‘A World of Their Own’: Searching for Popular Culture in the French Countryside (French...

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"A World of Their Own": Searching for Popular Culture in the French Countryside Author(s): Stéphane Gerson Source: French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 94-110Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42843602Accessed: 15-04-2015 14:45 UTC

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"A World of Their Own":

Searching for Popular Culture in the French

Countryside

Stéphane Gerson New York University

Eugen Weber is a historian who, as the French put it, a compté pour moi . I read his study of the Action française in high school, but Peasants into Frenchmen was the pivotal book. I remember buying it in the late 1980s, just out of col- lege, at Coliseum Books off Columbus Circle - back when there were indepen- dent bookstores in Manhattan and they sold books such as this one. Peasants into Frenchmen took hold of me and opened up vistas I had never contem- plated: namely, a rural world that came alive as a topic of study, a locus of nostalgia, and a vivid social landscape, rich in sights, sounds, and smells. This is a book without leading characters, but with an irresistible narrative thrust and a wealth of evidence that, prior to convincing the reader, leaves her dizzy. I recall feeling dizzy, but secure too, carried by an authorial voice that was removed from this rural world, yet empathetic and seemingly all-knowing as well. As a guide to this foreign land, as both an insider and an outsider, Weber was self-assured but never smug before the neophyte reader, somewhere between the Guide bleu and the Guide du routard.

The guidebook metaphor suits a book that explores, as one of its epigraphs puts it, "a world of their own, with its own uses and traditions"1 - a rural world that, given its physical, historical, and cultural distance, requires a cicerone. Four decades ago, scholars created a vibrant field of research around these "uses and traditions" - elements of what they called popular culture. This field encompassed values and beliefs, customs and rituals, forms of solidarity and conflict, of transmission and transformation, cultural contact sometimes, cultural destruction often. The concept of popular culture surfaces throughout Peasants into Frenchmen, notably in the last chapter, with its remarks on the early modern split and late nineteenth-century meeting

French Politics , Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer 2009 doi:10.3167/fpcs. 2009. 270206



"A World of Their Own" 95

between what Weber alternately calls "high and low cultures" and "popular and elite cultures." The book ends with the words: "popular and elite cultures had come together again" (495-96).

The thirtieth anniversary of Peasants into Frenchmen is thus an opportunity to revisit the role the concept of popular culture plays both in the book and in the historiography of France. This essay will first delineate the contours of this field of study in the 1970s and situate Peasants into Frenchmen within it. It will then trace the field's evolution during the following decades, focusing on the nineteenth century and assess the book's contribution to this body of scholarship. Finally, it will consider some future directions of research - and how this book may still prove helpful. My guiding idea is that, in terms of conceptualization, epistemological stance, and rhetorical voice, Peasants into Frenchmen adopts two distinct perspectives on popular culture, perspectives that are sometimes compatible but typically at odds. The first perspective revolves around the confident discovery of a fixed traditional civilization in the French countryside; the second is a more prudent, more conjectural search for fluctuating cultural processes. The first, or "civilizational," perspective was very much of its time and eclipsed the second, or "cultural process" perspective in reviews and commentaries on the book. Yet it was this second perspective that foreshadowed later developments in the field and has more to offer us today.2

* * *

In 1976, the study of European popular culture was in full effervescence. Peasants into Frenchmen came out five years after Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, one year after Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou and Natalie Zemon Davis's Society and Culture in Early Modern France, the same year as Carlo Ginzburg's Cheese and the Worms, and two years before Peter Burke's and Robert Muchembled's important books on the topic.3 Works in the field focused almost exclusively on the early modern, or preindustrial, period, and historians of France were at its forefront. Peter Burke declared that, having entered the second generation of scholarship, the field had become "academ- ically respectable."4 If Georges Lefebvre and Arnold Van Gennep were its intellectual ancestors in France, then the first generation had included the likes of Geneviève Bollème and especially Robert Mandrou, who had published De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles in 1964. During the years that followed - the late 1960s and 1970s - the study of popular culture acquired a new legitimacy and a large following among historians, as well as sociologists and anthropologists.5

What did popular culture mean for this second generation? Historians struggled to pin the concept down, and one review article had to reaffirm its elusiveness as late as 1984. Most agreed that "popular" referred to a particular social group, namely peasants (men and women who drew most of their sub- sistence from the land they tilled), though some historians paid attention to



96 Stéphane Gerson

urban artisans as well. But did it refer to what these men and women had created, to what they had received, or to what was intended for them? There was no consensus on this question. The concept of culture proved equally trou- blesome. Natalie Zemon Davis distinguished between two dominant approaches, which, she said, had converged within the history of mentalités. The sociological approach focused on "certain kinds of literature, art, religious practice or festivity, " whereas the anthropological approach studied "values, beliefs, customs, rituals and associations" to grasp "the lives and purposes" of particular communities. Reviewing the literature in 1977, historian William Beik identified a governing view of popular culture as "collective forms of thinking and acting of the bulk of the non-elite population," encompassing "customs, rituals, beliefs, and festivals."6 Historians tacitly agreed to cast a wide conceptual net.

