Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939 (review)

This book should have been written long ago. Rural militants and supporters played a major role in the electoral success of the French Communist Party (PCF) between the world wars. In fact, as Boswell notes in his introduction, the pcf remained as the largest communist party in the West after Adolf Hitler banned its German counterpart in 1933. If rural backers were instrumental in sustaining such an important communist movement during the turbulent (and relatively well-studied) interwar years, one would think that a significant literature on the phenomenon would have emerged long ago. Yet, Boswell's study falls on mostly parched ground. Previous explanations rely on difficult-to-examine leftist political traditions that date to the turmoil of 1848. These studies purport to explain voting habits by a sort of Newtonian law whereby successive generations of rural voters consistently rewarded parties that emerged further to the left-toujours plus à gauche. This theory has rural voters falling into the laps of the pcf as if by gravity. But Boswell will have none of it. His approach takes rural communism on its own terms, in its own context, and by its own voices. Boswell hypothesizes that from "the point of the view of the peasantry, rural communism was a coherent response to unfulfilled desires for political and social reform, the fears born of the Great War, the crisis of a quickly declining rural sector in search of salvation and identity" (7). He make his case using a diverse mix of evidence and methodological approaches.

The book has a little something for everyone. It is a regional study, in the sense that it focuses on the three departments of the Limousin (Corrèze, Creuse, and Haute Vienne) and the neighboring department of Dordogne. Based on data gathered from these interwar strongholds of rural communism, Boswell carefully, but convincingly, generalizes to a broader political landscape.

Archival and published sources from national, departmental, and local archives abound, but two particularly helpful methodologies dominate the body of the text. The first is electoral geography. Boswell marshals an impressive battery of inferential statistics to explain leftist strength in the countryside. Correlational analyses distinguish the communist vote from other political parties-spatially, historically, structurally-and show that the pcf enjoyed an unusually stable implantation at the village and communal levels. Boswell bolsters these findings with an ecological regression analysis in which he persuasively culls individual-level voting behavior from broader electoral outcomes.

Having demonstrated a strikingly stable communist support and sketched its social composition, Boswell turns to more common multiple regression analysis in order to examine the interaction of political behavior, demography, population density, religion, and farm structure. The results permit Boswell to question several long-held theories. For example, he concludes that pcf support did not originate from what had been assumed to be its natural adherents-the most proletarianized and poorest of rural inhabitants (landless agricultural workers and sharecrop-pers). Rather, he finds the Party's faithful supporters in "a balanced mix of small-holding peasants, tenant farmers, agricultural workers, temporary migrants, artisans, and shopkeepers" (89).

Boswell's quantitative analysis is matched by evidence garnered from oral interviews with thirty-four surviving pcf militants. Though Boswell quickly concedes a lack of statistical representation among his subjects, these interviews provide an indispensable texture to the study. Using them, Boswell skillfully interprets his subjects' worldviews and how they contributed to their support for the Party.

Boswell's study is an elegant history that greatly complicates our view of communism in France and elsewhere. More might have been said about the Popular Front and the peasantry's perceptions of its efforts to stabilize grain prices and enact social welfare in the countryside. But these are minor quibbles. Most important is the contribution that Rural Communism in France makes to a growing literature that interrogates our presumptions about what is "urban" and what is "rural." On this count, Boswell's work is a treasure.