International conference « Common people of the Land »
Three 20th anniversaries
Pôle rural (Pôle Sociétés et Espaces ruraux,
Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, University of Caen Basse-Normandie, France)
AHSR (Association d’Histoire des sociétés rurales)
HSR (journal Histoire et Sociétés Rurales)
International conference
THE « COMMON PEOPLE » OF THE LAND :
PEASANTS, LABORERS AND SERVANTS
FROM THE NEOLITHIC TO 2014.
(Caen, MRSH, 8-10 October 2014)
With the participation of MRSH-Caen (USR CNRS 3486) - Centre de Recherche en Histoire
Quantitative (UMR CNRS 6583) - ESO-Caen (UMR CNRS 6590)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Preliminary program around 8 themes : 1. Geographical and social mobility – 2. Demography and
family structures – 3. Housing, living environments, consumption – 4. Common people and the
economy – 5. Women and girls of the land – 6. Children in the rural world – 7. Public and
grassroots policies – 8. Common people and the power centers.
The scientific committee of the conference will examine all proposals for communications submitted
as a declaration of intent, one page long, and meeting the following criteria :
• A short and explicit title + subtitle (2 lines maximum).
• Goals of the communication (or issues and prospects).
• Sources and methodology (or documentary / experimental basis).
• 5 keywords.
• Number of the theme within which the communication is meant to be included
• Last name, first name, professional position (with titulatures if needed), research unit and
institution of affiliation, e-mail address
• Presentation in a few paragraphs of no more than 3000 to 3500 signs, spaces included, in Times 11
font, in French (or else in the language the applicant will use in the communication).
• Deadline for submitting an application : 15 January 2014.
• To be sent to : blandine.parey@unicaen.fr, jean-marc.moriceau@unicaen.fr and
philippe.madeline@unicaen.fr
The scientific committee will examine in the weeks following the deadline for submission all the
proposals received, and may ask for some adjustments in the process of making its selection. Each
proposal provider will then be informed of the committee's decision at the e-mail address given in
the submission.
Thank you for considering this call
Sincerely
Jean-Marc MORICEAU and Philippe MADELINE
Co-directors, Pôle rural de Caen
International conference « Common people of the Land »
General program for the conference
S
has always been a topic in human evolution. The poverty of the lower sort, or even of
those at the margins of society, is constantly debated. It is frequently mentioned in connection with rural
societies, which long remained the place of residence for most of the members of these vulnerable
groups, and are still hosting a large number of them. But these are usually passing references. The focus has
remained on more favored groups, while the « common people of the land, » a group including, unevenly,
small farmers, agricultural workers and plain farm servants are far from being known with the same degree of
precision, and indeed far from attracting the same level of interest. From the Neolithic to 2014, though, they
were the ones who carried out with their labor the development of our economies.
OCIAL INSECURITY
After twenty years of continuous activity, the Rural center (Pôle rural) of the Maison de la Recherche en
Sciences Humaines, which hosts the international journal Histoire et Sociétés Rurales as well as the Association
for the History of Rural Societies (Association d’Histoire des Sociétés rurales), has chosen to focus on the
humblest over five continents, in order to assess their place and evolution in the past and today. Historians of
every period, geographers of diverse traditions, archeologists, sociologists and ethnologists launch a joint
invitation to all human sciences, and to the various actors of agriculture and regional development to meet for
three days around this theme. Across the various academic boundaries of the historical field, already broken
down by Histoire et Sociétés Rurales, and through the interdisciplinary miscigenation which Pôle rural has
advocated since 1994, it is time now to confront the approaches and the results. In order to do so, the
organizers have selected eight main axes: geographical and social mobility; demography and family structures;
housing, living environments, and consumption; common people and the economy; girls and women on the
land; children in the rural world; public and grassroots policies; small farmers, laborers, rural servants and the
power centers.
- Types of presentation : oral presentations and/or posters. The scientific committee may steer a proposal
toward one or the other form when examining it.
- A clear link of a presentation with the « common people » theme will be a key criterion in the selection
process. Proposal concerning « the rural world » in general will not be considered.
- A presentation may be focusing on the core elements of a theme, or on its margins, at the intersection with
other themes of the conference. They can also fall within two (or more) among the several axes suggested.
