Thornton on the Ideology of the Haitian Revolution

J. K. Thornton, '"I Am the Subject of the King of Congo": African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution', Journal of World History, 4, (1993), pp 181-214.

I have finally gotten to this essay, which was left over from the past semester; glad that I did so. Not surprising, exactly, since I’ve heard about it several times, but satisfying.

Thornton’s argument in this essay is straightforward. Since perhaps as many as two thirds of the people in San Domingue in 1791 had been born and socialized in Africa, historians should look at least in part to political discourse in Africa in seeking to explain their actions. The continual civil wars in the Kongo over the course of the 18^th century meant that, especially in the later part of the century, a large number of defeated soldiers were enslaved, and sold across the Atlantic. Thornton has demonstrated elsewhere clear tactical continuities between the Kongolese civil wars and fighting in what would become Haiti during the revolution. Soldiers who had fought in the first fought again in the second. In the essay under discussion here, Thornton continues to discuss this particular group, though he points out that it is far from the only one.

The civil wars in Kongo, Thornton tells us, were in part fought over (or put another way, generated) two conceptions of kingship. One is autocratic, linked to conquest and a strong centralized state. The other is more limited and puts the king in the role of blacksmith, which is to say mediator, rather than amoral warrior. Thornton suggests in this article that the latter limited conception of kingship developed mostly as an alternative to the continual warfare generated by the un-winnable contest for hegemony between “two great family-based alliances, the Kimpanzu and the Kimulaza” (186). Thornton runs through several forms of evidence and consequence, finishing off with the following Revolution-era ‘war chant’ that has been interpreted in various ways:

Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!

Canga bafio té

Canga moune dé lé

Canga doki la

Canga li.

Unsurprisingly, the crucial word for Thornton is ‘Canga,’ or kanga, which can mean ‘to bind,’ ‘to kill,’ and also can carry the connotation of Christian salvation, as for instance it did in the 18^th century Kongo, which officially became a Christian kingdom in the early 16^th century. Historians who see the Haitian Revolution in purely racial terms tend to read these words as declarations of race war. Thornton, looking to Kongo, sees something very different. Similarly, he points out that the smaller leaders who resisted Louverture and Christophe were mostly Kongolese who had fought for a decentralized and mediatory kind of monarchy in the Kongo. This is to say that these people fought in part for a certain understanding of political right opposed strongly to the authoritarianism manifested by Louverture and others. The idea, suggested by the likes of C.L.R. James, that this rebelliousness was the result of immaturity or savagery, is simply wrong and stems not from analysis but from ignorance. This is, in no small measure, Thornton’s historiographical punch—though, interestingly, he argues against Fick (though agreeing with her bottom-up approach) on several points.

What does the Europeanist think of all this? At first I was concerned that Thornton was only going to point out that these people, coming from Africa, would bring African ideas with them, but that he would fail to bring specifics to the table. In fact, this essay makes clear that the specifics are available, even if its architecture is interpretive rather than empirical. It makes me want to read his book on Africa and the Atlantic. It would be interesting to look more closely at Thornton's methodological presuppositions, and no doubt one could pick some holes. In particular, what is this ideology? For instance, why is it that we (and they) continue to speak about monarchy even when the king is elected? No doubt for no very good reason. What are the modes of discourse in which this Kongolese ideology perpetuates itself? More prosaically put, why do these people continue to fight about these things, and not something else? To what extent?

Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism

I read a library copy of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. Previous readers have left it heavily underlined and have also left some notes in the margins. I was most surprised, and I suppose a bit gratified, when after reading Anderson describe Rosa Luxemburg’s distinctive path as marked by, “successive theorizations of the general strike as the archetypal aggressive weapon of the self-emancipation of the working class” (13), I looked over and say in the left margin, almost tucked into the binding ‘Sorel?’ My thought exactly.

Of course, this book is from the Duke University library. So when Anderson writes, “Astonishingly, within the entire corpus of Western Marxism, there is not one single serious appraisal or sustained critique of the work of one major theorist by another” (69), we should not be surprised that a previous marxinaut has underlined this, and written next to it, “Jameson an exception?” It is none the less gratifying, if only because this is such a wonderfully medieval form of scholarly debate, to read below that, “he’s not a major theorist, litboy.” And finally, in pen, “girl?” I am not the first one to comment on this comment. So I’m putting it on the internet.

