Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France During the Nineteenth Century.

One really ought to compare this book, a study of the department of the Loire, with James R. Lehning's last work, The Peasants of Marlhes, which was published in 1980 and covered virtually the same territory in central France. The contrast between the two gives one a certain idea of the direction in which social history is heading today.

Like many in the field, Professor Lehning has developed, over the last couple of decades, an interest in "cultural contact," something he undoubtedly experienced first hand in the course of his own researches. In the mid-1970s Lehning set himself up in Saint-Etienne, a small industrial town about fifty kilometres southwest of Lyons (his latest book even gives us the serial number of the grant that paid for the trip). Saint-Etienne is one of the most studied communities in western Europe, largely owing to a history of heavy industry and a burgeoning proletariat that fitted nicely into the then widespread theories of nineteenth-century modernization. But Lehning's visit to the capital of the Loire was not actually prompted by an interest in artisans and industrial workers; his concern was with peasants or, as he put it at the time, with the transformation of the rural family in "the age of industrialization, urbanization, and political revolution." He decided to concentrate on the village of Marlhes which, in the mid-nineteenth century, provided a home to some three thousand cultivators, weavers, and farm domestics in the mountains of Pilat, south of Saint-Etienne. As his studies progressed, Lehning gradually came to the realization that the "transition from a rural, agricultural, peasant society to an urban, industrial society" was not nearly as dramatic as everybody had been saying. "We must guard against an excessive formalism in stating the elements of continuity," he said with a glance to his masters, who were teaching the processes of change back home; Lehning clung securely to the idea of national and world processes, unseen but operating everywhere, just as countless articles in countless learned journals proposed at the time. Yet he couldn't avoid concluding that the peasant family unit was essentially preserved in this century of "upheaval and change," that "the local flavor of the peasant remained even after he had become a Frenchman, and [that] this localism colored the meaning of being a Frenchman."

In this second book, Lehning no longer talks of urbanization and industrialization. In the place of "peasant," he would prefer to speak of "country dwellers" while the word "man" disappears from sight and sound. Lehning, like others, has met the challenge of la fin d'une illusion, the collapse of Marxist criticism, by plunging into the problem of illusion itself: he turns away from the material concerns - economic growth and class conflict - of good old-fashioned "new social history" and now dives straight into a study of words, language and cultural symbols.

This explains the strange title, Peasant and French, which presents itself as an answer to Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, a book published at the time Lehning was setting off for Saint-Etienne. Weber argued that traditional, isolated peasant communities disappeared in the nineteenth century; improved transportation, elective politics, migration, conscription and education transformed them and integrated them into the French nation. This simple, universal transition is what gave Weber's well-written book such extraordinary narrative power. Lehning responds that it is all a storyteller's invention, that the truth is hidden behind an ongoing process of mutual exchange between two symbolic poles, "peasant" and "French," each of which constantly change their meaning.

With his wagon thus filled with the harvest of twenty years' research, its high struts flying ribbons of metaphor and symbol, Professor Lehning gets a final encouraging shove from his colleagues - some of the finest social historians in the land - and off he rattles, harvest, cart and all, down the slipway into the deep green pond of "discourse." Readers are left floundering in a murky text. We are invited to "imagine" communities in order to distinguish between those who were considered "French," and those who were not: "The positioning," he breathlessly writes, "of country dwellers outside of history by the French construction of the countryside has made it difficult to construct fictional or historical image of country dwellers that give them an active role in stories of national development. Change in the countryside therefore has had to be fundamental and essential: turning 'peasants' into 'Frenchmen' involved reconstructing those who lived in the countryside." On the next page Professor Lehning discusses housing construction.

His style is abysmal and his whole analytical edifice is as solid as water. None the less, somewhere deep down, there lurks the rocky bottom. By training, Lehning is a demographer and it is in relating family structures to economic conditions that he is at his best. The countryside, he says, was never isolated or timeless; there was always a market to exploit, there was always adaptation to the conditions of the moment - family structures survived and local cultures were maintained because they could accommodate change.

It is interesting to note in this connection that Lehning cites Alexander Chayanov and "his widely used theory of peasant economy" - perhaps Professor Lehning knows of works of which I am unaware; at any rate, he doesn't quote them here. My own impression is that Chayanov (who disappeared during Stalin's purges of the 1930s) won but a narrow following among anthropologists in the 1960s, picked up a couple of contributors to the American Historical Review in the early 1970s, and was denounced in the same decade by Marxist rural historians who could not stomach his individualistic microeconomics. As Lehning is well aware, the emphasis in that age was on the grand processes, on social integration, and not the study of the individual. Lehning, following the flock, appears in one passage to criticise Chayanov's analysis as being "timeless," that is, unhistorical; if he really believes that, then he does not know Chayanov. Chayanov's analysis, of course, was based on an extensive system of agriculture that existed in Tsarist Russia and it is not directly applicable to the intensive kinds of agriculture found in France; but behind the mechanics of Chayanov's explanations is to be found a logic - particularly his subjective labor-consumer balance (drudgery against satisfaction) - which, when adapted to France's intensive ways, proves extremely powerful.

I think Lehning has grasped this: he defines the goal of his "country dwellers" as the "survival of the household rather than economic maximization"; he refers to a "peasant logic" which plays to the market but is not the same as that of the market; and he believes that one should attempt to understand the system in its own terms rather than in "French" national terms. With his subsequent emphasis on exchange, "negotiation," and "strategies for protecting the family farm," Professor Lehning draws close to an analysis found in my own work on the Loire Country, although he does not mention it.

Does he thereby avoid the charge - hazardous, perhaps, in an academic career - of individualism, of conservatism? Certainly he fails to analyse individual farming units because he lacks the tools to do it: in the department of the Loire, he would have to coordinate data drawn from the civil registers (for family structures) with those of the cadastre (for property); this he refuses to do. Even when Lehning takes sample villages, one in the Monts de Forez, the other in the mountains to the north, he limits himself to a comparison of two census years (1851 and 1901); it is not a very reliable way of analysing development, particularly where the family cycle is concerned. He does make use of the fine demographic techniques developed by Ansley Coale and Etienne Van de Walle, but these were designed to trace trends in human fertility at national, even hemispheric, levels. They reveal little about "peasant logic."

Lehning's peculiar analysis of exchange between "peasant" and "French" extends into education, politics, religion, literature (though none of the novels he quotes bears the slightest relationship to the Loire), and the "gendering process," or, as he otherwise calls it, "the social and cultural constructions of men and women": we are obviously back into housing again. We learn that masculinisme - I don't know what language this is; it is certainly not French penetrated the countryside. Agricultural space was largely reserved for the "male" while women's activities were more concerned with the house. Girls were more supervised than boys, even at veillees. At dances, foires aux domestiques and cantonal fairs, boys were free to roam about, but not the girls. Every year, on 1st May, boys wandered from village to village and banged on pots; some even harrassed the girls. Unfortunately, girls' activities were not recorded by Monsieur Fortier-Beaulieu, the principal folklorist of the department; but then he, too, was a victim of national French discourse about country dwellers, being chiefly interested in "the story of change," the spread of urban patterns of sociability and the mobility of stray males. Women had to be content with their metaphorical powers of transformation and their symbolic relationship to water, fire, cotton thread and chicken - according to Monsieur J. Canard, another local folklorist.

In other words, the book gets awfully confused, and one only wishes Professor Lehning had stuck to the solid matter: property and family structure.

Gregor Dallas Anet (Eure-et-Loir)