• Embodying History for Social Change in Jules Michelet’s Le Peuple (working document)

    Author(s):
    Rebecca Powers (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Labor Studies
    Subject(s):
    French literature, Literature and history, Labor movement, Rhetoric, History
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    History and literature, History of labor rhetoric
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6F565
    Abstract:
    In his 1846 history-from-below, Le Peuple, Michelet presents himself as the embodiment of the history of France in order to reach beyond the discursive and effect social change. Unlike in many of his other histories, where an allegory of the body is used in the service of an overarching national or political narrative, the body in Le Peuple is quite literally the historian’s own body: a real, fleshy organism existing in the present. I argue that his body is not “deaf to his time” as Barthes claimed in 1954, but rather deeply engaged in the development of a pre-Marx working class identity. In this paper, I demonstrate that the popular history posits the historian’s organic body as a place where physical and intellectual labor can be united, and that this embodiment, far from being a mere rhetorical technique, was intended to solve the complicated “social problem” of the 1840s.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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