The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn

The Bachelors' Ball The Crisis of Peasant Society in Beam

PIERRE BOURDIEU

Translated by Richard Nice

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

First published in French as Le bal des celibataires © Editions du Seuil, 2002. This English translation 2008 © Polity Press Ouvrage publie avec le concours du Ministere francais charge de la Culture—Centre national du livre. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture—Nation Centre for the Book. All rights reserved. Published 2008 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 0 8 ISBN-13: ISBN-13: ISBN-10: ISBN-10:

12 3 4 5

978-0-226-06749-0 (cloth) 978-0-226-06750-6 (paper) 0-226-06749-1 (cloth) 0-226-06750-5 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002. [Bal des celibataires English] The bachelors' ball : the crisis of peasant society in Beam / Pierre Bourdiei translated by Richard Nice. p. cm. Articles previously published in 1962, 1972, and 1989. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06749-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-06749-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06750-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-06750-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Single people—FranceBeam. 2. Marriage—France—Beam. 3. Sociology, Rural—France— Beam. 4. Beam (France)—Rural conditions. I. Title. HQ800.4.F82B68413 2008 306.81'520944716— clumsy (desestruc)y grumpy (arrebouhiec)^ sometimes gross (a cops grousse), graceless with women (chic amistous ap las hennes)' (P. L.-M.). It is said of him, n'ey pas de here, literally 'he is not at the fair' (to go to the fair, one put on one's smartest clothes), he is not presentable. Thus the young women, who are more open to urban ideals, and rendered particularly attentive and sensitive by all their cultural training to gestures and attitudes, clothing and a person's whole demeanour [tenue], readier to deduce deep personality from external appearance, judge the men according to alien criteria. Judged by this standard, the men are worthless. Placed in such a situation, the peasant is led to internalize the image that others form of him, even when it is a simple stereotype. He comes to perceive his body as a body marked by a social stamp, as an empaysanit, 'em-peasanted' body, bearing the trace of the attitudes and activities associated with peasant life. So he is embarrassed by his body, and in his body. Because he grasps his body as a peasant's body, he has an unhappy consciousness of his body. Because he grasps his body as 'em-peasanted', he has a consciousness of being an 'empeasanted' peasant. It is no exaggeration to assert that it is for him a moment of exceptional awareness of the peasant condition. This unhappy consciousness of his body, which leads him (in contrast to the town-dweller) to break solidarity with it, which inclines him to an introverted attitude, the root of shyness and gaucheness, excludes him from the dance, prevents him from having simple, natural attitudes in the presence of the girls. Being embarrassed by his body, he is awkward and clumsy in all the situations that require one to 'come out of oneself or to put one's body on display. To present one's body as a spectacle, as in dancing, presupposes that one consents to externalize oneself and that one has a contented awareness of the image of oneself that one projects to others. Shyness and the fear of ridicule are, by contrast, linked to a fascinated awareness of oneself and one's body, to a consciousness fascinated by its corporality. Thus, the reluctance to dance is only one manifestation of this acute consciousness of the peasant condition which is, as we have seen, also expressed in self-mockery and self-irony - particularly in the comic tales in which the unfortunate hero is always the peasant struggling to come to grips with the urban world. Thus, economic and social condition influences the vocation to marriage mainly through the mediation of the consciousness that men attain of that situation. The peasant who attains self-awareness has

