Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introductory positions
- 2 The French nation and its peasants
- 3 The landscape in the early nineteenth century
- 4 Changes in the landscape
- 5 Gender, places, people
- 6 The ambiguities of schooling
- 7 Inside the parish church
- 8 A new site: electoral politics
- 9 Conclusion: toward a new rural history
- Sources and references
- Index
9 - Conclusion: toward a new rural history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introductory positions
- 2 The French nation and its peasants
- 3 The landscape in the early nineteenth century
- 4 Changes in the landscape
- 5 Gender, places, people
- 6 The ambiguities of schooling
- 7 Inside the parish church
- 8 A new site: electoral politics
- 9 Conclusion: toward a new rural history
- Sources and references
- Index
Summary
The notes to this book indicate the extent to which the nineteenth-century countryside has become a focus of study in the past several decades. This monographic literature has helped create a pervasive version of that history. Peasant society in this telling was isolated until the nineteenth century. It then experienced increased contact with the outside world thanks to better transportation, elective politics, migration, conscription, and education. As a result of this contact, peasant society became integrated into the French nation.
While many political historians have placed this transformation around the middle of the century, the most powerful and influential recent articulation of this orthodoxy is Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, and he places the inflection in the early years of the Third Republic. For Weber, the last decades of the nineteenth century saw “the wholesale destruction of traditional ways,” and tradition itself died. This story appears as well in a number of other works aimed at more general readers. The multiauthor Histoire de la France rurale rejects a static “peasant civilization” but spells out a process similar to the one Weber describes. The Second Empire and the first decade of the Third Republic witnessed the effloresence – the “apogee” – of rural society, helped by the prosperity of the Empire. But external impulses from the city and the national market in general made the following decades a period in which the peasant society of the third quarter of the century began to break up.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Peasant and FrenchCultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century, pp. 204 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995