I Peasants Into Frenchmen I Thirty Year PDF

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Peasants Into Frenchmen Thirty Years After

Author(s): Caroline Ford
Source: French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 84-93
Published by: Berghahn Books
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Peasants Into Frenchmen
Thirty Years After
Caroline Ford
University of California, Los Angeles
On a warm, cloudless day in December of 2006 a conference entitled "Peasants

Into Frenchmen Thirty Years After" was held at Royce Hall on the campus of
University of California, Los Angeles.1 The occasion was the thirtieth anniver-
sary of the publication of Eugen Weber's pathbreaking 1976 book, Peasants Into
Frenchmen : The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, which continues to
generate debate about processes of nation formation and political accultura-
tion among historians around the world. Eugen Weber attended the confer-
ence, and I remember him being part amused and part bemused by the
presentations and discussion that ensued. It was, of course, not known at the
time that he would pass away less than six months later at the age of eighty-
two. The articles by Laird Boswell, Stéphane Gerson, and Gilles Pécout that
comprise this forum were originally cast as presentations for the conference,
and each reflects on a separate aspect of the book and on its impact and legacy
thirty years after publication.
Ironically, I met Eugen Weber at the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue
de Richelieu in Paris as a young graduate student in the process of doing
research on a doctoral dissertation which ultimately challenged the central
thesis of Weber's book and his approach to the subject. That dissertation
became a book, and I did not meet Weber again until I joined the History
Department at UCLA in 2004. He appeared to be much the same man in 2004
that he was in 1985: curious, gracious, sardonic, and extremely witty. While I
never knew him well, I came to appreciate many aspects of him as an historian
and colleague. The purpose of this essay is to give an introduction to the arti-
cles by Laird Boswell, Stéphane Gerson, and Gilles Pécout by providing a brief
biographical sketch of Weber's life, the central themes of his scholarly work,
and his contributions as an historian.
French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer 2009
doi: 10.3 167/fpcs.2009. 270205
Thirty Years After 85
Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest,

son of Sonia and Emmanuel Weber, who was an
British boarding school in Herne Bay, in sou
Ashville College in England's Lake District, s
and summers in Romania. After the Second W
see or have news of his parents in Romania un
the British Army after his graduation from A
in Belgium, India - in the midst of a bloody p
He became a Captain in the King's Own Scottis
est regiments. He grew up, in other words, in
ing the worlds between eastern, central, and w
to navigate the worlds at the two ends of the
completing his army service he entered Cambr
While at Cambridge, he spent a year at the
Paris and taught English at the prestigious
Lakanal in Sceaux, where the French rural hist
who was only a few years younger than Webe
the historian Michel Winock, the French histo
extreme Right in France, later lectured. It was
words, he "fell for France, just as one falls in
rocated. In 1977 he was decorated with the Ordre National des Palmes
Académiques for his contribution to French culture. Like other brilliant h

rians who studied at Oxford and Cambridge before and after him, such as
Keith Thomas and Simon Schama, he did not complete a doctor of ph
phy, but this was because his dissertation, "The Nationalist Revival in Fra
1905-1914," was rejected. Weber later wrote: "No wonder that critics
the finished work impressionistic - meaning, I suppose that it carrie
many anecdotes and too little analysis." While many years later he ack
edged that this was a "crushing experience," it was one which he "survive
and he also wryly (and characteristically) noted that the book was still ac
in print.2
Weber taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for a year and obtained
an M.A. in 1954. While he was offered posts in Europe at the London School
of Economics and the CNRS in Paris, he chose to leave Cambridge and Europe,
seeking fresher and perhaps far freer intellectual pastures, and never regretted
it. He later noted that while things may have changed in the 1950s, academic
advancement in Europe depended too much on a system of clientage and
political considerations. In evident reference to Cambridge, he wrote that "in
the United States one did not progress by way of sherry parties - though a
good stomach for martinis did not harm."3 He first taught at the University of
Alberta in Canada and then at the University of Iowa (1954-56). He joined the
History faculty at UCLA in 1956 where, as Chair of the History Department,
then Dean of the Social Sciences, and later Dean of the College of Arts and Let-
ters, he helped to build the history department into one of the finest in North
86 Caroline Ford
America. At the same time,