The conference covers the very long term, from the Neolithic to current issues. Still, the goal is to
identify, and therefore define, periods for which the themes of a workshop are meaningful. It will be
interesting to explore the extent to which one can go back in time and still capture social differentiation,
considering both the available sources and the process whereby human communities became differentiated
(could the specialists of the Neolithic possibly observe uses of living quarters specific to the elites and to the
« common people » ? At what date can one start to give an empirical answer to this question ?), see theme n°
10. Communications can cover specific a period of any length, or rather try to identify evolution and
continuities over the long term..
All spaces in which the ways of the life of the « common people of the land » can be observed are
included in this conference. The communications can choose as their frames micro-regions as well as vast
areas, nearby places or far-away locales. Comparative analyses are welcomed.
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International conference « Common people of the Land »
Theme n° 1.
Geographical and social mobility
Coordinators : Michaël Bermond (Mcf, Geography, University of Caen)
and Jérôme Luther Viret (Mcf HDR, History, University of Caen)
Studying the « common people » from a social-historical viewpoint necessarily leads one to question the
conditions of their social reproduction, and the intertemporal variability of the mechanisms through which this
reproduction is ensured, following modalities which can be more or less modified for each given generation.
We primarily want to go back to classical topics, linked to the paths of inquiry opened by earlier works on social
mobility. Who were the « common people », from the point of view of their social origins ? What became of
their descendants ? Should we accept the idea of inherited social status ? Can one observe changes in the
social situations ? Under which conditions ? Is it possible to identify specific social-historical or geographic
contexts which would mark turning points in the evolution of the conditions under which the social
reproduction of the « common people » took place ?
This workshop will welcome works aiming at highlighting the diversity of the group made up of the
« common people, » and the circulations which took place between the various sub-groups within this
category. Indeed, it is as important to know more about the versatility, the horizontal mobility, the capacity for
individuals to switch activities in the course of their existence, as it is to draw intergenerational mobility tables
or to measure the degree of professional reproduction within the family. It would be also useful to raise the
issue of the equality of opportunity for each individual when it came to reaching the various rugs of the social
ladder. Approaches using quantitative aggregate studies or based on individual trajectories are equally
welcome. We also wish to hear from researchers analyzing the nature of the interaction between social
mobility and geographical mobility among rural dwellers of modest origins. In the past, the sheer difficulty for
the more modest actors merely to survive was a powerful motive force of professional and geographic
mobility. Today, one should wonder whether this same mobility is rather associated to forms of relative
sedentarity, or even geographically constrained immobility; this is another direction we wish to explore.
The avenues of inquiry suggested here are not exclusive of others; one has only to think of how little work
has been done on the age of migrants, on the influence of widowhood on changes of residence — since we
know that significant numbers of widows left for the cities or for other places, maybe in the hope of finding
help —, while the mobility of married couples is better known. Certainly it would be useful to have more data
on the links between mobility wealth (or the lack thereof), on the influence of family structures on the mobility
of the poorest inhabitants of the countryside, on the spatial dimensions of living areas, on the short- and longterm temporalities of migrations, and on the frequency of the movements taking place. And the same can be
said of moves prompted by the necessities of apprenticeships or of domestic service within the countryside as
well as from the countryside to the cities.
Theme n° 2.
Demography and family structures
Coordinators : Bernard Bodinier (PR emeritus, History, University of Rouen)
and Nicolas Carrier (PR, History, University Lyon III)
Source-related issues
The study of the demography and families of the common people raises specific issues of sources,
especially for older periods. Before parish records appeared, the population could be tallied mostly through
fiscal sources, but the poorest were often exempted from taxes. Moreover, servants were very often counted
as part of the household of those they served, and would not appear in household lists.
Even in more recent counts and censuses, a small landowner earning part of his livelihood as farm laborer
was more likely to appear as landowner, and thus to escape being counted as servant...
Measurements
The first step is to count the « common people » and therefore to assess their share of the population in
the countryside. Taking gender into account is also important, since it seems that menservants were more
numerous than maids.
It will also be necessary to measure as precisely as possible the geographical mobility of the common
people (micromoves, seasonal or permanent migrations, or even roving, urban pull or on the contrary
attachment to the land.
