ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take a closer look at works by Agricol Perdiguier, whose Livre du compagnonnage served as the principal source for George Sand’s Le Compagnon du tour de France (1841), a novel that imagines an unlikely romance between a noblewoman and a woodworker as a model for exploring intersectional issues of class and gender. I read Perdiguier’s later works for literary and political meaning that goes beyond their established status as historical documents bearing witness to the slow industrialization of nineteenth-century France. In spite of Jean Briquet’s assertion that Perdiguier is somehow “representative” in a straightforward way of the working-class writers of his generation, his rich and varied corpus of texts is compelling precisely because it problematizes the representation of compagnonnage and of working-class experience more generally. More precisely, I argue here that Perdiguier uses a variety of genres to chart his own course between personal memory and collective history.
