Every great history book has a story within it; and this book by Eugen Weber is no exception.
From Peasants to French. The Modernization of the Rural World, 1870-1914, published in 1976 by Stanford University, gloriously foundered under the weight of the Marxist-inspired historiography of those years. That is why it did not have the opportunity to be translated in our country. The paradigm of seeing the rural economy and peasant life within the class struggle could not leave a wrinkle of this size. Solution: it had to be left on the shelf of the university libraries, but with the condition that it would never be cited in class, except by the occasional heretic of those who always exist.
And it is still curious because this luminous book by Weber, an American of Romanian origin (1925-2007), who toured Paris in 1948 with the same self-confidence that Gene Kelly did in the famous film three years later, solves, with a extraordinary solvency, the great question that the true national identity rests on the peasant, on rural life, and on everything that constitutes their sphere of action, language, customs, legends, ways of life or aspirations.
Those in favor of the existence of a national idiosyncrasy need to see it reflected in the peasant with the same intensity as in the texts of land and language theorists. Because there is no doubt that a Nation that is considered as such refers to secular customs that last especially in the rural world, since it refers to ancestors who forge their distinctive features in agricultural tasks. But, in essence, the nation is a spoken expression, its own language, and, from the urban centers, cultural agents advocate that the different ways of peasant speech be unified into a single language.
In this magnificent book, the robust world of the peasants is presented as a colorful French drama, with a precise and accurate historical chronology, the years of consolidation of the Third Republic between 1870 and 1914; Come on, the Belle Époque of artists and writers. The audacity of its author is already evident in the title of the book: from peasants to Frenchmen.
In short, it is about reviewing three generations so that the grandchildren rectify the memory of their grandparents once the State has convinced them of the need to be part of a haughty nation: France. It was a vigorous response to what happened on the other side of the Rhine, among the Germans, victorious in Sedan over the controversial Second Empire: fascinating for some, a disgrace for others like Victor Hugo who denied it the cultural value that Mérimée or Viollet conferred on it. le-Duc. But those debates of people of letters, urban liberal class, with solid incomes or good public payrolls, and beautiful country houses, did not reach the rural world, with peasants who seemed taken from a motionless history, with ways of life similar to that of their ancestors in the times of Louis XIII and his musketeers. Men like León Gambetta on behalf of the Third Republic welcomed them as citizens. Because?
In those years, France was filled with cultural plans, and one of the main ones was the need to convince the stubborn peasants that they were all part of the same homeland, the French homeland. Exaggeration? It is enough to see the first peasants who already feel French respond to the call of a Nation in danger in the summer of 1914, and it is enough to see on the monoliths of all the towns the names that gave their lives for the country.
There is nothing heroic in this gesture: to understand it we must abandon the old story of class struggles and enter fully into what Weber understood as the great turning point in the history of France, that moment in which “the peasant converted to rationalism He could throw off his baggage of traditional artifices, which served as a shield in the unequal struggle to stay alive, with the intoxicating conviction that, far from being a powerless witness to natural processes, he himself was an agent of change.
As for the past, we will see later: first let's save France by making “popular culture and that of the elites come together again.” In short, reading this masterful book is essential in the current debate about whether the identity of a great nation can reside in its diversity.
Eugen Weber From Peasants to French. taurus Translation by Jordi Ainaud. 800 pages. 42.90 euros.
