Peasant and French

Abstract

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.

Neither Reformers nor Réformés: The Construction of French Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

“…To this end, the conventional image of the rural "savage" proved incongruous with elite objectives, and it was unsurprising that in the wake of the Paris Commune leading republicans would seek to rehabilitate the image of the peasant and associate the rural world directly with the interests and progressive values of the nouvelles couches social. 104 The transformation-both real and imagined-of la France profonde under the Third Republic revealed the extent to which modernity was a construction shaped and re-shaped through the discourse of elites as the cultural representation of the archaic peasant was replaced with that of the modern citizen. 105 If scholars have traditionally accorded a significant role to mass participation in defining a process of "political modernization," the republican "synthesis" of the late nineteenth century urges further examination into the discursive formations and cultural representations imbedded within the very concept of modern politics itself.…”