”² It may have succeeded only too well in that effort. The publishers of L’Atelier, a rival organ of the “moral and material interests” of workers, saw in this vaunted “hive” of the laborer a noisy Babel of vain murmurings and groans and dreams without substance or consistency.

This time around, however, we might well have had reason to expect something different. The article is signed “Gilland, worker locksmith,” and we are surprised right away to find such a complaint issuing from a member of the privileged corporation that stretches from the ancient nobility of smiths to the modern aristocracy of metal fitters. Moreover, Jérôme-Pierre Gilland is not one of those occasional writers who bequeathed to posterity only a few pieces of verse or a few summary thoughts, thus testifying to an impotent desire to swap their work tools for the writer’s pen. A worker—writer for whom George Sand wrote a preface and a deputy in the Second Republic, Gilland symbolizes the entrance of working-class representatives into the realms of politics and culture and their continuing loyalty to their fellow workers. This son-in-law of a weaver—poet who spent his whole life at his craft will make it a point of personal honor, after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, to pick up his locksmith’s tools again and go back to earning his living as a laborer.

Should we attribute much importance to the youthful disclosure of a man who would soon play the role of a worker Cincinnatus? He is not speaking here in his own name, after all; and in such “fragments of private correspondence,” which we come across in La Ruche and even the austere Fraternité, we find a common practice. After the writer has given way to the vagabond thoughts of his double or his demon, the worker—moralist takes over to affirm the virtues of work and the dignity of the worker. Our imaginary correspondent in this case is no different:

It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron, although there certainly is nothing ignoble about that calling. Far from it! From the anvil come the warrior’s sword that defends the liberty of peoples and the plowshare that feeds them. Great artists have caught the ample, manly poetry of our bronzed faces and our robust limbs, sometimes rendering it with great felicity and energy: our illustrious Charlet, above all, when he sets the leather apron alongside the grenadier’s uniform and tells us: “The common people are the army.”

As you can see, I know how to appreciate my craft …³

So everything is put right again. The depicted virtues of forged metal would quickly return the straying fancies of laborers to their assigned furrows as workers or soldiers in the national ideology. But how certain is the value of the image designed to keep the smith at his anvil if it must unsettle the order of the Platonic Republic, which subordinates the skill of the smith to that of the soldier only by excluding the illusionists who paint bridles, bits, and smiths without knowing anything about either of the two crafts?

The risk is not where we might first fear it to be: that is, in the arrogance aroused by such heroic images of the worker’s strength. What worker, especially one a bit enamored of engravings, would openly brag of his robust limbs or his bronzed face in an age when delicacy of joint and whiteness of complexion defined the ideal of the beloved maiden or the envied poet? Moreover, the martial image cannot hide from our locksmith the physical misery of workshop people. A few lines later he shows us that these vaunted physical qualities are simply a varnished reflection of the work and its constraints. Parents eager to thrust their children into the hell of the workshop, for example, know exactly what to say: “If the work is rough, they say the kid is very strong. If it is delicate, on the other hand, they say he is artful. They make him a Hercules or an artist as the case requires.”⁴ And when the vigor of his limbs is not a fake, for the locksmith it is a curse that excludes him from the realm of images in which he acts as model. A few years later, Pierre Vinçard will point up, in his fate, the extreme example of the alienation that causes the worker suffering, less from the loss of his object than from the loss of his image:

The severe pose of the metal worker provides for some admirable studies. The Flemish and Dutch schools have shown us how it might be used to good advantage by a Rembrandt or a Van Ostade. But we cannot forget that the workers who served as models for those admirable paintings lost the use of their eyes at a fairly early age, and that fact ruins some of the pleasure we experience when we contemplate the works of those great masters.⁵

The painter’s lie brings us back from the illusory sovereignty of the hand to the real sovereignty of the eyes. The ample, manly poetry depicted on workers’ faces by the painters of tempered steel is not simply the mask of worker misery. It is the price paid for the abandonment of a dream: that is, another place in the world of images. Behind the pictures depicting their glory lies the shadow side: the lost glory of pictures that they themselves have not made, that they are doomed never to make, as they well know. “As you can see, I know how to appreciate my craft, and yet I would have liked to have been a painter.”⁶

It is the dream of moving to the other side of the canvas. But not to represent the people—army symbolized in the hammer and leather apron of the smith. Rather, to paint another image of the army of the people: for example, the gold-studded cavalry officer with tricolor plume whose white steed stands out against the Oriental bodies, the fallen horses, and the Egyptian backdrop of desert, sky, and palm tree. It is Gilland himself, in a letter to George Sand, who rates the painter of the proletarian marshall Murat among the painters who have set him dreaming: “I would have liked to have been a painter. Delivering my messages, I could not help but stop and go into ecstasy before the shops with pictures and engravings. You cannot imagine how many blows Gérard, Gros, Bellangé, and Horace Vernet have cost me.”⁷