International conference « Common people of the Land »
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Lastly, we should question the geographical homogeneity and social endogamy of the common people, or,
on the contrary, wonder about their exogamy (beyond the topos handmaid/mistress); this in turn would lead to
an exploration of upward social mobility.
Comparisons
A comparative approach is absolutely necessary. To what extent is there a demography and family
structure specific to the common people, and different from those of the better-off groups in the population ?
To what extent are these characteristics specifically linked to their social situation, rather than to other
causes ? To be clear, were the birth or wedding rate of farm maids in the Mediterranean areas a function of
their status as servants, or of their situation as women in the Mediterranean ? Is the demography of farm
laborers a laborers' demography or a farmers' demography ?
In this respect, we should ask
- To what extent were there specificities to the birth and wedding rates of the common people ?
- Would it be possible to observe an unequal relationship to death (through infant mortality, for
instance) ?
- Were there family structures specific to the common people, in terms of number of children,
household types, family solidarities, etc. ?
- Was the common people more or less subject than other social groups to social and religious norms
(out-of-wedlock births, engagements and their role, extent of the use of marriage contracts,
treatment by regional customs, etc.) ?
- In the couple, did the wife wield a specific authority or fulfill specific roles, such as administering and
managing resources, having authority over children... ?
Theme n° 3.
Housing, living environments, consumption
Coordinators : Annie Antoine (Pr, History, University Rennes 2)
and Laurent Feller (Pr, History, University Paris I, senior member IUF)
This conference is focused on a question both perfectly obvious – « the common people of the land »
–and very hard to define as to its boundaries, indeed all the more so when the chronological timespan covered
increases. It is thus necessary to take particular notice of the general framework given, the common people as
opposed to the rural elites. Within this particular workshop, our goal is to contribute to a working definition of
the group under consideration, by focusing our discussions on what is commonly called material culture. This
notion includes housing, lifestyles, clothing, consumption, leisure, and all the elements which help clarify the
opposition between the common people and the other groups making up rural society. Each presentation is
expected to choose a topic which will help to validate or disprove the hypothesis of a specific character of the
« common people. » The workshop would consider issues such as these (what follows must not be taken as a
comprehensive list, obviously) :
1- housing and living conditions :
- the forms of housing,
- housing practices : rentals/ownership, where are the housing quarters with respect to other categories
(segregated spaces ? Or mixed housing ? Were servants housed with their masters, and what about seasonal
workers, or farm hands...).
- uses of housing quarters (rest, leisure, work), and inner layout
- comfort-related elements (chimneys, hearths, spatial layout)
2- consumption : food and other forms of material consumption, food preserves, culinary techniques...
3- tools and techniques
Were there tools, or even practices (a « technical culture ») specific to the « common people » ? This question
raises issues of specialization, versatility (day laborer), pluriactivity chosen or imposed...
handtools (spades, hoes, sickles, bill hooks, adzes, hatchets), whether for digging or pounding, should be a
particular focus here, in contrast with larger tools such as swing plows, heavy plows, or carts)
4- clothing and physical appearance. What were ordinary clothes, working clothes, festive clothes, for those
held to be common people ? How was social differentiation manifested in clothing appearances ?
5- leisure objects (specific entertainment for the « commoners » ?) and by the same token the separation in
time and space between leisure and work. Obviously, this point is tangentially related to theme n° 6 (culture
and mentalities).
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International conference « Common people of the Land »
This issue of the material culture of the common people can be approached from various
methodological fields : history, archeology, art history, geography, ethnology. Presentations may choose to
combine two or more of these fields, but may also apply a strictly specialized and field-specific methodology.
Theme n° 4.
Common people and the economy :
Surviving, getting by, or flourishing
Coordinators : Gérard Béaur (Directeur de recherche, CNRS; Directeur d’études, EHESS)
Maxime Marie (MCF, Geography, University of Caen)
and Pierre Ouzoulias (Chargé de recherches, CNRS)
In the collective imagination, the French peasant was either a very small farmer clinging to his little strips of
land and mired in self-sufficiency, if not autarchy, or a poor devil forced to hire himself out to try and survive
and feed his family, using every and all means available and combining all kinds of work, both agricultural and
proto-industrial. Thus, the inhabitants of the countryside, defined down to the most modest group among
them, are easily linked with poverty, routine, and inefficiency. Excluded from the markets, and vulnerable to
even the smallest crisis or bout of sickness, they seem to have had no other role than to die away.
