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...

In the forty years after the Revolution of 1789, the peasants and former seigneurs of the isolated region of the Corbieres, Languedoc, fought a protracted battle over the consequences of revolutionary change. This social conflict culminated in the murder of two nobles by a band of villagers in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1830. This book offers important new perspectives on the French Revolution and its consequences.
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This volume provides an authoritative synthesis of recent work on the social history of France and is now thoroughly revised and updated to cover the 'long nineteenth century' from 1789-1914. Peter McPhee offers both a readable narrative and a distinctive, coherent argument about this century. McPhee explores themes such as peasant interaction with the environment, the changing experience of work and leisure, the nature of crime and protest, changing demographic patterns and family structure, the religious practices of workers and peasants, and the ideology and internal repercussions of...