The peasant and his body

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a strong likelihood of seeing himself as a 'peasant' in the pejorative sense of the word. One sees a confirmation of this in the fact that among the bachelors onefindseither the most 'empeasanted' peasants or the most self-aware peasants - those most aware of what remains 'peasant' within them.8 It is to be expected that the encounter with a girl brings the unease to its paroxysm of intensity. First, it is an occasion upon which the peasant experiences, more acutely than ever, the awkwardness of his body. In addition, owing to the separation of the sexes, girls are entirely shrouded in mystery. 'Pi. went on outings organized by the parish priest. Not too often to the beach, on account of the provocative swimsuits. Co-ed outings with girls from the same movement, the JAC.9 These excursions - fairly rare, one or two a year - took place before military service. The girls remained in a closed circle in the course of them. Although there was some shared singing and a few timid games, you had the impression that nothing could happen between participants of different sexes. Camaraderie between boys and girls does not exist in the country. You can be friends with a girl only when you experience friendship and when you know what it means. For the majority of boys, a girl remains a girl, with everything that is mysterious about a girl, with the great difference that there is between the two sexes, and a gulf that is not easily crossed. One of the best ways to come into contact with girls (the only one there is in the countryside) is the ball. After a few timid attempts, which never took him further than the Java, Pi. stopped asking. They fetched him a neighbour's daughter who didn't dare refuse. That was one dance at least. Just one or two dances at each ball, that's to say every fortnight or every month, is little, very little. Certainly too little to be able to go from ball to ball further afield with any chance of success. That's how you end up as one of those who watch the others dancing. You watch them until two in the morning; then you go home, thinking that those who are dancing are having fun; and so the gap widens. If you want to marry, it becomes serious. How are you to get close to a girl you fancy? How do you find an opportunity, especially if you're not the go-getter type? There's only the ball. Outside the ball, there is no salvation .. . How do you keep up a conversation and lead it to an embarrassing subject? It's a hundred times easier in the course of a tango... The lack of relations and contacts with the opposite sex is bound to give a complex to the most audacious young man. 8

Many boys from the bourg are objectively as clumsy as some peasants from the hameauxy but are not conscious of it. 9 Jeunesse Agricole Catholique, 'y° u n g catholic farmers', founded in 1929 |trans.].

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It's even worse when he has a slightly shy nature. You can overcome shyness when you have everyday contact with women, but if you don't it can get worse. Fear of ridicule, which is a form of pride, can also hold a man back. Shyness, sometimes a bit of false pride, having to come out of your shell, all that creates a gulf between a girl and a decent young man' (P. C). The cultural norms that govern the expression of feelings help to make dialogue difficult. For example, affection between parents and children is expressed much more in attitudes and gestures than in words, i n the old days, when the harvesting was still done with sickles, the harvesters would move forward in a row. My father, who was working beside me, would cut in front of me when he saw I was tired, to give me some relief, without saying anything' (A. B.). Not so long ago, father and son would feel some awkwardness at being in the cafe together, no doubt because it could happen that someone would tell lewd stories or make remarks that would have caused intolerable embarrassment to both of them. The same modesty dominated relations between brothers and sisters. Everything that relates to intimacy, to 'nature', is banned from conversation. While the peasant may enjoy making or hearing the most unrestrained remarks, he is supremely discreet when it comes to his own sexual and especially emotional life. In a general way, feelings are not something it is appropriate to talk about. The verbal awkwardness that compounds physical clumsiness is experienced as embarrassment, both for the young man and for the young woman, especially when the latter has learned the stereotyped language of urban sentimentality from women's magazines and serialized love stories. 'Dancing isn't just a matter of knowing the steps, putting one foot in front of another. And even that isn't so easy for some people. You also need to know how to talk to girls, before you dance and while you're dancing. You've got to be able to talk during the dance about something besides farm work and the weather. And not many men can do that' (R. L.). If women are much quicker than men to adopt urban cultural models regarding both the body and dress, this is for various convergent reasons. First, they are much more strongly motivated than men, because for them the town represents the hope of emancipation. It follows that they present a privileged example of what Mauss called 'prestigious imitation'.10 The attraction and the grip of new products or new techniques in matters of comfort, of the ideals of courtesy or the entertainments offered by the bourg, are to a large extent due to 111

Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, p. 101.

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the fact that they are seen to bear the stamp of urban civilization, identified, rightly or wrongly, with civilization as such. Fashion comes from Paris, from the city; the model is imposed from above. Women strongly aspire to urban life and this aspiration is not unreasonable, since, according to the logic of matrimonial exchanges, they circulate upwards. They look first and foremost to marriage for the fulfilment of their wishes. Placing all their hopes in marriage, they are strongly motivated to adapt by adopting the outward appearances of the women of the bourg. But there is more to it: women are prepared by their whole cultural training to be attentive to the external details of the person and more especially to everything that has to do with 'tenue' in all its senses. They have a statutory- monopoly of the judgement of taste. This attitude is encouraged and favoured by the whole cultural system. It is not uncommon to hear a ten-year-old girl discussing the cut of a skirt or a bodice with her mother or her friends. This type of behaviour is rejected by the boys, because it is discouraged by social sanction. In a society dominated by masculine values, everything, by contrast, helps to favour the rough, coarse, pugnacious attitude. A man who paid too much attention to his dress and appearance would be regarded as 'gentrified' or (which amounts to the same thing) effeminate. It follows that, whereas men, by virtue of the norms that dominate their early upbringing, are struck by a kind of cultural blindness (in the sense in which linguists speak of 'cultural deaf-muteness'11) as regards all aspects of Henue\ from bodily hexis to cosmetics, women are much more inclined to perceive urban models and integrate them into their behaviour, whether it be clothing or techniques of the body.12 The peasant woman speaks the language of urban fashion well because she hears it well, and she hears it well because the 'structure* of her cultural language predisposes her to do so. What peasant men and women perceive, both in the hameau-dweUer and 11 The term is used by E. Pulgram, Introduction to the Spectrograph-}' of Speech (The Hague: Mouton, 1959). See also N. S. Trubetzkoy, Principles of Phonology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 51-5, 62-4. 12 Clothing is an important aspect of overall appearance. It is in this area that one sees most clearly the men's 'cultural blindness' to some aspects of urban civilization. Most of the bachelors wear the suit made by the village tailor. 'Some try out wearing sports outfits. They get it all wrong in combining the colours. It is only when the mother in the family is up-to-date or, better, when his sisters, who are more in tune with fashion, take things in hand, that you see well-dressed peasants' (P. C). In a general way, if a man has sisters, this can only increase his chances of marriage. Through them, he can get to know other girls; he may even learn to dance with them.

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the world of the hameau and in other peasants, is thus a function of their respective cultural systems. It follows that whereas the women adopt first the external signs of 'urbanity', the men borrow deeper cultural models, particularly in the technical and economic sphere. And it is easy to understand why this is so. The town is, for the peasant woman, first of all the department store. 'Clothes, too, are worn out of doors, and people of different classes meet and notice each other, so that there is a certain uniformity here also. A common market exists for food and to some extent for clothes.'13 Given the one-sided and superficial character of her perception of the town, it is natural that the young peasant woman associates urban life with a certain type of clothes and hairstyle, clear signs, in her eyes, of freedom - in short, she only sees, as the saying goes, the good side of it; and it is understandable, on the one hand, that the town exerts a real fascination for her and, on the other hand, that she borrows from the townswoman the external signs of her condition, in other words what she knows of her. From time immemorial, the better to prepare them for marriage and also because they were less indispensable to the farm than the boys, a number of families would place their daughters in apprenticeships, as soon as they left school, with a seamstress for example. Since the creation of the cours complementaire,14 they have been more readily persuaded than boys to pursue their studies to the brevet elementaire, which can only increase the attractiveness of the town and widen the gap between the sexes.15 In the town, through women's li M. Halbwachs, The Psychology of Social Class (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 95. 14 Additional years of schooling after primary education [trans.]. 11 Distribution of pupils in the cours complementaire in Lesquire in 1962 by sex and parents' socio-occupational category:

Sodo-occupational category of parents

o

I Male Female Total

9 17 26

2 0 2

5-*

B

o

8

5

a 2

k «£ .2 A 2 c

2 5 7

1 2 3

1 2 3

O

*§ S

S

o

£

4 3 7

2 2 4

21 31 52

The peasant and his body

91

magazines, serials, 'film stories' and songs on the radio,16 girls also borrow models of the relations between the sexes and a type of ideal man who is entirely the opposite of the 'empeasanted' peasant. In this way there is built up a whole system of expectation which the peasant cannot fulfil. We are a long way from the shepherdess in the ballad whose only ambition was to marry 'a good peasant's son':17 the 'gentleman' is back in favour. Owing to the duality of the frames of reference, a consequence of the different rates at which the sexes adopt urban cultural models, women judge their peasant menfolk by criteria that leave them no chance. It is then understandable that a certain number of dynamic farmers will remain unmarried. Thus, of the farms where bachelors are found, 14 per cent - all belonging to relatively well-off peasants - have been modernized. In the new rural elite, among the members of the JAC18 and the CUMA19 in particular, many are unmarried. Even when it helps to confer a certain prestige, modernism in the technical domain does not necessarily favour marriage. 'Young men like La., Pi., Po., perhaps some of the most intelligent and dynamic in this whole area, have to be classified among the "unmarriageable". Yet they dress properly and they go out a lot. They have brought in new methods and new crops. Some have modernized their houses. It's enough to make you think that, in this domain, imbeciles do better than the rest' (P. C). In the old days, a bachelor was never really an adult in the eyes of society, which made a clear distinction between responsibilities left to the young people, that is to say the unmarried, such as for example the preparation of public holiday celebrations, and the responsibilities reserved for adults, such as the town council;20 nowadays, failure to marry is increasingly seen as an Because they spend more time at home than the men, women listen more to the radio. A reference to the song quoted earlier [trans.J: 'Fair shepherdess, will you give me your love? I will be forever true ro you. You qu'aymi mey u bet hilh de paysa . . . (I would rather take a good peasant's son .. .) Why, shepherdess, are you so cruel? Et bous moussu quet tan amourous? (And you, sir, why are you so amorous?) I cannot love all those fair ladies . . . E you moussu qu'em fouti de bous .. . (And I, sir, give not a damn for you)' (collected in Lesquire, 1959) Jeunesse Agricole Catholique, see note 9 above [trans.]. " Cooperative d'Utilisation du Materiel Agricole, see p. 80, note 24, above [trans.]. 20 Marriage marks a break in the course of life. From one day to the next, there are no more dances, no more going out in the evening. Young people of bad reputation have often been seen to suddenly change their behaviour and, as the phrase goes, 'fall

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inevitability, so that it has ceased to appear as something imputable to individuals, to their faults and shortcomings. 'When they belong to a great family, people find excuses for them - especially when the appeal of a great family is combined with the appeal of a strong personality. People say, "It's a shame, and yet he has a fine property, he's intelligent, and so on." When he has a strong personality, he manages to make his mark anyway, otherwise he is diminished' (A. B.). This will be seen more concretely through the story told by a woman who, as a neighbour, went to help with the pelere, the slaughter and processing of the pig, at the farm of two bachelors aged 40 and 37. 'We said to them: "What a mess we found!" Those birds (aquets piocs)\ Just touching their crockery! Filthy! We didn't know where to look. We threw them out of the house. We said to them, "You should be ashamed! Instead of marrying . . . We shouldn't have to do that... You need wives to do that for you." They hung their heads and crept away. When there is a daune, the women - neighbours or relatives - are there to help. But when there are no wives, the women [who come to help] have to decide everything' (M. P.-B.). The fact that 42 per cent of the farms run by bachelors (of which 38 per cent are classed as poor peasants) are in decline as against only 16 per cent of the farms belonging to married men shows that there is a clear correlation between the state of the farm and bachelorhood; but the decline of the property can be as much the effect as the cause of the absence of marriage. Bachelorhood, experienced as a social diminishment, induces in many cases an attitude of resignation and renunciation, resulting from the lack of a long-term future. Again a testimony confirms this: 'I went to see Mi., in the Houratate neighbourhood. He has a well-kept farmhouse surrounded by pine trees. He lost his father and mother around 1954 and now he's about 50. He lives alone. "I'm ashamed to be seen by you looking like this," he said. He was blowing on a fire he had lit in the courtyard to do his washing. "I'd have liked to invite you in and do you the honours. You have never been. But, you know, it's a real mess inside. When you live alone . . . Girls don't want to come out into the country any more. I've given up hope, you know. I would have liked to have a family. I would have organized things a bit, on this side of the house [the custom is to do something in the house when the eldest son is into line*. 'Ca. hung out at all the dances. He married a girl younger than him who had never gone out. He had three children with her in three years. She never goes out, though she'd love to. He'd never think of taking her to a dance or to the cinema. That's all over. They don't even get dressed up* (P. C ) .

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married]. But now the land is blighted. There won't be anyone else. I can't bring myself to work on it. True, my sister came; she does come from time to time. She's married to a man who works for the railways. She comes with her husband and her little daughter. But she can't stay here"'21 (A. B.). The bachelor's plight is often exacerbated by the pressure of the family, who are desperate at seeing him reduced to this. 'I give them an earful,' said a mother whose two, already elderly, sons were still not married; 'I tell them "You're afraid of women! You spend all your time drinking! What will you do when I'm gone? I can't do it for you!"' (Widow A., aged 84). And another, talking to one of her son's friends, said: 'He needs to be told he has to get a wife, he should have married at the same time as you. Really, it's terrible. We are about as alone as can be' (related by P. C ) . No doubt everyone makes it a matter of pride and honour to disguise the shame of his situation, perhaps drawing on a long tradition of bachelorhood for the resources of resignation he needs to endure an existence that has no present and no future. Yet bachelorhood is the privileged occasion to experience the wretchedness of the peasant condition. If the bachelor expresses his misery by saying that 'the land is blighted', this is because he cannot do otherwise than grasp his condition as determined by a necessity that weighs on the whole of the peasant class. The non-marriage of men is experienced by all of them as the index of the mortal crisis of a society incapable of providing the most innovative and boldest of the eldest sons, the trustees of the heritage, with the possibility of perpetuating their lineage, in short, incapable of safeguarding the foundations of its order, at the same time as making room for innovative adaptation.

21

The judgements of opinion are often severe but they confirm the conclusions of the bachelors themselves. 'They have no taste for work. There are 50 of them like that who haven't married. They are wine-tipplers. If you're looking for men to drink on the carrere ... The land is blighted.'

Conclusion

'Girls don't want to come out into the country any more . . . ' The judgements of spontaneous sociology are always partial and onesided. The constitution of the object of research as such no doubt also presupposes the selection of one aspect. But, because the social fact, whatever it may be, presents itself as an infinite plurality of aspects, because it appears as a web of relationships that have to be untangled one by one, this selection cannot fail to see itself for what it is, to offer itself as provisional and supersede itself through analysis of the other aspects. The primary task of sociology is perhaps to reconstitute the totality from which one can discover the unity of the subjective awareness that the individual has of the social system and of the objective structure of that system. The sociologist endeavours on the one hand to grasp and understand the spontaneous consciousness of the social fact, a consciousness that, by virtue of its essence, does not reflect on itself, and on the other hand to apprehend the fact in its own nature, by means of the privilege provided to him by his situation as an observer renouncing the opportunity to 'act on the social' in order to think it. That being so, he must aim to reconcile the truth of the objective 'given' that his analysis enables him to understand and the subjective certainty of those who live in it. When he describes, for example, the internal contradictions of the system of matrimonial exchanges, even when those contradictions do not present themselves as such to the consciousness of those who are victims of them, he is simply thematizing the lived experience of the

Conclusion

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men who concretely experience those contradictions in the form of the impossibility of marrying. While he declines to give credit to the consciousness that the subjects have of their situation and to take literally the explanation they give of it, he takes that consciousness sufficiently seriously to try to discover its real foundation, and can only be satisfied when he manages to bring together in the unity of an understanding the truth immediately given to lived consciousness and the truth laboriously acquired through scientific reflection. Sociology would not be worth an hour of effort if its sole aim were to discover the strings that move the actors it observes, if it were to forget that it is dealing with people, even when those very people, like puppets, play a game of which they do not know the rules, in short, if it did not assign itself the task of restoring to those people the meaning of their actions. The informants J.-P. A., 85, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg but spent all his jouth in a hameau; widower; primary education [level of Certificat d'Etudes Primaires: CEP]; interviews alternated between French and Bearnais. P. C , 32, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; educated to level of Brevet Elementaire [elementary certificate]; junior executive; interviews in French. A. B., 60, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; level of Brevetfilementaire;junior executive; interviews in French, breaking occasionally into Bearnais. P. L., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; widower; primary education; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. P. L.-M., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; bachelor; primary education; craftsman; interviews alternated between French and Bearnais. A. A., 81, lives in a hameau; widower; can read and write; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. F. L., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; married; can read and write; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. Mme J. L., 65, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; married; can read and write; peasant farmer's wife; interviews in Bearnais. R. L., 35, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; can read and write; shopkeeper; interviews in French. Mme A, 84, born in Lesquire; lives in the hameau; widow; can read and write; worked as peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais.

