Une France locale: The Local Past in Recent French Scholarship

Une histoire á soi: Figurations du passé et localités, ed. Alban Bensa and Daniel Fabre (Paris, 2001)

Le bicentenaire de la Révolution française: Pratiques sociales d'une commémoration, by Patrick Garcia (Paris, 2000)

Ils apprenaient la France: L'exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique, by Anne-Marie Thiesse (Paris, 1997)

L'école républicaine et les petites patries, by Jean-François Chanet (Paris, 1996) "Les petites patries dans la France républicaine," special issue of Jean Jaurès cahiers trimestriels 152 (April–June 1999)

History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914, by Pim den Boer, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton, N.J., 1998)

Les représentations du Moyen âge au XIXe siècle dans les anciens Pays-Bas français et leurs confins picards. Essai d'historiographie comparée, by Odile Parsis-Barubé, 2 vols. (Villeneuve d'Ascq, 1999)

Naissance de la Normandie: Genèse et épanouissement d'une image régionale en France, 1750–1850, by François Guillet (Caen, 2000)

Local France: these words long evoked a story of neglect, coercion, nostalgia, and reaction. The neglect and coercion were those of a state that, since the Bourbons, stifled expressions of local autonomy and individuality. This is, of course, Tocqueville's argument: "independent life" fell victim to a cultural and political centralization that transcended the divide of 1789. "The movement of thought originated in the center alone" and the central state became "the unique and necessary agent of public life." ¹ Under the French Revolution, the republican state began castigating local idioms, a particularism that the united nation could ill tolerate. ² The regimes that followed throughout the nineteenth century differed in many respects, but not this one. All constrained local political action, associations, and "partial cultures." ³ Associations fared better under the Third Republic, but local culture did not. "The Bureau de l'Enseignement public," Maurice Barrès wrote in 1897, "has disgusted [schoolchildren] with their petite patrie," their local natural and historical milieu. ⁴ The local—i.e., identification with an infranational territory—had thus fallen victim to a hostile state as well as expanding markets, growing literacy, conscription, and improved communications. It survived as nostalgia and myth: the small-town industry and social harmony that, for Maurice Genevoix and others, underlay "French civilization." ⁵ And it survived on the Right and Far Right as a gateway toward immemorial traditions, hierarchy, and homogeneous community. Barrès's petite patrie linked the reactionary provincialism of aristocrats, legitimists, and clergymen to Vichy's rural organicism. ⁶ Moribund or retrograde, the local hence contributed little—be it as horizon or sphere of action—to the formation of modern France. The nation alone innovated: it alone, accordingly, carried historical significance.

This narrative underwent a partial modification in the 1960s and 1970s, when anticapitalist and antistatist currents converged on the local as antidote to an all-controlling, uniform, technocratic society. To distant national institutions and the French state's deceiving embrace of decentralization, these currents opposed local "self-administration": initiative and responsibility over singular and resourceful territories. The local and the pays (sometimes conflated with the region) became the physical location of a "new life" and civic action. They also embodied a flexible "place of residence and activity," whose modes of association and social action became appealing in a period of recession and limited geographic mobility. ⁷ Some scholars likewise turned to the local as an analytical category capable of illuminating the diverse social and political configurations of modern France. ⁸ Yet antistatist currents also endorsed the vision of the local as victim of a Jacobin state. And many in France still dismissed the local as folklore or militant delusion. The nation continued to dominate. ⁹

This is less markedly the case. Over the past twenty years, public and private figures have begun extolling the local as the embodiment of civil society, a...