Introduction

Abstract

When the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral wrote his memoirs at the end of the nineteenth century he recalled how, as a youth in a southern village, he learnt of the blood-stained memories of the French Revolution which continued to divide his family as well as his community. Disillusioned by republicanism, Mistral later sought calm in the eternal rhythms of nature only to be traumatized by the ‘gigantic crabs’ which now mechanically harvested crops ‘in American style, cheerlessly, in haste, without any joy or singing…. That’s progress, that’s the terrible, inevitable harrow against which nothing can be done or said.’ These twin furnaces of change — the French Revolution and later political upheavals, and the mechanization of productive processes — have ever since attracted historians to the period 1789–1914; perhaps no other period of history has been so extensively studied. In recent decades some social historians have suggested that Mistral and other contemporaries were confusing political strife and economic novelty with real social change. Arno Mayer has argued that historians, too, have been preoccupied with change, at the expense of ignoring the continuities in French society. To Mayer, France in this century remained a pre-industrial Old Regime, ‘first and foremost a peasant economy and rural society dominated by hereditary and privileged nobilities’. The French Revolution did not undermine their landed power and control of the Church and State, and, while a democratic republic was finally in place by 1880, France remained a traditional peasant and artisan society. Not until the ‘general crisis’ of the twentieth century, between 1914 and 1945, did the European Old Regime finally die.¹