Mandrou and the first generation of historians had bequeathed the field five dominant convictions about early modern popular culture. First was the existence of a single, homogenous culture, or "mental universe," in the countryside. Second: this mental universe was "authentic" perhaps, but also "primitive" in its "psychic faculties," its "emotivity," its lack of "mental analysis." Adverse living conditions produced a mentality of fear and "panic emotions" before a mystifying world. Powerless and terrorized, peasants sought refuge and explanations for their misfortunes in religious beliefs, superstition, and animist views of nature.7 Third conviction: a rigid physical and cultural divide separated utterly distinct popular and elite (or learned) cultures - a divide often linked to the city-country cleavage.8 Popular culture was thus often defined as what it was not, in its differences and more often than not in its shortcomings or backwardness. The fourth conviction follows: whereas elite culture was innovative and reactive, popular culture was "immobile and passive" - until, at the very least, the eighteenth century, when it lost its autonomy, if not its very claim to existence.9 While the leading historiographical trope was one of conflict between a dominant learned culture and a dominated popular culture, caught in a necessary "relationship of dependence," not all historians agreed on the outcome. Where some Marxist scholars saw a mental conquest by the hegemonic ideology of elites, church, and state (the almanac seen as a form of escapist literature), others depicted a shrewder, more resilient popular culture, which elaborated new forms of thought and critique (the almanac seen as resistance or emancipation). Fifth and final point: most historians used artifacts as direct conduits into popular culture. Almanacs and songs were what Bollème called "the expression par excellence of a popular mentality."10

* * *

By the mid-1970s, other approaches to popular culture were emerging, but the convictions outlined above still held sway and accordingly formed the backdrop to Peasants into Frenchmen. This book represented a significant the- matic and methodological leap, a risk even for Eugen Weber, a political and




intellectual historian who now turned to history from below (just as studying the Action française had a risk in the pre-Paxtonian world). Weber directed his attention to "those invisible folk around whom historical developments seem to swirl . . . ; but whose voice seldom reaches beyond hamlet or village or field, when it is raised at all."11

Peasants into Frenchmen made an important contribution to the second generation of popular culture scholarship, even if Weber did not explicitly situate himself within this field. This was one of the first books to take this rural culture seriously in its cultural rather than solely political or social dimensions, and to apprehend it in its complexity. Shifting his gaze from the Old Regime to the nineteenth century, Weber grappled with difficult questions about the ways in which rural residents he called peasants represented and engaged with their world. What, for instance, did "church attendance mean to churchgo- ers?" (340) To answer such questions, he tapped a broad corpus of little-used sources: folk songs and proverbs, reports by officials or teachers, historical and geographical monographs, and more. He also made his ambitions plain: a total history of sorts of the nineteenth-century French rural world, ranging from food to time to religion. In contrast, studies of popular culture commonly focused on a single social group (say, the poor), a single community (Montaillou), a single cultural activity (the fair), or a single source (the song). Peasants into Frenchmen is a rare mix of the particular and the general, of the telling detail or anecdote and the sweeping conclusion. It also tells two stories with equal narrative force: the awe-inspiring story of a rich, varied rural culture and the tragic story of its demise. The book could thus be read with equal profit, or pleasure, whether one sympathized with Western rationality or with rural culture - two forces commonly seen as diametrical at that time.

The book had, I suggested, a dual approach to popular culture. Its civilizational perspective adopted the first generation's core convictions, though Weber's key reference was not Mandrou but the self-defined folkloriste André Varagnac, an erstwhile curator at the Musée des antiquités nationales. Weber thanked Varagnac for sharing "his recollections and personal archives" (xiii) and acknowledged his debt to Varagnac's 1948 Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de vie. That book had depicted a homogeneous "popular culture": a set of beliefs, usages, "ways of living, thinking, speaking, acting." Ancient and cohesive traditions preserved the "moral and social equilibrium" of an archaic popular culture that, per Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, could not progress beyond "primitive" facts, references to mystery, and an empirical relationship to the world. There was a "difference of nature" between this universe and the rational one that came to prevail.12

The civilizational perspective of Peasants into Frenchmen proceeds along the same lines. While it evokes the rural world's diversity, it also flattens it while depicting an "archaic," "stable and homogeneous ... peasant's world" in which " one accepted what had always been" and one believed or said certain things (12, 191, 198, 19, my italics). This was a world of "misery" and "fear,"



98 Stéphane Gerson

"of menaces known and unknown/' in which baffled people, propelled by the waves of history, could neither "understand [nor] dominate their bodies, minds, and physical surroundings'' (15, 27). 13 This "popular culture [of] con- fusion" and ignorance perceived a "primitive unity of objects and beings" and used magic and the like to explain everyday hardship (462, 28). Here, the expression "a world of their own" underlines the temporal and spatial distance between circumscribed, alien domains: yesterday and today, them and us, popular culture and a learned, i.e. "French" culture. Change remained spo- radic and epiphenomenal for centuries in a world whose beliefs and practices had existed "from time immemorial" (47). The story ends with the disintegration of an exhausted culture that had lost its ability to renew itself. Local fears and attachments are displaced by material transformations and a modern French culture that emerges unchanged from the process. Here too, the presence or absence of artifacts and rites such as books and veillées provides broader lessons about values, norms, and outlooks.

