Soiled hands
Douglas Johnson
Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernisation of Rural French: 1870-1914, Eugen Weber (Chatto and Windus £12.00) In Britain we have never understood what a peasant is. Not only has the Channel proved a formidable barrier, but also the term 'peasant' is one of those unavoidable yet imprecise words, the content of which is both economic and social, and to which a certain prejudicial sense is attached. The peasant therefore always represents another, unfamiliar, alien world. But now, a learned American professor of French history tells us that the French too have had difficulty in coming to terms with the existence of the peasant world. In nineteenth-century France there were two nations: there was the urban and the rural. In the countryside there were many who did not speak French, there were large regions where the metric system was unknown, where roads were inadequate and distances considerable. Here a culture existed which was totally different from the rest of urban, national France. These were the areas, we are told, where the issues which affected the towns, their populations and politicians, were irrelevant.
When Frenchmen ventured into the countryside they had the impression that they were exploring savage territory, taking part in a colonial expedition. Gambetta described the peasantry as being several centuries behind 'the enlightened part of the country,' and just as the inhabitants of revolutionary Paris were said to give an involuntary shudder as they stood on the outskirts of their city and gazed at the unknown world that lay beyond, so Professor Weber tells us of the school-inspectors who comment incredulously on the absence of civilisation which characterises the rural regions which they had to visit, and he tells us about Flaubert, wandering amongst the suspicious peasants of Brittany as if he had been visiting some exotic bazaar.
Weber's subject is this world of villages and hamlets, which he describes with care and attention to detail (although the translation of peasant wisdom into Americanese tends to destroy much of the effect), and his main concern is to describe the ways in which its isolation and savagery were modified in the period between 1870 and 1914. He believes that it was during these years that official and national values were largely adopted. He is explaining and analysing the process of assimilation.
One immediate reaction is to suggest that Professor Weber has overstated his case in both directions. Rural France was not so violent as he claims, and the amount of
change that was accomplished by 1914 was not so considerable as he suggests. Bourgeois politicians, whether under the July Monarchy or the Third Republic, would periodically return to their roots in the countryside and would make contact with local inhabitants over a well-laden table. Printers would ensure that the newspapers would be delivered to the priest before Sunday, so that he could tell his parishioners what was happening. Henry Ceard's beautiful novel, Line Belle Journee shows how, at Easter, Parisians would take the train out to Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and would walk sedately through the countryside, inspecting the first signs of spring and worrying about early frosts. Most city dwellers were only too anxious to boast about their provincial and peasant origins, however anxious the peasant was to be known as un cultivateur. Maupassant's le Pere Milon is an apparently obsequious peasant, but he confesses to the killing of sixteen Prussians in 1871, because they had killed his father when he was serving in the army of rEmpereur premier. Does this show, as Professor Weber suggests, 'little sense of national identity'?
But it is the supposition that railways, the Ferry education laws, commercial developments and military conscription, could completely change the situation by 1914 that is most surprising. There were countless villages and hamlets which, by 1940, remained as cut off from the mainstream of national life as were those of the pre-1914 era. It was still a long walk to call on the doctor and to ask him to visit someone who was ill, and it was often easier to believe in the miraculous quality of calvados which would cure worms, of the toucheurs who claimed to be able to deal with most illnesses, just as births (and abortions) were handled by elderly women who were quite unqualified in any professional sense. There were rumours of infanticide, fear of ghosts and spirits, belief that the cure had the power of excommunication. Wireless sets were rare, and the postmen and the seamstresses who went from farm to farm with their sewing machines under their arm, were redoubtable conveyors of news and gossip, important adjuncts to the crieur public with his drum, and the local newspaper. Even within a small area it was possible to identify, by their accent, someone who came from the outskirts (so that in La Croix Avranchin, in Normandy, a woman was instantly recognised as coming from Saint Brie en Cogles, only fifteen kilometres away).
During the last war the Secretaires de mairie, had to help countless farmers who could not read the innumerable forms which they were obliged to complete, and after the war they could scarcely feel that they were dealing with the same people as themselves when the cultivateurs who came each year to register the birth of a child, would ask how much the next birth would bring in family allowances. As late as the 'fifties the police from Marseilles investigating the murder of the Drummond family at Lurs,
in the Basses Aloes, must have felt that they were surrounded by strangers when they penetrated the silence of the Dominici clan It seemed as if the savage peasants of the Giono novels, moved by elemental for and surrounded by a spirit-ridden Nature, still existed by the banks of the rive Durance. Thus one does not altogether acecPt Professor Weber's dating, or the somewhat over-precise organisation of his studY. Perhaps the real •changes in the French countryside came later, with the Gernlah occupation, or with the full impact or the motor car and television. As always with social history, time spans are longer theft one thinks. But, nevertheless, this is a rich presentation of the details of rural culture. From the tetaires, the milk-drawing Men,' who sucked the nipple of the newly deliver woman so as to start the flow of milk, tothe carnavels and charivaris, the popular songs,: superstitions and oral wisdom, this is abo°: which many will find fascinating. Ill: family, the farm, the church, the school these are the institutions which are ifilPtir: tant and which make much of what our normally studies in French history at/Pea as irrelevant, or at least marginal.
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