Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century / Edition 1

by James R. Lehning

Overview

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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521467704
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/28/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.55(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introductory positions; 2. The French nation and its peasants; 3. The landscape in the early nineteenth century; 4. Changes in the landscape; 5. Gender, places, people; 6. The ambiguities of schooling; 7. Inside the parish church; 8. A new site: electoral politics; 9. Conclusion: towards a new rural history.

Editorial Reviews

"Lehning's work raises important questions about the complexity of change processes in the nineteenth-century French countryside....[and] provides a valuable contribution to explorations of French rural culture and its history." American Historical Review

"This book couples a meticulous and deftly executed quantitative historical study of data about French ‘peasants,' broadly defined as country dwellers, with an excursion into a new cultural criticism that questions the ‘transparency' of the sources customarily relied on by social historians, namely the archives and reports constituted by officials of the French State." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"...a many-sided history that grants the magnitude of change, but emphasizes the exchange of cultures and ways in which French culture redefined its notions of the peasantry." Choice

"...his book is a timely rebuke to those who take too literally the strictures of Third Republic politicians and who fail to discuss the problem from a rural perspective." The Historian

From the Publisher