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

The first section of this book is a completely brilliant survey of sources showing French rural life pre-1870. The same method (endless accretion of detail, beautifully managed) didn't work quite so well for the period of change. But the whole book full of insight not only into its immediate topic, but into understanding more fully processes of change, as well as the sheer dreadfulness of poverty-stricken lives.

This is a very carefully composed and meticulously researched work on the transition from the traditional to the modern way of life in rural France between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War.

France underwent this sort of transition much later than England, and the book has some parallels to books on earlier phases of English culture (Thompson's Customs in Common and Laslett's The World We Have Lost, in particular) despite the fact that they deal with the 17th and 18th Centuries. In addition, England (proper, omitting Wales and Cornwall) never had as great a gulf between the culture and language of the cities and towns, a national culture, and that of the countryside.

The other linkage to be made, in the latter part of the book, show more is with Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition.

(As a plus, it pointed me in the direction if the original text and subtext of ”Les Filles des Forges".)

Well worth the investment of reading. show less

Un monde en sans cesse disparition, évolution, effondrement et foisonnement, un monde moderne, terriblement vivant.