Bedroom by Michelle Perrot

Author:Michelle Perrot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300167092
Publisher: Yale University Press

Chambrées

At first workers converged in “communal rooms,” as Villermé termed them in his description. In Sedan, “as in all industrial towns, single men live in pensions. For 25 or 30 francs a month, they sleep two to a bed, are fed, cleaned, given candles, and a small amount of beer at each meal.”22 Young men were not admitted below the age of twenty and needed parental consent. Two to a bed was standard practice in most of the textile cities that Villermé visited—Reims, Rouen, Tarare—and it included the foreign female workers employed in silk milling.23 How many beds were there per room? Villermé doesn’t say, nor does he use the word chambrées (hostels), which became widespread after 1840. The 1878 Annuaire statistique describes a chambrée as “a room containing several beds intended to house tenants who have no familial links to one another” (emphasis added). The answer to “How many beds per room?” is at least four, or five on average by 1880, often many more, especially at the beginning of the period.

The term chambrée has several meanings. In the south of France, it refers to working-class men’s societies, which emerged in the eighteenth century (though they had no doubt been around for much longer), set up in fairly rudimentary private rooms with a fireplace, a table, some chairs, some glasses; the men met to drink, to play games, to talk. Nevertheless, the meetings were pretty much clandestine, held upstairs, in rooms with balconies so as to be able to identify visitors and keep a lookout. The term chambrettes has nothing to do with size but with the modest origins of the participants. It means not “little room” but “little people” and was a virile Mediterranean form of socializing, according to Lucienne Roubin, a maison des hommes that could be compared to a Turkish oda. Men did not feel at all at ease in the house, which was dominated by the women’s kitchen. Maurice Agulhon has showed how the chambrées were politicized and became “circles” in the nineteenth century.24 But these southern chambrées were used to pass the time, not to spend the night; this was not the case in the north. With the military barracks as its origin, the word chambrée applied first and foremost to soldiers, with a virile, matey connotation. “Soldiers live gaily . . . and socialize in the chambrées,” wrote Voltaire. Camus has written, superbly, “Men who share the same rooms, whether as soldiers or prisoners, create a strange bond; as if having left their armor behind with their personal clothing, they unite each evening, beyond their differences, in the ancient community of the dream or fatigue.”25

The impressions we have of workers’ chambrées are less glorified; they raise the suspicions that usually greet groups of poor men, ragged and smelly, with the usual waves of xenophobia against gaunt Italians or anti-Semitism aimed at shoemakers or down-and-out Jewish tailors. However, beyond their miserable appearance, they represented forms of collective solidarity comparable to what is found in housing for African workers today.

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