French Peasants Research Articles

The Paradoxes of Sin: Vengeance as Death Drive in Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre

Abstract If revenge functions to compensate for inequity arising from an initial transgression, thereby restoring equity, can we speak of restoration of an equitable social or personal situation in Janet Lewis’s novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)? This work belongs to Janet Lewis’s series of three novels based on “Cases of Circumstantial Evidence”, of which The Wife of Martin Guerre is the most famous. It concerns the case of Martin Guerre, the sixteenth-century French peasant who apparently returned home to his wife after a long absence but was later revealed to be an impostor. The wife at first believes that the impostor is indeed her husband, then starts to have doubts, gathers information to contest his assertions, develops an exaggerated religious sense of guilt for the sin of adultery, and successfully sues him, leading to his being hanged. Several questions arise: is she justified in feeling guilty for having given in to sexual attraction, thus blinding herself to the available clues pointing to the impostor’s deception? Can the outcome be considered an equitable result, despite the fact that the false Martin Guerre was actually a good administrator, dealing fairly both with his subjects and his wife, and thus created a much more harmonious life for everybody than the lawful husband had done? I consider the story as a case of revenge stemming from an incorrect religious perspective, or alternatively narcissistic damage, which does not bring about redress of a tort, but rather social unhappiness.

Does One Health Fit All? A French Peasants’ Perspective

Does One Health Fit All? A French Peasants’ Perspective

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt, by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt, by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

Justine Firnhaber-Baker, The Jacquerie of 1358. A French Peasants’ Revolt. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2021

Article Justine Firnhaber-Baker, The Jacquerie of 1358. A French Peasants’ Revolt. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2021 was published on October 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 2).

Legal Vocabulary as Means of Revealing by Marcel Proust of the Cultural Codes of French Aristocracy, Bourgeoisie and Peasantry

This article is devoted to the stylistic and cognitive analysis of the legal vocabulary in the third volume of Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” used in order to describe mental, psychological and cultural world of Guermantes in its contrast with the world of bourgeoisie and with that of French peasants. The legal terms we consider in the paper are used by Proust as core components of a number of stylistic figures, first of all, similes and metaphors. Following Gérard Cornu and some other scholars, we understand legal terminology (legal terms and legal vocabulary in general) as any word of language (in our case, those of French) having at least one legal meaning, acknowledged by an authoritative French dictionary. The legal terms identified in the text were classified into two groups: general legal vocabulary and specific legal vocabulary belonging to different branches of law: constitutional, criminal, international. In order to confirm their legal semantics while conducting contextual analysis, we have consulted all types of diction-aries: bilingual, monolingual, general and special ones. The main aim of the article was to determine the functions of these figures in Marcel Proust’s text whose poetics is not at all legal. To achieve it, the main task was to identify the connections between the denotative meaning of a given term and its connotative contextual transformations. This means first of all to decode contextual links between the legal figure under analysis and various domains of life it was applied to by Proust. Eventually, this analysis helps to reveal French cultural codes, those of declining aristocracy, empowered bourgeoisie and, in “Guermantes”, of peasantry. Thus, the Guermantes are associated in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, represented by Marcel, with something ancient, inaccessible to rational minds, charming: some sublime images, magical legends of ancient times, exquisite works of art and music, antique music instruments. In this context, a legal term, such as carte photographique d’identité for instance, introduces, by contrast, some materially-minded, pragmatic, prosaic notes. At the same time, democratic changes leading to the rise of the bourgeoisie, as well as the world of peasants are depicted in an extremely concrete way, being associated with the untamed force of nature: damage and devastation caused by the floods, noises, and the like. At the same time, various typical human feelings, such as Marcel’s admiration and Saint-Loup’s love due to the use of legal figures may be represented as imprisonment.

