Page 49 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

24 Guy Poitevin

In the countryside, in 1600, print material had hardly reached vil-
lages. The oral culture retained its absolute predominance. It trans-
formed everything that came close to it and kept on transforming itself
as per the rules of memory and oblivion, observation and discussion.
Some medieval novels may have reached peasants from cities, but they
could not have that function of escapism that is observed in the course
of the seventeenth century. As in the past, peasants went on strike
against paying the tithe in Lyonnais, Ile-de-France and Languedoc;
villages in Bourgogne compelled their lords to let free half of the serf
population; in Bretagne, Guyenne, Bourgogne, Dauphiné, peasants or-
ganized themselves into improvised communes, established contacts
and revolt, shouting their traditional slogans, marching with colours
flying and chieftains with joyful titles. Nothing of this was either trans-
formed or encouraged by any print. Anyway, those—bishop, lord or
king—who wanted to control the countryside and maintain law and
order by other means than brutal force ought to send not books, but
messengers carrying seals of which nobody can laugh at, and documents
to be read loudly out to make their power manifest.
In cities, print materials, first of all the Bible, reached people in the
vernacular and common people started writing and publishing. But
the reading of a printed book does not smother oral culture. The latter
can find in books new topics for conversation. Learning through book
does not substitute learning through gesture: it can provide people
new ways to refer their pratique to a new or traditional authority.
Moreover, print does not provide common people with the science of
doctors in theology or medicine, or the production of the literati, nor the
orders of the powerful. Craftsmen, traders, women too (at least twenty
of them became famous) wrote their own books. Peasant sayings,
anonymous urban songs and traditions, poems and stories of artisans
and of their servants were printed. Groups from the common folk
collectively and publicly spoke up through print. Political pamphlets
were circulated. Festival brotherhoods (‘abbayes’, festive societies of
crafts and neighbourhoods) printed records of their carnivals where
they derisively attack kings, priests and nobility. For the first time,
a polemic literature circulated ideas that did not spread from the cen-
tre (government, strong movements of opposition like Huguenots or
Holy Catholic League), but from the bottom, from urban groups with-
out connection to power. Second, printed pamphlets brought to the
common people information on national events which was more