More than forty years after its publication, Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen still occupies a central place in European historiography on identity construction and the nationalization of the masses.

Eugen Weber is also the author of Action Française, Varieties of Fascism and Peasants into Frenchmen

Eugen Weber in this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

This is a very carefully composed and meticulously researched work on the transition from the traditional to the modern way of life in rural France between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War.

France underwent this sort of transition much later than England, and the book has some parallels to books on earlier phases of English culture (Thompson’s Customs in Common and Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, in particular) despite the fact that they deal with the 17th and 18th Centuries. In addition, England (proper, omitting Wales and Cornwall) never had as great a gulf between the culture and language of the cities and towns, a national culture, and that of the countryside.

The first section of this book is a completely brilliant survey of sources showing French rural life pre-1870. The same method (endless accretion of detail, beautifully managed) didn’t work quite so well for the period of change. But the whole book full of insight not only into its immediate topic, but into understanding more fully processes of change, as well as the sheer dreadfulness of poverty-stricken lives.

Adds Weber: “Villages hated each other from time immemorial, and all hated the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie” (pg. 47). It did not help that, as late as 1863, at least a quarter of the (predominantly rural) French population spoke no French: instead, they spoke a diverse array of
patois, “the various languages, idioms, dialects, and jargon of the French provinces” (pg. 67).

Nearly a century after the French Revolution, France could hardly be viewed as fertile soil for the emergence of a unified national identity.
In light of such diversity, Weber argues that the nation either had to be constructed by the French State (or, rather, by Paris), to be spurred by some exogenous shock, or, as in most cases,
to develop through a combination of both. And, in almost all cases, linguistic homogenization and convergence upon French was the crucial precursor and causal variable of interest.

E Weber Peasants into Frenchmen (1976)

J Lehning Peasant and French (1995)

T Margadant, ‘Tradition and Modernity in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of Modern History 56:4 (1984), 667-97

T Margadant, ‘French Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century,’ Agricultural History 53:3 (1979), 644-51

C Tilly, ‘Did the Cake of Custom Break’ in J Merriman (ed) Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1979), 17-41

Caroline Ford, ‘Peasants into Frenchmen Thirty Years After,’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 27:2 (Summer 2009), 84-93

S Gerson, ‘“A World of Their Own”: Searching for Popular Culture in the French Countryside,’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 27:2 (Summer 2009), 94-110
P Sahlins, ‘The Nation in the Village: State-Building and Communal Struggles in the Catalan Borderland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ The Journal of Modern History 60:2 (1988), 234-263

T Baycroft, ‘Peasants into Frenchmen? The case of the Flemish in the North of France,’ Review of European History 2/1 (1995)
G Robb, Discovery of France (2007)
R Price The Modernisation of Rural France (1983).

What is Weber’s main argument in Peasants into Frenchmen?

What critiques have been levelled at his argument?

Did peasants become French between 1870 and 1914?

Peasants into Frenchmen and its critics

What is Weber’s main argument in Peasants into Frenchmen?

What critiques have been levelled at his argument?

Did peasants become French between 1870 and 1914?

Core reading:
E Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), chapters 1 ‘A Country of Savages’ and 12 ‘Roads, Roads, and Still More Roads’ [ebook]

L Boswell, ‘Rethinking the Nation at the Periphery,’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 27:2 (Summer 2009), 111-26

Read a further item from the lists below.


Further reading:


Peasants into Frenchmen and its critics
E Weber Peasants into Frenchmen (1976)

J Lehning Peasant and French (1995)

T Margadant, ‘Tradition and Modernity in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of Modern History 56:4 (1984), 667-97

T Margadant, ‘French Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century,’ Agricultural History 53:3 (1979), 644-51

C Tilly, ‘Did the Cake of Custom Break’ in J Merriman (ed) Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1979), 17-41

Caroline Ford, ‘Peasants into Frenchmen Thirty Years After,’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 27:2 (Summer 2009), 84-93

S Gerson, ‘“A World of Their Own”: Searching for Popular Culture in the French Countryside,’ French Politics, Culture, and Society 27:2 (Summer 2009), 94-110
P Sahlins, ‘The Nation in the Village: State-Building and Communal Struggles in the Catalan Borderland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ The Journal of Modern History 60:2 (1988), 234-263

T Baycroft, ‘Peasants into Frenchmen? The case of the Flemish in the North of France,’ Review of European History 2/1 (1995)
G Robb, Discovery of France (2007)
R Price The Modernisation of Rural France (1983)


Peasant politics, society and culture before and after 1870
A Corbin The Village of the Cannibals (1992)

T Judt, Socialism in Provence (1979)

L Frader Peasants and Protest: Agricultural Workers , Politics and Unions in the Aude 1850-1914 (1991)
A Baker Fraternity amongst the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Association in the Loire Valley 1815-1914 (1999)
W Brustein, The Social Origins of Political Regionalism: France 1848-1981 (1988)
E Weber, ‘The Second Republic , Politics, and the Peasant,’ French Historical Studies 11:4 (1980), 521-550
E Berenson, Politics and the French peasantry: The Debate Continues,’ Social History 12:2 (1987) 213-29

P Sahlins, ‘Deep Play in the Forest: The War of the Demoiselles in the Ariège, 1829-31,’ in B Diefendorf and C Hesse (eds), Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1993) 159-180

P Sahlins Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles (1994)
P Jones Politics and Rural Society in the Southern Massif Central (1985)

P McPhee The Politics of Rural Life 1846-52 (1992)

T Margadant French Peasants in Revolt : The Insurrection of 1851 (1979)

M Agulhon The Republic in the Village (1970)

J Merriman, ‘Radicalisation and Repression: A Study of the Demobilisation of the Democ-Soc’ during the

Second French Republic ,’ in R Price, Revolution and Reaction (1975)
R Magraw, ‘P Joigneaux and Socialist Propaganda in the French Countryside1849-51’ French Historical Studies (1978)

E Berenson, Politics and the French peasantry: The Debate Continues,’ Social History 12:2 (1987) 213-29

M Lyons, ‘What did Peasants Read? Written and Printed Culture in Rural France, 1815-1914,’ European History Quarterly 27:2 (1997)

R Jonas Industry and Politics in Rural France: Peasants of the Isère 1870-1914 (1994)

A Moulin Peasantry and Society in France since 1789 (1991)

E Ackerman, ‘Alternative to Rural Exodus: The Development of the Commune of Bonnières-sur-Seine in the Nineteenth Century,’ French Historical Studies 10:1 (1977), 126-48