guished Teaching Award and
Corporation documentary se
brought his pedagogy into the
Eugen Weber was a prolif
broad themes. He described hi
history department website a
the decay of liberal instituti
popular culture in late ninetee
a characteristically ironical t
ble/' The list of the titles of
France and in the problem of
wing movements, and the fin
alist Revival in France , 1905-1
in the Twentieth Century (196
Europe (1971), Peasants Into
(19 76), France, Fin de Siècle (19
The Hollow Years : France in th
cult to understand why fa
national belonging concerne
during the "hollow years/' a
erupted in Europe. Joining th
years he witnessed the last
firsthand the devastation that
gium. He was stationed in a
ate aftermath of the war an
another occupation was comin
spoke of this particular mome
siderable degree of discomfor
elided this moment in his r
France. Ultimately, this elision
of the sectarian violence and the atrocities committed in the name of nation-
alism and religion in South Asia.
His own personal attachment to nation and community was also com-
plex. He was born a Romanian and although he left for England in his early
teens, he never lost his Romanian spoken accent. He also noted that being
Romanian gave him some advantages in becoming an historian. Unlike virtu-
ally all historians of nineteenth-century Europe, he had been born into the
nineteenth century by virtue of the fact that Romania still lived in that world
in the period between the wars. Romanian francophony and francophilia
helped to explain his early fascination with France, but when he convinced his
parents to send him abroad to school at a very young age he chose Britain, not
France, because it was "exotic" and, for him, the furthest away from his native
Romania. He became a British citizen, and some years later he finally became
an American "only by (mutual) choice/' but

to which he and his wife regularly retreated
His first two books, The Nationalist Reviva
both explored the world of "new right" pol
heart of the first book was the problem of
all political parties supported stringent m
against Germany. In this sense, he sough
between the spread of a particular kind of
tained that the new populist xenophobic
1900s was a "product of the capital," fro
stemmed, and which never translated into e
even if it influenced its representatives.5 W
about the right, except as "bogeys," or abou
cinated by their influence, even when their
tions of power. He was determined to exp
beyond stereotypes. While writing abou
in both his early and later work, he also
Emmanuel Beau de Loménie, Kléber Haede
a few. For some years during the 1950s and
the relationship between the various kind
ments and fascism and concluded that the A
ism was not fascist, which helped genera
taken up in Germany by Ernst Nolte, for e
cism and the notion of "proto fascisms."6 T
lish a more general work on European fascism
Revolution in the Twentieth Century, which
and an edited book with his UCLA colleague
A Historical Profile.7
What stands out in Weber's early writings
and the personalities and activities of the n
men, and parliamentary representatives, as
methodology. He wrote in The Nationalist R
"tell a story" that had not been told, but "t
speak for themselves. When developments c
that, insofar as possible, the historian sh
Weber remained a storyteller for his entire
chapters with epigraphs drawn from obs
poets, popular songs and political pundits
one that drew on grand theory or social sci
While his early work focused on the "cen
social elites, Weber increasingly became int
profonde, and the relationship between th
that he did as director of UCLA's French Center for Education Abroad at the
University of Bordeaux in, of all years, 1968. Ironically, Weber made absolutely
88 Caroline Ford
no mention of May 1968 in

While Paris was burning, Web
provincial cities, small towns,
perhaps his best-known work
later translated into many lan
and process by which rural
common national culture. Ch
considered the French Revolut
and participation of the Fre
time, Weber argued that thi
Third Republic (1870-1914). He
cific initiatives undertaken by
canize rural France. He argued
expansion, education, and mi
honored attachments and id
regional minds," and confirm
ment to those who adopted
France came to consider itself
subject of great controversy o
be attributed to regional dif
defined. While Weber never
referred to it in his work, in
marks of modernization the
which rested on certain kinds
the national, the "archaic" and
ular.10 Weber saw the process
the center outward, resultin
issues by those articulated in
What I found particularly su
ernization of rural France w
national integration to coloniz
not know until two years ag
soldier in the bloody period le
nage unleashed by British co
tion, and this aspect of his bo
death. He begins the last cha
Fanon, who was born in the sa
Fanon became one of the fore
rations behind national liberation movements worldwide. Weber uses the fol-
lowing quote from Fanon's work as an epigraph for the final chapter of
Peasants Into Frenchmen : "The colonist only ends his work of breaking the
native when the latter admits loud and clear the supremacy of the white man's
values."12 However, Weber saw the results of colonization in France in a favor-
able light, arguing against an insistence on the evils of colonialism as identi-
fied by Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu, for exa

