Abstract
The alternation of toil and festivity is an enduring feature of human existence. But to talk about work and leisure as binary categories of experience is to refer to a distinctly modern structure of social and private life. Weekends, vacations and national holidays continue to metre out the rhythms of our working, domestic and social lives in the twenty-first century. In the West, our rights to periods of time off are more often than not safeguarded by law and inscribed in employment contracts. But the boundaries and terms of this legal entitlement continue to be a site of political negotiation, symbolised, in the French context, by Lionel Jospin’s turn-of-the-millennium working hours reform. In returning to the early Third Republic, this book focuses on a period critical to the formation, and proposed transformation, of structures of labour, leisure and time in France, a period in which — to reprise Kristin Ross’s terms — ‘the programmed dyad of labor and leisure’ was emerging with new discipline.1
Le monde moderne n’a plus de temps que pour deux choses: le travail qui lui donne du pain, et l’amusement qui le distrait du travail.
[In the modem world people only have time for two things: work, which gives them bread, and amusement, which distracts them from work.]
Edmond Scherer, Études sur la littérature contemporaine (1886, IV, Chapter 2)
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Notes
In art history, leisure has been fundamental to the most influential accounts of painting in this period, not least those of T. J. Clark, in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
Robert Herbert, in Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
Michelle Penot, ‘On the Formation of the French Working Class’, in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 71–110 (p. 91).
See Alain Cottereau, ‘The Distinctiveness of Working-Class Cultures in France, 1848–1900’, in Working-Class Formation, ed. by Katznelson and Zolberg, pp. 111–54; and Lenard R. Berlanstein, ‘The Distinctiveness of the Nineteenth-Century French Labor Movement’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 660–85.
See Lucien Febvre, ‘Travail: évolution d’un mot et d’une idée’, Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 41 (1948), 19–28 (19).
Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ and ‘Works and Days’, trans, by Martin L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; repr. 2008), p. 40.
John Hughes, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 6.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 137.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedmann and trans, by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 805.
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état?, ed. by Roberto Zapperi (Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 121.
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), p. 17.
Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–7).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. by Gareth Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 222.
‘Company association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them [Parisian workers].’ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans, and ed. by Martin Milligan (New York: Dover, 2007), pp. 124.
See Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 12.
Louis Blanc, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 5th edn, 2 vols (Marpon & Hammarion, 1880), I, 127.
Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France, 1830–1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 86.
Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, ed. and trans, by Tenell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; repr. 2008), p. 187.
Christophe Charle, A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Berg, 1994), p. 230.
Gary Cross, A Quest for Time: the Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 18.
The Provisional Government’s short-lived decree of 2 March 1848 to lower hours of work to 10 in Paris and 11 in the provinces was made on the grounds that ‘un travail trop prolongé non seulement ruine la santé du travailleur, mais encore, en l’empêchant de cultiver son intelligence, porte atteinte à la dignité de l’homme’ [working excessive hours not only ruins the worker’s health, but worse still, in preventing him from developing his intellect, strikes a blow to man’s dignity]. Cited in Léon Faucher, ‘L’Organisation du travail et l’impot’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 22 (1848), 230–55 (p. 238).
Cited by Karl Marx in Capital: an Abridged Edition, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 181.
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 293.
George Sand, Le Compagnon du Tour de France, éd. by René Bourgeois (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988), p. 85.
Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 54.
Teny Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 199.
Paul Signac, cited in Robert L. Herbert and Eugenia W. Herbert, ‘Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac, and Others’, The Burlington Magazine, 102 (1960), 472–82
Jules Leclercq, ‘Beaux-Arts: aux Indépendants’, Mercure de France, 3 (1890), 174–6
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans, by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; repr. 1993), p. 497.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (Smith, Elder, 1851–3), II (1853), 151–231
Recent monographs on women and work in nineteenth-century France include: Juliette M. Rogers, Career Stories: Belle Époque Novels of Professional Development (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007)
Linda L. Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France: Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Alison Finch addresses questions of work in her important study, Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 38.
Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex and others, 12 vols (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976–81), I, 19.
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975–6), I, 679.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 127.
Alison Finch, ‘Reality and its Representation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present, ed. by Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 36–53
Nicholas White, ‘Naturalism’, in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. by William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 522–30
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White, C. (2014). Introduction. In: Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373076_1
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