Anderson’s brief history of an object he calls Western Marxism is clear and packed full of useful information. It is one of those texts that makes a broad range of complex material appear comprehensible and within one’s reach. The book is clearly useful, but I mistrust it. Here, I reproduce nearly two pages, a long paragraph, from the book—I wouldn’t normally do this, but I think Anderson manages to summarize and condense his basic narrative and argument here in a remarkably lucid manner:

“The circle of traits defining Western Marxism as a distinct tradition can now be summarized. Born from the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European capitalism after the First World War, it developed within an ever increasing scission between socialist theory and working-class practice. The gulf between the two, originally opened up by the imperialist isolation of the Soviet State, was institutionally widened and fixed by the bureaucratization of the USSR and of the Comintern under Stalin. To the exponents of the new Marxism that emerged in the West, the official Communist movement represented the sole real embodiment of the international working class with meaning for them – whether they joined it, allied with it or rejected it. The structural divorce of theory and practice inherent in the nature of the Communist Parties of this epoch precluded unitary politico-intellectual work of the type that defined classical Marxism. The result was a seclusion of theorists i universities, far from the life of the proletariat in their own countries, and a contraction of theory from economics and politics into philosophy. This specialization was accompanied by an increasing difficulty of language, whose technical barriers were a function of its distance from the masses. It was also conversely attended by a decreasing level of international knowledge or communication between theorists themselves from different countries. The loss of any dynamic contact with working-class practice in turn displaced Marxist theory towards contemporary non-Marxist and idealist systems of thought, with which it now typically developed in close if contradictory symbiosis. At the same time, the concentration of theorists into professional philosophy, together with the discovery of Marx’s own early writings, left to a general retrospective search for intellectual ancestries to Marxism in anterior European philosophical thought, and a reinterpretation of historical materialism in light of them. The results of this pattern were three-fold. Firstly, there was a marked predominance of epistemological work, focused essentially on problems of method. Secondly, the major substantive field in which method was actually applied became aesthetics – or cultural superstructures in a broader sense. Finally the main theoretical departures outside this field, which developed new themes absent from classical Marxism – mostly in a speculative manner – revealed a consistent pessimism. Method as impotence, art as consolation, pessimism as quiescence: it is not difficult to perceive elements of all these in the complexion of Western Marxism. For the root determinant of this tradition was its formation by defeat – the long decades of set-back and stagnation, many of them terrible ones in any historical perspective, undergone by the Western working class after 1920” (92-93).

One of my suspicions here has to do with the manner in which Anderson has constructed this historical object, ‘Western Marxism.’ It is not a self-referential intellectual field, nor is it really a retrospectively created one (like François Cusset’s ‘French Theory’), rather, it is a group of thinkers and texts—the two are run together—that share a common position, defined by their mode of engagement, vis-à­-vis Marx and his immediate successors, in particular Lenin. Western Marxism does not encompass all those thinking about Marx, even declaring themselves to be Marxists, even philosophizing within Marxism. Anderson gives us at the end a sketch of a tradition of Marxism inspired by Trotsky, including Ernst Mandel, which is separate from Western Marxism.

Anderson’s basic argument about the theoreticization of Marxism is well-taken. Theorists who speak of action through discourse often, it seems to me, walk a fine line between cultural criticism, or working the language, and out-and-out sophistic self-justification (that is: I make my revolution here in language, in the classroom, where it counts for my career, rather than putting my body in the way of the police, or giving my intellectual energy to organizing and protest for which one receives no academic points). I am not sure I would know a genuine praxis if I saw one. Perhaps this means only that I should read more Gramsci and Lenin. My inclination, and I am concerned it can never be more than that, is to think that whole problem of mixing theory and practice is the result of false categories and distinctions. This is not at all to say that the one can be the other, but rather that new terms and new forms of sociability will render the problem senseless.

Most interesting from a historical point of view is Anderson’s assertion that after the First World War, Marxist intellectuals lost an internationalist cosmopolitanism that had in the past served them well. Certainly, this is linked to much larger trends, and Anderson is of course correct that the Stalinization of the various parties had a part in cutting out the institutional framework which might have supported Marxist internationalism despite increasing nationalist tension. And yet the problem seems larger to me, and perhaps not quite rightly framed. Stalin is not enough of a reason for the French to stop reading Italian theorists. Answering this question would require understanding first the many modes in which nationalism functions (discursive, institutional, political...), and then also the ways in which intellectuals are unable to escape, or sometimes even see, these constraints. Both are hard questions to answer, and require empirical detail well beyond what Anderson is interested in doing here. The book is, at any rate, an excellent introduction to the contours of the field, which is what it set out to be. I would recommend it to interested students, but I’m not sure that I could make use of it in a class. Otherwise, it is a historiographical artifact of the 1970s displaying a fascination with Gramsci and Trotsky, an almost endearing will to progress, and the workmanlike simplification that I have come, for some reason, to associate with British writers of this period.