The partial truth these clichés contain make them all the more pregnant. It would be wrong to believe that old
times were so different. Indeed, we should wonder when exactly the category of small landholder became a
meaningful one. When did small peasants appear who were aiming mostly at producing with their family what
they would consume ? In former societies, what was the place and the role in the agricultural economy of
these elemental agricultural units ? How did they survive the emergence of large landholdings ? What
relationships did they develop with the latter, which were pursuing very different economic goals ?
In spite of repeated announcements of their demise, in spite of the decisive economic superiority and
expansionism which was supposed to characterize large landholdings, small peasants did not die out. How did
these common people and their families achieve survival, not without hardships probably, by living off
agriculture and the related activities they were entrusted with ? Were did they find the resources and energy
they needed for their survival ? How did they compensate for handicaps which seemed to consign them to
unavoidable extinction, and what is their situation today ? To which realities does this category of the
« common people » correspond, in modern rural areas, with lower-class categories strongly overrepresented,
and with the inclusion sometimes of the most marginal fringes of the population, particularly since a new trend
toward wage labor has developed, particularly in the most labor-intensive agricultural branches such as truck
farming, cattle-raising, wine-raising, and fruit-growing ? What is the fate of small agricultural operators who
chose to remain on their small landholdings, or reoriented their efforts towards pluriactivity ?
This workshop will try to answer these questions, through an examination of the economic and social
dimensions of the living conditions of the common people, and an assessment of the complex relationships
they maintained, or still maintain, with the various economic roles which were assigned to them, or still are.
1) Producers. Which kinds of crop did they choose to develop when they were operators ? Were they
more or less productive, more or less innovative, and to what extent were they able to take into
account innovations introduced by other farmers, or suggested by agronomists ? Which job positions
were they given on the farms when they had to depend on wage-based income, or else which range of
other proto-industrial activities could they put into play ?
2) Consumers. How did they arbitrage between the various expenses they had to face ? To what extent
did their standard of living evolve over time ? To what extent did they adopt other modes of
consumption, and mimic those of other social groups ? Did they accept to join some industrious
revolution in order to improve their level of consumption ?
3) « Traders ». What relationship did they have with the merchant sphere, with product and labor
markets ? How important was their role in the supplying of cities and the rural bourgeoisie with
agricultural and industrial goods ? To what extent did they use the market to acquire the goods they
consumed ?
4) Debtors. Which relationships did they maintain with their creditors ? Were they drowning in debt,
were they themselves creditors sometimes ? To what extent did borrowing and debts contribute to
their being better off, or conversely impoverished ? was credit a way out of poverty, or the road to
expropriation ?
5) Taxpayers. How much of a burden were the various kinds of levies (taxes, land rents paid to
landowners, tithes, or seignorial rights) ? To what extent did they threaten their means of livelihood ?
Can we identify different phases within the pressure exerted by the flow of levies ?
Presentations will examine these issues by playing both on scales of observation and on temporalities, by
selecting specific historical moments, from the Neolithic to the present day, and by choosing the
approaches which will seem most appropriate.
International conference « Common people of the Land »
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Theme n° 5.
Women and girls of the land
Coordinators : Clotilde Lemarchant (MCf, Sociology, University of Caen)
and Christophe Maneuvrier (MCf, History, University of Caen)
As far back as 10 years ago, during a session of the Pôle rural, Éliane Gubin pointed out that women from
the countryside were still far too neglected by women's history, which focused mainly on the history of
women's emancipation (often through the prism of working-class history) and of male domination, particularly
through the study of the violence to which women were subjected. Sifting through the summaries and reviews
published in Histoire et Sociétés Rurales since 2003, one has to conclude that the historiographical landscape
has not significantly evolved, and that women's history is far from occupying its full space within rural history.
In the present state of the research on gender and professions, it has become clear that intersectionality is
highly fruitful in heuristic terms : suggesting that we should think about women when analyzing lower-class
populations on the land is a good way to update the necessary connection which must take place between
gender and social class.
