The long and winding road of nationalization: Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen in modern European history (1976-2006)

European History Quarterly

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 264-286

  Cabo, Miguel ^a   Molina, Fernando ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA   (Spain)

^b UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY UPV EHU   (Spain)

Author keywords

Mass politics; Nation building; Nationalism; Public sphere

Indexed keywords

EID: 66449089614     PISSN: 02656914     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0265691408101441     Document Type: Review

References (146)

1. Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905-1914 (Berkeley, CA 1959)
2. Action Française. Royalism and Reaction in the Twentieth Century (Stanford, CA 1962)
3. Varieties of Fascism. Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, MA 1964)
4. Eugen Weber, The Western Tradition, 2 vols (Wilmington, MA 1971)
5. This book, a well known synthesis of modern European history, illustrates the interest in reflexive synthesis that was revived in Apocalypses. Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, MA, 2000)
6. Eugen Weber, France, Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, MA 1986)
7. My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, MA 1991)
8. The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York 1994)
9. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), x
10. Peter Flora, 'Introduction', in P. Flora (ed.), State Formation, Nation-building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan, Based on his Collected Works (New York 1999), 65
11. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication. An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA 1953)
12. Two works were essential in the application of these theories to nation-building: C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ 1975)
13. and S. Rokkan and S.N. Eisendstadt (eds), Building States and Nations, 2 vols (Beverly Hills, CA 1973). Both are put into context in Flora, 'Introduction', 54-8
14. Karl W. Deutsch, Tides among Nations (New York 1979), 135
15. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and 'Nation Building' in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill 2000)
16. Justo G. Beramendi, 'Ethnos versus Polis? On Method and Nationalism', in J.G. Beramendi, R. Máiz and X.M. Núñez (eds), Nationalism in Europe Past and Present (Santiago de Compostela 1993), Vol. 1, 69-111
17. The French version, translated by Antoine Berman and Bernard Géniès, is titled: La fin des terroirs. La modernisation de la France rurale (1870-1914) (Paris 1983)
18. Roger Magraw, France, 1815-1914: The Bourgeois Century (London 1983)
19. Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, NJ 1980)
20. Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830-1852 (Princeton, NJ 1984)
21. Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment (Cambridge 1983)
22. The Republic in the Village; The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic (New York 1982)
23. Charles Tilly, 'Did the Cake of Custom Break?', in J.M. Merriman (ed.), Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York 1980), 17-44
24. in the same line was John Merriman, in his review of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50 (1978)
25. J.A. Silver, 'A Review of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen', American Historical Review, Vol. 82 (1977)
26. Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics. Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1886-1900 (Princeton, NJ 1984)
27. Eugen Weber, 'The Second Republic, Politics, and the Peasants', French Historical Studies, Vol. 82 (1980), 521-50
28. 'Comment la politique vint aux paysans: A Second Look at Peasant Politicization', American Historical Review, Vol. 87 (1982), 357-89
29. Suzanne Berger, Peasants against Politics. Cultural Organization in Britanny, 1911-1967 (Cambridge, MA 1972)
30. Christianne Guionnet, L'apprentissage de la politique moderne. Les élections municipales sous la monarquie de Juillet (Paris 1997)
31. Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life. Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852 (Oxford 1992)
32. Edward Berenson, 'Politics and the French Peasantry: The Debate Continues', Social History, Vol. 12 (1987), 213-29
33. Gilles Pécout, 'La politisation des paysans au XIXe siècle. Réflexions sur l'histoire des campagnes françaises', Histoires et sociétés rurales, Vol. 2 (1994), 91-125