Badiou's Ethics

Perhaps reading Being and Event before any of Alain Badiou’s other books means that I read his smaller essays more sympathetically. Certainly, I would have taken a different attitude to the (quite lucid) sketches and condensations of his larger philosophy that Badiou gives here and there in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, if I did not know in what detail he worked them out earlier.

Verso has bundled together with the essay on ethics a long interview with translator and Badiou scholar/interpreter Peter Hallward. The interview is in some ways quite a different thing, and at first appears tacked-on; however, it answered, or tried to answer, questions about politics that the main essay left me asking. There is also an introduction from Hallward, which on principle I did not read. Judging by the questions that he asks of Badiou in the interview, it’s probably a good introduction. However, since this book already seems to be a kind of introduction to Badiou, I would strongly recommend that new readers go directly to the beginning of the main text.

Badiou writes against the ideology of human rights, in particular the discourse that takes as its organizing point Nazism and the Holocaust. According to this facile way of thinking, he says, evil is self-evident, and the great ethical task is to intervene in the world to stop these evident evils (which tend to be genocides). This whole ‘ethical turn,’ he argues in the first chapter, is a regression from the anti-humanist and specific engagement of the 1960s.

The second chapter is devoted to a critique not so much of Levinas, but of the distortions, simplifications, and misunderstandings of his work that circulate. Interestingly, Badiou takes as fairly obvious that Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy rests on an essentially theological foundation—this is a matter of some debate, and arrived at only painfully in other circles. Badiou argues that it is in fact impossible to attach any permanent rights to humans-as-animals. That is, against Levinas (or a version of him), there are no rights or obligations for others tattooed on our human faces.

For Badiou ethics as a struggle to avoid radical evil, which is how it is usually posed, is a “figure” of nihilism. He makes a series of arguments here, especially having to do with the repeated invocation of the Holocaust as both that which is absolutely singular and also something constantly to be struggled against. In the end, though, his real problem is with ethics as negative. It is not an ethical position, in his view, to simply try to mitigate cases of the most massive human suffering (never mind the enormous potential for self-serving, hypocrisy, and voyeurism inherent in the current way of thinking about this—I wonder what he thinks about Myanmar, about this specific case of ‘human rights interventionism’?). For Badiou, it is only meaningful to understand ethics as somehow a positive imperative, and it is only from this perspective that it is possible to understand Evil.

Now, I myself have run across the argument, which Badiou must always brush aside, that Evil occurs when people try to change the world in radical or utopian ways. This is Arendt; this is any number of less worthy lights from the postwar period. It is either a liberal or a conservative, and in any case a deeply anti-Marxian position. Although I’m not exactly convinced by most of Badiou’s brief comments on historical specifics—for instance: the Terror was really the result of the pressure of external war on the Revolutionary situation—I appreciate the search for a positive ethics, and his courageous acceptance of the principle that with positive ethical imperatives comes positive evil. How does this work?

Only subjects are able to reach (up to) Good, and so also Evil. A subject is not the same as an individual human organism, though they sometimes overlap. A subject is formed always and only through fidelity to an event via a truth-procedure. The fourth chapter of Ethics sets this out in terms of an ethics of this truth-bearing subject—which is infinite in its variety, but may take one of Badiou’s four famous forms of truth: political, scientific, amorous, artistic. Of course all this, and its relation to the event, is central to Badiou’s thinking. The chapter seems to me like a good way in, though I won’t pretend to have grasped things so well as to be able to make such a judgment. At any rate, people who want to know more are referred to Being and Event and other books.

If the Good is thought of in terms of successful fidelity to an event through the bearing of a truth-procedure, ethics will always be specific to the situation of the fidelity. So, again, there is no universal principle, except perhaps that of specificity. For me, there are some problems hooking this into any meaningful analysis of global capitalism—I suspect that for Badiou these analyses would be scientific, and no doubt very important, but would not have the kind of radical meaning that Marxists of an older stripe would give them. This is discussed in the interview, and is something for which (the incorrigible) Zizek has criticized him. Badiou does not privilege economics. The emancipatory struggle must be political. Capital, despite the empirical power that it wields today, should not be granted any metaphysical status. I haven’t decided quite what I think about this yet.