In contrast, the second, suppler perspective that runs through the book understands "a world of their own" as the culture-specific ways in which peasants granted meaning to their world. The emphasis is less on strangeness or backwardness, or functional efficacy, than on singular and complex cultural logics. Weber probes, for instance, "the logic behind the pealing" of church bells, a source of comfort and meaning within this rural mind frame (28). He apprehends the veillée and the charivari as multi-faceted cultural rituals - the lat- terà public ridicule serving to enforce local codes of honor. And he considers the cultural resonance of local dialects and their broad semantic gamut, "luminous to those familiar with the experience it reflected" (90). Following this perspective, rational actors made strategic choices and juggled numerous allegiances and cultural codes. They moved between physical and symbolic worlds, taking pride in their knowledge of both French and dialect, borrowing external locu- tions to augment their own idiom. This perspective points toward multi-direc- tional, rather than simply top-down, cultural flows, "a good deal of coming and going about in the processes, nurses and maids bringing rural ballads into town kitchens and nurseries," medieval courtly ballads making their way into the countryside, where they penetrated rural culture, fashioning it as much as they were fashioned in the process (478-79). This perspective also recognizes the multiple dimensions of cultural practices. Pilgrimages, for instance, were at once about discovery and diversion, pleasure and profit, solace and spiritual yearning.

The book's two perspectives differ in their voices as well. The first provides an assertive, neutral account of a process that was "neither good nor bad," but simply happened (484). Drawing categorical conclusions from the evidence, it declares that " the peasant wanted to be 'chez soi'" (156, my italics). Its confident judgments and flat declarations bring to mind the stance of social anthropologists such as E.E. Evans- Pritchard. 14 The second voice, however, recognizes the methodological difficulties of capturing the cultural logic of a barely literate population. It accordingly places what we do not, or cannot,




know at the heart of the narrative. It concedes the sketchy nature of its claims and denotes its distance from this world by using conditionals, interrogatives, the first person plural ("we are told" [44]) and prudent expressions ("perhaps/' "it may be," or "must have looked like" [102, 385, 27]). It acknowledges, either explicitly or through soft irony, the bias of its sources: travelers who are nec- essarily shocked, folklorists who struggle to escape nostalgia, officials or priests with limited understanding of the pays or peasants. Leaps of imagination are thus necessary for the historian to gain a glimpse of this vanished, fleeting culture. Peasants into Frenchmen, warns Weber, is "a suggestion of the work still to be done" (xiii), but also of the contours of this rural landscape. The book's dual register, its mix of confident deduction and cautious inference, may help explain the book's narrative force and its hold on generations of readers.

Weber's two perspectives sometimes dovetail, most notably in his account of change. If the impetus came from the outside, shifting the contours and expectations of this rural culture, it did not constitute a violent end, imposed by hegemonic elite forces. Instead, Peasants into Frenchmen depicts a gradual, incomplete process that generated new gestures and terminologies as the rural culture appropriated artifacts such as cigarettes or photographs. "The old structure did not in fact break," writes Weber. "It stretched, it twisted new turns into the old shapes, incorporating the newfangled and the up-to-date into familiar patterns" (231). Peasants embraced external institutions, symbolic languages, and cultural forces when the latter appeared meaningful rather than incomprehensible, when they seemed to bring opportunities rather than threats. "It was only when what the schools taught made sense that they became important to those they had to teach" (303).

But let us keep things in perspective. The neat interface between Weber's two perspectives often founders as he oscillates awkwardly between primitivism and agency in his depictions of French peasants. And the cultural process perspective remains, in content as well as in voice, much more timid than the civilizational one.

* * *

Peasants into Frenchmen came out on the eve of a sea change in the historical study of popular culture. This sea change was fueled by the cultural and lin- guistic turns, by renewed dialogues between historians and the likes of Clifford Geertz or Michel de Certeau, and by critiques of Western rationality. Historians had once depicted a primitive culture of fear and mystery. They now examined creative, strategic agents who drew from rich moral economies and exploited, as Natalie Zemon Davis put it, "what physical, social, and cultural resources they had to survive, to cope, or sometimes to change things."15 The focus shifted from vast cultural aggregates to discrete situations and the cultural codes via which agents created meaning and imprinted legibility. Stuart Clark declared in 1983 that "nature was not mysterious to peasants because it was unintelligible to them; if it was mysterious, that was precisely because it was



100 Stéphane Gerson

intelligible in terms of a language of mystery."16 Historians had once emphasized immobility and passivity. They now discovered a flexible culture, capable of adaptation, reinvention, and critical appropriation of external rules or norms.17 Historians had once looked for a single popular culture. They now studied plural "cultures of the people" and emphasized internal diversity -

social, geographic, generational, sexual, or religious.18 Historians had once posited a divide between popular and learned cultures. They now pointed to porous boundaries, cultural gradations, and shared beliefs. Visions of top-down imposition and displacement gave way to exchange, "syncretic bricolages/' and two-way flows that reordered the cultural landscape.19 Historians had once described the disintegration of popular culture and peasants as victims. They now uncovered actors with multiple identities, overlaps between tradition and modernity, and forms of resistance or negotiation - new catchwords that some historians have, no doubt, used with reckless abandon. Historians, finally, had once paid attention to artifacts and production alone. They now examined practices of reception and consumption. Echoing earlier critiques of André Varagnac (notably by the Marxist medievalist Charles Parain), Roger Chartier declared in 1984 that "what is 'popular' is neither culture created for the people nor culture uprooted; it is a kind of specific relation with cultural objects."20