modernity brought were often emancipati
as such."13 Perhaps the issue of race was w
to Weber, for he wrote that "given time a
tion worked."14 A reading of Pierre-Jakez H
ton Village, among many other memoirs o
one to conclude otherwise.15
Weber's account of how popular and elite culture came together again
generated a spate of books, including my own first book, and articles chal-
lenging aspects of what came to be described as the "Weber thesis," the process
by which rural groups and minorities became integrated into the French
nation-state.16 Some historians who worked on southern France during the
Second Republic disputed the timing of the process of political integration,
while others critiqued the "top-down," "center-outward" approach to the sub-
ject, arguing that national identity was often forged at the periphery and
occurred as a result of a process of negotiation and selective appropriation.17
Issue was also taken with Weber's benign view of how the Republic attempted
to stamp out regional languages and local traditions as well as with his seem-
ing erasure of local resistance.18 Despite, or perhaps because of, the fierce
debate that it engendered, Peasants Into Frenchmen has remained a central work
to which historians of rural politics, integration, and nation formation con-
tinue to refer, and it has become, in ways that historical works by English-
speaking authors sometimes have, a kind of a classic in France, translated as La
Fin des terroirs : La modernisation de la France rurale, 1870-1914. It was recently
republished by the French publishing house Fayard in 2005 as part of series
entitled, "Les Indispensables de l'Histoire." The book jacket of that edition,
moreover, signals its importance for the French reading public at large: "Le
regard porté dans les années 1970 par l'un des plus grands historiens
américains sur l'entrée de la France dans la modernité a durablement
bouleversé la perception que nous nous faisons de notre passé." Ironically,
the title of the French translation suggests, many in France viewed the passin
of an earlier age with some nostalgia, as a world that they had lost, rather than
an emancipation to which Weber eludes. A testament to the continuing schol-
arly importance of the book is reflected in, among other conferences, an inter
national colloquium that I attended in Rome in 1997, on the twentieth
anniversary of the publication of the book. The colloquium was entitled "
politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle: France, Italie, Espagne, Portuga
and sponsored by the École Française de Rome, the École Normale Supérieu
in Paris, the Universität de Girona and the Università degli studi della Tuscia-
Viterbo.19 Its participants included Maurice Agulhon, Peter McPhee, Gill
Pécout, and Alain Corbin, among others.
After the publication of Peasants Into Frenchmen, Eugen Weber's research
turned to the cultural history of the fin-de-siècle, autobiography, and twenti
eth-century French politics. Some historians saw no connection betwee
90 Caroline Ford
Weber's concerns in Peasants I

Siècle, which focused on urban
bear some relationship in th
quences. While Weber did no
tion to the modernization of
discrepancy between the obv
this period and a fin-de-siècle
than examining agencies and a
Into Frenchmen, he focused o
at the heart of the book is th
one of decline and decadence.
de Siècle was written not only
always said he wrote his book
years, Jacqueline Weber, and
were those whom he wanted t
book and bears all the charact
humorous style, its use of an
an historian, whom he define
in the details and drama of ev
Paris, from the transgression
and sports. I always found i
uninterested in sport focused
and nationalism in such inte
the dark history of the Dreyf
in France and Europe at large,
ter entitled the "Best of Times."
This brings me to Weber's final book, Apocalypses: Prophecies , Cults , and

Millennial Beliefs through the Ages, which is in some ways an extension of his
research on fin-de-siècle France. It is based on the Barbara Frum Lecture that he
was invited to give by the University of Toronto in 1999. It is a book that is the
broadest in terms of his chronological scope, extending from the Franks to the
present and centering on the notion of fin-de-siècles (in the plural) and pre-
sentiments regarding the passing of an age. Chiliasm was not in Eugen Weber's
nature, which is perhaps why the subject held such fascination for him.
Many historians are unaware of Weber's "other life" as a man of letters and
film critic. His life-long activity in this domain is a reflection of his desire to
reach a broader reading public. As early as the late 1950s he contributed articles
to Film Quarterly, and from the 1970s onwards he wrote frequently for the Times
Literary Supplement In the 1980s he became a regular and popular contributor to
the Los Angeles Times Book Review, branching out in the 1990s to write for the
New Republic, Libération, London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, and
the Wall Street Journal. But his central activity remained the writing of books.
The work that in some ways stands alone among Eugen Weber's many
books is his My France . It is primarily a collection of essays on subjects drawn
Thirty Years After 9 1
from his earlier work, the Right and the Lef

