Communism in Rural France: French Agricultural Workers and the Popular Front

摘要

The nature of the French rural community has fascinated and puzzled generations of historians, anthropologists, sociologists and geographers. Albert Soboul's classic 1956 study of it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in the journal Past and Present) showed that peasant protest in modern France has been both endemic and evolving. Peasant uprisings and agrarian revolts prefaced the Revolution of 1789. They were aimed at the seigneur, the tax collector and the money lender: it was by opposing such 'external' enemies that a rural community constructed an 'internal' consciousness of itself. Traditional protests - riots, demonstrations and even revolutions - continued during the first half of the nineteen century as peasants fought a reactionary battle to retain their common rights of usage over fields, heaths and woods. But with the decline of the land-owning aristocracy and the increasing integration of the agricultural sector into the developing capitalist economy, latent antagonisms within rural communities surfaced and new, progressive, forms of protest emerged.