Locating the Centre: Confining and Defining the Power of Paris

Abstract

In the historiography of French nation-building, the centre-periphery model has proved seductive as much for its failures as for its successes. Following the post-war era, modernization theory promised a golden age to any nation which could overcome the challenges of economic and cultural diversity and move as a whole towards a modem homogeneous economy and political system. In this optimistic climate, historical examples abounded, best represented in France by Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen in which the transition from traditional to modem society took place through the domination of modem urban centres over a tradition-bound periphery. I In the 1980s and 90s, however, modernization theory was increasingly under fire in a global climate where regionalism and once local identities became justifications for separatist movements and put the structure ofthe modem nation to test. Amidst these conflicts, revisionists like Caroline Ford and Peter Sahlins stepped in to reconsider the relationship between the centre and the periphery by suggesting that in France the nation was not imposed on the centre by the periphery but developed through a dialogue between them. But while these revisionist works provided a more subtle understanding ofthe making ofthe modem nation by giving more agency to the periphery, they did not reconsider the centre as such.3 The aim ofthis article is precisely to bring this national centre under the historian's gaze in order to rethink the relationship between the centre and the periphery.