Potential answers in complexity. Without overstating the patchwork quality of individual and community experience, mapping out some of the ways in which rural life offered multiple avenues for intensifying household earning potential. The wide regional dispersal of classic proto-industries in textiles; the combination with extractive industry and town-based production to create self-reinforcing networks, as in the Cevennes. Seasonal migration and other rural-urban linkages, including the ‘export’ of (largely female) domestic servants. Crop diversification and specialisation – maize, potatoes, vines, market-gardening.

All this nonetheless in a context of rising tension, with evidence of a ‘feudal reaction’ of intensified exploitation of seigneurial rights and claims, and of a willingness to contest such claims. Here we need to chart the ‘mainstream’ outlines of the feudal relationship, its exploitative evolution, and at the same time its interweaving with rural social structures themselves. The place of feudal office-holding, as judges, stewards, bailiffs, agents, etc, in the construction of a ‘rural bourgeoisie’, and the interweaving of such positions with the structures of local government themselves, in both their dimensions as artefacts of communal organisation and conduits for impositions from the state.

Interrogating the burdens on the rural population through the lens of the cahiers. The clear perception of injustice as a fundamental element in the Old Regime order, and the acting-out (in at least some regions) of a forcible restitution from early in 1789. As through into the era of the Great Fear, the presence of the peasantry as an active force in the revolutionary landscape, yet always one awkwardly at odds with bourgeois understandings of the issues at stake.

The continued complexity of rural response to what the Revolution had to offer. Understanding the establishment of municipalities within traditions of communal autonomy, and relating these to issues confronting the peasantry – to redeem feudal dues or reject the compromises offered by the elites; to continue to resist taxation (and to reject the end of regional privilege), or to take the ‘patriot’ stance. The interpenetration of rural and urban politics in different setting – hardline antagonisms in the West, unavoidable entanglements in the Midi.

The Terror, with its accent on brutal searching-out of food for cities and armies, and consequent demonisation of the peasantry. Rural responses, and continuities of alienation into the thermidorian period – how far had the shift from ‘anti-revolutionary’ resistance to ‘counter-revolutionary’ revolt gone for most regions, were there still ‘patriotic’ peasants?

Two decades of warfare and their socio-economic impacts: loss of men to the armies (and the insoumis tradition in some regions); loss of markets for proto-industry; does the burden of tax fall on the rural population, are they better off than before 1789? Emerging from the Napoleonic shadow, is the French countryside stagnant, or vital? How do the liberties gained in terms of communal autonomy (albeit now with appointed municipalities) square against the demands of modernisation: has the revolutionary settlement created a new zone of conflict between rural/agricultural and urban/industrial needs and wants?

Reiteration of the patchwork pattern of local circumstances, customs and social and cultural realities; population growth, albeit slowing; migration both seasonal and long-term; proto-industries (and in some regions more than proto-) and tensions with the quest for household landholding – partible inheritance, family limitation. Persistence of the overriding reality of poverty and subjection – to taxation, to landowners, to aggressive Church missions and intrusive curés, to employment at bare subsistence levels, and to the ravages of disease.

Breaches in this structure – greater intrusion of primary education, beginnings of a loss of patois culture. The crisis years around 1830, and resultant repolarisation of local politics, emergence of legitimism and republicanism/radical Bonapartism as influences/heritages. Continued population growth competing with patterns of agricultural ‘modernisation’ (rendering some labour redundant) and threat of environmental degradation – signs of the countryside approaching a critical transition away from muscle-powered and naturally-fertilised agriculture towards, of necessity (but with disruptive consequences), a more commercial, mechanical and artificial rural production. The peaking of the rural population-wave and the coming of the subsistence-crisis of 1846-8.

Nobility as high society, le monde – Lilti’s perspectives on what mattered to the elite audience, as opposed, e.g. to Goodman’s gendered narrative of salons [but defer some of this discussion to ‘culture’ chapter.] This as a transition to, firstly, the decline of a ‘court’ under Louis XVI, and the continuing sense of the necessary defence of privilege in, e.g., the 1787 Assembly of Notables. The complexity of noble positions shown by the rapid progression towards a caste-like attitude on display in the Estates-General elections, the defensiveness in the spring of 1789, and the transformation towards an acceptance, by some, of civic equality manifested in August.

