Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 117

In the years from 1793 to 1800, travellers returning to the French countryside were met with a deafening silence: the everyday tolling of village bells, which had marked times of day, moments of prayer, weddings, births, deaths, and much else, was not to be heard. A revolutionary measure to efface the clerical underpinnings of the Old Regime, the silencing of church bells made way for a new routine sound, the martial beat of the drum that signalled the call to assemble or sounded the alarm.

This is but one of the memorable discoveries that await readers of this fine, engaging book. Path-breaking and painstaking, it is a comparative study of six villages chosen to ensure wide geographical distribution and contrasting ecological situations. The book’s approach and arguments bespeak a clear allegiance to Tocqueville over Marx and Georges Lefebvre, so accordingly the main theme is the political evolution that arose from the interaction of state policy and local practice. Like Tocqueville, Jones concludes that equality before the law was more enduring than liberty (political participation) at the village level, an irony for a book so entitled. Nonetheless, he shows persuasively that state centralization of the kind Tocqueville attributed to the Old Regime was in fact a product of the Directory and Empire.

Tocqueville’s failings in rural history are not overlooked either but persuasively corrected. His argument that state centralization sapped the life out of rural communities during the Old Regime is put to rest, thanks to compelling comparative evidence for the six diverse villages. Four of the six had a tradition of regular assemblies, and village officials were not the unlettered creatures of Tocqueville’s imagination but a literate elite whose control of economic resources and positions within the seigneurial enterprise assured a steady – if oligarchic – hand at the wheel. The power of seigneurs and their agents, underestimated by Tocqueville and numerous revisionist historians today, exerted a shaping and often unwelcome influence over daily life. That peasant resistance in the cases under study was typically short-lived and episodic suggests, ventures Jones, that a shared sense of reciprocity continued to guide the relations between lords and peasants.

Between 1787 and 1790, the argument continues, the Old Regime died in the minds of villagers as one reform after another flowed down from Versailles and Paris, providing the welcome writs for peasants to break free of seigneurialism. Differing greatly from George Lefebvre’s description of the peasant revolution as largely an autonomous movement, Jones’ account emphasizes the connections between Parisian authorities and village officials – an approach reflecting the author’s reliance on the minute books of the new communal governments. Village elites, these sources reveal, kept in close contact with the National Assembly, looking there to confirm their new rights and usually succeeding in manoeuvring revolutionary mandates for change to their own advantage. Courting approval from above and endorsement from below, dynasties of power brokers usually remained in charge over the whole period – a conclusion that stands shoulder to shoulder with Jean- Pierre Jessenne’s account of rural Artois (Pouvoir au village et révolution: Artois, 1760–1848 (Lille, 1987)).

Novel and interesting is the fresh evidence in Chapters Three and Four on peasant politicization and the new civic landscape of village life. From 1787, villagers were schooled in national politics, and few could ignore how the influence of the state in their lives expanded and how the meaning of liberty was further and further narrowed under the Directory, Consulate, and Empire. Although we learn little about the resentments such narrowing caused or about grievances that arose from huge war-time requisitions of men, food, and horses, Jones gives imaginative attention to the lessons villagers received in civics and national identity. That effort sheds new light on evolving notions of citizenship that were reinforced by oath taking and service in the National Guard, just as it indicates how the practice of regular elections from 1789 to 1804 built a firm foundation of democratic political culture at the village level. In his treatment of rituals and their changing political functions, the revolutionary experience comes alive. As to what endured, Jones emphasizes that a new belief took hold in the minds of villagers: in sharp contrast to the old order, the new bureaucracy was the guarantor of legal equality; moreover, it both enforced and obeyed the law. Chapter Six studies another enduring change and an underlying continuity: the state’s subordination of the church and the persistence of religious belief despite the suppression of public worship from 1793 to 1800.