First, one should consider the visibility of this half of the agricultural population : social visibility, and also
visibility in the sources precisely because of its social invisibility. It is quite difficult enough to focus on women
in agriculture, but studying them among « common people » becomes a real challenge, since this invisibility is
doubled, and generates a host of problems when one tries to access the reliable and abundant information
which is precisely our goal. The problem becomes even thornier for more remote periods, in which whatever
writings were kept were almost exclusively male, even when the « voice » of women can sometimes be heard,
particularly in judicial and hagiographical sources.
A second question is raised by the linkage between work and family, between production and
reproduction, between economic issues and relationship issues (kinship). Agriculture has long been a
« profession for couples. » The role of women and agriculture, and what it entails, is a classic, and old, topic of
study (M. Segalen, 1980 ; V. Soriano, 1980 ; A. Barthez, 1982 ; R. Lagrave, 1987), which still deserves
reevaluating and updating (S. Dahache, 2010) : in the modern era, what has become of the « women of the
land, » and of their status ? Can specificities be eventually identified for the various regions of France, some of
them remaining strongholds of agricultural activity ? What is the place of women in agriculture today ?
Lastly, a third direction of inquiry would focus on issues of power, on the place of women in politics, on
their ability to enforce, or prevent the enforcement, of seignorial or community decisions, on their
participation in movements of revolt. This discussion would also have to deal with women's sociability, with
the relationships they maintain with institutions (notably churches), with their religious practices, and their
voting behaviors.
BARTHEZ Alice, Famille, travail et agriculture, Paris : Economica, 1982.
DAHACHE Sabrina, « La singularité des femmes chefs d’exploitation, » in HERVIEU Bertrand et al., Les mondes agricoles en
politique, Paris : Presses de Sciences Politiques, p. 93-110, 2010.
GUBIN Éliane, Choisir l'histoire des femmes, Ed. de l'université de Bruxelles, 2007.
GUBIN Eliane, « Un rempart contre le désordre: les paysannes belges au tournant du XXe siècle, » in Les Femmes dans les
sociétés rurales, J.-M. Moriceau and P. Madeline dir., Enquêtes rurales 10, Cahiers de la MRSH, Caen, 2004.
LAGRAVE Rose-Marie, Celles de la terre. Agricultrice, l’invention politique d’un métier, Ed. de l’EHESS, 1987.
MORICEAU Jean-Marc, MADELINE Philippe (dir.), Les Femmes dans les sociétés rurales, Enquêtes Rurales 10, 2004.
SEGALEN Martine, Mari et femme dans la société paysanne, Paris : Flammarion, 1980.
SORIANO Véronique, WAGNER Christine, La femme et l’espace rural, Paris : Editions Plan Construction, 1980.
Theme n° 6.
Children of the land
Coordinators : Christophe Maneuvrier (Mcf, History, University of Caen)
and Jean-Marc Moriceau (Pr, History, University of Caen ; Senior member, IUF)
While the role of women in agriculture is still far from well understood, particularly among the common
people, the same holds true all the more for children and teenagers. In the life cycle however, before
agricultural settlement took place — generally along with marriage —, the work of the young has long been
crucial to the functioning of rural societies. This fact is all the more obvious since, up to the development of
Malthusian practices — in the 19th century, or even in the 20th century depending on which country one has in
mind —, over half of the population was under 20 years old, and the 7 to 20 years old made up a significant
share of the workforce until the introduction of compulsory education and the massive recourse to foreign
laborers. In the farms, the process of learning a craft adequate to one's age and gender provided for a series of
jobs as family help or farm hand which guaranteed the availability of a free, or very cheap, complementary
workforce. Thus child labor was not found only in the industrial sector.
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International conference « Common people of the Land »
Economic issues are thus central to this workshop. But we should also question the cultural identity of the
children of the land. And along with any discussion on this issue, one dominant theme appears for the
researcher : the surprising visibility of documents on young actors, which remain nonetheless unused. In this
respect, there are multiple paths of inquiry on which one can make progress.
What was the range of tasks given to children, and what amount of revenue did they bring to the farm ?