Evil, then, which is related to the Good of the truth-process, is to be understood in terms of a typology of failures of fidelity to the event. This is all set out in the long fifth chapter, and I won’t try to recap it here. Suffice to say that this is where Badiou’s own philosophy does the most work. We end up with three names, or kinds, of Evil. The first is “to believe that an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude” (71). Badiou here discusses the Nazis, who are after all the inescapable point of reference. It is crucially important for Badiou that Nazism was not fidelity to a real event, but rather was real fidelity to the simulacrum of an event. Rather than practice fidelity to the name of the void of the event (which seems to be 1917—shades of Ernst Nolte?), which is always emancipatory because empty, Nazis were faithful to a plenitude (Aryan-ness) and were therefore obliged to exteriorize the void, especially around the name ‘Jew.’ If one does not embrace and practice fidelity to the void as possibility, then it becomes necessary to eject this void and enforce it around one’s self. In this way, the Evil Nazi subject contained in its essence the genocidal impulse, enforcing the void.

I’m playing a bit fast and loose with Badiou’s vocabulary here, which is dangerous, but this is an excellent example of something that Hallward presses him on in the interview: the void is a concept taken from set theory, and is crucial for Badiou’s ontology. Here it slides very quickly from the ontological to the ontic and goes from being a name for the constitutively nameless to a sort of neologism for killing human animals. Badiou’s answer to Hallward was not, for me, entirely satisfactory.

The next form of Evil—or, rather, name of Evil—is betrayal. This is less well developed than the other names of Evil, and seems to me in fact the most salient one. It can occur when one convinces one’s self that the truth one is practicing is in fact a terror. That is, you betray the fidelity you have been practicing, and, crucially, deny the very possibility of subject-hood associated with it. This is understood as a failure of courage, but it seems to me just as easy to read as an empirically-based decision. This is a major problem, I think, for Badiou—there is no way to know, or test, a truth, since it exists only as it is born by a subject. So how is a well-meaning person to be certain that they are not a Nazi, practicing what appears to be fidelity to the universalizable void of a situation (as, he says, Heidegger briefly and foolishly thought), while in fact they are externalizing the void in order to give place to the particular plenitude? In short, how do we know what is a universalizable and an immortal truth-procedure, and what is a scam? Badiou’s answer seems to be a kind of secular faith, or courage. At a certain point, one must decide.

There’s more to say here, but I want to pause and point out my problem with two sorts of words that Badiou uses that bother me. The first is his mobilization of the universal/particular. This, I think, is justified by, or at least connected to, math. Many systems and modes are universalizable, he suggests. Politics, further, is always about the universal. I’m not certain what the import of these claims are, and especially how one thinks about this universalist impulse within the situation, which is always where his ethics stays. The answer, I suppose, is a kind of ontological proceduralism? It’s the fidelity that is universal, and the subject that is immortal, rather than their content? What does he mean by Immortal? Plato, I think, is the reference point here, but I’m not familiar enough with all that to know what he might be making of it. It seems to me that Immortal is what we in fact are, as subjects, according to Badiou. Humans are different from other animals because they can be subjects of truth, and therefore immortal. Fine, but again I’d like to hear more about—though it sounds ridiculous—the content of this immortality.

The last name of Evil is the disaster—or, the temptation of totality. Again, it seems that this has to do with the void and the nature of the situation. It is an ontological rule that descriptions of situations are not co-extensive with the situation. A disaster is when fidelity to the truth-procedure attempts to name every element of the situation, which in principle cannot be totally named by any language. I believe it is here that Badiou mentions Gödel’s theorem. It is Evil, then, to take one’s fidelity to a truth-procedure, and march it into every corner of the situation. This is to say, no truth is total, and so no one fidelity may be used to organize the entire world. The distinction here is between what Badiou calls ‘opinion,’ which is what we normally use to operate in the world, and the truth-procedure. The first is incoherent and messy, the later is totally consistent. Evil happens with this consistency is enforced.

Especially here at the end, I’m simplifying considerably and stripping away most of Badiou’s language. I’ve signaled most of the places where there seem things left out to me, where gaps or failures seem especially clear. Some of this no doubt comes from my unfamiliarity with the larger body of his work, some no doubt from failure to read well enough. As to whether I think this is a good way of understanding the world...well, this is another question.

