FRANCE

Jeremy D. Popkin

From 1500 to 2000 the societies of France and its European neighbors evolved in the same general direction. Populations that had been overwhelmingly composed of peasants dominated by a class of noble landowners became predominantly urban, made up of workers and members of the middle classes. Societies characterized by an elaborate hierarchy were replaced by ones in which all citizens theoretically enjoyed equal rights. France's path to modernity had many unique features, however, of which the most important was the Revolution of 1789, the most sweeping attempt deliberately to change social relations undertaken in any European country up to that time. The Revolution had long-lasting effects on all levels of French society; but, paradoxically, it did not make France a leader in the transition to the social patterns that have come to characterize Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. France provided the paradigm case of modern social revolution and yet experienced a slow, evolutionary pattern of social change from 1800 to the mid-twentieth century, a paradox that makes the country's modern social history a challenge to investigation.

FRENCH SOCIAL HISTORY UNDER THE OLD REGIME (1500–1789)

Drawing on documentary sources—parish registers, long series of grain prices, and royal tax and judicial records—unmatched in Europe, the French historians of Annales school social history, beginning with Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the 1920s, made this period their special focus. In contrast to social historians inspired by the marxist tradition, the Annales scholars deemphasized class conflict and the teleological notion that the history of the early modern period could be summed up as "the transition from feudalism to capitalism." Borrowing freely from other social-science disciplines—demography, geography, economics, and anthropology—the Annalistes tried above all to understand how the population of the past supported itself without the benefit of modern technology and medicine. Bloch's classic French Rural History (1930; English translation, 1966) depicted the farming arrangements of the period, such as the two- and three-field crop rotation systems and collective constraints on individual owners, not as evidence of backwardness but as a coherent system functioning to provide a dependable food supply without exhausting natural resources. Thanks to the Annales school historians, a clear picture emerged of the period's remarkably stable demographic system. Its key feature was an unusually late average age of marriage for both men and women: first marriages normally involved partners in their mid- to late twenties. Only at that age were the partners likely to have inherited a farm that would enable them to set up an economically independent household. Coupled with strict regulation of premarital sexuality, late marriage reduced the number of children a woman was likely to bear and thus limited the overall growth of the population. The high infant mortality rates characteristic of premodern societies were an additional drag on population growth.

France's population growth during the Old Regime was also held down by periodic demographic crises. At least once a generation, a major epidemic, famine, or other disaster devastated major parts of the kingdom, creating a dismal peak in the death statistics. The seventeenth century especially was marked by a succession of such catastrophes. In the aftermath of each crisis, marriage rates and birthrates rose above normal levels and the population eventually recovered; but these periodic setbacks ensured that the country's overall population, which was probably around 19 million in the mid-1500s, did not grow steadily thereafter but instead fluctuated with only a slight tendency toward growth until after 1700.

In the early modern period, France was among the largest of European states. Farming patterns, family structures and inheritance systems, dialects, and cultural practices varied from region to region, making generalization risky. Nevertheless, it is clear that by 1500 most French peasants had the legal status of freedmen, able to own and bequeath property and to migrate in search of new opportunities. New patterns of trade and the steadily growing power of the French monarchy fostered the growth of a bourgeois elite, whose richest members, like the court banker Jacques Coeur, had wealth and influence to rival those of the greatest nobles. The social structure of the country was still heavily influenced by the seigneurial system, however. Even free peasants still owed their landlord—usually a noble, though the seigneur might also be the church or a bourgeois from a nearby town—a variety of dues, obligations, and marks of honor that reinforced a sense of hierarchical inequality.

Peasants, nobility, and clergy. After 1500, French society settled into a fairly stable pattern whose main features would endure until the second half of the eighteenth century. Labeled by the revolutionaries of 1789 ancien régimen, it was an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society: the percentage of the population living in towns of two thousand or more was about 15 percent in 1600, and still under 20 percent in 1750. Peasants lived in village communities of five hundred to fifteen hundred persons. Households typically consisted of nuclear families, although extended-family households were common in some regions of the center and south. French peasants usually owned some land but not enough to support themselves fully. They supplemented the produce of their own plots by leasing additional land from a local seigneur or working as hired laborers. All members of the peasant household contributed to the family economy, although tasks were divided by gender and age. Peasant houses usually had only one room, which served for shelter, indoor work, meals, and sleep. The peasant diet was simple and monotonous, based on bread or gruel made from one or another of the cheaper grain crops—rye, barley, buckwheat, or millet—so as to save the more valuable wheat for sale. Meager as French peasants' existence was, their standard of living was still better than that of villagers in most other regions of Europe.