Commoning the seeds: alternative models of collective action and open innovation within French peasant seed groups for recreating local knowledge commons

In this article, we expand the analytical and theoretical foundations of the study of knowledge commons in the context of more classical agrarian commons, such as seed commons. We show that it is possible to overcome a number of criticisms of earlier work by Ostrom (Governing the commons. The evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990) on natural commons and its excludability/rivalry matrix in addressing the inclusive social practices of “commoning”, defined as a way of living and acting for the preservation of the commons. Our empirical analysis emphasizes, using the most recent advances in the IAD/SES framework, the distributed and collaborative knowledge governance in a French peasant seed network as a key driver for reintroducing cultivated agrobiodiversity and on-farm seed conservation of ancient and landrace varieties. These inclusive peasant seed groups developed alternative peer-to-peer models of collaborative peasant-led community-based breeding and grassroots innovations in the search for more resilient population varieties. Our results highlight the various models of collective action within the network and discuss the organizational tradeoffs of opting out of peasant seed activities and recreating a shared collective knowledge base on the benefits of restoring cultivated agrobiodiversity. It helps us better understand how modern peasant seed groups function as epistemic communities which contributes to envisioning alternative agricultural systems.

“A Ray of Sunshine on French Tables”

The French citrus industry in Algeria grew rapidly in terms of land area and fruit production from the 1930s until Algerian Independence in 1962. This article contends that technical expertise regarding citrus cultivation played a role in colonial control of Algeria’s territory, population, and economy. The French regime enrolled Algerian fruit in biopolitical interventions on rural ways of life in Algeria and urban standards of living in France. Technical manuals written by state-affiliated agronomists articulated racial distinctions between French settlers and Algerian peasants through attention to labor practices in the groves. A complex legal, technological, and administrative infrastructure facilitated the circulation of citrus fruit across the Mediterranean and into metropolitan France. This nexus of scientific research, economic profit, and racial hierarchy met criticism during the Algerian War for Independence. In the aftermath, expert discussions about citrus production reflected uncertainties and tensions regarding Algeria’s future. Citrus’ place in scientific, technological, and economic changes in twentieth-century Algeria illuminates the politics of technical expertise under colonialism and during decolonization.

Young Voices from the Field and Home Front: World War II as Depicted in Contemporary Children’s Literature

Promoting support for Allied Forces was a central theme of contemporary children’s literature in the eve of and during World War II; the body of work captures a surprisingly complex and conflicted view of armed conflict and nationhood.Amid the expected imperatives that American children scavenge scrap metal for war bonds and cozy stories of English children evacuated to safety in North America, there is nostalgia for pastoral Russia and an unabashed celebration of the Soviet collective effort. In one of the most charged depictions, a pair of dachshunds forced to wear Nazi uniforms outwit their master. An Austrian refugee, the creation of a refugee writer, pointedly informs a naïve French peasant boy: “There are a great many Germans who hated the Nazis, didn’t you know that?”1 before revealing his father was a prisoner at Dachau.

Ignatian Radicalism: The Influence of Jesuit Spirituality on Dorothy Day

In December 1951 issue of Catholic Worker newspaper, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) included an obituary for French-Canadian Jesuit named Onesimus Lacouture (1881-1951), originator of the retreaf that she had enthusiastically embraced decade earlier and which she would later memorialize in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. Noting that Lacouture had been of twenty-one children in his family-his father had married twice-Day wrote,Doesn't that sound like beginning of life of saint? Peter Maurin was of twenty-three children. These two men who had most on my life (and so in way on life of Catholic Worker) were both French peasants, of France and French Canada. They both knew life of land and of city. Both were men of poor.1For Day, Lacouture and his theology had deeply profound effect and- along with Maurin-she saw French-Canadian Jesuit as having had the most influence on her life and Catholic Worker. I am completely sold on this retreat business, she wrote in 1941, I think it will cure all ills, settle all problems, bind up all wounds, strengthen us, enlighten us, and in other words make us happy.2 And indeed, others would later credit retreat-which Day called bread for strong-as having brought about second conversion in her life.3Despite such high praise from Day, theology operative in Lacouture's retreat has often been portrayed by contemporary scholars in much more negative terms. For instance, J. Leon Hooper, S.J., has suggested that retreat was filled with Jansenistic suspicion of body and that its wholesale rejection of natural could be understood only as a flirting with of which Lacouture was (accurately) accused.4 Not to be outdone, James T. Fisher described retreat theology as being imbued with bitterly mystical, 'gloomy Catholicism' which wedded of Port Royal to harsh struggle for Catholic survival in Canada.5 And he described Lacouture's ethnic Jansenism as having blended potently with Day's more aesthetic Jansenism to help form what Fisher declared to be one of most abject brands of self-abnegation in American religious history.6Such characterizations of theology that deeply shaped Dorothy Day are not insignificant. This study argues that depictions like those made by Hooper and Fisher have greatly contributed to way in which Day and others associated with Catholic Worker have been characterized as sectarian and out of step with traditional Catholic theology.7 In fact, Fisher's depiction of Lacouture's theology goes long way in shaping Eugene McCarraher's argument that, because of their rejection of middle-class materialist aspirations of their fellow Catholics, Day and others associated with Catholic Worker movement are ultimately irrelevant to American Catholicism.8But while descriptions of retreat as Jansenist seem to prevail in American Catholic scholarship-influencing way Day and others have been perceived-it is certainly not only way that Lacouture's theological vision can be or has been interpreted. In fact, quite different depiction of Lacouture's retreat was offered by Fr. John J. Hugo (1911-85) two generations ago. Hugo, Pittsburgh priest, was Dorothy Day's spiritual director for much of 1940s and '50s, and was perhaps greatest promulgator of retreat in English-speaking countries (Figure 1).9 Throughout 1940s-during period in which he himself was prevented from preaching retreat by his bishop-Hugo wrote several works defending retreat theology in response to criticisms of it made by some of most prominent U.S. Catholic theologians of day. These critics had accused retreat of promoting an exaggerated supernaturalism with Jansenist tendencies- charges not all that unlike those made more recently by Fisher and Hooper. Central to Hugo's defense was his claim that Onesimus Lacouture, S. …

