The Second Republic, Politics, and the Peasant

Abstract

There has been debate of late, some of it explicit, some implicit, about the rate at which French country people of the nineteenth century were integrated in the national political process, about the major factors and stages of this integration, and the degree to which country people assimilated the rules and values of the political game which they were called to join. One view of the French nineteenth-century situation was expressed by Karl Marx in 1852, who found peasants to lack political interest or initiative. Two score years later, Friedrich Engels repeated the observation,1 and many an administrative report from the provinces confirmed their impressions during the intervening years. When the peasants were not described as indifferent or apathetic, they simply voted as their betters told them. Dependent and submissive, they were citizens in name only: savages more like cattle, to which a guidebook of the 1820s compared them; barbarians in the midst of civilization, as Engels found them at mid-century.2 A more positive impression has been advanced in our day by the authors of two seminal works: Philippe Vigier with his dissertation on La Seconde Republique dans la region alpine (1963) and Maurice Agulhon with the influential La Republique au village (1970). These works and others represent the Second Republic as chiefly responsible for the politization of simple people, not only in towns, but in the country too: the efforts of the red opposition to Louis-Napoleon's ambitions carrying urban arguments into village and hamlet, the success of their propaganda evident in growing governmental con-