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This article examines the determinants of the timing and prevalence of female marriage in a sample of 33 rural villages in the French department of the Loire in the second half of the nineteenth century when the area was beginning to experience a demographic transition. Data from 1851 and 1891 are used in the analysis. The conclusions reached are that both timing and prevalence tended to be determined by similar factors Marriage chances were structured by demographic factors, with mortality in 1851 and the sex ratio in 1891 being significant deter minants. Socioeconomic factors exerted a relatively weak influence, and especially striking is the absence of any significant effect of rural industry on either the timing or the prevalence of marriage. Cultural factors, by contrast, were very significant: isolation, in 1851, and linguistic particularism, political conservatism, and female literacy in 1891 all supported traditional pat terns of restricted marriage. The unusual direction of the influence of literacy is attributed to the overwhelming role of the Catholic Church in providing education for women in the rural parts of the department

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This essay examines the impact of rural industry on nuptiality from several perspectives. First, aggregate data on marriage behavior during the second half of the eighteenth century are considered for one of the major protoindustrial regions of France, the departments along the northern border. No clear relationship is found between nuptiality and the presence of rural industry. The essay then examines the composition of the proto-industrial labor force in the department of the Loire during the nineteenth century and suggests some clarifications of this relationship. Two different models of proto-industrial family economy emerge. It is the combination of these two kinds of family economy in the same area that produced the ambiguous results found in the aggregate data. Thus, while in some parts of Europe proto-industrialization may have influenced age at marriage and proportions ever-marrying, this was by no means a universal effect. The household context of proto-industry played a major role in determining its impact on nuptiality.

Peasant and French examines the relationship between French peasants and the development of the French national identity during the nineteenth century. Drawing on methods from cultural studies and social history and a broad range of literary and archival sources, Lehning argues that modern France has in part defined itself as different from the peasantry. Rather than seeing rural French history as a process in which peasants lose their identities and become French, he views it as an ongoing process of cultural contact in which both peasants and the French nation negotiate their identities in relation to the other. The book suggests a new kind of rural history that places the countryside in its national context rather than in isolation.