34. Three recent contributions to the debate, that support a comparative chronology of the politicization of the French peasantry prior to the Third Republic, are: J.L. Mayaud and L. Raphael (eds), Histoire de l'Europe rurale contemporaine. Du village à l'etat (Paris 2006)
35. J.C. Caron and F. Chauvaud (eds), Les campagnes dans les sociétés européennes. France, Allemagne, Espagne et Italie 1830-1930 (Rennes 2005)
36. and La politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle. France, Italie, Espagne et Portugal (Rome 2000)
37. Günter Riederer, Feiern im Reichsland: politische Symbolik, öffentliche Festkultur und die Erfindung kollektiver Zugehörigkeiten in Elsaß-Lothringen (1871-1918) (Trier 2004)
38. A critique of this dissociation is found in Pierre Barral, 'Depuis quand les paysans se sentent-ils français?', Ruralia, Vol. 3 (1998), 7-21
39. Jean Luc Mayaud, La petite explotation rurale triomphante. France, XIX siècle (Paris 1999)
40. and François Ploux, 'Production et recomposition des identités villageoises en France de la monarchie de Juillet aux années 1930', in Mayaud and Raphael (eds), Histoire de l'Europe rurale contemporaine, 39-56, 40
41. Along the same lines, more recently, Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Les campagnes Françaises entre mythe et histoire (XVIIIe-XXIe siècle) (Paris 2006)
42. James R. Lehning, Peasant and French. Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (New York 1995)
43. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA 1989)
44. Jean-François Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle (Toulouse 1987)
45. Christian Thibon, Le Pays de Sault. Pyrénées audoises au XIXe siécle: les villages et l'État (Paris 1988)
46. In contrast, a recent analysis on French Flanders grants more weight to state mechanisms and arrives at conclusions akin to Weber's, see Timothy Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Suffolk 2004)
47. Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton 1993)
48. Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ils aprenaient la France. L'exaltation des regions dans le discourse patriotique (Paris 1997)
49. Jean-François Chanet, L'école républicaine et les petites patries (Paris 1996)
50. Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place. Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Ithaca, NY 2003)
51. Berenson, 'Politics and the French Peasantry', 227
52. Theodore Zeldin, 'The Destruction of Peasants', The New York Review of Books, 24 November 1977
53. Peter M. Jones, Politics and Rural Society. The Southern Massif Central, c. 1750-1880 (Cambridge 1985)
54. Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind. French Peasants and the Supernatural (Cambridge, MA 1987)
55. David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766-1870 (Rochester and New York, NY 2003)
56. Mikel Aizpuru, book review of La fin des terroirs (1983), Historia Contemporánea, no. 1 (1988), 238-40
57. Juan J. Linz, 'Early State-Building and Late Peripheral Nationalisms against the State: The Case of Spain', in S.N. Eisenstadt and S. Rokkan (eds), Building States and Nations (London 1973), 102
58. Juan-Pablo Fusi, 'Centre and Periphery 1898-1936. National Integration and Regional Nationalisms reconsidered', in F. Lannon and P. Preston (eds), Elites and Power in Twentieth-Century Spain (Oxford 1990), 33-40
59. and 'Revisionismo crítico e historia nacionalista', Historia Social 7 (1990), 127-34
60. Borja de Riquer, 'Sobre el lugar de los nacionalismos-regionalismos en la història contemporánea española', Historia Social, 7 (1990), 105-26
61. The key aspects of this debate can be found in Xose-Manoel Núñez, 'Los oasis en el desierto. Perspectivas historiográ ficas sobre el nacionalismo español', Bulletin d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Espagne, Vol. 26 (1997), 483-533
62. and Fernando Molina, 'Modernidad e identidad nacional. El nacionalismo español del siglo XIX y su historiografía', Historia Social, Vol.52 (2005), 147-71
63. Borja de Riquer, 'La débil nacionalización española del siglo XIX', Historia Social, Voi. 20 (1994), 97-114
64. and 'La faiblesse du procesus de construction nationale en Espagne au XIX siècle', Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, Vol. 41/42 (1994), 353-66
65. Riquer, La débil nacionalización española, 113
66. Borja de Riquer, Escolta Espanya. La cuestión catalana en la época liberal (Madrid 2001)
67. Ludger Mees, Nationalism, Violence and Democracy. The Basque Clash of Identities (Hampshire 2003)
68. and with Santiago de Pablo and José-Ramón Rodríguez, El péndulo patriótico. Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco, 1895-1936, 2 vols (Barcelona 1999)
