Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century - Hardcover

Lehning, James R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052146210X ISBN 13: 9780521462105

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

Rather than viewing the development of the French national identity as a process in which peasants lose their identities and become French, this text perceives it as an ongoing process of cultural contact. Peasants as well as the French nation negotiate their identities in relation to each other.

Review:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 052146210X
• ISBN 13: 9780521462105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254