Two Models of Ownership: How Commons Has Co‐Existed with Private Property

AbstractThis article challenges the claim by many historians that the rise of capitalism requires the destruction of common property systems. In contrast to the English case in which commons were enclosed, French peasants used their common property system to regulate the market, provide a rural safety net and a democratic check on elites, while urban industry developed. European battles over common property replayed in surprising ways in colonial African countries such as Sierra Leone, and echoes reemerge today. The West African country of Guinea tests two possible paths to development of a market society: the English path and the French path. Interviews with key government officials collected in 1993 help explain why Guinea, despite adopting a land law in 1992 inspired by the English path, has so far failed to widely apply the law and, in fact, is following the French path. The United States pursued a policy of replacing American Indian common property systems with exclusive individual property rights. Nonetheless, Indian common property survives in the form of recent recognition of Indian off‐reservation hunting and fishing rights. The Menominee reservation successfully resisted the destruction of its common property system and today participates in the market in a manner that preserves reservation ecology, democratic government, and Menominee cultural identity. Rethinking the meaning of French, African, and U.S. accommodation to common property systems offers important lessons for contemporary development policies in Africa and around the world.

The literary author as a sociologist? Among French Peasants by August Strindberg

The literary author as a sociologist? <i>Among French Peasants</i> by August Strindberg

Philip S. Gorski, editor. Bourdieu and Historical Analysis.

According to Philip S. Gorski, Pierre Bourdieu has mistakenly been treated as a reproduction theorist rather than as a historical analyst concerned with explaining social change beyond the dualism of structure and event. This orientation, he argues, guided Bourdieu's empirical studies of Algerian and French peasants, literary fields, and May 1968; it was also built into his dynamic concepts. But is this volume's aim to revise our understanding of Bourdieu or to elaborate new approaches to historical analysis? David L. Swartz contributes to the former by skillfully elaborating Bourdieu's “metaprinciples”: an activist orientation, attention to material and symbolic forms of power, micro and macro levels of analysis, relational thinking, breaking with conventional understandings of objects, and self-reflexivity about the positions and dispositions that link analyst to object. Unfortunately, Swartz does not directly discuss what these principles might mean for historical analysis. In contrast, Craig Calhoun insightfully treats Bourdieu as a historical sociologist whose interest in change was itself forged through experiences of historical transformation, including Algerian colonialism, the postwar economic boom, and neoliberal anti-welfarism. He contends that Bourdieu's concepts (i.e., field, habitus, and capital) grasp the historical specificity of modern society as differentiated into distinct spheres with their own logics and values. He also identifies Bourdieu's method of historicizing a field, its corresponding habitus, and the analyst's categories in order to counteract the “tendency [of scholars] to project their own … relation to the social world into the minds of the people they observe” (p. 43). The third framing essay by Christophe Charle makes interesting points about comparative and transnational histories of European intellectual networks, but offers little new about Bourdieu or his historical analysis.

