Class Formation and Workers’ Attitudes toward Education:La Pensée Ouvrière(1948) by Georges Duveau

Abstract

AbstractLa pensée ouvrièrere pendant la second république et le second empire,Georges Duveau's classic but largely-forgotten study of French artisanal workers, focuses on changing attitudes toward work and education between 1848 and 1870, years which Duveau himself lauded as exceptionally fertile and creative in French social thought. How to explain such extraordinary fecundity? Partly, it can be explained by intensified police repression after Napoleon III’s coup, when the educational institutions of workers were repressed and they had to design new ones under the eyes of a suspicious state. Perhaps a more important factor, one suggested by the recent work of Thomas Piketty, is the ever-growing need to produce workers capable catering to the ever more sophisticated needs of the fabulously wealthy. The highly skilled artisanal production in Paris combined with the growth of factories created the distinctive conditions of French economic growth.