Most Old Regime peasants' horizons were bounded by their village and its local region. Villagers chose marriage partners from their own community or a neighboring one. Although individual families farmed their own land, the village community dictated crop rotation patterns and set dates for sowing and harvesting. The village council, usually dominated by the wealthier families, allocated taxes and looked after other community concerns. Few peasants received any formal education. The local curé was often the only educated person in the village, and the post-Reformation church accommodated the peasantry by translating basic religious texts into their dialects. Those peasants who could read served as cultural intermediaries for their communities, often by reading aloud from almanacs and chapbooks carried by traveling peddlers.

Although peasants formed the majority of France's population under the Old Regime, other groups also played an important part in the country's life. The hereditary nobility was a small minority—some estimates suggest they numbered less than 1 percent of the population—but they loomed large in its affairs. Nobility was in principle a hereditary status characterized by the possession of certain legal privileges, particularly exemption from many of the most important taxes. In practice noble status was almost always accompanied by ownership of a seigneury or landed estate. Not only were seigneurs' landholdings usually considerably larger than those of even wealthy peasants, but they also enjoyed the right to maintain a court, to collect dues and labor services from tenants, and to compel peasants to use the seigneur's oven and mill; they also enjoyed a variety of honorific privileges, such as special seating in church.

In the early modern period, most French nobles were the descendants of commoner families that had enriched themselves and elevated their status over a period of several generations. Starting in the 1500s the French monarchy institutionalized this process through the sale of venal offices; these were administrative and judicial positions whose exercise conferred noble status, either on the purchaser or on his heirs if the post stayed in the family for a specified number of generations. The possibility of buying noble status meant that the group was never a closed caste but instead regularly absorbed the descendants of the most successful and ambitious commoners. This wealthy and educated office-holding noblesse du robe (nobility of the robe) often looked down on poorer members of the noblesse d'épée (nobility of the sword), whose status depended on military service. During the sixteenth century, and especially during the disorders resulting from the country's long religious civil war (1562–1598), local nobles often exercised considerable autonomy. As the kings of the Bourbon dynasty, established by Henri IV in 1594, consolidated their authority in the course of the seventeenth century, ambitious nobles increasingly realized that the road to individual and family preferment ran through clientage ties with powerful figures at the royal court, and ultimately with the king himself. The court, permanently established at Versailles under Louis XIV, became a magnet for the wealthier and more influential nobles, as well as a center for the propagation of new models of aristocratic behavior.

Like the nobility, the Catholic clergy enjoyed a number of special privileges, including tax exemptions and the right to be judged in special courts. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century had challenged the church's position in French society. Henri IV's Edict of Nantes (1598) granted the Protestant Huguenots the status of a protected minority, but also ended any real threat to Catholic predominance; the gradual implementation in France after 1600 of the reform program laid down earlier by the Council of Trent consolidated the church's position. Parish clergy received better training and tightened their control over the laity's behavior. The period's religious enthusiasm fueled the spread of new religious orders, many of them created by women, such as the Filles de la Charité and the Ursulines. Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked the triumph of this Catholic revival. A substantial number of Huguenots emigrated—the one significant instance of emigration from France during the early modern period—while those who remained were driven into clandestinity.

Urban and rural social structures. France's cities grew slowly during this period. The Paris population reached 400,000 during the reign of Louis XIV, but regional metropolises such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Rouen had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants until the end of the eighteenth century. Cities served as administrative centers for the monarchy and the church, as market and cultural centers, and as homes to specialized artisans and professionals such as lawyers and doctors. The dense crowding of urban habitats and the lack of sanitation facilitated the spread of disease. Death rates in cities were higher than in most rural areas, and city populations were sustained only by a steady flow of immigrants. In France more than in any other European country, the custom of entrusting newborns to wet nurses became widespread, both among artisan families, to whose economy the wife's labor was essential, and among elites, whose female members did not want to be burdened with childrearing. Because wet nurses often neglected their charges, this practice led to very high rates of infant death.

Urban social structures were more complex and hierarchical than those found in rural areas. Urban society was usually dominated by wealthy commoners, especially merchants. In smaller towns, prosperous artisans, organized in guilds, played a significant role. By the early sixteenth century, city governments had usually taken over from the church such functions as providing aid to the poor and running schools. Local elites struggled to maintain their autonomy from the encroaching royal government. Louis XIV perfected a system of exploiting cities by converting municipal positions into venal offices and forcing towns to buy back the right to name their own leaders. At the same time, urban elites imitated the nobility in waging protracted struggles over matters of honor and prestige. Urban leaders spent much time and energy dealing with the poor, who made up the vast majority of every city's population. Below the level of the skilled artisans was a mass of apprentices and journeymen, casual laborers, beggars, criminals, prostitutes, and groups in need of assistance, such as orphans, the aged, the sick, the insane. City governments tried to maintain the authority of guild masters over their workers. Knowing that high food prices provoked disorder, they worried incessantly about supplies and sought to regulate market procedures. They also sought to control and sometimes confine the unemployed, the sick, the insane, and criminals.