96

nacneiowooa ana we reasani ^onanton

B. P., 45, born in a neighbouring village; lives in the hameau; married; primary education; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. L. C , 42, born in a neighbouring village; lives in the bourg; married; primary education; shopkeeper; interviews in French. Similar information regarding the bachelors is also to be found in the transcripts of their interviews. The testimonies given in the local language are transcribed in the spelling conventionally used in Bearnais literature.

Appendix I Bibliographical notes

The Pyrenean provinces - Bigorre, Lavedan, Beam and the Basque country - preserved an original customary law the rules of which could only be maintained in manifest contradiction of the principles and legislation of the Civil Code. This fact has not failed to attract the attention of historians and legal scholars. The law of Beam', writes Pierre Luc, 'appears to be essentially a customary law and shows very little influence of Roman law. As such it offers us an extremely interesting model. Such things, for example, as the swearing of oaths of innocence with oath-helpers, the designating of hostages to guarantee contracts, mort-gagey and the possibility of acquitting monetary obligations in kind were still currently practised there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while in certain other regions they had fallen into disuse more than two centuries earlier' [12, pp. 3-4]. Beam has interested jurists and historians because, in contrast to what happened in most provinces of southern France, local customs long resisted contact with Roman law. For a long time, legal and historical studies were exclusively based on collections of customary laws, in other words, on the Fors de Beam. Thus, as early as the eighteenth century, some local jurists, De Maria [1 and 2], Labourt [3] and Mourot [4 and 5], wrote commentaries on the Fors de Beam, particularly on the subject of the dowry Bibliographical notes compiled in collaboration with Marie-Claire Bourdieu. Numbers in brackets refer to items on the bibliographical list that follows on p. 105.

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[dot] and on the customs of succession. Unfortunately, there is only one rather mediocre edition of the Fors [6], which brings together often very corrupted readings dating from various periods and therefore needs a great deal of critical editing (as was already observed by Roge [7 and 8]) before it can serve as the basis for an analysis. Since such an edition does not yet exist, modern scholars have concentrated on the reformed For of 1551, on the wide variety of legal treatises available since the sixteenth century and, above all, on the commentaries on these texts by the legal scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though two of these modern studies, Laborde's work on the dowry in Beam [9] and Dupont's book on the practices of succession in Beam [10], are based on the reformed For and on the jurisprudence of the last two centuries of the monarchy, they are extremely valuable. The voluminous thesis of Fougeres [11] merely repeats, at least for Beam, what had already been said in earlier works. The historians of law have come to the conclusion that compilations of customary law should be used with caution, since they present a relatively theoretical law containing obsolete rules while neglecting provisions that are still observed. They have found that notarized documents are one source that can furnish information on actual practices. The model for this type of research is the work of Pierre Luc [12]. On the basis of notarial registers, this author first studied the living conditions of the rural population and the system of land ownership, the structure of the Beam family and the rules under which its patrimony was preserved and passed on to the next generation. In the second part, he examines the technical and legal procedures involved in working the land in the framework of the family and of the community, as well as a number of problems concerning the rural economy, such as credit and practices of exchange. Comparison between the information that can be gathered from ethnographic inquiry about the Beam society of the past and the data that historians and legal scholars have derived from the documents (customary law and notarial registers) can serve as a basis for a methodological reflection on the relationship between ethnology and history, and more precisely the history of law. The mountains of Beam and Bigorre are also where Frederic Le Play, the most famous critic of the Code Napoleon, situated the famille souche, the 'stem' family, which he considered the ideal family organization, especially by contrast with the 'unstable' family resulting from application of the Civil Code [13]. Having defined three types of families, namely, the patriarchal family, the 'unstable' family - which is characteristic of modern society - and the 'stem' family,

Bibliographical notes

99

Le Play proceeds to describe the latter (pp. 29ff) and enumerates the advantages each of its members derives from it: 'On the eldest, who carries a heavy burden of obligations, it (this system of inheritance) confers the respect attached to the ancestral home or workshop; to those members who marry outside the family, it gives the support of the "stem" house along with the satisfactions of independence; to those who prefer to remain in the paternal home it gives the tranquillity of bachelorhood as well as the joys of the family; and to all it affords the happiness of reliving in their paternal home the joys of early childhood, even in advanced old age' (pp. 36-7). 'By instituting one heir in every generation, the landowning stem family does not sacrifice the interests of the younger children to those of the eldest. On the contrary, it obliges the latter to renounce the net profit of his work throughout his life, first in favour of his siblings, then in favour of his children. The family can only obtain this material sacrifice by granting him a compensation of a moral order, namely the respect attached to the possession of the ancestral home' (p. 114). The second part of Le Play's book is a monograph on the Melouga family, an example of the stem family of the Lavedan in 1856. An epilogue by E. Cheysson describes the end of that family under the impact of the law and the new mores: 'Until very recently, the Melouga family had continued to exist; it was like a living remnant of a once powerful and fruitful social organization. But it, too, finally succumbed to the influence of the law and of the new mores that had spared it owing to an exceptional combination of favourable circumstances. The Code is doing its work; the levelling process continues; the stem family is dying; the stem family is dead' (p. 298). The claims of the theoreticians of the Le Play school are not borne out by the data of ethnographical studies. They are also contradicted by the work of Saint-Macary [14] who, on the basis of the notarized documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showed the persistence of inheritance and marriage patterns that do not conform to the Civil Code. The various authors offer very varied explanations for the permanence of the family institution and the inheritance customs that are bound up with it. For J. Bonnecaze, for example, 'the maintenance of the organic conception of the family by the rural populations of Beam has no other source than the Bearnais soul itself, of which it is the reflection' [15]. This 'soul' is characterized by a profound mysticism expressed in the cult of the house and the spirit of sacrifice to the values of the group, allied to a very realistic conception of the economic and social factors attached to the organization of the stem family.

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Others have explained the persistence of ways of life and customs in terms of geographical and historical factors. Beam was the only feudal state to break free completely from the authority of the king of France, and the viscount of Beam the only feudal lord who fully asserted his rights. This explains why, of all the old provinces, Beam was the one that remained longest on the margins of the kingdom of France. Its spirit of independence and its refusal to merge its identity were kept up until the Revolution. A century after its attachment to France, the Intendants who sought to impose the laws and ways of the centralizing monarchy still encountered mistrust and hostility from the bodies representing the Bearnais community - the Parlement of Pau and the fitats de Beam. The longevity of this national resistance implied strong internal cohesion; and, indeed, the two groups which formed the Beam population, the shepherds of the mountain valleys and the peasants of the foothills, had social organizations which, though distinct, were both characterized by a high degree of integration. So there is every reason to think the explanation for the permanence of profoundly original cultural models should be sought in an original history. But the history of Beam has never been studied from that point of view. It therefore seemed necessary to seek the elements of such a study in already published works, even if the gaps in the documentation make it impossible to present a real synthesis. As regards the Middle Ages, the authors have mainly been interested in the rural life and social organization of the Pyrenean populations. Copious documentation will be found in the first part of the works of Theodore Lefebvre [17] and Henry Cavailles [18], as well as good bibliographies. The rural history of the populations of the foothills is much less well known. However, Pierre Luc's work, already cited [12], presents a detailed picture of rural life, farming techniques and the condition of the rural populations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although this study would have gained from being placed in a historical context and making use of the comparative method. While the remarkable stability of Beam rural society appears to be linked to the inheritance and matrimonial customs, the permanence of these customs themselves cannot be explained without a study of seigniory and the community of the bests (lou besiat or besiau). If, as March Bloch thought, 'these two kinds of bonds are not antinomic, but, on the contrary, reinforce each other', then a study of the rural seignory, characterized by its modest dimensions and a simplified organization (the interlocking of feudal rights seems to have been less intense than elsewhere), might supply