This sea change kept the field vigorous for two decades. Historians continued to focus on the Old Regime (although they increasingly sought out popular culture in cities as well as in the countryside), but important publications revolved around the nineteenth-century as well - most in this anthropological vein.21 I will draw attention only to a few of them. Some scholars continued to study the entire French peasantry. Judith Devlin's The Supersti- tious Mind (1987), for example, depicted peasant superstition as a logical rather than credulous means of making the present bearable and projecting oneself into the future. But new economies of scale led historians to focus on localities, events, or individuals and trace changes at ground level. Alain Corbin's study of the murder of an aristocrat in the village of Hautefaye, The Village of Canni- bals (1990), analyzed the local "system of representations" according to which this ostensibly savage, irrational act proved coherent for its participants at century's end.22 The microlevel did not precede the macro analytically, but was part of an interplay of scales that displayed the complexity of social life. Other historians adopted local and regional frameworks as counterforces to distant, sometimes myopic, national tableaus. David Hopkin's Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture (2003), a study of rural images of the army, soldiers, and military service, held that a textured analysis of Lorraine could illuminate the cultural logic of local peasants. Hopkin emphasized contradiction and ambiguity rather than coherence and predictable adherence to an immutable moral economy. His villagers viewed soldiers "with a mix of hostility and admiration." When they embraced military service and patriotic language, it was less out of loyalty to the nation than due to local considerations and the lure of adventure, freedom, and escape from a confining "village morality."23



"A World of Their Own " 101

Hopkin's actors thus came to "their own ideas about veterans."24 Histori- ans (and especially historians of religion) tended to temper narratives of cultural duality in favor of coexistence and commingled cultural horizons. Philippe Boutry held that the "dominant character" of "popular religion" in the Ain countryside, near Lyons, was coexistence between the old and the new. Healing saints were also doctors. Similarly, the prophetic current of the 1860s and 1870s owed as much, argued Hilaire Multon, to clerical culture as to the beliefs of humble folk - "one of the modalities of Catholic popular culture." Neither gullible nor passive, local actors forged syncretic religious beliefs and practices in a dynamic rural world.25 Peter Sahlins's study of the 1829 "War of the Demoiselles," an uprising in the Ariège countryside, linked such resourcefulness to, among other things, tactics and resistance. Peasants drew from a local symbolic repertoire and responded to state rationality as they "took possession of and defended their forest" through ritualized dress and feminine metaphors. Inter-cultural circulation and two-way exchanges thus characterized this nineteenth-century world. Sahlins suggested that "the codes of folk culture" and the "language of popular culture" (which included chari- varis and the demoiselles) penetrated the national satirical press after 1830. Thomas Kselman likewise argued in his book on the cult of the dead that rural practices imprinted a broader French "folklore of death." Urban dwellers looked to "rural traditions for both inspiration and consolation" as they con- templated funeral practices in a secularizing world.26

While historians grew wary of teleological narratives culminating in destruction, they did not, of course, ignore change. The governing modus operandi since the 1980s has been to examine local modalities of change and inter-cultural contact - processes of reception, appropriation, and synthesis. Peter Sahlins drew from the work of his father, Marshall, to depict what he called "dexterous and flexible traditionalism" in the Ariège, a rural culture that drew selectively from local traditions to incorporate external elements into a malleable cultural framework.27 Likewise, Martyn Lyons's study of lit- eracy depicted creative peasant-readers who took "control of the medium [of print], as it was absorbed within a dynamic and ever-changing rural culture." He added: "popular culture is reborn phoenix-like, adapting to new conditions and formulating new means of expression." Boutry similarly argued that forces of change emanated, not only from the cities, but from the countryside itself, where clergymen helped turn religion from a collective " fait de mental- ité " into a set of individual opinions (doing so via reconstructed churches, new devotions, and political activities). Boutry's depiction of clergymen as "servants, promoters, or actors of parish modernity" echoes more recent por- trayals of national cults and pilgrimages: Ray Jonas on the Sacré-Coeur, Ruth Harris and Suzanne Kaufman on Lourdes.28 Catholic actors who were ambiva- lent, if not hostile, towards modernity nonetheless fused traditional practices and modes of devotion with modern forms of politics, pedagogy, tourism, and mass consumption.29




* * *

Where does Peasants into Frenchmen fit in this new picture? Let us note, first, that many scholars still operate in a field that Weber helped clear three decades ago. Hopkin's monograph is a case in point. He diverges from Weber in important respects, but also tackles questions that Weber had put on the table and uses similar folkloric sources. He also ends up fleshing out Weber's narrative when he argues that the army spread a sense of what it meant to be French, and more specifically a French male.30

This said, several factors seem to have limited the book's influence on this field. First is the sheer difficulty of emulating Weber's brío. He set the bar high in terms of scale and scope, in his analytical reach and rhetorical punch. Sec- ond, the book's civilizational perspective on a unitary, backward, static popular culture became an all-too-inviting foil following the sea change of the early 1980s. While I have not studied this question systematically, it appears that criticism of the book has been sharper on foreign (especially American) shores than in France. One explanation may be that its narrative of modernization and rural assimilation dovetailed with the French historical profession's enduring attachment to the Third Republic and with Durkheimian notions of mechanical and organic solidarity. Another factor may be the declining appeal of modernization theory among American academics, some of whom associ- ated it with a series of postwar foreign policy debacles. Moreover, while Peas- ants into Frenchmen's cultural process perspective anticipated trends of the 1980s and 1990s, most historians (myself included) either overlooked or downplayed it. This is partly because we read the book too fast and partly because this perspective is ultimately a series of gestures, openings, and sug- gestions rather than a forceful argument taken to its logical conclusion. Even the leaps of imagination, made to recover this elusive world, remain hidden behind mounds of evidence and authoritative statements.