Tensions and instability. Social tensions were always present in Old Regime France, and collective violence was no rarity. The religiously inspired violence of the second half of the sixteenth century often had social overtones. Protestantism found a following among some nobles and among artisans and educated elites in urban areas; it was less successful in the countryside, outside of a few specific regions, and among the urban lower classes. The seventeenth century saw a number of important regional uprisings by peasants, who often turned to local seigneurs for leadership. These uprisings were directed primarily against the royal government's relentless drive to collect ever more tax revenue to pay for the wars that marked the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. These movements were significant signs of the social cost imposed by the growth of the absolutist state, but their impact was limited by their focus on local issues. Considerable social disorder also accompanied the series of revolts against royal authority known as the Fronde (1648–1653), but these movements, too, failed to coalesce into a coherent challenge to the existing social order and collapsed when their elite leaders made peace with the king. The centralized administration developed under Louis XIV and perfected over the course of the eighteenth century was more effective both in preventing conditions from degenerating to the point where revolts were likely and in repressing protests before they could spread.

From 1500 to around 1750, the social system of the French Old Regime thus maintained itself largely intact. The slow pace of technological and economic change and the absence of an alternative to the traditional hierarchical order ruled out any radical alterations. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, changes that undermined this social order began to occur. One of the most significant of these, although contemporaries were only dimly aware of it, was the beginning of a sustained growth in population. By 1740 the population had risen to an unprecedented level of over 24 million; after a brief setback in the following decade, it grew even more rapidly over the next four decades, reaching a figure of about 28 million by 1789. The causes of this marked increase are unclear. Population growth was well under way before any significant changes in agriculture occurred. Changes in medical practices had at best a marginal effect; infant mortality remained high. A shift in climate—the "little ice age," with its many cold, wet summers and bitter winters and a cycle of warmer weather that resulted in good harvests—may have been one factor; the cumulative effect of slight improvements in farming methods, birthing practices, and sanitary arrangements may also have contributed.

The eighteenth-century population increase—which, although substantial, was more gradual than that in other European countries—had important social effects. With more peasants competing for opportunities to farm, landlords were able to raise rents, and the larger number of mouths to feed meant more demand for their marketable surplus. The gulf between rich and poor thus tended to grow. Some developments, however, slowed the growth of discontent. Although fewer peasants had enough land to maintain themselves, the gradual spread of rural manufacturing industries organized on the putting-out system provided many peasant families with a second source of income. Since most of the increased income from agriculture ended up in the hands of urban landowners—nobles and bourgeois—who spent it on fancier homes, additional servants, and other forms of consumption, France's cities absorbed some of the surplus rural population.

The rising tension between rich and poor was one important aspect of the growing instability in eighteenth-century France; changing relations among the country's elites was another. The country's growing economy benefited especially members of the urban bourgeoisie. Merchants in port cities grew rich off the booming colonial trade, which flourished after the end of Louis XIV's wars; manufacturers profited from the growth of the textile industry and other enterprises. As they enriched themselves, members of the bourgeoisie adopted a lifestyle that increasingly resembled that of the privileged nobility. Nobles, for their part, found ways around the traditional restrictions that prevented them from engaging in commerce; through their investments, they increasingly shared the same economic interests as the bourgeoisie. As the real differences between the two groups diminished, the special privileges that set nobles off from bourgeois commoners came to seem unjustified. The spread of the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment, adopted both by many nobles who saw themselves as cosmopolitans above petty class prejudices and by educated members of the bourgeoisie, provided an ideological rationale for criticism of traditional social arrangements.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1789–1815

The social history of the Old Regime poses the question of how a highly inegalitarian society managed to maintain itself intact over a long period. The period of the French Revolution, the broadest social upheaval European society had witnessed in many centuries, raises very different questions: what forces led to the sudden overthrow of the earlier system, and which social groups gained and lost from the new order? The social history of the Revolution, in contrast to that of the Old Regime, was long dominated by scholars working in the marxist tradition, who emphasized the "bourgeois" character of 1789 and the importance of socioeconomic conflicts in determining its outcome. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a strong revisionist reaction against this social interpretation of the Revolution. Even historians who retained an interest in social history radically redefined its content. Historians of women challenged a definition of the social that ignored gender, and cultural historians looked at forms of symbolic behavior rather than trying to identify distinct social classes.

The social tensions that had been building up in the second half of the eighteenth century exploded when the threat of insolvency forced the king to summon the Estates-General, a representative assembly that had last met in 1614. The Estates-General was traditionally divided into separate chambers for the nobility, clergy, and commoners, or third estate; its convocation immediately posed the question of the privileged orders' special rights. Bourgeois deputies such as the abbé Sieyès called for the elimination of all social privileges that divided the "nation" and the restructuring of the Estates-General as a single body, the National Constituent Assembly. To ensure their triumph over the king and the privileged orders, the deputies needed the support of a popular insurrection. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the subsequent wave of antiseigneurial peasant violence known as the Great Fear guaranteed the Revolution's success.

The National Constituent Assembly now had a unique opportunity to legislate sweeping social changes. Its declared intent was to eliminate all group privileges and all vestiges of the feudal regime, leaving a society composed of equal individuals who would be rewarded on the basis of merit. At the same time, the revolutionaries guaranteed the right of property and accepted the economic inequality that this was bound to perpetuate. In its first, or liberal, phase (1789–1792), the Revolution abolished noble status and the clergy's special privileges, as well as those of guilds, towns, and provinces, and gave minority groups such as Protestants and Jews full rights. Obstacles to market capitalism, such as internal customs barriers and guild restrictions, were wiped out. The 1791 Le Chapelier law forbidding workers' organizations consecrated the triumph of employers. Nobles retained their land, however, and when the church's extensive holdings were put up for sale, the procedures favored wealthy bidders over peasants. The new constitution enacted in 1791 restricted voting rights to wealthier taxpayers. This favoritism toward the wealthy produced a reaction, as the popular classes realized that the new order offered them few tangible benefits. Confronted also with a domestic counter-revolutionary movement and, after April 1792, with a foreign war, the largely bourgeois revolutionaries split. Their more radical, or Jacobin, wing turned to the urban populace.

The most militant members of that group, the famous Parisian sansculottes, a mixture of shopkeepers, artisans, and workers, led the crowd that stormed the royal palace on 10 August 1792, setting off a "second," or "radical," revolution. Their actions forced the summoning of a new assembly, the National Convention, elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. Still composed primarily of bourgeois deputies, the Convention nevertheless enacted measures designed to eliminate the last vestiges of class privilege and distribute wealth more widely. It also bowed to popular pressure for drastic action against enemies of the Revolution, resulting in the Reign of Terror. The alliance between the radical bourgeois Jacobins and the popular classes disintegrated as external threats to the new regime receded. Under the leadership of Robespierre, the Convention brought the sansculottes under control. This alienated the Jacobins' poorer supporters, however, and when Robespierre himself was overthrown by more conservative bourgeois politicians on 27 July 1794—in the revolutionary calendar, 9 thermidor, year II—the masses abandoned him. The result was the "thermidorian reaction" and the installation of the Directory, a regime dedicated to the narrow defense of bourgeois interests.

Social effects. The changes in property distribution and social conditions brought about by the Revolution were less dramatic than its rhetoric suggested, but they were still substantial. Noble families were often surprisingly successful in restoring their landholdings in the years after the Terror, but nobles as a group never regained their privileged status. The Revolution opened many new opportunities to educated commoners, thereby creating a self-conscious bourgeoisie who would never again allow themselves to be reduced to subordinate status and a landowning peasantry that fiercely defended its interests and prevented an English-style enclosure movement. The Revolution did not immediately put France on the road to a modern capitalist industrial economy—in fact, the disorder it caused set economic development back considerably—but revolutionary legal reforms, codified in 1804 in the Napoleonic Code, eliminated restrictions on the use of property inherited from the seigneurial system and cleared the way for further changes in the nineteenth century. By selling off church lands and confiscated noble properties, the Revolution caused a significant redistribution of wealth. The numerous landholding peasants became a distinctive component of France's social structure into the mid-twentieth century.

One of the Revolution's major social effects was a redefinition of gender roles. Men enjoyed many legal advantages over women in the Old Regime, starting with French law's prohibiting a woman from inheriting the throne; but the complex nature of privilege before 1789 allowed some women considerable prerogatives. Noblewomen had greater rights than male commoners', guild masters' widows could inherit and run their enterprises, and some women's guilds did exist. The Revolution's assault on the notion of special privilege raised the question of gender privileges, and some radicals, both female and male, argued that true equality between the sexes was a necessary consequence of the movement's principles. Women participated in revolutionary uprisings, and legislation such as the egalitarian divorce law passed in 1792 gave them increased rights. Other revolutionaries contended, however, that the equality of all males necessarily implied the subordination of all women. In 1793 the National Convention put itself firmly on the side of those who claimed that "nature" militated against any female participation in public affairs. In the Jacobin republic, women were to tend the home and raise patriotic children.