French Theory

François Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed The Intellectual Life of the United States [2003, 2008], is neither a history of the US academy in the 1970s and 1980s, nor is it a history of those authors named and implied in the title. It is, rather, a history of the ways in which these authors were read (this verb understood in the broadest sense) in the US in these decades. Cusset’s underlying argument in its most banal formulation is that the “French Theory” is an object created in the US mostly, but not entirely, by academics. Cusset argues that the American (mis)reading of these authors had at first two major directions: textualist aestheticism and essentialist identity politics. This creative misuse was generally the result of a failure on the part of Americans to appreciate the degree to which all these thinkers, especially Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, were really grappling with Marx, trying to move past Marx without loosing the critical power of Marxism. Most people would not, I think, object strongly to this. By the end of the book, however, it is plain that Cusset wants to go further. Theory is not in decline, or has always been in decline, and while many of its American practitioners failed to be sufficiently (or were incorrectly, ineffectively) political, French Theory as an object constituted by these practitioners, contains a real critical and emancipatory potential even today. The final pages of the book are quite breathless. The language of politico-sexual emancipation (since capital and desire cannot be thought apart) is much in evidence.

Cusset’s obvious approval of what he understands to be his subject’s real message does not in the end detract from the book as a work of history. There are plenty of things to complain about, as there will inevitably be in a book about material which is close, and remains lived, for many people. The early chapters on student life and academic culture in the US seemed to me unbalanced and caricatured in several ways—positing ‘college’ as a perpetual gap for both a large percentage of the 18-22 age cohort, and also for the professoriate. Some sociological care should be taken here, and I say this keeping Cusset’s Bourdieusian perspective in mind. It also seems to me that Cusset is unnecessarily dismissive of identity politics as a tactical and strategic necessity. Identity politics is often practically a slur, and this seems to me to be more the result of a swinging pendulum than anything else. I haven’t studied the 1980s, so perhaps this form of politics really did do more damage than good, but I’d want a great deal more information and consideration before making any such statement.

There are smaller annoyances, which may well be the result of linguistic and cultural translation (the book was originally published in French, in 2003). For instance, at one point ‘date rape’ is defined as a kind of PC invention, an excess of the 1980s, “date rape, in which ‘date’ refers to the already highly codified American practice of gradual, formal steps of increasing intimacy, through dinner and drinks, before sexual relations, while ‘rape’ in this case indicates that a mere indiscrete question can be viewed as rape” (173). I suspect that Cusset is ascribing this view to the PC police, but it sounds like he believes that this is all date rape ever means. On another level, one wishes that the editors had caught such apparent but ambiguous gaffs as this one: “As early as in the eighteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that this tradition was a key to pedagogy in the United States...” (222-223). Maybe in the French it is clear that Tocqueville was speaking about the 18^th century, and not in that century (he was born in 1805).

These are silly quibbles that interrupt one’s reading a bit, but do not affect that basic worth of the book, which is great. The book is in three parts. In the first part, Cusset tries to lay out the American context for the arrival of theory. He has chapters on Theory’s troubled relations to Literature, and a whole chapter on the vagaries of deconstruction. His general framework here is, as I suggested, broadly inspired by Bourdieu. French Theory arrived with force because it was useful for various people, especially academics. There is a little slight of hand here, because Cusset is convincing that French Theory is an object that only gets constituted in the US, so he isn’t able to offer a strong set of reasons for why some writers crossed the Atlantic and some did not. He can’t be faulted for this—the reasons are no doubt both, as it used to be put, internal to the texts and contingent to their circumstances.

The middle part of the book gives us chapters on identity politics (and here, I think that for Americans one’s opinion of the book will be linked to one’s opinion of Cusset’s treatment of this issue), the ideological backlash to Theory, the academic star system, Theory and student life, Theory in art, and the interferences between Theory’s sometimes technical discourse and America’s love-affair with technology. Especially in the chapter on the backlash, Cusset has some problems with causality. To what degree and according to what modes was the rise of the neoconservatives linked to the supposed impasses of identity politics and the deconstructivist turn of academic activism? I need a broader evidence base before I will say that academic leftists simply abandoned the field of public discourse to the right in the 1970s.