What was the distribution by age, or by gender ? Is it possible to specify, within this distribution, the
employment distribution for children ? Beyond major, permanent characteristics, were there variations
according to the economic outlook ? Did crises such as the ones in 1348-1349 and 1693-1694 bring about the
abandonment of children, or their being exposed to increased risks ? Conversely, once the practice of
employing children started to fade away or disappear, new angles of analysis become available to historians,
who can explore new choices. What were the consequences of the setting up of a public and compulsory
system of education, such as the one created in France in 1884 ? Thereafter, what were the observable
particularities in the educational trajectory of the children of farmers and day laborers, compared to other
social categories ? This workshop aims at offering preliminary answers.
1. The representation of children
Iconography (paintings, miniatures, stained glass, etc.) as well as medieval, Early modern and modern literature
are replete with illustrations of children. Some more delimited topics of inquiry could be explored, such as the
figure of the shepherd. Indeed children are also found in agricultural textbooks and rural economy handbooks
(from the 16th to the 20th century), as well as on archeological sites (children's tombs, segregated spaces
within housing areas, in the parish graveyard, in the church, etc.).
2. The roles ascribed to children
Agricultural childhood is evoked in the agricultural surveys of the 19th and 20th centuries and the descriptions
of farms, particularly for the early associational agricultural fairs (comices), and the prizes for good character
granted to old servants, the whole career of which was then recapped. For more remote periods, indications
can be found in judical or notarial sources (trusteeships for minor orphans, apprenticeship agreements, and
also pardon letters).
3. Grown-up children testifying
The upward social mobility of some children of the land was a source of autobiographies as early as the Middle
Ages, as with Froissart in L’Epinette amoureuse. Some children did bear witness — but at the other end of their
life cycle, as with Valentin Jamerey-Duval for the reign of Louis XIV, or captain Coignet for the Revolutionary
era. In the 20th century, a large part of the countryside literature devoted some space to their experience.
Later testimonies of grown-up children, or, more on the spot, the reports and inquiries stemming from
tragedies having occurred (deaths of children) throw some light on their activities in the fields or in the
pastures, and in this respect one can also use oral surveys conducted by sociologists or ethnologists.
4. the day-to-day place of children, as revealed by extraordinary incidents
Circumstances out of the ordinary, such as peasant revolts, or attacks of wolves on cattle, from the 15th to the
20th century, provide us with documentary approaches which can be used to reveal ordinary situations.
Children can then take center stage, bringing in full view their sociability and the diversity of tasks they
performed.
5. Education, socialization, transmission
Which relationships and activities did the children experience with their parents, their siblings and their
extended family ? Education and learning rarely took place strictly within the nuclear family : uncles and aunts,
remote parents, neighbors, and wet nurses could play a crucial role. At the end of the 1870s and in the 1880s,
the poor lists drawn up by schoolmasters gave the motives for children's absenteeism. Were these children of
the land schooled only after the school laws of the Third Republic were passed ? What of religious education,
what of games, transmission of habitus, family and local culture ? And gender issues play a role in these
processes transforming children into adults...
In these attempts at reconstitution, presentations will take care to point out economic or political turning
points. By examining the place of children in agricultural history, we hope to provide for fruitful rereadings of
documentary sources.
Theme n° 7.
Public and grassroots policies
Coordinators : Alain-Gilles Chaussat Ph. D. student, History, University of Caen)
Edgar Leblanc (Inspecteur général honoraire Agriculture)
and Nadine Vivier (Pr emeritus, History, University of Maine)
Public policies here means both a set of general principles, of strategies and of directions elaborated by the
State and local institutions to buttress specific measures aiming at changing global situations — for instance
education, health, land availability, the social safety net... —, as well as more or less isolated interventions from
a political power close-by, or further removed, aiming at alleviating the negative impact of the populations of
International conference « Common people of the Land »
8
tragic events such as wars, natural disasters, epidemics, epizootics, economic crises... Other measure can have
as their goal the consolidation of the situation of specific subgroups of the population, as in the case of the
support granted to small landholders by the Third Republic, the distributions of bread to the poor organized by
monasteries in the Middle Ages, or the poor houses (dépôts de mendicité) set up under Louis XIV. Yet other
can introduce repressive dimensions, as with the Napoleonic Code with respect to vagrants. In every case, the
political power intervened in the economy and in social life. While we have well-documented examples of
public policies designed to help the poorest in the cities, for Antiquity as well as for the Middle Ages and the
early Modern and modern eras, what of the countryside ?