The Napoleonic period (1799–1815) was marked by a return to a more hierarchical social order, particularly with respect to gender. The Napoleonic Code deprived women of the right to own property in their own name and gave full control over the family to its male head. Poorer male citizens lost ground, too. Workers had to carry a livret, or work book, and could not change jobs without a favorable report from their previous employer; wealthy men could buy exemption from military service. Napoleon claimed that the Legion of Honor he created in 1802 did not mark a return to aristocracy, since any citizen could theoretically earn admission by outstanding service to the state and membership was not hereditary; but in 1808 he established a new nobility, rewarding his most loyal supporters with titles and landed estates. A highly centralized system of specialized national schools, begun during the revolutionary decade, was consolidated as a mechanism for training an educated elite for state service. The "Napoleonic settlement" guaranteed the land purchases made during the Revolution, but returned unsold noble properties to their original owners. Although he encouraged the growth of some industries, Napoleon still envisaged France as an essentially agricultural society, with the peasantry as the reservoir from which he would fill his army's ranks; the populations of some major cities actually fell during his reign. At the time of Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, it was not yet evident that France was launched on the processes of urbanization and industrialization that were to mark the nineteenth century.

URBANIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION (1815–1968)

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the changes that would eventually transform France from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. The rural population peaked in the 1830s; after that date population growth shifted to the cities. New forms of wealth derived from industry and commerce displaced landownership. Compared with most other European countries, France experienced these changes slowly: on the eve of the 1914 war, 40 percent of the population still lived in the countryside, versus 6 percent in England. Thus it may be misleading to talk about an "industrial revolution" in France. Historians have actively discussed causes for the French lag, ranging from resource disadvantages (in coal, for example) to a conservative business culture to the slow population growth, which limited consumer demand and the available labor force. But change did occur, as even artisanal sectors became more commercial. And by the 1830s and 1840s, the introduction of power-driven machinery and the building of the first French railroads were making an impact. There was an acute consciousness that the country faced a critical "social problem" in its major cities. Middle-class writers described the poverty, overcrowding, disease, and social breakdown that characterized slum neighborhoods in Paris and in provincial manufacturing centers such as Lille and Lyon. Early socialist theorists—Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Louis Blanc—identified capitalism and individualism as the causes of these ills and offered various prescriptions for healing them. The Saint-Simonians were especially sensitive to the fact that the growth of industry depended heavily on the exploitation of female labor, and that overcoming the challenges of modernity required reexamining established gender roles.

In 1830, after several years of economic distress and political confrontation, opposition to the conservative Restoration regime set up after Napoleon's defeat boiled over into another revolution. Although the urban crowd played a major role in the insurrection, rural protests were minor compared with those in 1789, and middle-class liberals were able to keep control of the country's institutions. Proclaimed as a "citizen king," Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans, a relative of the deposed Restoration king, took the throne. His period of rule, from 1830 to 1848, was categorized even at the time as a "bourgeois monarchy." This reflected in part the king's deliberate policy of adopting the lifestyle of a wealthy bourgeois in contrast with his predecessors' efforts to revive aristocratic court practices. The label also reflected, however, the sense that the new regime was dominated by bourgeois interests. The right to vote was extended, giving more members of the middle classes a voice, and government policies such as subsidies for railroads promoted industrialization.

The bourgeois social order that took shape after 1830 was often depicted, in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert and the biting caricatures by the artist Honoré Daumier, as one in which money was the measure of all things. In fact the French bourgeoisie also put a high value on honor and reputation, sometimes adopting what had been aristocratic practices, such as dueling. One hallmark of bourgeois life was the withdrawal of women from economic activities. Although working-class and peasant women had to contribute directly to family income, the bourgeois "lady" increasingly restricted herself to the household, overseeing servants who did the actual domestic chores. The bourgeois July Monarchy initiated public elementary schooling for boys, but religiously inspired conservatism prevented the creation of public schools for girls until the early 1880s. Secondary education remained a privilege of the wealthy; the school system was one of the main means by which France's bourgeois social hierarchy perpetuated itself.

Although a social order dominated by bourgeois values was firmly in place after 1830, political stability remained elusive. A severe economic crisis in 1845–1847 alienated much of the population from Louis-Philippe's regime, which was overthrown in February 1848. As in 1830, the Paris crowd played the leading role in the movement, and the provisional government that took power made important gestures to the working classes, including the creation of the Luxembourg Commission to hold public hearings on their problems. The February revolution set off an unprecedented outburst of popular demonstrations and political activity; socialist and feminist groups actively spread radical ideas. The entire male population was allowed to vote in elections for a constituent assembly. Peasant voters generally backed conservative candidates, however, and the Assembly took a confrontational attitude toward urban workers. The result was the bloody June Days uprising in 1848 in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris, put down at a cost of perhaps some two thousand lives. Its defeat strengthened the conservatives' hold on the assembly, which later passed the Falloux law allowing religious education in public schools for the first time and an electoral law disenfranchising much of the urban population.