This brings us to the present state of the field. Despite the rich works discussed above, research on rural popular culture has been meager these past fif- teen years, especially with respect to the nineteenth century. Open the relevant volume of the 1998 Histoire culturelle de la France, by Françoise Mélo- nio and Antoine de Baecque, and you will find but two pages of general remarks about the " savoir-vivre des paysans ," how Zola and the like depicted rural folk, and the disintegration of village solidarity.31 While rural studies have held their own and religion has garnered growing interest, research has continued to focus on modernization and politicization (François Ploux on rumors, Alain Garrigou on electoral practices, Tamara Whited on forests).32

There are several ways to explain this declining interest. In conceptual terms, we have gone from popular culture to popular cultures to a vision of cultural porosity within which the concept holds marginal value.33 The field has also moved, as Lise Andriès points out, from collective phenomena (with dis- tinctive social or political features) towards the lifestyles, leisure activities, and even "styles" of subcultures, and towards an anthropology of daily life that



"A World of Their Own " 103

focuses on individuals.34 Methodologically, the longstanding difficulty of locat- ing sources about the countryside intensified when one sought to document cultural exchanges or modes of appropriation. Historiographically, the transi- tion from social to cultural, gender, and political history - with their focus on discourse, political culture, and elites - may well have drawn attention away from the countryside and a popular culture that left few written traces. Interest also shifted in other directions: towards the resources and multiple identities of individuals who shuttled between city and countryside, for instance; or towards urban mass media, leisure, entertainment, consumer society - the commercial- ized "popular" culture that cultural studies has made its bread-and-butter.35 Interest has also moved toward empire and post-colonialism, settings to which some historians (like certain segments of the Left) have transposed questions and critiques about cultural contact, state intrusion, or resistance that others had previously asked of the metropolei peasants.36 Indeed, the French peasant lost some of the symbolic and political allure it had carried in the 1970s, when he stood for self-determination and resistance and, as Susan Carol Rogers noted, a "soul of France" threatened by mass culture (La Fin des paysans).37 Whether the peasant will recover its historiographical allure in the era of globalization and José Bové, but also of the party Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions and the National Fronťs Barrèsian rhetoric on la France profonde is an open question.

And yet, whether we agree or not to speak of popular culture(s), this field of study is not exhausted. At least three directions of research suggest themselves. A first direction is the kind of fine-grained cultural analysis that historians have been producing about urban elites - moving away from resistance and towards social imaginaries, modes of appreciation and sensibility, changing norms of virility and femininity, or pleasure and suffering. Scholars have taken steps in this direction: for instance, André Rauch on urban and rural reg- imens and crises of virility; or Corbin's Village Bells (1994), a study of the changing "systems of appreciation" that surrounded the ringing of bells. Bells were rung throughout the century, but their abilities to protect or mobilize rural communities, the symbolic orders they regulated, the identities they des- ignated - all of this changed along with the broader " univers sonore. There is also the question of collective memory, whose scholarship has focused almost exclusively on elites. We know little about the ways in which rural individuals, families, or villages commemorated, reconfigured, or forgot events and fig- ures of local or national scope. All of this has much to teach us about territorial identities, cultural repertoires, and collective mobilization. Edward Woell's recent book on religious devotion in the western town of Machecoul contains a fascinating chapter on those clergymen and secular actors whose sermons and missions institutionalized a memory of counter-revolutionary violence as "memory of holy war."39 There is more to be done along those lines.

A second direction of research - sketched in Peasants into Frenchmen's cultural process perspective - would provide a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which rural actors tapped multiple cultural registers, either at once




or successively. Conceptually, one might begin with Anthony Grafton's depiction of the Renaissance astrologer Gerolamo Cardano as a man who ''like most of his contemporaries and many of us - inhabited a mental world which had many mansions, ... from enchanted memory castles to austere observatories/' a man who moved from one mansion to the other without an "overarching system [that] unified all his beliefs and arguments."40 Beliefs and loyalties need be neither wholehearted nor fully coherent. Recent scholarship has shown that various actors could integrate local and national loyalties.41 Here, one might explore their postures - from deep conviction to partial or intermittent beliefs to distance, play, and irony - as they navigated various physical or cultural terrains and circulated between one terrain and another. While some contemporaries embraced an immutable set of convictions or beliefs, and then, perhaps, switched to a different one, one might hypothesize that a greater number integrated elements from several cultural repertoires at any one time. For example, when analyzing the resonance of astrology, almanacs, and Nostradamus's predictions (my current research interest), one should expect to uncover outlooks that mix utter seriousness, ironic distance, and playful experimentation. These are the outlooks of men and women who, like Cardano, drew from languages of mystery and scientific rationality as they sought to make sense of their world, define themselves in various public settings, and distinguish themselves from other contemporaries.42

