Reading Peasants: the Pragmatic Uses of the Written Word

Abstract

The landed classes of the early nineteenth century expected peasants to be submissive and to know their place. So the very devout Eugénie de Guérin, on her family’s estate in the Tarn, was horrified in 1837 when a labourer dared to argue with the local curé about the significance of the Council of Trent.¹ The peasant reader was a new phenomenon. He (such peasants were usually men) constituted a potential challenge to the landowners’ traditional perceptions of the social hierarchy, in which the peasant’s deference and intellectual dependence had seemed natural and permanent.