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.

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.

Challenging the notion that modernization is a homogenizing process, Susan Rogers contends that in the course of large-scale transformations communities often reproduce and strengthen distinctive cultural and social features. To make this argument, she focuses on the French farming community of "Ste Foy" during a period of rapid change (1945-75). Using ethnographic field data and archival material that she collected as a "participant-observer," she finds an intriguing puzzle: an allegedly archaic social form, the ostal, has become increasingly common in the community. The ostal, a type of family farm organized around an extended "stem family" household, is a variant of the stem family systems associated with preindustrial southern Europe. How have Ste Foyans continued to remake this "archaic" mode as their community grew more prosperous and more involved in national and international markets? In showing how the specific identity of a community is reproduced rather than obliterated by modernization, the author reveals dialectical relationships between structure and change, history and culture, and the centralized nation-state and regional diversity. This analysis addresses anthropologists, historians, and scholars interested in local politics and economic development.

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.

"In post-World War II France, commitment to cutting-edge technological modernization and explosive economic growth uprooted rural populations and eroded the village traditions of a largely peasant nation. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. The attachment of the French to rural ways and the agricultural past became a widely-shared preoccupation in the 1970s; this, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Though the French countryside is often imagined as stable and enduring, this book presents it as a site not just of decline and loss but also of change and adaptation. Rural Inventions explores the rise of restored peasant houses as second residences; utopian experiments in rural communes and in going back to the land; environmentalism; the literary success of peasant autobiographies; photography; and other representations through which the French revalorized rural life and landscapes. The peasantry as a social class may have died out, but the countryside persisted, valued as a site not only for agriculture but increasingly for sport and leisure, tourism, and social and political engagement; a place to dwell part-time as well as full-time; and a natural environment worth protecting. The postwar French state and the nation's rural and urban inhabitants remade the French countryside in relation to the city and to the world at large, not only invoking traditional France but also creating a vibrant and evolving part of the France yet to come"--

This book examines the social history and historical geography of the most important agricultural pressure groups in France since about 1918, which helped to shape the evolution of French farming this century.

The triumphant rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte over his Republican opponents has been the central theme of most narrative accounts of mid-nineteenth-century France, while resistance to the coup d'état generally has been neglected. By placing the insurrection of December 1851 in a broad perspective of socioeconomic and political development, Ted Margadant displays its full significance as a turning point in modern French history. He argues that, as the first expression of a new form of political participation on the part of the peasants, resistance to the coup was of greater importance than previously supposed. Furthermore, it provides and appropriate testing ground for more general theories of peasant movements and popular revolts. Using manuscript materials in French national and departmental archives that cover all the major areas of revolt, the author examines the insurrection in depth on a national scale. After a brief discussion of the main characteristics of the insurrection, he analyzes its economic and social foundations; the dialectic of repression and conspiracy that fostered the political crisis; and the armed mobilizations, violence, and massive arrests that exploded as the result. A final chapter considers the implications of the insurrection for larger issues in the social and political history of modern France.