Did three generations of reform establish liberty on the land? Here, some will regret, Jones steers clear of debates about rural capitalism. Vigilant against anachronism and the encroachments of theory, he treats agrarian reform efforts as they materialized in his six villages from the land clearance edicts of 1764 to the 1804 law that regularized the procedures for dividing common lands. The ways in which top-down reforms aggravated local misunderstandings are treated with skill. His discerning analysis of national land sales during the Revolution and Empire confirms the prevailing view that the rural and urban bourgeois were the chief 118 the agricultural beneficiaries of the sales. Moreover, it enriches our understanding both of the Jacobin efforts to turn the landless into micro-proprietors and how these efforts, together with the division of common lands, met to some degree the peasant hunger for land. In treating the continuing conflicts that pitted enclosure against collective rights, he wisely reminds us that self-interest has a logic all its own. At bottom, rich and poor alike wanted to have their cake and eat it too: exclusive access to land they possessed and customary rights over the lands of others.

Such vintage insights that appear time and again in the book occasionally need elaboration or clarification. In the chapter just discussed, for example, readers convinced by the claim in the pre-Revolutionary discussion that ‘no consensual language of “rights” and “freedoms” existed in the agrarian world in the Old Regime’ are left to wonder whether the situation was much different when Louis XVIII returned to the throne, for conflicts over individual and collective rights continued, and Napoleon’s hope of creating a uniform code of agrarian law never materialized. Another question concerns seigneurialism. Given its demise and the consequent elimination of shared rights on land previously held by seigneurial tenure, more about the implications of this critical change for new and evolving definitions of private property would have been helpful. Finally, that land became ‘an unmistakable signifier of citizenship’ with particular import for the previously landless is another insight mentioned only in passing. It cries out for additional development, the better to grasp the fuller meaning of revolutionary change at the village level.

Such a missed opportunity results partly from the decision to end the story in 1820. From the Consulate through the Restoration, the slim evidence on village politics falls all but silent until 1830 when elections of communal officials were restored and the voices of micro-proprietors could again be heard, sometimes loudly. It was then, when political possibilities were reopened by the July Revolution in Paris, that the suppressed language of liberté and citizenship was often recalled with vigour and memories of the Revolution were invoked in popular efforts to restore participatory citizenship and the accountability of their heretofore appointed mayors. Long curtailed, liberty returned to the village in the 1830s and to varying degrees depending on the locality.

One other missed opportunity is worth mentioning: the absence of any discussion of seigneurial justice and its successor as court of first instance, the Justice of the Peace. As recent research by Zoe Schneider, Jeremy Hayhoe, Anthony Crubaugh, and the reviewer has shown, the functioning of seigneurial justice reveals history review much about village governance and power relations not only between the lord and peasants but also between village elites and ordinary residents. In open-field communities at least, the courts regulated agrarian practices and settled to general satisfaction disputes involving crop damage by trespassing livestock. More broadly, seigneurial justice shaped villagers’ perceptions of law and legal rectification. How villagers assessed and responded to new civic arrangements and new rules oflaw depended in no small way on those Old Regime perceptions.

One quibble: in a book brimming with meticulous archival research, it is regrettable that the author chose to keep footnotes to a minimum.

This book confirms Jones’ place among the premier historians of rural France during the Old Regime and Revolution. A fine achievement, the study builds on the strong foundation of his earlier work and includes important new departures. That seigneurialism in a diverse selection of villages was more significant than anticipated is one good example, a finding that will be influential. That villagers, and especially the elites among them, came to understand the relevance of national politics for their own lives and interests is a revision of greater importance. It persuasively restores the origins of peasant politicization to the Revolution, undermining further the claim by Eugen Weber – and by Jones in his first book – that this process began only when the schools and teachers of the Third Republic were well-established. For these and other reasons, this avowed experiment in comparative micro-history is a noteworthy success. Elegantly written and wisely argued, the study will hopefully convince others to add comparative perspective to their research into rural history. Those who do might consider whether a Tocquevillian approach gives undue attention to top-down commands and local responses; they might also consider seigneurial justice and weigh the advantages of pushing beyond 1820 and into the 1830s. Although much talent, time, and energy will be needed to match the author’s accomplishment, his book calls out inspiringly, ‘Aux archives!’