From tribes to a nation: how France unified its countryfolk and cities

James Bradshaw

November 11, 2024 3 Reactions

Weber explains a fundamental political difference between the old French monarchy and the Republican system which replaced it.

The King had little need to promote the French language or to ensure that a unified way of life was practised within his realm. As political control was completely centralised, other areas of life could be decentralised safely.

This model was upended by the Revolution of 1789 and all that followed on from it. A subject could be passive but a citizen could not.

“[T]he Revolution had brought with it the concept of national unity as an integral and integrating ideal at all levels, and the ideal of oneness stirred concern about its shortcomings. Diversity became imperfection, injustice, failure, something to be noted and to be remedied,” Weber notes.

As with so much in political history, here in French Revolutionary thought we see the genesis of much of the subsequent debate between the modernising and equalising Left and the tradition-preserving Right.

Industrialisation

It was not just language and politics where the 19th-century peasant was often detached from national life.

Most Frenchmen worked the land, but farming was a way of life rather than an economic enterprise. What existed in much of the countryside was a “self-sufficient life in which until around 1870 many peasants bought only iron and salt, paid for all else in kind and were paid the same way, husbanded their money for taxes or hoarded it to acquire land.”

Agricultural productivity was noticeably low, and there was little incentive for the peasants to innovate or improve their practices.

Unsurprisingly, malnutrition was common, as evidenced by the large numbers of conscripts who needed several months of regular feeding before they could physically cope with military life.

The abysmal state of rural roads helped to keep many regions shut out of the national economy. In the late 19th century, improvements in transportation (both road and rail) began to change this.

This had an enormous impact beyond the economic sphere, as Weber explains, the “less mobile the society, the greater the stability of its themes and of its categorisations.”

Industrialisation came slower in France than in England, but the eventual growth of the cities led to a flight from the countryside which was accelerated by greater geographic mobility.

This spread the manners, beliefs and language of the big cities to the small villages. Railroads also brought goods mass-produced in the big cities, which was a major blow to small-scale manufacturing in the countryside, and further encouraged migration to urban areas.

New opportunities opened up for a new generation of peasants, which brought with it new vices as well.

Social ills and secularisation

One of the most interesting insights of Weber is that this period of relative social liberation coincided with an increase in government legislation cracking down on the offences against good manners and orderliness which suddenly became common. Society was no longer self-regulating.

“It is surely more than simple coincidence that at this very moment paternal authority was simultaneously sapped by a number of legislative measures that trespassed on what had once been considered the father’s natural domain: protecting working children, requiring them to attend school, in one way or another ignoring the will or interest of the paterfamilias,” he writes.

This concern about fading authority became discernible throughout France in this period. Weber is not alone in making this observation about the relationship between authority and power: the great Robert Nisbet had pointed this out years earlier in his magisterial work, The Quest for Community.

Throughout the Third Republic’s early decades, there was a great battle between Church and State, which culminated in the expulsion of religion from public life in the 1905 law, which enshrined the concept of laïcité.

France in the 1870s was a Catholic nation (about 35.4 million Catholics out of a population of 36 million) divided between the believers and the lapsed.

Secularism made steady grounds as religious indifference increased. “Sunday, the peasants go to church,” one observer wrote around 1870, “some moved by religious feeling, most by habit or by fear of what people say.”

The social role of church attendance had been important in areas where there was little else in the way of weekend activities, but this gradually changed.

One sign of the religious change is declining fertility. To the vexation of the clergy, family planning became common, and in political terms, this would significantly weaken what had long been the most populous nation in western Europe. Never again would French domination of the continent be a realistic prospect for France to achieve or its enemies to fear.

As education levels increased, many came to view religion as superstition. Weber certainly paints a picture of 19th-century peasant piety which is galling to the modern reader.

Priests were widely believed to have magic powers, such as being able to control the weather.

An English traveller passing through a southern region in 1894 found that bottles of holy water were placed on chimneys to protect against lightning.

The intercession of completely fictional saints was much sought after, like Saint Pissoux, who allegedly aided those afflicted by urinary incontinence.

