From the Preface by Lucien Febvre: MARC BLOCH'S Caracteres originaux de l'histoire ruralefranfaise, which was originally published at Oslo in 1931 and appeared simultaneously at Paris under the imprint Belles Lettres, has long been out of print. As he told me on more than one occasion, he had every intention of bringing out another edition. In Marc Bloch's own mind this was not simply a matter of reissuing the original text. He knew, none better, that time stops for no historian, that every good piece of historical writing needs to be rewritten after twenty years: otherwise the writer has failed in his objective, failed to goad others into testing his foundations and improving on his rasher hypotheses by subjecting them to greater precision. Marc Bloch was not given time to refashion his great book as he would have wished. One wonders whether he would in fact ever have brought himself to do it. I have the impression that the prospect of this somewhat dreary and certainly difficult task (however one may try to avoid it, revision of an earlier work is always hampered by the original design, which offers few easy loopholes for escape) held less appeal than the excitement of conceiving and executing an entirely new book. However this may be, our friend has carried this secret, with so many others, to his grave. The fact remains that one of our historical classics, now more than twenty years old, is due for republication and is here presented to the reader.

From the Preface by Lucien Febvre: MARC BLOCH'S Caracteres originaux de l'histoire ruralefranfaise, which was originally published at Oslo in 1931 and appeared simultaneously at Paris under the imprint Belles Lettres, has long been out of print. As he told me on more than one occasion, he had every intention of bringing out another edition. In Marc Bloch's own mind this was not simply a matter of reissuing the original text. He knew, none better, that time stops for no historian, that every good piece of historical writing needs to be rewritten after twenty years: otherwise the writer has failed in his objective, failed to goad others into testing his foundations and improving on his rasher hypotheses by subjecting them to greater precision. Marc Bloch was not given time to refashion his great book as he would have wished. One wonders whether he would in fact ever have brought himself to do it. I have the impression that the prospect of this somewhat dreary and certainly difficult task (however one may try to avoid it, revision of an earlier work is always hampered by the original design, which offers few easy loopholes for escape) held less appeal than the excitement of conceiving and executing an entirely new book. However this may be, our friend has carried this secret, with so many others, to his grave. The fact remains that one of our historical classics, now more than twenty years old, is due for republication and is here presented to the reader.

France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

Men stayed on the farms, and women departed for the mills.

This book, first published in 1983, is a major contribution to our understanding of how and why French rural peasant society became modernised by radical changes in the communications system – in particular, the coming of the railways. The author argues that complex changes in the transport systems, and their effects on agricultural market structures, finally brought traditional French rural civilisation to an end. With the extension of commercialisation, and the widening of horizons, new economic and social structures – and changed attitudes – rapidly came into being. Writing as an economic historian, the author has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to this study which incorporates economic, sociological, historical and geographical methods and data.

Describes the negotiation of French national identity during the nineteenth century in terms of the relationship between the French and their rural cultures.

France is often held up as a bastion of gastronomic refinement and as a model of artisanal agriculture and husbandry. But French farming is not at all what it seems. Countering the standard stories of gastronomy, tourism, and leisure associated with the French countryside, Venus Bivar portrays French farmers as hard-nosed businessmen preoccupied with global trade and mass production. With a focus on both the rise of big agriculture and the organic movement, Bivar examines the tumult of postwar rural France, a place fiercely engaged with crucial national and global developments. Delving into the intersecting narratives of economic modernization, the birth of organic farming, the development of a strong agricultural protest movement, and the rise of environmentalism, Bivar reveals a movement as preoccupied with maintaining the purity of the French race as of French food. What emerges is a story of how French farming conquered the world, bringing with it a set of ideas about place and purity with a darker origin story than we might have guessed.