test
Search publications, data, projects and authors

Book

French

ID: <

2268/6911

>

Where these data come from
The public’s cri. Popular culture, press and dialectal song in Liège (XVIII and 19th centuries)

Abstract

What can we learn from Mathieu Laensbergh’s Almanach predictions that the ideas of Enlightenment will be awaited in the 18th century? What change in mentality with regard to magico-religious practices suggests the comments of the pilgrimage booklet in Saint-Hubert in Ardenne? It is in response to such questions that the tests contained in this book are answered on the basis of documentation combining ‘popular’ literature, newspapers, catalogues of booksellers, songs, etc. Oral communication plays an important role here, particularly when it is dialectal. The dissemination of common values and questions also takes place through theatre, where serious, vaudeval and operast-comic tragedies — we are in the Grétry country — constitute a real average “cultural landscape”. It will be seen how Laensbergh or the memories drawn up during trials between rural communities and the authorities demonstrate the progress of critical rationalism, through a lexicon where the sensitive bourgeois lives with the illuminated aristocrate. For their part, the pilgrimage booklets offer a change in the eyes of the ‘neuvain’ against rabies, the sacral protection giving way to the design of the market contract and hygiene. The discussion on ‘improving the human species’, together with the questions of eugenism, children’s diet and vaccination, is part of the debate between the Encyclopaedic Journal and the Giornale Enciclopedico di Liegi. How can we be surprised by the strength with which the Vervioist people will fight the old regime in the years before it falls? An exceptional figure dominates the event intellectually and practically: Nicolas Bassenge. The ‘patriotic’ song measures his charism and its evolution, when the aspiration for a peaceful society develops. The same requirement of conciliation and pragmatism can be observed in the treatment accorded to Walloon under a French regime which is less jacobin than has sometimes been said. Is there continuity or break between the catalogue of reading at the end of the 18th century and that of the romantic era? What is new on land, alongside a persistent tradition of the ‘useful’ book now aimed at the Balzacian entrepreneur and what is the reception of a romantism often deemed ‘disgusting’? Together with Georges Sand and the 1848 Vans, the feminist claim will erode on the local scene, while alternating into the fully-fledged conscript song of the mother and gaided of the escadron, with a few protests against the army, war and the money society that governs them.

Your Feedback

Please give us your feedback and help us make GoTriple better.
Fill in our satisfaction questionnaire and tell us what you like about GoTriple!