The Assembly's conservatism worked in favor of the country's elected president, Napoleon I's nephew Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who ousted the deputies in December 1851 and restored the Napoleonic empire in 1852. Resistance to his takeover in parts of rural southern France showed that the brief republican interlude had convinced many members of the lower classes that they deserved political rights. Taking the title Napoleon III, the new ruler initially followed a conservative social policy. His regime benefited from a renewed surge of industrial activity in the 1850s; general prosperity and an authoritarian police quelled unrest. As economic growth slowed in the 1860s, however, social protest resurfaced. Napoleon III sought to broaden the base of his regime by making some concessions to the labor movement. Self-proclaimed working-class candidates ran in Paris municipal elections in 1864, and unions were legalized. The period also saw an important resurgence of feminist activity. Napoleon III's faith that rational social engineering, firmly directed from above, could produce improved living conditions for all classes was exemplified by the remodeling of Paris under Baron Georges Haussmann, prefect of the Seine. Slum neighborhoods were cleared away, modern water and sewer systems built, and broad new boulevards eased traffic problems. As a result, however, the city's poor were increasingly forced out to the suburbs: the elegant new spaces of the city center were largely reserved for the well-to-do.

That social tensions still ran high became obvious when Napoleon III's regime collapsed after defeat by Bismarck's Prussia in 1870. In March 1871 the Parisians revolted against the conservative assembly that had replaced the emperor. They set up a directly elected council, the Commune. During the two months of its existence, the Commune launched numerous social experiments. Women played a major role in the movement. Conservative reaction against the Paris "reds" was violent. Some 20,000 to 25,000 were killed when government troops retook the capital in the "bloody week" of fighting in May 1871. The Commune uprising generated long-lasting myths on both sides: to bourgeois conservatives, it showed the danger from the unruly masses; to workers, it demonstrated the possessing classes' implacable enmity. Ironically, however, the real victors after 1871 proved to be the moderate republican representatives of France's middle classes. Led by Leon Gambetta, the republicans appealed to the "new social strata," the lower middle class and a now republicanized peasantry. These groups became the social basis of the Third Republic (1875–1940). This regime proved remarkably stable, suggesting that it satisfied the wishes of a strong majority of the population that wanted a regime respectful of property but willing to take some steps to benefit the poor.

The Third Republic. With the consolidation of the Third Republic's institutions in the early 1880s, the social program elaborated in 1789 seemed at last to have been accomplished. The new regime guaranteed the civil equality of all male citizens, provided a uniform (but gender-specific) elementary education for all children, and protected property and order. The century between the French Revolution and the definitive installation of the republic had seen important social changes, however. The industrial working class's place in French society remained a controversial issue. An 1884 law legalized strikes, and a general trade union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was created in 1895. The socialist movement, damaged by the defeat of 1871, recovered in the 1880s and attracted the support of many workers; working-class families also provided the base for a flourishing network of consumer cooperatives. French socialism was weakened by its division into several competing parties, but all expressed workers' dissatisfaction with a society in which they remained largely marginalized. The growth of large industry and of new forms of commerce, such as department stores, put pressure on artisans and shopkeepers, who looked to the government for protection. As in other European countries, a "new middle class" of salaried clerks, teachers, and professionals developed; some of them embraced trade unionism to defend their interests.

The place of women in French society was another major social issue in the Third Republic. Women were still denied voting rights, but their civil rights expanded. Divorce, banned since 1816, was legalized in 1884, and single women gained control of their own income and property. By the 1880s France had become the first country to experience the demographic transition to low birthrates. Fearing that a stagnant population endangered the country's future, even social conservatives supported "maternalist" welfare measures designed to encourage women to have children and to improve the health of the babies they did have. France was thus in some respects a pioneer in the development of the modern welfare state. The low birthrate meant a demand for labor that gave France the highest rate of female participation in the labor force of any industrialized country. Partly as a result, the country was also in the lead in providing daycare through a system of public nursery schools (écoles maternelles) founded in 1886. The late nineteenth century also saw the beginnings of women's entry into the educated professions. In 1870 a medical degree was granted to a woman for the first time. The creation of public schools for girls in the 1880s created a demand for trained schoolteachers, and women were also hired as inspectors under many of the welfare laws created during the period. The emergence of these "new women" provoked a vocal conservative backlash, and many women themselves, particularly those loyal to the Catholic Church, denounced these developments.