When reforming clergy sought to rectify abuses, they were faced with a major dilemma at a time when public religiosity was under assault by the atheistic Left.

Many of the peasantry’s religious practices — what Weber calls the “antiquated and semi-pagan forms of popular piety and worship: the colourful rituals of urban fraternities, the laxity attached to public ceremonial and festivities [and] the unregenerate magic practices” — may not have been entirely orthodox, but they were of the greatest importance in binding the flock to their Church.

A secular god

In addition to eventually being driven from public life and turfed out of the education system, the Church sometimes withdrew voluntarily from areas where the clergy felt their involvement was less than desirable.

“[T]hey considered the tree of the Church too strong to be hurt by pulling off the ivy. Yet when the ivy had been pulled away, the tree was left alone and isolated. Over and over, the struggle over practices it disapproved of left the Church mistress of an emptied field,” Weber reflects.

Thus, only part of France’s secularisation can be explained by looking at legislative developments.

When explaining the rapid secularisation of Ireland in the late 20th century, the great Irish philosopher Desmond Fennell drew attention to the degree to which the Irish hierarchy had neglected (and in some cases condemned) similar practices in which the peasant people of Ireland had demonstrated their “belief in the existence of the spiritual world”.

Unlike Italian Catholicism, the Irish variant had ceased to be festive. Fennell understood that this meant social life in Ireland was remarkably secular even at a time when church attendance rates were extremely high. When attendance fell, this led to a much greater alienation from Christianity.

This is only part of what makes the religious shift significant.

To survive in this world, a people needs a unifying set of values and Weber describes how French Republicans provided one which replaced Catholicism within the school system and more broadly.

“A Catholic God, particularist and only identified with the fatherland by revisionists after the turn of the century, was replaced by a secular God: the fatherland and its living symbols, the army and the flag. Catechism was replaced by civics lessons. Biblical history, proscribed in secular schools, was replaced by the sainted history of France.”

Did this work? Has this secular vision of France endured?

Recent developments certainly suggest not. France’s crisis of identity is worse than that of many other Western nations, and the deliberate severing of the nation’s spiritual roots is one major reason for this being the case.

Disunity in diversity

A secular state governing a nation of baptised Catholics was one thing; a secular state governing a highly diverse population has proved more challenging.

From 1870 onwards, France was unified politically, linguistically, economically and culturally, but mass immigration in the late 20th century along with other changes have reversed this process.

More broadly, was the comprehensive modernisation of rural France, which Weber so eloquently describes, necessary?

The same question can be asked about other countries which underwent a similar process of industrialisation and urbanisation in that time period. While we may bemoan the damage to distinctive regional cultures, there is no denying the benefits economically and socially.

In the specific case of France, it is possible that centralisation was necessary to prepare the nation for its greatest ever trial: a war in which 1.3 million French soldiers would lay down their lives, mort pour la France, to stem the German assault and take back Alsace-Lorraine.

There is no going back to the peasant world, but in its elevation of communal and regional identity, there is something in that world which is deserving of much greater consideration.

In France and everywhere else in the West, the capital and the countryside have once again diverged politically and socially, as every electoral map shows.

New secular ideologies are being tried and then discarded as Western nations seek to replace what has been lost, without acknowledging obvious facts about what that lost something is.

Populists who point to a nebulous concept of the nation as being the solution to a social crisis are only slightly more correct.

A better and more durable solution would be to look not upwards to the nation but downwards to the province or county, and ultimately to look sideways to one another.

The cause of much of today’s unease is what Durkheim, another astute observer of French society, called anomie: the breakdown in moral values and the detachment of man from his neighbour. A reform agenda to counteract this needs to have a clear focus on the local as well as the national dimension.

The peasants of France and their counterparts across the world knew and understood the world around them. They knew they had a place within it: it was familiar and homely to them.

In a world of economic and social dislocation, anyone seeking to bind nations together should be mindful of the damage which what we call nationalism originally did in dismantling one set of close social ties in order to establish another which was more distant.

This is the lesson of Eugen Weber’s masterpiece, and it is one which should be heeded.

What do you think of this history of France? Leave your thoughts below.

James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including politics, history, culture, film and literature.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons