Beneš, Jakub

Carbonell Esteller, Montserrat

Cobo Romero, Francisco

Martín Viso, Iñaki

Morey, Antònia

Peres-Cajias, José

Soto Fernández, David

Torró Gil, Lluís

Wade-Martins, Susanna

English

UCL Discovery

   Crítica de libros  Book reviewsRHA88_portadilla_RESEÑAS__Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 285RHA88_portadilla_RESEÑAS__Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 286Historia Agraria, 88   Diciembre 2022   pp. 287-324   DOI 10.26882/histagrar.088r10b © 2022 The Author(s)  287Laurent Brassart, Corinne Marache, Juan Pan-Montojo and Leen van Molle (Eds.)  Making Politics in the European Countryside, 1780s-1930s Turnhout, Brepols, 2022, 332 pp.The book under review is the nine-teenth volume in the Compara-tive Rural History Network (CORN) series published by Brepols, but it is, somewhat surprisingly, the first to di-rectly address politics. Thirteen chapters, along with a general introduction and three thematic section introductions, consider how and when rural dwellers, particularly peasant villagers, became involved in mod-ern politics. Such questions are not new and have long prompted vigorous debate in some fields, such as the history of nine-teenth-century France (see, for instance, Berenson, 1987). Nonetheless, persuasive answers based on a sufficient sample of de-tailed case studies remain elusive. For one thing, national historiographies on rural matters tend to be more isolated from each other than bodies of work on urban areas, in part reflecting the denser networks of communication and transportation con-necting cities. Sources, moreover, are scarce for illiterate and/or subaltern segments of society with the result that less is written about the countryside in general. And then there is the question of whether peasants who become involved in politics grasp the consequences of their actions. As Eric Hob-sbawm wrote in 1973, ‘their [peasants’] unit of political action is either (in practice) the region or (conceptually) the human race: the parish pump or the universe’ (Hobsbawm, 1973). Fully aware of these challenges and pit-falls, the editors of Making Politics in the European Countryside define politicization expansively as a process whereby inhabi-tants of rural areas appropriated ‘questions and debates relating to the organisation and the future of the communities to which they belonged’ (p. 14). This approach al-lows the volume’s contributors to discuss topics ranging from shifting peasant elec-RHA88_resenas_Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 287pp. 287-324   Diciembre 2022   Historia Agraria, 88288toral behaviour (a classic focus of politi-cization studies) to behaviour with less ob-viously political content, such as ‘meetings, demonstrations, petitions, passive resis-tance, obstruction, strikes, riots and vio-lence, including lynching’ (p. 15). Accord-ing to this framework, politicization may (but need not) entail consistent awareness of the national or state community. More important is the extent to which dwellers of the countryside expressed demands and aspirations with reference —either positive or negative— to concepts of social-political organization that emerged during the era of revolutions and revolutionary wars between the 1780s and the 1850s. At the same time, as Laurent Brassart states in his introduc-tion to part I, the invocation of new mobi-lizing concepts such as ‘national sovereignty, representative democracy and social justice’ (p. 24) did not preclude us-ing forms of action and language from cen-turies past.  The chapters in part I, ‘The shock of wars and revolutions, 1780s-1850s’, show that the deployment or adoption of new po-litical concepts was uneven, reversible, and often locally specific in meaning. In the French villages between the Seine River and the North Sea examined by Jean-Pierre Jessenne, peasants embraced new ideas of citizenship and nationhood in the period 1789-91, but their enthusiasm waned con-siderably thereafter to the point that, after 1800, their ‘politicization’ meant renewed deference to local notables. Brassart and Maxime Kaci meanwhile demonstrate that in the years 1789-1815, highly charged lo-cal events along the current French-Belgian border —migration of radical Brabançon refugees into France, departure of conser-vative émigrés out of France, and resistance to conscription— politicized villages in such diverse ways that it is difficult to gen-eralise. Niels Grüne shows that the ‘translo-calisation’ of issues as well as their framing with respect to new party programs (espe-cially Liberalism) proceeded much further in the first half of the nineteenth century in the north Upper Rhine Plain than in the Hessian Uplands or eastern Westphalia —more socially stratified rural societies that remained beholden to traditional authority. For Denmark, Jesper Lundsby Skov em-phasizes the hard ideological work that key peasant-friendly academics performed to legitimise the 1788 emancipation of the peasantry and the 1849 democratic consti-tution, casting doubt on entrenched no-tions of a centuries-old rural-urban con-sensus in Scandinavia. Part II, ‘Shifting repertoires of collective action’, is arguably the litmus test of the volume’s highly elastic conception of politi-cization. Are things like mob violence and illegal wood-cutting political acts? The col-lective answer provided by the four chap-ters in this section and by Juan Pan-Mon-tojo in the thematic introduction is yes, insofar as such deeds challenge the ex-panding modern state or its representa-tives. According to Alexandre Dupont, the French peasants who in 1870-1 took ad-vantage of the collapse of the Second Em-pire to help themselves to forest resources invoked French patriotism in areas under German occupation, while loudly rejecting the incipient authorities of the Third Re-Crítica de librosRHA88_resenas_Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 288289public in other places. Even as French peasants adopted what Charles Tilly re-ferred to as a ‘modern’ repertoire of col-lective action —encompassing union orga-nizing, strikes, meetings, demonstrations and so on— older (‘archaic’) forms of ac-tion —charivari, field and forest invasions, violence, etc. —did not disappear and even augmented newer tactics well into the 1930s, as Édouard Lynch suggests. Above all, Nadine Vivier argues, French peasants were aware of the political choices they faced from 1848 onward and their appar-ent electoral capriciousness vis-à-vis re-publicanism and populist strongmen (Napoleon III) had less to do with igno-rance than with their distinct attitudes to-wards the state; for instance, they voted against the war-mongering republic in February 1871. Political meaning suffused collective action in less participatory sys-tems than France’s. Rural Spanish crowds that lynched, or attempted to lynch, those who had egregiously affronted popular no-tions of justice in the years 1895-1923 could, as Óscar Bascuñán Añover proposes, either reinforce local clientelist politics (caciquismo) of the restoration era or chal-lenge the entire system, creating opportu-nities for political adversaries.  Highlighting the political potential of such actions certainly contributes to the originality of the volume, though the con-tributors to this section could clarify the in-terpretive payoffs of doing so. What major outcomes in French and Spanish history can be seen in new light thanks to a capa-cious definition of political activity? Does Dupont’s contention that peasant poachers were ‘fully modern, in their own way’ (p. 138) force us to reconsider what we know about modern France, or Spain, or any-where else? Such questions remain to be confronted directly. The third section of the volume, ‘Polit-ical parties in the countryside’, returns the reader to more familiar terrain along with uncontroversial notions of politicization. Nonetheless, the five chapters in this sec-tion address rural politics in refreshing ways, unencumbered by rigid left-right di-chotomies or implicit urban frustration that underpin much previous scholarship on the subject. Together, they bear testimony to Leen van Molle’s pithy remark in the section introduction that the farming classes, particularly smallholding and mid-dling peasants, are ‘political semi-nomads, time and again in search of the best de-fender of their own particular interest’ (p. 216). Milan Řepa charts the development of Czech agrarian politics in Moravia over the final third of the nineteenth century from a camp within the Moravian National Party to a multi-party system featuring two Catholic parties and the socialist-friendly anti-clerical Agrarians. Florencia Peyrou examines Spanish republicans’ translation of early nineteenth-century liberal ideas of nationalization (desamortización) and self-government into demands for land redis-tribution and federalism, which enjoyed brief ascendancy in 1868-74 and the First Spanish Republic (1873-4), before feder-alism bifurcated into platforms of clien-telist conservatism and anarchist socialism. Looking at Catalonia between the 1890 introduction of universal male suffrage and Historia Agraria, 88   Diciembre 2022   pp. 287-324Crítica de librosRHA88_resenas_Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 289Crítica de libros290 pp. 287-324   Diciembre 2022   Historia Agraria, 88the Spanish Civil War, Jordi Planas and Raimon Soler-Becerro emphasize the role of various and competing agricultural as-sociations in shifting rural support away from the previously hegemonic Liberal and Conservative parties to the mass political republicans and regionalists; the former at-tracted adherents of agricultural unions (for example the viticultural rabassaires) while the latter won support among landowners’ associations. If mass political mobilization in the countryside led in 1930s Spain to polarization and Civil War, in Scandinavia it led, uniquely, to compro-mise and consensus between urban and rural interests. But Erik Bengtsson and Josefin Hägglund show the many twists and turns that led to this outcome, from the establishment of the patrician-led Country Party in the 1860s to the secession of left-leaning agrarians into urban-dominated populism to the establishment of compet-ing anti-urban Farmers’ Leagues in the 1910s and their eventual merging in the 1920s. Miguel Cabo’s magisterial con-cluding chapter in many ways provides the framing for the foregoing studies, providing at once a macro-explanation for the rise of agrarian parties as a response to the late nineteenth-century agrarian economic cri-sis in contexts where cooperativism, agrar-ian pressure groups within conventional parties, and agricultural unions proved in-sufficient as well as a useful anatomy of agrarianism in practice. Drawing on copi-ous scholarship in at least nine languages, Cabo argues that agrarian parties, despite their ambivalence towards the political left, contributed to an expansion of civil society particularly through educational initiatives and, exceptions aside, generally defended liberal parliamentary structures.  The panorama of rural politics and politicization afforded by this volume con-stitutes a significant addition to our un-derstandings of the European countryside in the modern era. Its value would have in-creased substantially with a wider geo-graphical scope. Given that agrarianism ar-guably reached its apex in east central and eastern Europe in the first half of the twen-tieth century, it is regrettable that aside from Řepa’s chapter on Moravia and parts of Cabo’s herculean synthesis, the region is neglected, with critical cases of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Poland, not to mention Rus-sia and Ukraine, left out. While political agrarianism did not reach the same heights in other parts of the continent, scholars of comparative rural politicization would also benefit from considering developments in Greece, Italy, and Ireland. In sum, the ed-itors and contributors to this volume have, together, taken a large and bold step toward a fuller understanding of rural people’s in-volvement in modern politics. Many more ought to follow their lead.   Jakub Beneš orcid.org/ 0000-0002-0528-2057  University College London  REFERENCES BERENSON, Edward (1987). Politics and the French Peasantry: the debate continues. Social History 12(2): 213-229. HOBSBAWM, Eric J. (1973). Peasants and politics. The Journal of Peasant Studies 1(1): 3-22.RHA88_resenas_Maquetación HA  29/11/2022  13:48  Página 290

Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros (Historia Agraria, 88)

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Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros (Historia Agraria, 88)

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