A final direction of research, further away still from a closed "world of their own," would revolve around the trajectories of cultural beliefs, stances, or anxieties that breached any putative popular-elite divide, yet still led distinct lives in different geographical or social settings. To continue with the example above, there has been a revival of scholarly interest in the nineteenth-century marvelous and what has been labeled the irrational. A number of scholars have amended, for one, the view that the rural world alone was "eager for miracles" (352). They have also argued that urban phenomena such as the occult, spiritism, and mediums drew partly from rural traditions such as village sorcerers, which seeped into urban culture and melded with bourgeois aspirations, languages of science or reason, and fears.43 Fear itself remains a promising topic, though not as a history that contrasts a mentality of blind fear with one of mature reason, or simply posits that modernity dissolved ancient fears (such as the night).44 Rather, this would be a history of socially-determined thresholds and objects of fear, of everyday fears and others linked to momentous occurrences, of fears instilled by consumer culture and political forces (something Weber delved into in his 1964 book on Léo Taxil). A history of this kind would also bring together a sociology of pro- ducers with attention to reception and the distinct ways in which rural and urban actors responded to manufactured fears. Here too, one should expect ambivalence, partial if not conflicted beliefs, and interplays of seriousness and play.45




* * *

Do we, however, have the sources to proceed further as regards the countryside? This remains a central question in this field. Peasants into Frenchmen uncovered, as one reviewer put it, "rich material most of us never knew was available in libraries and archives."46 Since its publication, historians have ven- tured further in their use of municipal and parish archives, but they have not unearthed a field-altering trove - or even anything comparable to the 1,500 love letters, recently uncovered by Paula Cossart, between a Parisian widower and his mistress.47 We remain dependent on the external sources that Weber had used. How we read and write about such sources is hence all the more crucial.

It is surprising, then, that historians have made rather small strides in this domain. Folklore and reports by prefects or subprefects have of course been critiqued since the 1970s. Michel de Certeau, Jacques Revel, and Dominique Julia wrote a classic essay on "domestic exoticism" and "the beauty of the dead" of a popular culture on the verge of extinction. Alain Croix showed how, neglecting time and social milieu, fin-de-siècle folklorists depicted an atemporal, immutable, and harmonious rural world. But apposite research procedures have not always followed.48 Weber himself critiqued some of his sources, but he also took many at face value: here, folkloric accounts; there, an administrative report about peasants "bent under a yoke of habit"; elsewhere, a depiction of localism as "narrow, ignorant, apathetic, cross-grained" (480, 207). Likewise, some of our best scholarship today sometimes equates external representations of social practices with the practices themselves.49

Sudhir Hazareesingh's study of Second Empire festivities, The Saint- Napoleon (2004), is instructive. While the author concedes the "potential for bias" of administrative reports about the provinces, written as they were for superiors in Paris, he adds that some officials managed to overcome this bias and write "candid" reports. This leads him to use some reports as quasi-trans- parent records of crowd enthusiasm, a festival's success or failure, and a range of sentiments.50 Whether officials were ready or not to write detailed or critical reports is important, no doubt, but what matters most here are the conceptual constraints, the imperatives of time, the professional incentives, and the administrative procedures that conditioned, not only what these men chose to write, but also what they could see or grasp. Pierre Karila-Cohen's research on French administrative efforts to measure public opinion demon- strates how vital it is to deconstruct the epistemological categories that run through such documents. Karila-Cohen shows that envoys were expected to send Paris frequent reports between 1815 and 1848 (covering as many as nine departments in twenty days). This haste led them to rely on fickle local informers: notables who could lie or direct investigators in a direction that suited their interests. It also led them to describe the selfsame situations month after month, drawing each time from the same shallow well of adjec- tives. This in turn prevented them from grasping the rhythms of rural time and introduced a deceptive "impression of immobility" into their depictions




of the French countryside.51 Studies of popular culture that fail to undertake probing critiques of administrative or other sources risk making vast claims about a world that is grasped at a double or triple discursive remove.

This is an appeal to caution, but we need boldness as well. Ten years ago, Alain Corbin sought to recover the private and public life of an anonymous clog maker from the Orne - an ordinary figure who would serve as a conduit into a vanished rural world. His book, The Life of an Unknown, has attracted sur- prisingly little attention given that it grapples in such innovative ways with the problem of mediation by external sources. To grasp what this clog maker could have known, experienced, and felt, to recover his social and familial networks, his local solidarities and memories, Corbin tried to bypass external investiga- tive procedures that focused on this individual alone. He ultimately concluded that this was impossible - thus emphasizing anew the importance of critiquing these external sources, but also suggesting that this elusive topic may require its own epistemological stance and rhetorical voice.52 This is another domain in which dialogues with anthropology - and its efforts to align what Renato Ros- aldo called "compositional modes" with the contours of the cultural world under examination - presented historians with new vistas from the 1980s on.53

But historians of modern France have, like others, struggled to alter ancient poses of all-encompassing, quasi-positivistic certainty. For premises of an approach that incorporates conjecture and imagination, considers the virtual and the hypothetical, and, without falling into solipsism or relativism, makes room for the historian's point of departure and research process, we might turn to Corbin's Life of an Unknown . While this book resembles in part the regional monographs of old, it also incorporates first-person excerpts from the author's research diary and openly discusses decisions made in the course of research, the historian's discoveries and disappointments, what he learns and what he cannot know, his own dialogue with the dead.54 For other intimations of such an approach, we might also reread the flawed but ever-stimulating Peasants into Frenchmen and listen to the more muted yet also most resonant of its two voices. This is the voice that ventures from the realm of the certain to the realm of the possible, the voice that opens itself to imagination, the voice that asks "What do I dare conclude from all this information?" (112). Eugen Weber took risks and challenged other historians to do the same. Thirty years later, he still does.

