Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914

"Yes, it is a classic. Weber was a very peculiar man. He published a collection of autobiographical essays called My France , which are well worth looking at. He was born in Romania and was partly Jewish but was also associated with the extreme right, at least in terms of family background. He left Romania as a refugee and was educated in England and France. He served in the British Army. I read somewhere that he had trained as a Methodist clergyman. He had all these peculiar experiences, all of which eventually came together when he went to the United States and became a very big name historian. But he’s always slightly different from mainstream academic historians. He’s very ambitious, capable of seeing a big picture. This book is inspired by a certain kind of modernization theory. In the 1950s and ’60s, you had books that were about a big change in history, usually political change. For instance, Elton’s work related to the Tudor revolution in government. In retrospect, it seems a very parochial book, but it was brilliant at the time. Then, in the 1970s, people started doing much more social history but also looking for big changes. Think of something like Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic . The objection to these books is always that they take changes over a very long period and telescope them, saying that it all happened, as with this book by Weber, in the late 19th, early 20th century. I worked as a dishwasher in a French hotel, just before I went to university. When I read Weber’s book, I thought that, actually, lots of the things that he is describing as having gone out in the late 19th century are things I can remember happening in Haute Savoie in the early 1980s. The people I worked with still used the word ‘bourgeois’ to mean someone who lived in a town, using it as a geographical definition rather than a social definition. It makes Weber’s book kind of dubious. “Things like drinking red wine weren’t created by God” On the other hand, it’s inspiring to have this massive intellectual self-confidence, arguing that ‘here is the big change of modern France.’ It’s a fantastic book for anybody to read. If you’re interested in France , it gives you a sense of how what we think of as being quintessentially French was born. One of the key things about the book is the idea that things like drinking red wine weren’t created by God as what the French do. There was a time when lots of people in France drank cider—in Brittany—or beer, in Alsace. Weber said, ‘There’s a national culture which is created by certain institutions. It doesn’t just spring up naturally. In the case of red wine, was created largely by conscription and military service.’ He gives you a sense of how France used to be so fragmented and how it all comes together. It’s a wonderful book, very suggestive if you’re working on any other country as well. If you’re looking at India, say, you instantly think, ‘This is a world in which peasants are drawn into a national culture, where—if they move from rural India to Bombay to work as a bus conductor, say—they experience the excitement of encountering all these national institutions. A bit of both. There is some urbanization. Mainly he’s talking about how a national culture comes to the countryside. In some ways, that’s what makes France different from every other country in Europe. In every other country in Europe, the peasants were, indeed, leaving the land. What’s remarkable about France is people were leading a different life, but staying on the land. Urbanization probably affected France less than most European countries, and especially emigration affected France much less than other countries. If you’re a Russian peasant, your life is going to change because you might well move to Chicago, for example. Whereas if you’re a French peasant, you will almost certainly stay in your own little area. You might move to the nearest small town, your son might become a stationmaster or an instituteur , a primary school teacher. They’re quite modest changes on the face of it but in cultural terms, they’re quite dramatic."