Les autobiographies des cheminots italiens

In Italian railway world, the autobiographical genre was born during the second half of the 19th Century. The corpus studied in this article illustrates a social reality specific to Italy (strongly politicized professionnal group that remained for a long time the first group of the country in size) and some major turning points of its history (nationalization in 1905, World Wars). Gathered from the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale Pieve Santo Stefano but also using testimonial (or not) literature, the texts here extend over the whole 20th Century and represent a constantly evolving production, notably under the influence of the recent retirement of an important number of Italian railwaymen. Following the managers and trade unionists writings, this autobiographical and literary field is characterized by critic testimonies of exploited employees and agents of private companies, by the political role and image of rail community, finally by the railwaymen’s children, focusing on the sometime touched memory of « The Great Rail Family » as well as on the hardness of labour. By the end, appears the offspring’s break with the rail world, cutting off lines of railways employees.