Le village sous l'Ancien Regime.

Lynn, Michael R.

Le village sous l'Ancien Regime, by Antoine Follain. Paris, Fayard, 2008. iii, 609 pp. 27.00 [euro] (paper).

Scholars who write on the history of the village in early modern France are presented with a vast array of issues and problems. They must decide how to define their subject, what to do about absent or insufficient source materials, identify appropriate chronological parameters, and so on. This helps explain the large number of regional studies, instead of national accounts, as well as the focus on the decades immediately prior to the French Revolution rather than the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In Le village sous l'Ancien Regime, Antoine Follain endeavours to address many of these concerns and produce an in-depth, comparative analysis of the village. Drawing on studies written over the last century from every part of France, combined with his own exhaustive understanding of the villages of Normandy, Follain pushes the traditional limits of his subject, forcing his discussion back in time, and creating a work which is both geographically inclusive and covers the entire time period. The result is a broad-based account of the inner workings of villages and their relationship to the state.

After a brief introduction, Follain uses the first substantive chapter to tackle the vast historiography surrounding the subject of villages. This survey starts with an examination of seminal nineteenth-century histories of village life and continues, in a chronological fashion, to the present. He takes to task many earlier historians, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-Pierre Gutton, for making overly facile generalizations about the nature of rural life for the entirety of France based on their regional studies. Similarly, he critiques the tendency of historians to focus on the late eighteenth century and, therefore, reduce all of the Old Regime to the decades prior to the French Revolution. Almost all the historians discussed here are French, leaving the reader to wonder why Follain decided to omit so many other works from this chapter and from his bibliography. In addition, after criticizing so many other historians for using their case studies to discuss all of France, Follain seems unable to avoid the same tactic. Throughout the book, l'exemple normand makes frequent appearances and often seems to dominate Follain's argument.

The bulk of Follain's book explores the development of villages and their institutions over the course of the early modern period. Thus, the ensuing chapters tackle a series of issues, such as the existence and nature of village political culture, the political structure of village governance, the communal nature of village life, and the relationship between the village and local power structures. He organizes his book into six groups of two chapters, what Follain calls "a dynamic approach to the problem of the rural community" (p. 22). Chapters three and four, for example, focus on the definition of the community, what it meant to be a part of the village, and the influence of the parish on social relations. The next two chapters examine how villages divided up and used communal space and commonly held goods as well as the ways in which villages dealt with taxation. He also explores the differences between parish communities and municipalities. In chapters seven and eight, Follain enters into an analysis of the inner political workings of villages. He discusses the composition and character of general assemblies, the nature of political participation, the presence (or absence) of municipal buildings, and the ways in which politics operated at the level of the village.

Follain then turns his attention to the people who ran the village, along with their overall effectiveness. Of particular importance here is the role of the treasurer, although Follain discusses many other positions as well. In the last two chapters Follain concentrates on the state of villages from the end of the seventeenth century to the period of municipal reform after 1787. His goal is to outline the development of villages as fiscal and administrative units, along with their relationship to the state, during this period.

The overall sense that emerges from this book is that villages during the Old Regime are somewhat difficult to compare, have a wide variety of diverse structures and institutions, and defy attempts to create easy typologies. In addition, villages exhibit a strong dynamism over time in response to local conditions and state demands. Nonetheless, Follain does offer a compelling discussion combined with a deep and original exploration of the village from 1500 to 1800. Follain's willingness to delve into comparative analysis provides an excellent counterpoint to his in-depth investigations of particular regions (especially Normandy). Similarly, the chronological breadth allows Follain to draw conclusions about long-term shifts in the village. For this reason, another chapter taking the story into the nineteenth century would have been a welcome addition.

In the last sentence of the book, Follain announces that none of the preceding chapters should be considered as finished or complete. While this statement comes across as a little alarming at the end of a six-hundred-page book, it is no more than the simple truth. Indeed, one issue that emerges after finishing the book is the list of topics Follain did not consider. The author resolutely and manifestly focuses his attention on the history of "villages," for example, but not on the history of "villagers." He does occasionally touch on other issues; religious life, for example, comes under some scrutiny, especially with respect to the influence of parish structure on civic life. Village cultural life as a whole, however, is not his purview in this study. Thus, questions of religious practice, work environments, times of feast and famine, social status, and other such concerns remain markedly absent here, although that does not particularly detract from the book. Follain is not trying to recreate the quotidian experience of the average villager. Instead, he recounts the history of the village itself, its institutions, and its relationship with the state. Through a combination of synthesis and analysis, Follain has written a thorough and fascinating account of Old Regime villages.

Michael R. Lynn

Agnes Scott College