ABSTRACT
This second chapter describes the rise and fall of the workers’ press from its origins directly following the Revolution of 1830, to the period of expansion in the 1840s which gave rise to L’Atelier, La Ruche populaire, L’Union, and La Fraternité de 1845, and finally to its sudden disappearance in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848. In this chapter, I argue instead that the French worker press brought to light an active and politically conscious public of readers and writers. Through articles, essays, and works of poetry and prose fiction, these newspapers engaged critically with the dominant press in ways that challenged the primacy of the public sphere from which they were excluded by their economic and social status. In this sense, the worker press expressed artisans’ and other workers’ rights to participate in rational-critical debate. Further still, the resulting network of written exchanges also established the efficacy of the kinds of affective and sentimental discourses that Jürgen Habermas’s analysis disregards. Forming something akin to what Lauren Berlant has called an “intimate public,” the newspapers I examine here rewrote key narratives about the suffering of the working classes, thus creating ambivalent, but potentially emancipatory, modes of identification and attachment among its principal producers and consumers. In the final part of this chapter, I look more carefully at one particular episode that illustrates some of these tensions and contradictions especially well: the media blitz following the suicide of the typesetter, writer, and activist Adolphe Boyer. The passionate reporting around Boyer’s death revealed crucial fantasies of affective identification and their limits.