The short final section, we see Cusset’s own politics most clearly, because here we come the closest to a ‘balance sheet’ for Theory—though Cusset oddly explicitly refuses to link discourse to history at the beginning of chapter 12 (after he’s been doing so for 250 pages). We get a wonderful world-tour of French Theory, discussing its impact an the forms in which it was constructed in a number of countries across the world. Some, Cusset argues, for historical reasons, have a more ‘American’ version of French Theory than others.

Cusset is dismissive of the nouveaux philosophes, and outlines in scandalized tones François Ewald’s development of Foucaultian thinking (I wonder if he has the same feelings about Lacan’s annointed?). The problem for me is that Ewald sounds interesting. So the question becomes, how do we decide what an emancipatory text is? Or put another way, is there any way, apart from professional institutions and (Fishian) interpretive communities, to tell which texts are brilliant and deserve careful study and which are, pardon the French, bullshit? It seems to me obvious that much mistrust or dismissal of Theory, within the academy and out of it, is not so much the result of a belief that in the epistemological or political unsoundness of it all, but rather of a sneaking suspicion that it’s all being made up, that these people are hacks, or worse, deluded. That there is no there there, so to speak. When an engineer says something no one understands, you’re none the less able to judge by result. The same, in a sense, is true of the novelist or the poet, or at least sometimes is—they spout none-sense about what they write, but there are always those novels and poems that one can come back to, that do something. Theory somehow tends not to be thought of in this way. Cusset makes gestures toward thinking about this, but rarely gets beyond generalizations about America’s technological society, and its underlying philistine pragmatism. This is not a very satisfying answer.

One might argue that the scale on which Cusset is working prohibits him from making the king of detailed arguments that would be necessary to maintain that text A is better (denser, more useful, more thoughtful—or even more in tune with its context) than is text B. I’m not especially sympathetic to this defense, although it does have merits—books can only be so long, Cusset could not have provided the panoramic syntheses that he does if he had had to explain what, exactly, makes A Thousand Plateaus so amazing. It’s been done before, and isn’t his project.

All of these criticisms, on which I’ve dwelled far too long, should not take away from what seems to me to be a remarkable achievement. Derrida provides one of the blurbs on the back jacket, and I agree with him: this will be a work of reference for some time. Anyone with an interest or a bone to pick would profit from reading this book.

A final note: the way Cusset constructs his book seems to me not so dissimilar from François Dosse’s intellectual histories of the Annales and structuralism (which are excellent). I don’t know of other scholars in France doing this kind of thing, though no doubt there are—is Cusset a student of Dosse’s?

androgyny in the 1840s

A random connection, about which, or around which, there is perhaps already a book: Celestin Bouglé, in a 1910 article about Proudhon, mentions that it is the couple ‘androgyne’ which is the basic unit of justice for Proudhon (this is on page 371 of the September 15^th 1910 issue of Revue de Paris). I remember from reading Barthes’ book on Michelet that this historian, a contemporary of Proudhon’s, also speaks about the necessity of androgyny for true historical understanding. Certainly Fourier and Saint-Simon (or at least his followers) did some serious thinking about the nature and meaning of gender difference. I wonder how much this has been worked out? Certainly it's an argument for thinking harder about the roots of Third Republic-era republican gender ideology.

Boiling hot potatoes

Chapter nine of Bill Reddy’s The Rise of Market Culture, from 1984, is a close examination of dialect songs from Lille during the Second Empire. It’s really quite a wonderful thirty-five pages. Probably, without context, the below excerpt from one of these songs, written by one Alexandre Desrousseaux, is close to meaningless. Here it is anyway. I’m giving it first in the Lillois dialect in which it was published in 1865, not so very different from French, and then in Reddy’s English translation (see pg 272 of this volume).

Comme l’commerce est à l’baleine
Min maît’ m’a donné min livret;
Mais j’vas tâcher de m’tirer d’peine,
In essayant d’un aut’métier.
J’irai d’main, avec eun’ cayère,
Avec eun’ marmite d’puns-d’-tierre,
Sus l’Grand’Plach’ tout le long du jour,
Crier de bon coeur et comme un sourd :

Tout boulants ! Tout boulants!
V’là des puns-d’-tierres charmants.

Since my trade is turning cold
My boss has turned me out.
But I aim to get out of the hole
By trying another route.
I’m going tomorrow with a chair
And with a pot full of potatoes
To spend all day on the Grand Square
To yell with a will like someone deaf:

Boiling hot! Boiling hot!
Charming potatoes in the pot!