The cultural war against nobility and perceived noble values, from the abolition of noble status in 1790 to the Terror. How far occasioned by an increasingly intransigent aristocratic opposition, how far the logic of new definitions of citizenship. Constructions of an ideological definition of ‘aristocracy’, and the extent to which it colours the experience of nobles. And the extent to which one could be born noble and still be a radical republican – Lepeletier, Hérault de Séchelles, Saint-Just; lesser figures such as Roux-Fazillac, even the sans-culotte Lazowski.

The further complications of post-thermidor, when we begin to be able to discuss what the nobility might have lost, materially, through the previous years, to biens nationaux and other confiscations, what they retained, and if they managed to claw anything back. How far the ideological chasms opened up in this period were held open specifically by nobles, or if they simply played a part alongside other groups attracted by royalist and Catholic politics. The detachment from any long-term questions of change visible in the vacillations of 1797-99: Higonnet’s climax of anti-nobilism versus the quest for social quiet of the Consulate: apparent ‘ideological’ decisions and the short-term promptings of social and political circumstance.

The extent to which Napoleonic plans for social and political stabilisation relied on an accommodation with the nobility to build his masses de granit, and the extent to which such an accommodation was achieved. Noble attitudes in 1814 and 1815; initial relative moderation, then the 100 days and Napoleon’s gestures towards radical populism, then the chambre introuvable scarcely weeks later: is the latter noble ‘true colours’ on display, or a literal reaction to an exceptional resurgent threat?

The extent to which politics under the Restoration are about the nobility. On one side the controversy over the émigrés’ billion, on the other a general participation in electoral politics as the wealthiest landowning class. Is there a ‘preservation’ of noble social power despite the previous quarter-century, or merely a delay in social-structural change keeping up with ideological evolution? Does 1830 mark a final turning-point when the politics of orders finally gives way to the politics of classes? How can we characterise the social role of a grouping that remains marked by relative wealth, and is increasingly identified by fixed reference back to pre-revolutionary ancestry, yet is slipping from collective significance both politically and economically? Need to be alert here to the capacities of individuals and networks of nobles to pursue income and influence flexibly, from engagement with the market for royal loans in the Old Regime to extractive and other industrial investments then and afterwards.

Here is the point to orient the reader the second half of the book through the lens of the shift from nobility to notability. From one explicit kind of connection between forms of mobility and immobility (the fact of individual ascent into nobility versus the myth of immemorial ancestry and historical legitimacy) to another (the slow-moving sociology of a still-rural country versus the revolutionary rise of the bourgeoisie). The various roles played out in old-regime society by the nobility – hobereau, seigneur, grandee – and their connections that created a fine-grained cascade of disdain, where both the disdain and its granular qualities mattered. What of that, culturally, the surviving and possibly thriving nobility tried to reimport into the new world clearly emergent by the 1840s, and the material challenge to their ability to affect the new order. In this context, and as example, some thoughts on the trajectory of Alexis de Tocqueville to the end of our period.

Summarise the vast imposition of manpower created by the Empire, how much of it was shifted onto non-French territories, how military formations remained remarkably resilient –e.g. in Spain – against desertion, even while patterns of insoumission remained persistent at home. How far the Empire constituted a ‘nation in arms’ phenomenon, at the time and in hindsight, and the impact of that on the perception of the individual soldier, during and after service.

The practical and the symbolic aspects of military service post-1815. David Hopkin on the latter, as against evidence for radical and bonapartist subversion in garrisons – Hazareesingh.

Turning to warmaking, beginning by exploring the traumatic aftermath of 1763, and the beginning of technical debate about military ‘modernisation’; the question of what nature of experience was derived from participation in the American War, and how the French army was organised, and re-organised, for war through the early years of the Revolution [Scott, Bertaud]. Myths and realities of revolutionary élan and drill – weight of numbers vs. tactical innovation, voltigeurs, etc. Drive vs. organisation in early Napoleonic campaigns, Italy, Egypt, and comparison with achievements of some other less lucky generals.

