Modernization Of Rural France Research Articles

Balzac et consorts: scénographies familiales des conflits historiques dans le roman du xixe siècle. Textes réunis et présentés par Pascale Auraix-Jonchière

The theme of family life in nineteenth-century French literature and society has garnered considerable scholarly attention since the 1970s, as evidenced by Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (1870–1914) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976) and, more recently, Claudie Bernard’s Penser la famille au dix-neuvième siècle (1789–1870) (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2007). The present collection of essays adopts a particularly ambitious approach to this topic by exploring it not merely in relation to French writers of the period (including Balzac, Chateaubriand, Dumas père, Maupassant, and Zola), but also to the works of Dickens and Shelley. As Pascale Auraix-Jonchière explains in her prefatory remarks, family relationships were shaken and often broken by the 1789 Revolution, not least as a result of changes to France’s inheritance laws. However, far from seeking to evaluate the accuracy of literary texts as historical documents, this volume focuses on the multiple ways in which they show the upheavals of the Revolution reverberating in the private sphere. Central to this analysis is the concept of ‘scénographie’, which in its theatrical connotations provides a useful descriptor for exploring how works of fiction dramatized and reflected events unfolding on the wider historical stage. As the absolutism of the Ancien Régime crumbled, so, increasingly, patriarchal authority was called into question. Equally, literature proved a fertile domain in which to explore the themes of adoption, incest, illegitimacy, and mésalliance. Given his well-known interest in the damage wrought to family life by the abolition of primogeniture, Balzac provides an obvious starting point for this discussion. In the opening chapter of the volume, Marion Mas examines Balzac’s frustration at what he perceived as the erosion of patriarchal authority, and how this caused him to represent alternative forms of paternal relationship, such as that between Bourgeat, the selfless water-carrier of La Messe de l’athée (1836), and the medical student Desplein. Among the other notable contributions to this volume, François Kerlouégan explores the revolutionary allegory at the heart of George Sand’s depiction of family life in Mauprat (1837), while Alex Lascar reflects on the emotional and physical violence engendered by unsuitable marriages, especially in Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43). In a compelling and sometimes disturbing essay, Claudie Bernard also analyses the consequences of aristocratic inbreeding in Élémir Bourges’s 1884 novel Le Crépuscule des dieux. Striking a delicate balance between discussion of canonical and lesser-known texts, this volume presents a detailed and often insightful re-appraisal of family life in nineteenth-century fiction. While the concept of ‘scénographie’ is not — perhaps understandably, given the scope of the volume — carried through as systematically as it might have been, this does not diminish the value of a collection that will serve as a useful reference for specialists and students alike.

L'État éducateur politique dans les campagnes du dix-neuvième siècle : Lectures franco-méditerranéennes d'Eugen Weber

This article explores the role of the state as a vector of political acculturation in the French and Euro-Mediterranean countryside in the nineteenth century. It begins with a consideration of the importance of the reciprocal images of peasants and elites. It goes on to discuss how the terms "modernization" and "modernity" have been called into question, largely on account of how historians have deployed arguments originating in the disciplines of economics and anthropology. Finally, it examines how the debate about the role of the state in rural politicization, based on readings of Eugen Weber's classic book, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (1870-1914), goes beyond the simple question of the efficiency of the administration and opens up a wider inquiry into the virtual integration of people into the state and the role of rural elites in mediating between the local and the national.

Book Review: The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-century France

Book Review: The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-century France

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France.. By Roger Price. New York: Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. 503$37.50.

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France.. By Roger Price. New York: Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. 503$37.50. - Volume 45 Issue 2

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France

This book, first published in 1983, is a major contribution to our understanding of how and why French rural peasant society became modernised by radical changes in the communications system – in particular, the coming of the railways. The author argues that complex changes in the transport systems, and their effects on agricultural market structures, finally brought traditional French rural civilisation to an end. With the extension of commercialisation, and the widening of horizons, new economic and social structures – and changed attitudes – rapidly came into being. Writing as an economic historian, the author has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to this study which incorporates economic, sociological, historical and geographical methods and data.

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France.

The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, by Eugen Weber, Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside, by Pamela Horn

<i>Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914</i>, by Eugen Weber, <i>Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside</i>, by Pamela Horn

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

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

Eugen Weber. &lt;italic&gt;Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914&lt;/italic&gt;. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1976. Pp. xv, 615. $20.00

Journal Article Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1976. Pp. xv, 615. $20.00 Get access Weber Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1976. Pp. xv, 615. $20.00. Judith A. Silver Judith A. Silver University of New Hampshire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 82, Issue 3, June 1977, Page 653, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/82.3.653 Published: 01 June 1977

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

France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.