French hexagon, France, the peasantry and p
alist Revival, Jews and Anti-Semitism, and N
He revisited and reworked many of these the
autobiographical essay that is "vintage Weber
and deft turns of phrase. Yet the collection i
of history and on Weber's own life and writi
me from this perspective is his heart-rendin
Bloch, which is, to my knowledge, his only f
the life and work of this famous historian of
journal Annales (until he was forced to flee Pa
pation). Denounced as a member of the Re
shunned and abandoned by his co-editor at
did nothing to defend him against anti-Semit
beaten and shot along with twenty-five fello
Some of the aspects of Bloch the historian
resemblance to Weber himself: "As an his
never without a book in his hand. ... He was never without a work in
progress."21 In reading through Bloclťs work from its inception, Weber was
struck by its consistency "both in style and in the dominant themes or
approaches - despite its great variety" as well as its "ease, assurance, and lack
of constraint."22 He admires Bloch for his role as an examining magistrate and
detective, but argues that for a historian this is not enough. The historian,
wrote Weber, "is (ideally) a cultivated traveler arriving in a foreign land he has
read much about, foreign but not entirely strange, and yet all the stranger
because, although familiar with much and with many he encounters, he is
continually surprised at gestures, attitudes, and activities he had not expected,
or that he finds more complex, more obscure than he thought."23 This is the
historian that Weber aspired to be and became. Bloch, who fought valiantly in
World War I, was, like Weber, a captain, "the oldest captain in the French
army," while Weber must surely have been one of the youngest in World War
II. Weber believed that no one shows better than Marc Bloch that the historian
contributes "not a model, but the suggestion of a new way of going about our
business, not a vision, but a view; vision surviving at best as a document of its
times, the view adding to historical understanding."24 In many respects Weber
was just such a historian. It is telling that Weber ended his France , Fin de Siècle
with a reference to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, noting that the
narrator, like the historian, sought to recover and understand past experience,
emotions and individuals in order to "forfeit to time and to resurrect them in
a book that would provide a link between lost past and present." He con-
cluded by saying that "memory wanes, but the books we write about [the past]
may live on."25
The range of Eugen Weber's scholarly writings was vast. Many historians
disagreed with him, but none dismissed his writings. He never launched a
92 Caroline Ford
"school" or had followers wh

his fellow historians to ask
cles that follow indicate, wh
conversation continues.
Caroline Ford is Professor of History at the University of California, Los

les. She is the author of two books, Creating the Nation in Provincial France
gion and Political Identity in Brittany (1993) and Divided Houses : Religion
Gender in Modern France (2005). Her most recent publication is "Reforest
Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial A
ria/' (American Historical Review, April 2008).
Notes
1. This conference was sponsored by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies
and the History Department at UCLA.
2. Eugen Weber, My France: Politics , Culture and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1991), 6.
3. Ibid., 7.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968), 13.
6. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française , Italian Fascism , National Social-
ism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1965). The
subject was later taken up by the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in La Droite révolu-
tionnaire: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978).
7. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century
(Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1985) and The European Right: A Historical Profile
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).
8. Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 16.
9. Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France , 1870-1914 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 486.
10. See, for example, Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York:
Wiley, 1964) and Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry
Into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1953).
11. He further elaborated on the political dimension to this process in an important
article published in 1982. Weber, "Comment la politique vint aux paysans: A Sec-
ond Look at Peasant Politicization," American Historical Review 87 (April 1982): 357-
89.
12. Quoted in Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen, 485. Frantz Fanon was born in Mar-
tinique and worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Algerian war, after doing
a residency under the direction of the radical Catalan psychiatrist François
Tosquelles, ultimately writing the "bible" for anticolonial nationalist movements,
The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance

1963).
13. Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen, 492.
14. Ibid., 491.
15. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, trans. June Guichar-
naud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
16. Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity
in Brittany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
1 7. See, for example, ibid.; Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in
the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); P.M. Jones, Politics and
Rural Society: The Southern Massif Central, c. 1 750-1880 (Cambridge, New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985); Peter McPhee, Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobiliza-
tion in the French Countryside (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
18. Caroline Ford, "Religion and the Politics of Cultural Change in Provincial France:
Religion and Political Identity in Brittany," Journal of Modern History 62, 1 (March
1990): 1-33.
19. École Française de Rome, La Politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle: France, Italie,
Espagne, Portugal (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000).
20. Weber, My France, 15.
21. Ibid., 249.
22. Ibid., 250.
23. Ibid., 251.
24. Ibid., 258.
25. Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1986), 245.

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Berghahn Books

Peasants Into Frenchmen Thirty Years After

On a warm, cloudless day in December of 2006 a conference entitled "Peasants

Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest,

Académiques for his contribution to French culture. Like other brilliant h

America. At the same time,

an American "only by (mutual) choice/' but

no mention of May 1968 in

fied by Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu, for exa

Weber's concerns in Peasants I

This brings me to Weber's final book, Apocalypses: Prophecies , Cults , and

from his earlier work, the Right and the Lef

"school" or had followers wh

Caroline Ford is Professor of History at the University of California, Los

The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance

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