Peasants into Frenchmen?

Dr Chris Pearson

President Sarokzy grappling with the issues at the Salon international de l’agriculture

Lecture themes

• The modernization of the French countryside

• The creation of a unified sense of French national identity

• The impact of Weber’s book and controversy it provoked

Eugen Weber (1925-2007)

Rural France went from being a world ‘where many did not speak French or know (let alone use) the metric system, where pistols and écus were better known than francs, where roads were few and markets distant, and where a subsistence economy reflected the most common prudence. This book is about how all this changed, and about how mentalities altered in the process; in a word, about how undeveloped France was integrated into the modern world and the official culture – of Paris, of the cities’ (p.x)

‘A Country of Savages’• Peasants bewildered by modernity and cities:

‘suspicious, anxious, bewildered by everything he sees and doesn’t understand, he makes great haste to leave the town’ (Flaubert)

• Extreme poverty – agricultural was underdeveloped

• Static countryside• Suspicious minds• Violence

A fragmented countryside

• Isolated communities, fearful of outside• ‘Isolation made for ignorance, indifference,

for rumors that spread like wild-fire in contrast to the stubbornly slow assimilation of current events’ (p.43)

• A linguistic mosaic – ¼ of countryside didn’t speak French in 1863

The ‘Agencies of Change’: Transport

• Roads – expansion during Third Republic, especially after 1881

• Railways – branch lines constructed 1880s+19,746km in 187926,327km in 188264,898km in 1910

• ‘Before culture altered significantly, material circumstances had to alter; and the role of the road and rail in this transformation was basic’ (p. 206)

‘Agencies of change’: The Army

• Universal conscription from 1889) • Army becomes ‘the school of the

fatherland’ – an ‘agency for emigration, acculturation, and in the final analysis, civilization’ (p. 302)

Schools – ‘civilizing in earnest’• Jules Ferry’s reforms of 1880s• Schools spread literacy, the speaking of

French, cleanliness, morality (importance of effort and duty), patriotism

• ‘schools brought suggestions of alternative values and hierarchies; and of commitments to other bodies than the local group’ (p. 338)

• Roads, railways, schools, and the army modernized the countryside

• Modernization a positive thing; brought progress to the countryside

• Influential book

Weber’s argument in a nutshell:

Critiquing Weber (1): Education

• Over-reliance on elite, urban sources – representations of countryside rather than “reality”

• Many peasants could read and write (Lyons, ‘What did the peasants read?’ European History Quarter [1997])

• Education had already reached the countryside, well before Ferry’s reforms of the 1880s (MacPhee)

Critiquing Weber (2): Economics

• Exposure to markets well before 1870s and proto-industrialization throughout 19th century (Tilly)

• Research on proto-indutrialization shows that countryside not solely reliant on agricture (Tilly, p. 33)

• ‘The European world bequeathed to the nineteenth century by the eighteenth was actually connected, mobile and even, in its way, industrial. There was no solid cake of custom to break’ (Tilly p.39)

• In France, economic modernization and agricultural output developed throughout the nineteenth century

• Pre-1880 economic growth had ‘created a countryside which was bustling with productive energy, not just in a few favored zones but in widespread areas of the nation’ (Margadant)

• Slow, gradual change occurred in rural France, well before the Third Republic (Margadant)

Rural economies in 19th century France

Critiquing Weber (3): Politics

• Imaginative resistance during Guerre des Desmoiselles (1829-30) [see Sahlins, Forest Rites]

• Involvement in national politics during Second Republic (1848-1851): support for left-wing “Dem-Soc” party, formation of democratic rural societies and armed opposition to Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’Etat

Map of resistance to 1851 coup

Conceptual critiques

• Weber’s model is too “top down” and centralized Peter Sahlin’s study of Cerdanya valley suggest that a sense of national identity developed on the periphery

• Weber too uncritical of modernity – sees it as progress

Weber on colonization‘Change is always awkward, but the changes modernity brought were often emancipations, and were frequently recognized as such. Old ways died unlamented… Perhaps this should make us think twice about “colonialism” in underdeveloped countries’ (p.492)

Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (2007): unlike Weber presents modernization as a tragic loss of diversity

‘A post modern view would identify modernity as a normative project. If social history is the child of modernity, then it is seen to be part of this project, not innocently naming the world but creating it in its own political and intellectual image’

Patrick Joyce, ‘The end of Social History?’ Social History 20:1 (1995)