The army as a counterinsurgency force – lessons learned, for good and ill, in the Vendée and the bocage. In conventional campaigning, evolution of the corps d’armée system, changes in operational warfare, Napoleon’s underlying assumptions about decisive battle and forced peace – as at Austerlitz, Tilsit, Wagram, etc – and the collision with ‘total war’ among the people as in Spain – the virtues and flaws of David Bell’s views on this.

Military organisation in general after the Restoration – social and political tensions, contrasts between garrison life and the acquisition of a new ‘active’ role in Algeria from 1830. Exploration of the logics of the militarised treatment of this adventure, with perhaps a sideways look back at Napoleonic attempts to pacify the Caribbean… the foundation of the Foreign Legion as effectively a specifically colonial army.

The Legion as a particularly spectacular contrast to the National Guard, from its revolutionary foundations in 1789 as a specific and direct manifestation of the ‘nation in arms’ at home. The deep ambiguities of the defence of order during a revolutionary conflict that the Guard manifested, both on the Parisian scene and in regional conflicts both rural and urban – its reputation in the West as a force of intrus, and its use in moderately brutal suppression of disorder and enforcement of tax-gathering. Militarisation from 1792, and the parallel formations of assorted political militias and armées révolutionnaires until their suppression at various points in 1794 and after.

The sucking out of the life from the idea of armed civilians across the 20 years from Thermidor to the Restoration, but the revival of the ideal in the face of a bourgeois concern at aristocratic values that produced the politically-troubling Guard of the 1820s, leading to its 1827 suppression in Paris and role in the 1830 revolution. The double face of the Guard again through the periods of social unrest of the 1830s and 1840s; membership as a marker of status, roles as sometimes reluctant, sometimes enthusiastic supporters of order, reformist participation in February 1848. Other militias such as the Garde mobile and their role in suppressing the June Days. [Bianchi/Dupuy; G. Carrot]

From there to a panorama of what it meant for the Church to be the First Estate of the Kingdom – in particular by the reign of Louis XVI the noble domination of high office, the ideological mission of preserving cultural hegemony, and the sheer scale of Church endowments and occupation of the landscape: notably in the cities, with neighbourhoods and districts gathered round churches, monasteries, abbeys and convents (and hospitals and schools). Penetration of religious authority into everyday life, and the presence of the Church in life-choices – from the education of peasant boys to the reception of foundlings, to the social role of nuns and lay sisterhoods against those of confraternities.

Against this the record of conflict over religion, the expulsion of the Jesuits seeming to mark a victory for dissident voices, with the long history of Jansenist resistance showing how arguments over the exercise of faith could animate both elites and popular support, and draw on official and street-level modes of dissemination.

Conflict within Catholicism leads onto conflict with other faiths, reviewing the position of the Protestant minority, their civic disabilities, and the continuing tensions that their presence caused, especially in the southeast; likewise with the Jewish population especially in the east. The changing attitudes that moved towards the relief of civil disabilities in the 1780s, which leads onto a discussion of the underlying trend of ‘enlightenment’ as far as it affected religious attitudes. The alternative ‘Voltairian’ and ‘Rousseauian’ responses to questions of faith and the supernatural, and the differing appeals of each.

Then we can examine the long history of arguments about religion’s connection to the Revolution, from Barruel to Van Kley…

Beyond such debates, the question of what revolutionary reform actually did to the structures of the Church, from village rectories to hospitals and schools, and thus offering some perspective on the rise of religious antagonism to the Revolution, with its sectarian aspects in the south, and the descent towards the horrors of the Vendée. Use Suzanne Desan’s work to gloss the survival of religious feeling and practice, compare with studies of Grégoire and other efforts to maintain a ‘constitutional’ Church.