69. José Álvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid 2001), 16, 19, 549-50 (forthcoming English version, by Manchester University Press)
70. Alejandro Quiroga, Making Spaniards. Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses (London 2008)
71. Miguel Cabo, 'Quelle nation dans les campagnes? État et nation-building en Espagne, un débat ouvert', in Mayaud and Raphael (eds), Histoire de l'Europe rurale contemporaine, 222-48
72. Xose-Manoel Núñez, 'The Region as Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (1840-1936)', European History Quarterly, Vol. 31 (2001), 483-518
73. Josep M. Fradera, 'Regionalism and Nationalism: Catalonia within Modern Spain', in P. Ther and H. Sunhaussen (eds), Regionale Bewegungen und Regionalismen in europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Marburg 2003), 3-18
74. Ferran Archilés and Manuel Martí, 'Ethnicity, Region and Nation: Valencian Identity and the Spanish Nation-state', Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24 (2001), 245-78
75. Stephen Jacobson, 'Spain. The Iberian Mosaic', in T. Baycroft and M. Hewitson (eds), What is a Nation? (Oxford 2006), 210-12
76. See Maitane Ostolaza, 'École et construction de la nation dans l'Espagne liberale, 1857-1931: Une vision "peripherique", le cas du Pays Basque', in Hommage a Carlos Serrano (Paris 2005), 167-81
77. Fernando Molina, La tierra del martirio español. El País Vasco y España en el siglo del nacionalismo (Madrid 2005)
78. Justo G. Beramendi, 'Identity, Ethnicity and State in Spain, 19th and 20th Centuries', Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 3 (1999), 79-100
79. Xose-Manoel Núñez, 'La questione nazionale in Spagna: Note sul recente dibattito storiografico', Mondo Contemporaneo, Vol. 2 (2007), 105-27
80. Stephen Jacobson, '"The Head and Heart of Spain": New Perspectives on Nationalism and Nationhood', Social History, Vol. 29 (2004), 393-407
81. Da contadini a francesi (Bologna 1989)
82. For an overview of historiography in this field, see Giacomina Nenci, Le campagne italiane in età contemporanea (Bologna 1997)
83. Silvio Lanaro, 'Da contadini a italiani', in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell'agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, 3 vols (Venice 1991), Vol. 3, 937-68
84. Along the same lines, see Linda Reeder, 'Women in the Classroom: Mass Migration, Literacy and the Nationalization of Sicilian Women at the Turn of the Century', Journal of Social History, Vol. 32 (1998), 101-24
85. Pier Paolo D'Attorre and Alberto de Bernardi interpret the massive emigration of southern Italians as the consequence of a deficient nationalization of the peasant masses and obstacles to land ownership; see 'Il "lungo addio": una proposta interpretativa', in P.P. D'Attorre and A. de Bernardi (eds), Studi sull'agricoltura italiana. Società rurale e modernizzazione (Milano 1994), XXXI
86. A broad overview of this question can be found in Renato Zangheri, 'Contadini e politica nell'800. La storiografia italiana', in Caron and Chauvaud (eds), La politisation des campagnes au XIX siècle, 13-27
87. Silvio Lanaro, 'Da contadini', 956; Antonio Gibelli, 'Grande guerra e identità nazionale nelle testimonianze dei combattenti', Ricerche storiche, Vol. XXVII (1997), 617-34. However, the ruralist rhetoric that accompanied this patriotic movement did not include social measures that would have facilitated a full nationalization of the peasantry, such as a reform of the system of agrarian contracts and property ownership, as pointed out by D'Atorre and De Bernardi, 'Il "lungo addio"', XXXVIII
88. David Laven, 'Italy', in Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (eds), What is a Nation? Europe 1780-1914 (Oxford 2006), 256
89. Piero Bevilacqua, 'Introduzione', Storia dell'agricoltura italiana, XL
90. Gian Enrico Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una nazione: tra etnodemocrazie regionale e cittadinanza (Bologna 1993)
91. and, particularly, E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria: la crisis dell'idea di nazione tra resistenza, antifascismo e repubblica (Rome 1996)
92. Bruno Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani: spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell'Italia unita (1870-1900) (Bari 1991)
93. Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione: rappresentazione dello stato e spazi sociali nella Italia unita (Bologna 1997)
94. For example, S. Soldani and G. Turi (eds), Fare gli italiani: scuola e cultura nella Italia contemporanea (Bologna 1993), which, in spite of the topic and title, makes not a single reference to Weber's book
95. Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie. Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo (Bologna 2003). Along the lines of recent studies on the Third Republic in France or the Restoration in Spain, he argues that a regional - national continuum was inherited from that time that, in spite of fascist centralism, allowed a place for localist and regionalist cultural tendencies within Italian national identity
96. Gilles Pécout, 'Politisation et intégration nationale en Italie: les campagnes toscanes des années 1860', Revue Historique, Vol. 617 (2001), 81-106
97. For example, see Stefano Pivato's analysis of the diffusion among the popular classes of names that referred to key political actors of the Risorgimento era, in 'Integrazione nazionale e culture popolari. L'onomastica politica e ideologica nei comuni rurali italiani', in Caron and Chauvaud (eds), La politisation des campagnes au XIX siècle, 117-33
98. There is a work that can be seen as equivalent to Nora's on lieux de la memoire, which are the 3 volumes edited by Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich 2002), but they hardly cite Weber's work and do not attempt to dialogue with him
99. Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Württemberg 1997)
100. Siegfried Weichlein, 'Saxons into Germans. The Progress of the National Idea in Saxony after 1866', in J.N. Retallack (ed.), Saxony in German History. Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933 (Ann Arbor, MI 2000), 166-79
101. and Nation und Region. Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf 2004)
102. For an interesting comparative approach, see Maiken Umbach, 'A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture and the Law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Late Nineteenth Century', in American Historical Review, Vol. 110 (2005), 659-92
103. Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region, 375
104. Dieter Langewiesche, '"Staat" und "Kommune": Zum Wandel der Staatsaufgaben in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert', Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 248 (1989), 621-35
105. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge 2001)
106. Confino, The Nation, 50
107. this author goes one step beyond the theses of Celia Applegate in A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley 1990)
108. See also the edited work by Jost Hermand and James Steakley (eds), Heimat, Nation, Fatherland. The German Sense of Belonging (New York 1996)
109. as well as James Retallack (ed.), Saxony in German History: Culture, Society and Politics, 1830-1933 (Ann Arbor, MI 2000)
110. Charlotte Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum : nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1995)
111. which extends the classic study by Georg L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca 1996[1973])
112. Mark Cornwall, 'The Habsburg Monarchy', in What is a Nation?, 174
113. Kelly Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village. The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland. 1848-1914 (Ithaca, NY 2001)
114. Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien. Über Zugehörigkeit und sociale Emanzipation in 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 2005)
115. Tomasz Kizwalter, O nowoczesności narodu. Przypadek polski (Warszawa 1999)
116. For a preview of his dissertation, see 'Polish Landed Gentry of the Mid-19th Century and Modernization', Acta Poloniae Historica, Vol. 62 (1990)
117. José María Faraldo has updated this modified approach to nationalization resulting from modernization, examining the case of the Polish peasants resettled after 1945 in formerly German lands, 'The Teutonic Knights and the Polish Identity. National Narratives, Self-image and Socialist Public Sphere' in G.T. Rittersporn, J.C. Behrends and M. Rolf (eds), Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs (Frankfurt/Main 2003)
118. Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: a Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, NJ 2002)
119. Andrey Karagodin, 'Reflections on Tradition and Modernity in Post-Emancipation Rural Russia (1861-1917)', unpublished paper presented at the Fifth ESSHC (Berlin 24-7 March 2004)
120. James Brooks in When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, NJ 1985) applied a scheme similar to Weber's (though this book is never cited) to his study of popular culture and the alphabetization of the peasantry after the Emancipation, describing a state-sponsored modernization process
