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  • People and Politics in France, 1848-1870
  • Charles Tilly
People and Politics in France, 1848-1870. By Roger Price (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004) 474 pp. $95.00

In recent work, historians have adopted five different views of social class: as hierarchical position (a rank or stratum defined by recognized and effective differences in prestige, wealth, and/or power), market connection (a population segment defined by distinctive relation to land, labor, and commodity markets), consciousness and culture (a set of people who regard each other as social equals and/or share a distinctive body of understandings, representations, and practices), location in production (occupants of a large but distinctive position within a system of material production), or illusion (at best a mistaken description of inequalities better characterized in other ways). Distancing himself from both Marxist and discursive versions of reductionism, Price organizes his rich synthesis of French social and political history from 1848 to 1870 around the third view, vigorously [End Page 257] presenting classes as major historical actors, but treating them as shared political cultures that displayed plenty of local variation.

Price distinguishes dominant classes, middle classes, the peasantry, and the working class. Much of the book consists of separate social histories for the four categories, each history moving from material conditions to culture to political behavior and each illustrated widely from local and regional histories. Price's emphasis on class as political culture means that he can say a great deal about the chatty classes—the elites and the middle class—but must rely mainly on leaders, political authorities, and external observers for most of his information on workers and, especially, peasants.

Drawing self-consciously on recent work in political science, Price considers authoritarianism and democracy to be outcomes of changing alignments among major classes, with regional political differences resulting from contrasting connections between elites and other social classes. Despite surviving pockets of republicanism, in this analysis, the 1848 revolution predisposed elites and significant segments of the middle classes, as well as the peasantry, toward the authoritarian rule imposed by president, then emperor Louis Napoleon. Gradually, however, frightened elites regained courage, demanded more political autonomy, and in the process opened the political arena to the better-behaved segments of the working class.

During the 1860s, according to Price, a semidemocratic pact emerged. The pact capitalized on the broad suffrage established by the 1848 revolution and united participants in their opposition to the democratic extremists who would reappear in the multiple Communes of 1871. As he makes this argument, Price draws on a wide variety of printed and archival material, including the familiar correspondence of the central government's regional officials with their Parisian superiors and the less familiar papers of the British political economist Nassau William Senior deposited at the University of Wales, Bangor. Senior's papers allow Price, for example, to report frank conversations between the British intellectual with French aristocrats who voiced reservations about their emperor and his policies. The result is a densely documented, lively, perceptive survey of a transformative moment in French history.

Charles Tilly
Columbia University
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