The Church, institutionally, as a pillar of counter-revolution, and religion, culturally, as a marker of antirevolutionary allegiance – posing the question of how Napoleon was able to effect the Concordat, and whether it solved any real problems. The role of religion in Napoleonic and anti-Napoleonic propaganda, and the question of whether this affected domestic attitudes.

Restoration Church structures, successes and failures in turning back the revolutionary tide. Church role in helping to cultivate a conservative/reactionary movement – revival of confraternity/compagnonnage amongst artisans; development of missionary efforts within France, cultivation of ‘loyalist’ regional sentiments, the memory of the Vendée – J Margadant on the duchesse de Berry.

Evaluation of the continued implantation of Catholicism as practices and structures in the 1830s and 1840s – religion becoming less a dimension of a coherent [or incoherent] elite worldview, more a separate sphere [and a gendered one – Caroline Ford].

Chapter 4: Being French…

Open with the sweep of ‘greater France’ as it was still imaginable prior to the collapse of the 1763 settlement – from Madras to the Mississippi – and the crashing impact of that collapse, especially in the context of a discussion of the ‘new patriotism’ [Dziembowski, Bell] that recent war had developed. Moves into the basic question of how ‘Frenchness’ was experienced, and by whom. Relating topics from the previous two chapters to the concept of ‘nationality’ as it emerges, and is in competition with others such as privilege and particularism. And also forms of cosmopolitanism, both intellectual and aristocratic.

‘Nationality’ as a concept itself new to the period, set against old-regime practices – droit d’aubaine and its ‘feudal’ implications – and innovations, from the revolutionaries’ definitions of the patrie to Napoleon’s creation of jus sanguinis identity. [Rapport, Wahnich, Weil]

Considering the physical bounds of nationhood; old-regime models of borderlands, where identities blur, against revolutionary and ‘modern’ interpretations of (apparent) clarity. The Pyrenees [Sahlins, McPhee], Alsace, Savoy, the Belgian territories… also the cultural bounds and the debates over language in the Revolution and after [Bell, other work on Grégoire]… and the racial bounds:

Life under the Code Noir for whites, free blacks and slaves; promises of revolutionary liberation, and betrayals. Napoleonic imperial attitudes – both crudely racial and also intra-European – and their continuities after 1815. The question of Algeria, colonisation and rationalising the subjugation of a ‘free’ population – early C19 thoughts on Islam and exclusion.

After considering these various forms of outer boundary, attention to inner ones. Considering in the classic perspective of ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ how far dialect and geography held the population apart – versus how far, through interchange of information, individual and collective seasonal and permanent mobilities, there was from the beginning of the period already a sense of the wider world, and perhaps the wider nation, in far-flung corners of France. And against this perspective and its teleologies, the question of what might be lost in ‘becoming French’ – custom, autonomy, identities not pivoted around the nation-state. This leads on to a revisiting of issues already touched on, such as privilege, taxation, administrative centralisation, from a more cultural dimension as they shape or interact with identities at local and national level. Also looking ahead to structural material changes around migration, urbanisation, demographic transitions – the 1840s as a watershed era?

The classic ‘picture’ of old-regime administration provided by the idea of the intendants – administrative, centralised, unaccountable – and its contradiction by what we now know about patronage-networks, provincial autonomy and bargaining. The significance of venality of office in tying elites to the crown, while complicating the administrative picture. Taxation and its collection as a particular example of complexity. The role of the parlements in these elite tangles, and their relative lack of success in providing more than rhetorical opposition.

Administration at the ground level – authority in the village and the communauté d’habitants. Tithes, tailles and militia ballots, etc. The varied patterns of election and imposition of officials and representatives, and the life of such assemblies. Life in the cities between police and municipal liberties – non-noble elites and the opportunities of state ‘service’.

The complex mesh of the two functions across France as a whole, embedded in a corporate sense of the state. Extending also beyond European shores – settler assemblies and the Code Noir?