121. The multiple implications of this debate for Russian historiography are evident in the records of a debate held at the Russian Institute of History, transcribed in Otechestvennaia Istoriia 2 (1997) under the title of' Sovremennye kontseptsii agrarnogo razvitiia'
122. David Moon, 'Peasants into Russian Citizens? A Comparative Perspective', Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 9 (1996), 43-81
123. David Moon, 'Peasants into Russian Citizens?', 76
124. Ilya V. Gerasimov, '"Russians into Peasants?" The Politics of Self-Organisation and Paradoxes of the Public Modernization Campaign in the Countryside in Late Imperial Russia', Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 2 (2004), 239
125. A similar tone can be seen in the comments by V. Koznova and F.B. Belelubskii in the debate cited in Otechestvennaia Istoriia 2 (1997)
126. Along the western border, for example, the Czarist State appears to have prioritized the maintenance of the state and order, over any hypothetical Russification, according to Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (Dekalb 1996)
127. The sporadic attempts at reinforcing the Russification of the state had counterproductive results, as evident in the case of Estonia. See Toivo U. Raun, 'Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-Century Estonian Nationalism Revisited', Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 9 (2003), 129-47
128. Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward. Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914 (London 1999); Ilya V. Gerasimov, 'Russians into Peasants?'
129. Scott J. Seregny, 'A Wager on the Peasantry: Anti-Zemstvo Riots and Adult Education in Stavropol Province, 1913-1916', Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 79 (2000), 90-126
130. Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914 (Berkeley, CA 1999)
131. Joseph Bradley, 'Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Czarist Russia', American Historical Review, Vol. 107 (2002), 1094-123
132. Some recent examples are: Paul R. Corner, Contadini e industrializzazione (Rome 1993)
133. Jean-Luc Mayaud, La petite exploitation rurale triomphante. France XIX siècle (Paris 1999)
134. Rafael Domínguez, El campesinado adaptative. Campesinos y mercado en el Norte de España, 1750-1880 (Santander 1996)
135. For an example of the diversity and vitality of the various modes of association during the nineteenth century, see Alan R.H. Baker, Fraternity Among the French Peasantry. Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815-1914 (Cambridge 1999)
136. A recent study of this question can be found in Gloria Sanz Lafuente, 'Une relecture des grandes organisations de propriétaires terriens en Europe. Entre l'entreprise coopérative, la transformation agraire et la politisation des campagnes 1880-1939', in Mayaud and Raphael (eds), Histoire de l'Europe rurale, 117-37
137. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London 1995)
138. Gerard Noiriel, Population, immigration et identité nationale en France, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris 1992)
139. The other well known work in this field is that of Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge 1992)
140. in which he argues for a dichotomous ethnic-civic interpretation, but leaves this approach behind in 'Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism', in M. Moore (ed.), Self-determination and Secession (London 1998)
141. This dichotomous approach is clearly overcome in David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism. Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (London 2000)
142. or Mark Hewitson, 'Conclusion. Nationalism and the Nineteenth Century', in What is a Nation?, 313-27
143. Celia Applegate: 'A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times', American History Review, Vol. 104 (1999), 1157-82
144. Eric Storm: 'Regionalism in History, 1890-1945: The Cultural Approach' European History Quarterly, Vol. 33 (2003), 251-65
145. Two recent historical monographs on this phenomenon from a European perspective are R. Petri, 'Regioni e storia regionale in Europa. Antitesi o metafora della nazione?', Memoria e Ricerca, Histoire de l'Europe rurale, Vol. 22 (2006), 107-34
146. and Xose-Manoel Núñez, 'La construcción de la identidad nacional en Europa y España', Ayer, Vol. 64 (2007). In Laurence Cole (ed.), Different Paths to the Nation. Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-70 (London, 2007) the complex interaction of national, regional and local identities is displayed in a useful comparative display