Stéphane Gerson is Associate Professor of French and French Studies at New York University. His research has focused primarily on two themes: how nineteenth- century actors responded to changes that were both liberating and traumatic; and the craft and writing of history. He has published The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (2003) and co-edited (with Laura Lee Downs) Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (2007). He is currently working on a cultural history of the Nos- tradamus phenomenon (for St. Martin's) and a new edition/translation of Nos- tradamus' Prophecies (for Penguin Classics).




Notes

1 . Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 232. Further references to the book will be indicated in the text, in parenthesis.

2. Caveat: This essay will focus on the French peasantry alone, at the expense of working-class culture, and it will say little about politics, acculturation, or national loyalty.

3. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1971]); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Vintage, 1979 [1975]); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper, 1978); and Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France , 1400-1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985 [1978]).

4. Peter Burke, "From Pioneers to Settlers: Recent Studies of the History of Popular Culture," Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, 1 (January 1983), 18.

5. On this last point, see Jacques Revel, "La culture populaire: sur les usages et les abus d'un outil historiographique" (1986), in his Un parcours critique: Douze exercices d'histoire sociale (Paris: Galaade, 2006), 295. See Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (London: NLB, 1973 [1932]); Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 4 vols. (Paris: Auguste Picard, 1937-58); Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: la Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (Paris: Stock, 1964); and Geneviève Bollème, Les Almanachs populaires aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Essai d'histoire sociale (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1969).

6. David Hall, "Introduction/' in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 14; Jean-Claude Schmitt, "'Religion populaire' et culture folklorique," Annales E.S.C. 31, 5 (September-October 1976), 942; Natalie Zemon Davis, "Introduction: The Historian and Popular Culture," in The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France from the Old Regime to the Twentieth Century, ed. Jacques Beauroy et al. (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1977), 9-10; and William H. Beik, "Searching for Popular Culture in Early Modern France," Journal of Modern History 49, 2 (June 1977), 266.

7. Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: PUF, 1971), 240; and Alphonse Dupront, "De la religion populaire," in his Du sacré, croisades et pèlerinages (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 138. See also Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe -XVIIIe siècles): Essai (Paris: Champs- Flammarion, 1978), 79; and Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 148-51. On religion as a key aspect of this primitive culture, see Vittorio Lanternari, "La religion populaire: prospective historique et anthropologique," Archives de sciences sociales de religions 53 (1982), 138.

8. Bollème, Les Almanachs populaires, 41; and Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de psychologie collective (Paris: Pion, 1968), 553.

9. Alphonse Dupront, in François Furet et al., Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton et Cie, 1965-70), 1.

10. Jean-Claude Barthez, "Culture populaire ou culture dominée?" in Les Cultures populaires: Permanence et émergences des cultures minoritaires locales , ethniques, sociales et religieuses, ed. Geneviève Pou jol and Raymond Labourie (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 50; and Bollème, Almanachs populaires, 40.




11. Weber, "Introduction," in Emile Guillaumin, The Life of a Simple Man, ed. Weber, trans. Margaret Crosland (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), ix.

12. André Varagnac, Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de vie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948), 9, 22, 353, 33-34, and 93.

13. Charles Tilly, "Did the Cake of Custom Break?" in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John Merriman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 17-44.

14. On Evans-Pritchard's style, see Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 60-63.

15. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, xvii. 16. Stuart Clark, "French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture," Past and Pre-

sent 100 (1983), 84. Along the same lines: William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, "Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Pre- modern Europe," in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 13 and 202. On these changes: Hall, "Introduction," in Understanding Popular Culture, ed. Kaplan, 14-15; and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, "The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch Variant," Social History 15 (1990): 191.

1 7. See Daniel Roche, "Jacques-Louis Ménétra: An Eighteenth-Century Way of Life," in Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, ed. Daniel Roche, trans. Arthur Gold- hammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 251 and 342.

18. See, for instance, Jean-Claude Schmitt, "Les traditions folkloriques dans la culture médiévale: quelques réflexions de méthode," Archives des sciences sociales des religions 52 (1981), 6.

19. Alain Babadzan, "Tradition et histoire: quelques problèmes de méthode," Cahiers ORSTROM, série sciences humaines XXI, 1 (1985), 122; and Robert Scribner, "Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?" History of European Ideas 10, 2 (1989), 184-85.

20. Roger Chartier, "Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France," in Understanding Popular Culture, 235. Charles Parain had similarly argued that "it is not the custom itself, the popular fairy tale's themes that matter, but the way in which they are used": Parain, "Un nouveau mythe: la civilisation traditionnelle," La Pensée 23 (1949), 95.

21. Some key publications on the Old Regime: Daniel Roche, The People Of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century, trans. Marie Evans (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987 [1981]); Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence , Power , and Solidarity in Eigh- teenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993 [1986]); and Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertain- ment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

22. Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1990]), 118.

23. David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766-1870 (Wood- bridge: Royal Historical Society, 2003), 349-50.

24. Ibid., 285. 25. See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Penguin,

1999), 358; Philippe Boutry, Prêtres et paroisses au pays du curé d'Ars, 3rd ed. (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 478; and Hilaire Multon, "Les temps sont proches: prophétisme politique et culture apocalyptique dans le catholicisme français et italien (1859-1878)," 3 vols (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Paris 12-Val de Marne, 2002), vol. 1, 14.

26. Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 112, 114, 121, and 127-28; and




Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 64.

27. Sahlins, Forest Rites, 132. 28. Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women,

Peasants (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001), 155 and 131; and Boutry, Prêtres et paroisses, 11 and 180.

29. Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Suzanne Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

30. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant, 1. 31. Françoise Mélonio and Antoine de Baecque, eds., Histoire culturelle de la France, 3

vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1998), vol. 3, 339-42. 32. François Ploux, De bouche à oreille: Naissance et propagation des rumeurs dans la France

du XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 2003); Alain Garrigou, Histoire sociale du suffrage universel en France, 1848-2000 (Paris: Seuil, 2002); and Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasants Politics in Modem France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On the historiography of European Catholicism and popular culture, see Caroline Ford, "Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe," Journal of Modern History 65, 1 (March 1993): 152-73.

33. See Scribner, "Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?" 17. 34. Lise Andri ès, "La culture populaire en question," in Lise Andriès and Geneviève

Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue: Littérature de colportage, (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 14.

35. Caroline Hodak, "Du théâtre équestre au cirque: 'une entreprise si éminemment nationale.' Commercialisation des loisirs, diffusion des savoirs et théâtralisation de l'histoire en France et en Angleterre, 1760-1860" (Ph.D. thesis, EHESS, 2004); and Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2000), 47.

36. On cultural history and "resistance," see Herman Lebovics, Imperialism and the Cor- ruption of Democracies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 107.

37. Susan Carol Rogers, "Good to Think: The 'Peasant' in Contemporary France," Anthro- pological Quarterly 60, 2 (February 1987), 59; and Henri Mendras, La Fin des paysans: Changement et innovations dans les sociétés rurales françaises (Paris: A. Colin, 1970).

38. André Rauch, Crise de l'identité masculine, 1789-1914 (Paris: Hachette, 2002); and Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

39. Edward J. Woell, Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers: Religious Devotion and Counter- Revolution in Western France, 1774-1914 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), 188. Cf. Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire, 1800-1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

40. Anthony Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 177.

41. Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France: L'exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1997); and Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

42. See, for instance, Maureen Perkins, The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity (Lon- don: Pluto Press, 2001).

43. Thomas Kselman, "The Varieties of Religious Experience in Urban France," in Euro- pean Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830-1930, ed. Hugh McLeod (London: Rout- ledge, 1995), 176-77; and Lynn L. Sharp, "Fighting for the Afterlife: Spiritists, Catholics, and Popular Religion in Nineteenth-Century France," The Journal of Reli- gious History 23, 3 (October 1999): 282-95.




44. Cf. Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident , XIVe -XVIIIe siècles: Une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978).

45. See Edgar Morin et al., La Croyance astrologique moderne: Diagnostic sociologique, new ed. (Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, 1981); as well as Eugen Weber, ed., Satan franc- maçon: La mystification de Léo Taxil (Paris: Julliard, 1964). For elements of such a history of fear, see Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005); and Simone Delattre, Les douze heures noires: La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).

46. Robert Bezucha, review of Peasants into Frenchmen, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, 4 (Spring 1979), 746.

47. Paula Cossart, ed., Vingt-cinq ans d'amours adultères: Correspondance sentimentale d'Adèle Schunck et d'Aimé Guyet de Fernex, 1824-1849 (Paris: Fayard, 2005).

48. Michel de Certeau with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, "La beauté du mort," in Michel de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel , (Paris: Seuil 1993 [1974]), 48; and Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux 16e et 17e siècles: La vie- la mort- la foi, 2 vols. (Paris: Maloine, 1981), 2: 936. See also the critique of nineteenth-century folklore and ethnography in Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 40 and 64; as well as Hall, "Introduction," in Understanding Popular Culture, ed. Kaplan, 9; and Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1984), 230. Cf. Edward Shorter, "The 'Veillée' and the Great Transforma- tion," in The Wolf and the Lamb , ed. Beauroy et al., 120.

49. See, however, Sahlins, Forest Rites, xi, xii, and 138; and Gilles Laferté, La Bourgogne et ses vins: Image d'origine contrôlée (Paris: Belin, 2006), 12-13.

50. Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth- Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 14.

51. Pierre Karila-Cohen, "Le Christ s'est arrêté à Origny: le temps, l'enquête et l'administrateur," in Imaginaires et sensibilités au XIXe siècle: Études pour Alain Corbin, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini and Dominique Kalifa (Paris: Créaphis, 2005), 103-106; and Pierre Karila-Cohen, "De l'enquête politique comme voyage: les agents itinérants des ministères de la Police et de l'Intérieur sous la Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet," Sociétés et représentations 21 (2006): 144-46. For other critical takes of these epistemological categories, see Michelle Perrot, "Délinquances et système pénitentiaire en France au XIXe siècle," Annales E.S.C. 30 (January- February 1975): 67-91; Eric Phélippeau, "La fabrication administrative des opinions politiques," Revue française de science politique 43, 4 (1993): 587-612; and Nicolas Mariot, Bains de foule: Les voyages présidentiels en province ; 1888-2002 (Paris: Belin, 2006).

52. Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nine- teenth-Century France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 [1998]), 9; and Emmanuelle Saada, "L'historien, l'ethnographe et l'em- ployé de l'état civil," French Politics , Culture & Society 22, 2 (Summer 2004), 37.

53. Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting , 1 883-1974: A Study in Society and History (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 21; and Rosaldo, "From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker as Inquisitor," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog- raphy, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 77-97.

54. I have discussed this in my article "L'impossible présence de l'historien," French Pol- itics , Culture & Society 22, 2 (Summer 2004): 91-108.



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