The decisions taken by these political, or religious, centers of power, directly influenced the situation, the
economic or social position of the common people of the land. They could be global in scope, as in the case of
European policies of sustainable development, or include a specific focus, for instance on fighting poverty, as
with contemporary rural agroindustrial policies in South America, or else grant new rights, as with the various
and recurring attempts at land reform in every period. Policies could concern exclusively the poor in rural
areas, as in the case of the macro-social policies of reduction of poverty in rural areas enforced today in Mexico
or Brazil.
Proposals thus have a vast field of inquiry to explore. The widest possible variety will be encouraged, both
in time and space ; are included the remotest periods just as much as our contemporary world, and neither
France nor Europe will be given privileged place. Thus, we hope to offer analyses of the birth and development
of public — as well as grassroots — policies, of their development and results, using specific examples.
proposals can concentrate on the negative or positive impact of given policies on the situation of the common
people in rural areas, through the study of a particular decision ; or such policies can equally well be replaced in
a more global set of policies.
Theme n° 8.
Common people and the power centers.
Coordinators : Philippe Madeline (Pr, Geography, University of Caen ; co-director, Pôle rural)
and Antoine Follain (Pr, History, University of Strasbourg)
The relationships developed between the common people and the various centers of power were highly
diverse. The primary ones appeared within communities and villages ; others reached up to the highest levels
of society and the State. They were common to the whole of rural society, or maybe specific to the lower sort.
They can be approached in a variety of ways, from the role of the peasantry in the rise of citizens to power, to
the relationships between wage-earners and their employers, through the mobilization of the common people
in political, trade-union or civic movements. It is also possible to focus on extraordinary times, from wellknown revolts such as the one of the Nu-Pieds in Normandy in the 17th century, to the social gains of 1968,
including the Varenne agreement, largely forgotten, but granting to agricultural wage-earners the same rights
as those granted in other economic sectors. Thus the relationship of the peasant world to the various forms of
power is a recurring element in agricultural history. But the two examples we just gave should prompt us to
differentiate starkly between small landholders and wage-earners in agriculture.
For the former, both the community as a whole, really made up of peasants masters of their own houses, as
well as various forms of service users unions, cheese maturing cooperatives (fruitières), winegrower's
brotherhoods, mutual insurance associations for cattle, and so on, manifested the activity of a rural society and
a professional group which managed to organize and confront economic and political powers, and prevent the
destruction of the smallest members through social isolation. This effort was prolonged at the end of the 19th
century through the creation of the Ministry of Agriculture, which affirmed the specificity of the role of the
peasantry in French political life (see Hervieu and Purseigle, Sociologie des mondes agricoles, 2013).
As for the rural proletariat, this « crucial and hidden social group, » the effort to rescue them from oblivion,
a good illustration of which was given by the Royaumont conference « Les salariés agricoles aux XIXe-XXe
siècles » in 1992 (see Hubscher and Farcy, La Moisson des autres…, 1996), must be pursued vigorously,
particularly by looking for relevant sources. Still proposals will avoid any simplistic opposition between the two
groups
Possible avenues of inquiry include :
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What was the role of the lower sort in the various kinds of power (political, trade-union, professional,
grassroots) at various scales in time and space ?
What were the behaviors specific to small peasants at key moments in History, and in their own
history ?
How did wage-earners face employer power in various historical and geographical contexts.
Rebellions of the lower sort, including any kind of demonstration against established powers.
The role of trade unions, and of social policy gains.
International conference « Common people of the Land »
9
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When and how did the lower sort gain power, and could they do so outside of an upward social
mobility which would remove them from the category we have built to study them?
Key moments, strikes, emotions, revolts : winegrowers in Middle-Age Burgundy, « bacchanals » in the
Ile-de-france and Picardy countryside in the 18th century, strikes of 1919 and 1936...
The use of sources : administrative and judicial records, life narrations, the press, datebooks... The
possibility of finding specific sources, such as maybe leaflets. The material traces left by the lower sort
facing power, whether written, visual, or architectural...