INDUSTRY AND POLITICS IN RURAL FRANCE Peasants of the Isere 1870-1914

French socialism in the nineteenth century was confined largely to its Parisian adherents, but the process of industrialization in rural France began to create opportunities for socialists to expand their movement after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. In this book Raymond A. Jonas offers a study of socialist success by focusing on one department in southeastern rural France, the Isere, where the silk industry converted peasants into workers and brought a thriving and dynamic local economy to towns, villages, and hamlets.
Analyzing peasant society and public opinion through a close study of rural household formation and through systematic use of press reports and electoral returns, Jonas explores in detail the consequences of the development of rural industry for politics, work, population movement, public opinion, and gender relations. He argues that work in dozens of the new textile mills gave thousands of women a public profile in rural society that a patriarchal peasant society would not otherwise have afforded them. Men stayed on the farms, and women departed for the mills.
Jonas shows how women's wages arrested the rural exodus because they subsidized peasant farming and gave women a powerful lever with which to reshape household relations and village society. At first their efforts were tentative - the weapons of the weak. But by the first decade of the twentieth century, they had learned how to influence public debate. Their presence "feminized" the public realm; the textile villages were the mirror images of such "masculinized" places as garrison towns and port cities - profoundly gendered places.

Raymond A. Jonas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington.