Mémoire du féodalisme et émancipation paysanne dans la France du XIXe siècle

Cette conférence a été enregistrée dans le cadre du séminaire annuel du pôle Sociétés et espaces ruraux de la MRSH, consacré pour l'année 2015-2016 aux pouvoirs publics et sociétés rurales.

David Hopkin studied history at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, from 1985 to 1988.  He returned to Cambridge in 1994 to pursue his doctorate under the supervision of Peter Burke and Bob Scribner.  He was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College from 1997 to 1999 and lecturer, then senior lecturer, in the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, from 1999.  He joined Hertford as Fellow and Tutor in History in 2005.

Abstract

Historians of rural politicisation have followed nineteenth-century observers of the French countryside to argue that the memory of feudalism had a large influence on rural political choices.  The influence of local memories, they claim, helps explain why rural voters did not behave according to the expectations of modern politics.  But what memories? Neither nineteenth-century observers nor historians have provided much detail.  In order to discover the contents of these memories we need to turn from the administrative archives towards the archives of oral literature. Nineteenth-century folklorists collected hundreds of legends about lords and the seigneurial regime told in rural communities.  Some of these were of purely local distribution and can be related to precise historical events and persons.  But many form part of a much larger, indeed international repertoire consisting of archetypal stories and motifs that could be adapted to local circumstances.  In this sense it seems that peasants in many parts of France, and far beyond, shared a common, albeit 'legendary' history of feudalism: a common history in that they agreed on what happened in the past and also how those events should be interpreted.  It is possible that this common history helped peasants to articulate a common identity, and that this common identity may explain peasants' ability to mobilize in order to surmount the challenges posed to small-scale family-run agriculture in a globalising world.