Reform plans – the state-centric conception of representation as grease on the wheels of taxation…

Revolutionary blank slates – or not? The municipalisation of France, the models drawn on for spontaneous organisation in 1789, and the thinking behind the reorganisations of 1790. What the death of corporatism meant for the chance of being represented in practice. The localisation of administration vs. the needs of the state: ramifications, e.g. in tax-gathering, of assumptions about gains in autonomy. [Woloch, Gueniffey]

National representation and suffrage: arguments and assumptions in the progress towards manhood suffrage under the Republic, alongside election by acclamation and sans-culotte fraternisation raids. [Crook, Edelstein] The Constitution of the Year III and the attempt at a stable republic – what did it say about the administration/representation conundrum; and how in practice was the supremacy of the state enacted? H. Brown’s ‘security state’ concept and the passage to the Consulate.

The resumption of open dictatorship – how did the educated classes accommodate themselves to the encroachments that led to Empire? Who were the Prefects and their cohorts, and how far did they replicate the local embroilment of the pre-revolutionary system: was administrative centralisation any more, or less, of a reality by 1815 than in 1763?

Change and continuity through and after 1814/15 – how much is this now a ‘new regime’ firmly entrenched as a form of administration in its own right, how much amenable to shoves from the sovereign? What logic was evident in the decision not to follow a reactionary course in relation to state structures?

Administration and elections under Restoration and July Monarchy: what became accepted norms of government intervention? How did other aspects of the prefectoral system embed themselves outside the Napoleonic context of continual war, and within a new context of ideological divergence? Following the logic of Sarah Maza, can we see state service as a substitute for ‘class-consciousness’ amongst that group that spurns the label of bourgeoisie?

General reflection: administrative structures and economic and social change. Is there a particular tradition of intervention/guidance/stimulation [and/or hindrance, obfuscation, incompetence…] by the state in industrial and commercial development? See Jeff Horn…

Room here also for a sidelight on the kinds of discourse discussed by Shovlin and Sonenscher; between patriotism and fear of despotism, the fraught reflections of at least some contemporaries on what kings could do, and what they should. Slide from fairly abstract debates to the brewing of the ‘pre-revolution’, and the aspects of debate there that recapitulate old problems and begin to pose new ones. Monarchy vs. ‘nation’ in all its potentially-divisive aspects.

Think about some time-honoured exponents of views on government – Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably – and how/if they featured in thinking in the early months of the National Assembly. Whether politicians were simply following well-established models in shunning republicanism so violently in 1791, for example, and what effect the evolving politics of revolutionary Paris itself might have had on such judgments.

Reflections on the theory of monarchy on display from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the last 3 years of their lives – did it acknowledge any movement from 1766?

Conversely, addressing the near-pathological suspicion of executive power after 10 August 1792, the extent to which this itself was a significant factor in the acceleration of the Girondin/Montagnard split towards civil war. Democratic theorising vs. factional practices. The logic of ‘revolutionary government’ and national sovereignty. Defining the boundaries of the ‘sovereign’, and their porosity.

Living without a ‘head of state’ in the Terror and after. A sidenote on the obsession with kingship that enters into the post-thermidorian denigration of Robespierre, the magic of monarchy still alive. Directorial schemes and their working in practice. The descent to a ‘politics of coup’, and the extent to which that reflected a gulf between a ‘sovereign people’ and the ‘heads’ of the state – what is a Republic for?

Napoleonic rise and mutations – a very great deal could be written on the public and private justifications for the conversion of the Republic steadily into an Empire, and thereafter into something ever-more closely approaching the model of a traditional European monarchy (with megalomaniacal features). Need to concentrate on the aspects related to sovereignty, and to distinguish, as far as possible, between shared and rational approaches to the problems made clear by the later 1790s, and the pathological impact of personality. Does the Napoleonic experiment leave behind anything for the future, beyond a mythology?

By contrast, the debates of the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, touch very clearly on the nature of monarchy itself under a constitution, and in the move to revolution in both 1830 and 1848 make many of the questions of sovereign initiative in relation to the body-politic highly explicit. From the ‘granting’ of the 1814 constitution to its steady intensification of restrictions, and through the oddly parallel process from 1830 to 1835, the question of whether monarchs serve their people, or vice versa, played out in the shadow of republican alternatives, and the chapter will end with consideration of what republicans meant by a republic as a state or as a body of citizens.

Opening with a classic, Sièyes’s views on the essential harm done to society by privileged orders; a powerful viewpoint, but one which reflects a largely static view of the social and political arena. Moving backwards into the Old Regime, we want to pick up on some of the ways it was already changing, and had changed, and how these were reflected on. One important aspect is the disaster of 1763 itself, and the loss of empire in North America and India – how this challenged definitions of the French place in the world that had been emerging during that imperial ascent.

Moving over the heavy lifting of attempted reform and the politics of perpetual crisis soon to settle over the finances (for later consideration), the chapter will then look at elite attitudes to their own identities and roles through the 1770s and 80s. This may well expose a self-contradictory mess – Kwass on taxpayers, Bossenga and others on venality and privilege would certainly suggest so; but when overlaid with real debates (as depicted by Smith, Blaufarb, etc) about noble social identity, this ‘mess’ shows that the monarchical order was undergoing some kind of evolution, even if its direction was unclear.

When addressing the constructive work of the Revolution, what they saw, looking back, emerges in part from what they wanted in its place. On the one hand, elitist programmes of reform such as the Committee of Thirty that begin the process; on the other the mixture of Rousseauist rhapsodies and nitty-gritty regulations that surrounded the Constitution of 1791, the intended ‘end point’. The unalloyed commitment to individualistic political participation sets a marker against the aggravations of privileged corporatism, while (perhaps implicitly) the philosophy of sovereignty and the general will exalts the active state over such collectivities. Such practical implications need also to be balanced against the more millennial aspects of the revolutionary creed emergent from 1792, but brought back into focus as the fate of the 1795 constitution points towards militarised force as an essential foundation of order. What were revolutionary political institutions intended to achieve, are there significant continuities beneath sharply-changing rhetorics – beyond merely the opportunity to assert a statist/international-relations view of outward-facing sovereign power?

Thus, arriving at Napoleon, we can deal with the same questions of what his regime was for, and what it was against, in the make-up of state and society. Was it merely a dictatorship riding on the back of political exhaustion and the rise of a ‘security state’, or a consolidation of revolutionary ideals? How far did the steady augmentation of its monarchical aspects indicate that the pre-revolutionary past still remained an important frame of reference for defining what Napoleonic France should be? Given the dramatic twists of 1814-15, with the installation first of a monarchy more ‘liberal’ than the Empire, and then the short-lived return of a ‘Jacobin’ emperor, did Napoleonic rule have any principles that were its own, or merely serve as a brutal parenthesis in a struggle ongoing since the 1770s? Drawing on ‘classic’ interpretations like Tulard, recent views such as Englund, Jourdan; Woloch’s work on the ‘collaborators’ and Brown on the ‘security state’…

In the debates of the Restoration decades, there is a serious and perhaps ‘world-historical’ innovation to consider: the rise of the ideological distinction encapsulated in the ‘parties’ of movement and order. Secular historical change as an ideology, or at the very least a frame of reference in itself, rises to prominence, and against it is enshrined a vision of the past that is constrictive, accessed by conservatives as a limit on what should be done, rather than, as in pre-revolutionary times, as a source of arguments about what might be done.

The revolutionary decades have also created groupings that see the monarchical order as fundamentally illegitimate, and the goals and methods of revolutionary and republican secret societies and publicists can be explored to show, again, the fundamental ideological change effected since 1789. But against this needs to be put the shenanigans of the 1830 revolution – how different power-blocs were able to use the idea of revolutionary change to create a more amenable monarchy. How this also created, and reinforced through the early 1830s, a politics of vengeful hate amongst ‘montagnards’ in contexts of rapid and disruptive social change (Harsin). Contrasting such views to those of Guizot, and the more reflective Tocqueville, would round out the chapter with a sense both of the immensity of change over the era, and its complexity and incompleteness, leading onto further thematic explorations.