Republicans, Bonapartists and rural voters in nineteenth-century France Review of Chloé Gaboriaux, La République en quête de citoyens: Les républicains français face au bonapartisme rural (1848–1880). Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2010

The significant rural vote for anti-republican and Bonapartist candidates in the period between 1848 and the 1870s has been seen as evidence of the need for French peasants to be converted to the French Republic. Chloe Gaboriaux's book begins with the aftermath of the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the Presidency of the Republic in 1848, and tracks the different directions of republican approaches to rural votes over the next two decades. She shows how French Republicans themselves changed their version of the Republic to make it more attractive to peasants, so that by the 1870s they were seen as the model for the Republican citizenry. This essay describes Gaboriaux's argument, and places it in the context of current discussions about democratization.

Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting (review)

Reviewed by: Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting Eszter Szalczer Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting. Anna Westertåhl Stenport. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Pp. viii + 216. $50.00 (cloth). Locating August Strindberg's Prose makes a long overdue contribution to our understanding of the Swedish author's instrumental role in devising transnational prose modernism. Anna Westertåhl Stenport reads Strindberg's prose against that of Kafka, Conrad, Rilke, and Breton, among others, re-contextualizing some of his most radical texts. Strindberg, internationally regarded as one of the seminal figures of the first wave of modern drama, and more recently as an experimental visual artist (as revealed in the 2005 exhibition of his paintings and photography at the Tate Modern), wrote fiction and non-fiction in several languages (Swedish and French) set in widely ranging locations that chart the European urban, rural, and colonial landscapes. [End Page 218] His heterogeneous and self-reflexive narratives follow extremely mobile characters as they cross over geographical, national, gender, generic, and linguistic boundaries, mirroring the author's permanent condition of self-imposed exile, or as Stenport puts it, his modernist "geographical vagabondage" (4). The concept of literary setting is central to Stenport's project of re-locating Strindberg's prose in the heart of European modernism. All the five texts discussed in detail are transnational travel narratives. Stenport offers to explore what she considers original in Strindberg's prose, including "the complex construction of setting across national traditions, languages, and trajectories of travel" (6). This emphasis on the transient and constantly mobile settings of Strindberg's prose challenges the preoccupation with the delocalized authorial persona that has been found in Strindberg scholarship to date—this persona's modernist impulse is spent in gestures of subject-formation and identity-construction—and urges us to re-think prose modernism and its legacy in terms of literary setting. Locating August Strindberg's Prose offers close readings of spatial descriptions in five texts, tracing each narrative's structural dependence on the construction of settings. Stenport asks questions about "how Strindberg writes about locations, where he writes, about which places, in what languages, and for what audiences" (6). This approach allows her to engage with larger questions about production and reception, in an effort to de-marginalize Strindberg's work. Since the texts analyzed are all founded on movement across cultures, subcultures, languages, and national borders, considered together they present a case study for how modernism formalizes transnational setting and subverts models of literary influence conceived as binary oppositions such as margin and center, import and export. The initial chapter focuses on Strindberg's radical narrative of social transgression, A Madman's Defense (Le plaidoyer d'un fou, 1887-88), written in French in Sweden and set in multiple locations across Scandinavia. The frequently shifting settings—including apartment houses, railway stations, and anonymous boarding houses—suggest a constant state of transition and the gradual "de-housing" of the characters as they leave the safe haven of domesticity and venture into uncharted territories represented by divorce, lesbian desire, and male hysteria. These transgressions, coupled with a subjective narratorial voice, appoint the text a precarious position of transience and liminality. The first person narration by an increasingly unstable and irrational subject dismantles perceived gender-roles and undermines late-nineteenth-century novelistic genre-expectations, where the omniscient third person narrator stands as guarantee for narrative truth. Stenport effectively shows how the feminized journal form, which poses as a scientific case study of the narrator's wife, deconstructs its claim to the rational "defense" of its speaker's sanity. A Madman's Defense is a fitting introduction to Strindberg's border-crossing modernism, a novel that challenged established paradigms of scholarly reception and gave rise to the long prevalent tradition of psychopathologizing the author through his text. In her next chapter Stenport turns to a lesser-known work, Among French Peasants: A Subjective Travelogue (Bland franska bönder: Subjektiva reseskildringar, 1889) with which Strindberg seems to have created yet another form, which could be designated as rural ethnographic modernism. The work is a non-fiction travel narrative whose subtitle alone undermines ethnographic claims to scientific...