The world wars. In France, as in all combatant countries, World War I caused profound social changes. Because of the country's low birthrate, the staggering casualties—1.3 million men—had a lasting effect on its demographic structure, leaving a population disproportionately elderly and female. The needs of war production dramatized industrial workers' role in the country and gave them an increased sense of their importance. Inflation devalued the savings and investments that undergirded middle-class families' status. Women moved into many jobs that had formerly been reserved for men, causing further tension over gender roles; but France did not follow Britain, the United States, and Germany in giving women the vote. A conservative backlash followed the war, marked by a law banning contraceptives. Immigration, already significant before the war, continued afterward as employers and the government systematically recruited workers from Poland and Italy to fill the ranks of the country's depleted labor force. French industries followed American models in rationalizing their workplaces and trying to establish paternalist discipline over employees, whose militance diminished after the defeat of a widespread wave of strikes in 1919–1920. Industrial workers' living conditions continued to be worse than those of other population groups, especially in the desolate suburbs of Paris's "red belt" of communist-dominated suburbs and other urban areas.

Compared with more industrialized countries, France was not hit as hard by the world economic depression that started in 1929; but its effects were still significant. Together with fear of fascism, protest against economic conditions fueled a mass movement that swept the Popular Front coalition of Socialist, Communist, and middle-class Radical parties to power in 1936. Immediately after the elections, workers staged the largest wave of strikes the country had ever experienced, occupying factories to demand better pay and working conditions. The most long-lasting of the Popular Front's responses was France's first law on paid vacations, generalizing to the entire population what had been a bourgeois privilege. The Popular Front era allowed the Communist Party to implant itself solidly in working-class neighborhoods. The reunification of the French union movement in 1936 extended Communist influence. The party would dominate French labor politics until the 1970s. Some middle-class groups responded to the surge of left-wing radicalism in the 1930s by backing France's numerous quasi-fascist movements.

The military defeat of 1940 ended the Third Republic and brought to power the Vichy government of the authoritarian, conservative World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Under Pétain's aegis, conservative and fascist ideologues tried to remodel French society, often in contradictory ways. Vichy glorified the peasant and artisan traditions of the past but also accelerated industrial modernization to meet the production demands of the occupying Germans. Vichy propaganda talked of replacing the unregulated capitalist economy and its conflicts with a corporatist system, but the organizations it created heavily favored employers. Vichy's paternalist tendencies led to the continuation of prewar trends toward a more comprehensive welfare state: it was Pétain's government that implemented the system of family allowances passed just before the war. Hostility to foreign immigrants, already heightened by the depression, played a role in Vichy's decision to pass anti-Semitic legislation and to turn many of France's Jewish residents over to the Germans.

Opposition to Vichy and the Germans grew steadily as the war progressed. Discredited in 1939 by its support for the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Communist Party recovered once the Germans invaded Russia in 1941; its working-class base became a stronghold of resistance. Other resistance movements brought together trade unionists, intellectuals, feminist activists, Catholics, and a cross-section of patriots from other social groups. From exile, General Charles de Gaulle established himself as the leader of this opposition, but the government he established at the moment of the Liberation in 1944 had a strong left-wing slant. The constitution of the new Fourth Republic, adopted in 1946, included a long list of social rights that laid the basis for a comprehensive welfare state, embodied in the creation of a comprehensive social security system. Although the Communist Party was ousted from the post-Liberation government in 1947, its strong support among workers, especially those in the greatly expanded government-owned sector of the economy, gave it considerable influence. World War II did not cause as many changes in the position of women as had the previous war, but they finally received the right to vote in 1944.

Postwar developments. Economic reconstruction was high on the national agenda after the war, spurred by a centralized planning system and by generous American aid. France's version of the baby boom, evident in statistics as early as 1942, continued into the early 1960s and also stimulated growth. During the "thirty glorious years" from 1945 to the early 1970s, France became a consumer society. Urban centers grew rapidly; the more technocratic government of the Fifth Republic, established in 1958, deliberately encouraged the conversion of small farms into more efficient units and a shift of population from country to city. Increasing prosperity did not end social tensions, however. Workers continued to feel excluded from French society, and the large cohorts of young people born after the war chafed at its rigidity and conservatism. The marked decline in birthrates that followed the introduction of the birth control pill in 1965 was a sign of a widespread shift in social values. Even more spectacular were les événements de mai (the events of May) in 1968, a nationwide wave of strikes by students and workers that completely paralyzed the country. Although this movement did not result in any institutional changes, it profoundly changed the social climate. After 1968 France would become more individualistic, more concerned with consumption than production, and less respectful of hierarchical authority structures.

