La trajectoire d’Émile Guillaumin

Retourner le stigmate en emblème : une stratégie audacieuse mais inefficace

Abstract

Émile Guillaumin (1873-1951) is, in France, the best known and most quoted of peasant writers. His trajectory is indeed exceptional. Having remained a peasant all his life, he tried to penetrate a literary field that was particularly closed to the working classes. For this, he implements a strategy of brandishing his social stigma, a strategy that pays off temporarily, since he manages to publish several collections of poems and novels. But this strategy quickly encounters limits. And after the Great War, he was forced to reorient himself towards a journalistic activity. He then became a kind of columnist specializing in the countryside of the 1930s.