Over against this imperial dream, however, the moralists of the day set very different images of the painter. The pretensions of the scribbler, the debaucheries of the artist, and the miseries of the genius bring us back to the same model: the man who commits suicide pursuing the chimera of glory, in the realm of those shadows whose existence hangs on the whim of the powerful. This fate, we know, does not spare the most illustrious. A few years earlier, the waters of the Seine had swallowed up the despair of Baron Gros. Strangely enough, however, this curse on the artist now comes to envelop the modest existence of the common worker painter, the painter of buildings or signboards. And the working-class moralists are as zealous as the bourgeois moralists in warning about these dangers. We are surprised to find the old editor of L’Atelier, Leneveux the printer, placing the trade of painter way down in the hierarchy of occupations offered to adolescents. He ranks it just above the deadly dangerous jobs of the cesspool-cleaner and the ceruse-maker.⁸ Neither the comparative mortality rate nor the wage statistics justify such ostracism of the painter’s trade. We get a better picture of the thinking underlying such practical advice when we look at the promotional committee for worker associations and see Corbon, Leneveux’s colleague, sharing the concern expressed in the question posed by the reporter about an association of worker painters: “The speaker would like to know if the members of the association are married.” The peril of the trade is primarily moral, and one cannot “fail to appreciate the influence of marriage on habits of order and economy.”⁹

But why are the worker painters the only ones to be scrutinized in terms of this general norm, given the hundreds of dossiers under scrutiny? Is it, perhaps, that their immorality exceeds the norm in seduced girls and downed glasses? That theirs is the worst sort of perversion, in that it turns a worker’s occupation into the means to flee the condition of the man in the leather apron? That is the temptation from which the “people’s priest,” Father François-Auguste Ledreuille, would like to save the endangered workers through his Sunday sermons. But the hack writer in him cannot help but give way to the charm of it all, as he imagines the words of a shoemaker who has resolved to give up his own trade for that of painter:

I will make you woods that aren’t there, letters that you would not know how to read, pictures for which the models have never existed. Always in the air like the birds, intoxicated with the sun, chattering, singing to all the echoes of empty rooms, passing from luxurious mansion to attic garret, from countryside to city, not knowing today where one will be working tomorrow. Always new companions and new figures, welcomes at every streetcorner, tables spread at every town gateway, acquaintances at every stage and level, and a good day’s work always.¹⁰

Of course, there must be a sad end for paradisiac temptations to a vagabond life and an airy trade. Ledreuille’s painter would end up a consumptive in the town hospital: proof enough that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and that a good trade is better than a bad one.

For Ledreuille’s listeners and for those who refuse to listen to him, however, the problem is knowing what exactly is a good trade. Where do you find one that is not subject to accidents, illness, unemployment, salary cuts, off-seasons, and boredom? Ledreuille assures them that such jobs abound in the countryside. Whether he is being ingenuous or cynical, we do not know; but he urges all those driven by poverty to the city to head right back and look for the treasure buried in their father’s field.

Less scatterbrained than our preacher and his painter, the former shepherd Gilland knows from experience that the relationship between the nurturing countryside and the illusionary city is a bit more complex. In one of his stories he might well attribute the apprenticeship trials of his double, “little William,” to the illusions propagated by a worker boasting about the charms of Parisian life. But he also knows very well that the heavenly contemplations of the little shepherd were not feeding his five brothers, that his fall was steep to the bottom of the stone quarry, and that the boy would have to reascend the muddy pathways with his back bent under the weight of his basket.¹¹ Besides, Gilland himself refused to go back to the pastoral servitude to whose charms he returns his hero. He knows also that the good workers end up in the hospital just as the others do and that, of his first two loves, it was not the woman of ill repute but the respectable seamstress who died of consumption. Poverty is not defined in the relationship of idleness to work but in the impossibility of choosing one’s fatigue: “I would have liked to have been a painter. But poverty enjoys no privileges, not even that of choosing this or that fatigue for a living.”

What is at stake here is not the right to idleness but the dream of another kind of work: that is, a gentle movement of the hand, slowly following the eyes, on a polished surface. It is also a matter of producing something other than the wrought objects in which the philosophy of the future sees the essence of man-the-producer being realized, at the price of losing some time in the ownership of capital. Our “friend of the workers,” Ledreuille, was on target: “woods that aren’t there, letters you would not know how to read,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the New English Edition
• Introduction by Donald Reid
• Part I: The Man in the Leather Apron
• Part II: The Broken Plane
• Part III: The Christian Hercules
• Epilogue: The Night of October
• Outline Chronology