The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders &amp; American Expansion (review)

Reviewed by: The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion Robert Englebert Gitlin, Jay — The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 269. Jay Gitlin's The Bourgeois Frontier is a remarkable book that combines commercial history and genealogy to create an incredibly detailed yet easily digestible narrative that seeks to insert the story of the French — or more specifically French merchants — into the American grand narrative. Through an exploration of the French experience in the early American Midwest, Gitlin effectively shows that French merchants were no bit players in the expansion of the American empire, but rather helped "broker the transition to an American regime of settlement (p. 187)." These French merchants engaged in diverse activities as Indian agents, founders of towns, fur traders, land speculators, financiers and early industrialists. Gitlin's ability to connect the dots between French towns and French merchant families leaves us with a web of commercial and kinship connections in what he identifies as the Creole Corridor from Detroit to New Orleans. Moreover, he impressively places these merchants and their families in a broader context and [End Page 419] shows how they extended out along the Upper Missouri and southwest along the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico, while still maintaining links to markets and capital in places like New York and London. Gitlin begins by tackling the legacies of Francis Parkman and Frederick Jackson Turner, who he argues made the French vanish from history. First the French were partially erased through defeat at the hands of the British during the Seven Years' War, and then they were more definitively expunged from memory as a result of being overrun by American settlement and the westward expansion of the frontier. The legacies of Parkman and Turner, with notions of backward French peasants and Anglo-American exceptionalism, have been remarkably durable, and Gitlin's greatest achievement may be to finally put these myths and stereotypes to rest. Merchant after merchant, from Chouteau, Cerré, and Gratiot, to Campau, Robidoux, Vallé, Menard, and Pratte, Gitlin provides a nuanced account of how French merchants adapted to life under American rule and found ways not only to survive, but to prosper and wield enormous power and influence until the 1830s. Gitlin argues that the Creole Corridor was a new west beyond the frontier that emerged out of the middle ground of the French and Aboriginal Pays d'en Haut. Based on trade relations and understandings of Native sovereignty, this new west was quite different from the trans-Appalachian west defined by violence and outright confrontation. Gitlin persuasively demonstrates how French merchants acted as intermediaries between indigenous peoples and American Federal officials, negotiating the relocation and removal of native peoples. According to Gitlin, French merchants were able to do this precisely because of their historical relationship with many of the Indian nations in the heart of North America. To Gitlin's credit, he clearly explains that French merchants and their families profited from the process of American land acquisition, and that indigenous peoples did not fare well and often had little choice but to accept French mediation. The idea that French merchants were able to use their experience as "middle grounders" to adjust and succeed under American rule is innovative and should generate debate. After all, not all merchant families were able to parlay their middle ground experience under the French, British, and Spanish regimes into success under American rule. What of the numerous French and mixed-descent (métis) families that were not part of this successful merchant group? Gitlin hints at this bigger picture with material on the founding of towns, schools, and associations, as well as petitions to colonial administrators and state and federal officials. Yet for the most part, the larger French story is left untold. Still, what Gitlin has done is quite remarkable given the limits of the surviving records, which consist mostly of merchant family correspondence, and business and legal documents. Gitlin notes that he saw this work primarily as an urban history, and towns such as St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans tend to dominate the book. However, a side effect of focusing on towns...

