The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside 1846-1852

ISBN-13: 9780198202257 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 318 str.

Peter McPhee

Opis

The first full scholarly study of rural politics in France during the Second Republic (1848-1852), this book examines the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent regime that changed the face of mass politics in France. Unprecedented numbers of French men and women participated in legal and illegal forms of political activity during a period of protracted crisis which was ultimately resolved by a military coup d'etat. McPhee explores this neglected period of rural France and draws on hundreds of regional studies to examine the large-scale political mobilizations of right and left in the countryside, and offers a new synthesis and interpretation of these years. A lucid and scholarly analysis of a turbulent period in modern French history and its long-term social and political consequences, this book shows that rural politics were both more complex and more threatening to urban elites than has been generally recognized.

Recenzje

'Peter McPhee's new book is both an admirable synthesis of recent work on the French Second Republic and an effort of his own to explain why peasants made the political choices they did... McPhee's command of the literature is impressive as is his ability to shape it into a framework of narrative and analysis that does justice to the complexity of the issues at hand. McPhee makes a provocative case for the relative autonomy of rural politics and for the need to view that politics on its own terms. Edward Berenson, Journal of Historical Geography, No. 20, Vol. 1, 1994