Common Suffering as a Resource? Worker's Descriptive Representative Claims in 1848, France

The declarations of principles of working-class candidates in the French elections of 1848 reveal a particular rhetoric of representative claim-making that relies on descriptive representation. Indeed, the common experience of workplace suffering is put forward to gather workers and thus legitimize the these working-class candidacies. The discursive form of these claims indicates that they exceeded the sole substantive representation of the workers's interests. By putting forwaord the idea that the manual experience and the common suffering bound to worker's status and life allowed candidates to access the social truth, working-class candidates questionned the normative definition of intellectual skill and political competence. The experience of the manual labor offers them a privileged access to the knowledge on "the social" and to an ability to enforce political reforms. The analysis of the reinvestment of the discursive register of suffering to foster an agenda of political regeneration questions the normative discussion opened by Jane Mansbridge (1999). Although the expression of this type of representative claim refers to some of the functional dimensions put forward by Mansbridge, it raises the question of the perception of the position of the dominated by the dominated themselves. The rhetoric of the working-class candidates indicates a detachment of the position of dominated and denotes the maturity of a class which tries, in the name of the political legitimacy they acquired, to redefine the balance of power. Can we then speak about descriptive representation in a context where the social characteristic "worker" is widely claimed and valued? And if the dominated, by finding the sources of new cultural capital, conceived themselves as dominant; would this not be the invention of a new social meaning capable then of emphasizing in a convincing way their distinctive political skill?