ABSTRACT
Starting with the situation in France at the end of the eighteenth century, we have seen that those excluded from the dominant social
groups frequently have a form of power and of voice. Except in the case of the nobility, however, it is a power that tends to rely on practice rather than on law, and a voice which tends to be oral rather than written. The power, for instance, of servants was a very real one, but it was an oppositional power, whose undermining of authority ranged from outright theft to manipulation by the production of subtle discomfort. The master controlled the written records, the servant’s voice with rare exceptions was heard only in the spaces of exclusion, such as the kitchen and servants’ hall. Whatever the form of exclusion in different social contexts, the ‘other voice’ has always existed, the question being rather where and in what company it may be heard. As we saw in Chapter 4, in the acceptance of noble bastardy, oppositional practice may even become an implicit cultural code, but one denied an official voice. Thus it is characteristic of the oppositional that the servants’ hall should institute a hierarchy equivalent to that of the masters.
