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Martyn Lyons, (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2001)
THIS SHORT but stimulating book is an extension of Martyn Lyons's earlier essay, "New Readers in the Nineteenth Century; Women, Children, Workers," in A History of Reading in the West, edited by G. Cavallo and R. Chatier (1999). Aside from switching from an international to a French focus and elaborating upon the reading practices of French women and workers, Lyons has chosen to omit children and include peasants in the book. Each of the three groups is treated separately, in relation to issues particular to that social group. There are, however, common themes.
One theme is the prevalence of fears about losing control of the reading, and hence the moral and political beliefs, of most of the French population on the part of the Catholic Church and of political leaders from monarchists to radical republicans, and ultimately on the part of the patriarchal, property-owning bourgeoisie, in 19th century France. The final chapter not unreasonably compares the book to Louis Chevalier's monograph on bourgeois fears of the new working class in Paris in the first half of the 19th century (Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes). Along these lines, Lyons notes that bourgeois and clerical anxieties about new readers peaked in post-revolutionary periods such as 1817 to 1830, when the Church campaigned against "mauvais livres," launched "Bibliotheques des bon Livres," and dispatched missionaries who organized autodafes (ritual book burnings). They peaked again after the introduction of universal manhood suffrage during the Second Republic, when the Second Empire...