In retrospect it also became clear that 1968 marked France's move into the era of postindustrial society. The 39 percent of the workforce employed in industry that year was an all-time high. The international economic slowdown that began in the early 1970s hit the country's traditional heavy industries hard and led to a decline of the classic factory proletariat that had been the basis for Communist support. Unemployment, almost unknown during the postwar decades, became a major issue, remaining above 10 percent from the early 1980s to the end of the century. The economic slowdown of the 1970s, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, led voters to turn to the left. The Socialist François Mitterrand, elected as the country's president in 1981, initially took measures similar to those put through by the Popular Front and the Liberation. The minimum wage was raised sharply, workers' rights were increased, and the government promised a break with the world capitalist system. When this policy proved impossible to reconcile with France's increasing integration into the European Community and the world economy, however, Mitterrand changed course. His subsequent policies, often damned by critics as neoliberal, reduced inflation and favored economic growth, but at the cost of high unemployment and the disappearance of many traditional industries.

The most prosperous sectors of the workforce in France, as elsewhere in the developed world, became those in white-collar managerial and bureaucratic jobs, the educated cadres whose consumer-oriented lifestyle has increasingly become the country's social model. Women have succeeded in moving into this group, but only with difficulty; France has lagged behind other industrialized countries on gender issues. Another social problem highlighted once economic growth slowed was the increasing population of non-European immigrants, often from France's former colonies. Many immigrants successfully assimilated into French society, but the poorest found themselves confined to ghettos in the suburbs of large cities, where riots have broke out on several occasions after 1980. As unemployment rose, so did resentment against these groups, particularly those from North Africa; in elections in the late 1980s and 1990s, the vociferously anti-immigrant National Front party regularly claimed up to 15 percent of the vote.

French society at the turn of the century has increasingly come to resemble those of the other nations of western Europe. Like them, France came to be characterized by a very low birthrate, an aging population, a high average per capita income, and an overwhelmingly urban society. The rising costs of France's extensive welfare system have posed major problems, as have the integration of postcolonial immigrants and the achievement of greater equality for women. Some traditional social problems have persisted: neither poverty nor substantial inequality between social groups has been banished from French life. Nevertheless, France's problems can unmistakably be seen as those of a prosperous society protected from the hunger and disease that dominated its life in earlier eras. France's history shows that there has been more than one route to modernity in western Europe. Increasingly ready to merge into a larger European community, the French can take pride especially in having been the first to articulate the principles of individual freedom and social equality that have become the bases of modern European social life.

See also other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature on modern French social history is so extensive that a short bibliography can provide only a suggestion of the richness of the literature and the multiplicity of approaches the subject has inspired.

Synthetic Overviews

Braudel, Fernand, and Ernest Labrousse, eds. Histoire économique et sociale de la France. Paris, 1970–1982. A comprehensive survey of the country's social and economic development.

Duby, Georges, and Armand Wallon, eds. Histoire de la France rurale. Paris, 1975–1976.

Dupâquier, Jacques, ed. Histoire de la population française. Paris, 1988. Stresses demographic developments.

Specialized Monographs

Auslander, Leora. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Berkeley, 1996. An example of newer cultural-history approaches to social history.

Becker, Jean-Jacques. The Great War and the French People. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. New York, 1986.

Bloch, Marc. French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics. Translated by Janet Sondheimer. Berkeley, 1966. Classic founding text of the Annales social-history tradition.

Burrin, Philippe. France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York, 1996. Summary of research on the Vichy period.

Evenson, Norma. Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978. New Haven, Conn., 1979.

Gaspard, Françoise. A Small City in France. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Case study of tensions caused by non-European immigration in late-twentieth-century France.

Godineau, Dominique. The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution. Translated by Katherine Streip. Berkeley, 1998. Women's revolutionary experience from a social-history perspective.

Goubert, Pierre. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Ian Patterson. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1986.

Guillaumin, Emile. The Life of a Simple Man. Translated by Margaret Crosland. Edited by Eugen Weber. Hanover, N.H., 1983. Invaluable first-person account of nineteenth-century rural life.

Jackson, Julian. The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988. The great social movement of the 1930s.

Liu, Tessie P. The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidary in Western France, 1750–1914. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. A regional study of industrialization, offering an exemplary combination of economic and women's history.

Markoff, John. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park, Penn., 1996. Exhaustive quantitative study of rural protest in the French revolutionary era.

Ménétra, Jacques-Louis. Journal of My Life. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. With commentary by Daniel Roche. New York, 1986. A unique first-person account of an eighteenth-century historian's life, with a leading historian's commentary.

Merriman, John. The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century. New York, 1985. A fascinating study of change in this city.

Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920. Princeton, N.J., 1981. The rise of a new commercial culture and its social effects.

Noiriel, Gérard. Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Translated by Helen McPhail. New York, 1990.

Rudé, George. The Crowd in the French Revolution. Oxford, 1959. A monument of modern social history.

Sewell, William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980. Traces continuities and changes in working-class culture.

Smith, Bonnie G. Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J., 1981.

Wylie, Laurence. Village in the Vaucluse. 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. Classic anthropological study of small-town life in mid-century France.