FROM THE EDITORS

Editors of academic journals are confronted with choices and trade-offs.A wide variety of factors are influencing the choice of articles and themes for aparticular edition. Scientia Militaria, the South African Journal for Military Studies,is a journal with a particular focus and covers a wide spectrum of military-relatedtopics. As an academic discipline, Military Science, though, is characterised by itsinterdisciplinary nature. This interdisciplinary nature is once again demonstratedthrough the variety of articles in this particular edition.Prof. William Dean from the US Air Command and Staff contributed aninteresting article on morale among French colonial troops on the Western Frontduring the First World War. He pointed out that the traditional images of the FrenchArmy on the Western Front during the First World War have been that of thegrizzled yet determined French peasant or worker. However, recent researchportrays a different view of the French Army on the Western Front. Dean’s articleprovides an overview of the morale of the 600 000 men from across the Frenchempire who served in the frontline and in logistics units in France. Bringing thesecolonial soldiers to a foreign country and culture to fight in a new type of horrificwar was strenuous, while at the time perhaps not contentious. The article providesan impressionistic overview of the morale of these colonial forces in France. Theauthor argues conclusively that the French colonial empire paid a high price in thewar. The colonies were economically and demographically dislocated and thereturning colonial veterans of the First World War played a part in the growingnationalism of the inter-war years. Their experiences and views contributed towardsthe setting of the stage for post-1945 revolutions in the French empire.

MORALE AMONG FRENCH COLONIAL TROOPS ON THE WESTERN FRONT DURING WORLD WAR I: 1914–1918

The traditional images of the French Army in World War I on the WesternFront from Cyril Falls’s to Marc Ferro’s surveys (both entitled The Great War 1914–1918) have been that of the grizzled yet determined French peasant or worker – thepoilu. It is clear from recent research that this is far from accurate and that theFrench forces were far more heterogeneous than portrayed by previous images.1Men were called from all over the French empire to serve in the frontline and inlogistics units. Virtually every part of the French Empire responded, althoughsomewhat grudgingly, even including Tahiti, which provided a Bataillon Pacifique.Bringing men to a foreign land and culture to fight in a new type of horrific war wasquite a strain on these 600 000 soldiers.2 The bulk of these soldiers were drawn fromNorth and West Africa, with smaller numbers coming from Madagascar, Indochinaand Equatorial Africa. This article is an attempt at giving an impressionistic glimpseof this subject describing colonial morale both at the frontlines and behind the lines,seeing how they compare to their metropole comrades and trying to gain anunderstanding of the vie quotiedienne of the colonial soldier.

La Marguerite by William Morris Hunt

<i>La Marguerite</i> by William Morris Hunt

The Displaced Naturalist: W. F. Campbell’s Life of Exile in Normandy

This article examines the dynamics of rootedness and displacement; bourgeois authority and peasant ways of life; signified and signifier, that are at work in Walter Frederick Campbell’s Life in Normandy (1863).Walter Frederick Campbell (1798–1855) spent the last years of his life in Avranches, Normandy as an economic refugee. He had been Laird of Islay for thirty-two years and his financial ruin was in large part due to the agricultural and economic reforms he had implemented on the island. He was in many ways a benevolent proprietor and was described as “a man of kind heart and generous nature”. The reforms he introduced were farsighted, visible in the landscape still today, while he resisted the temptation to clear the overpopulated island.Life in Normandy is a fictionalized account of Campbell’s experience in and around Avranches. His son, John Francis Campbell edited the two volumes and declared them to be primarily a philanthropic effort to teach Scottish peasants how to improve their practices: “It was suggested that a good cheap dinner would tempt a poor man from bad dear drink abroad, and that a poor Scotchman’s wife might be taught to do that which poor wives do elsewhere” (p. v). Hope and Cross, the protagonists of the narrative are clearly Campbell’s alter egos and are both passionately interested in nature, fishing and shooting. The action in Normandy takes place against the background of rumblings from the 1848 Revolution in Paris.The account can be read as a long reflection on the dislocation of identity and the precarious meaning of home for the economic exile as well as for the Scottish and French peasant.

Interwar France and the Rural Exodus: The National Myth in Peril

AbstractInterwar France saw itself as a rural nation. The First World War, won in the muddy earth of the trenches, elevated the image of the ‘peasant soldier’ to a symbolic height. But paradoxically, it was during this period that the urban population overtook the rural. Against this backdrop, references to the noxious consequences of rural migration increased in frequency and virulence. The condemnation of rural migration was part of the celebration of a French national identity rooted in the past, the earth and other key agrarian values, such as thrift, hard work and property ownership. French peasants are perceived to be the last bearers of this value set. In other European countries too, the same ideological debate was at play. In Italy and Germany, in particular, the regimes were faced with a similar dilemma, championing a racially pure, rural, identity rooted in the past, whilst embracing a modernising revolution. Their parallel attempts at aligning these two ideas are richly suggestive.