Bibliographical notes

101

one of the reasons for the internal cohesion of the small peasant communities. Although it is mainly devoted to political and institutional history, P. Tucoo-Chalaa's work [19] makes an important contribution to the history of Beam society of that time and more especially to the history of the rural classes that is part of the general history of the viscounty. Without claiming to offer an exhaustive study of the rural seigniory, Tucoo-Chalaa emphasizes its originality: he shows that the opposition in lifestyles and interests between the mountain populations and the lowland peasants dominates the whole rural history of Beam and explains many facets of the evolution of Beam society up to the French Revolution. The need to protect the landholding against fragmentation is certainly due to a large extent to the fact that the mountain populations placed severe restrictions for the lowland peasants on all the uncultivated land which could have allowed an extension of the patrimony through clearance. Some aspects of the history of the rural classes are covered in the works of J.-B. Laborde [20 and 21], the author of a history of Beam which is well documented and enriched with the findings of personal research [16]. In the Middles Ages, the peasantry of the foothills still included a significant proportion of serfs, as shown by the works of Paul Raymond [22 and 23]. They were freed only within the framework of the movement of the bastides, which developed relatively late, in the early fourteenth century. The history of the institutions of the Middle Ages provides valuable insights into the birth of the Beam nation. It enables one to follow, through the extension of the fors and privileges and through the progress of communal freedoms, the formation of this little independent state, with a remarkable system of legislation which gave the Bearnais the opportunity of playing a significant role in public affairs. Institutions like the £tats de Beam, or, at the level of the community, the assemblies oibesis and their jurats [municipal magistrates], appear as a force for integration of the society, if only through their role in maintaining the Bearnais language and the local customs, and as the expression of a strongly integrated society. The basic data on the history of the institutions are brought together by P. Tucoo-Chalaa in chapter 13 of Histoire des institutions au Moyen Agey entitled 'Les institutions de la vicomte de Beam (Xe-XVe siecles)' [25]. The work by Leon Cadier [26], though older and contested on some points by Tucoo-Chalaa, nonetheless remains the essential reference for the whole period of the establishment of the institutions, bringing to light the dual origin, feudal and 'democratic', of the Etats. Although they stemmed from the old feudal court, which was itself

102

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

a particularly strong and influential institution owing to the independence of the vassal nobles from the suzerain, the long process of transformation of this court into a representative assembly of the three orders of the Province can only be understood by reference to the development of municipal and bourgeois liberties; but these had no doubt found a favourable soil in the spirit of independence that was alive in the communities by virtue of the various privileges and liberties with which the viscounts of Beam had endowed them as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the vitality of the old feudal institutions, the liberalism of the suzerain and the extent of the rights and freedoms acquired by the communities and towns all contributed to the establishment of this liberal institution, which, from the end of the Middle Ages, gave an equal place to nobles and commoners, which was to play such an important role in the government and administration of the country, and which was to exert such a great influence over legislation and be the backbone of resistance to assimilation into the kingdom of France. 'Few provinces of Old France', Cadier concludes, 'had such liberal institutions as the small independent state of Beam.' There is no overall study of the evolution of Bearnais rural society and economy in the last centuries of the ancien regime and during the Revolution. The most recent and most synthetic works on this period are those of Maurice Bordes [27, 28 and 29]. It seems that it was in this period that the stability of Bearnais society was most clearly manifested. Whereas in other regions the rural economy and society were shaken by the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, in Beam the technical and economic transformations seem to have helped to strengthen the internal cohesion of the society and consolidate its economic bases. The factor that dominates the rural history of eighteenth-century France is demographic expansion. After long centuries of demographic stability (it had not suffered the haemorrhage of population resulting from the Hundred Years' War), Beam too saw its population increase in the second half of the century, although, to judge from the figures cited by J.-B. La fond, to a lesser extent than other regions [31]. The question is whether this increase was great enough to lead to the creation of a class of labourers, as in other provinces. Everything suggests that was not the case, since we know that it resulted in a wave of emigration abroad, especially to Spain, and since it seems that this society, given its structure, could integrate this slight increase. Even wrhen the land could not feed the whole family, those offspring who were to earn their living as employees retained close links with the family estate. Thus the younger sons who formed the

Bibliographical notes

103

underclass of domestic servants and labourers remained attached to the traditional social organization. The slow growth of the population also helps to explain the weak development of the towns, and consequently of industry and commerce, as shown by Abbe Roubaud in his review of the Beam economy in 1774 [32]. Because it always remained small in number, the bourgeois class never took possession of a large proportion of the peasants* landholdings, all the more so because, after having long invested their incomes in livestock, they mainly aimed to acquire the aristocratic lands, for reasons of prestige. This explains why the various forms of indirect land ownership, in particular tenant farming, never took a strong hold. The peasant, the master of his own domain, was able to enclose it relatively early, because of the structure of land ownership. 'In Beam . .. each community, or almost, possessed, next to its "plain" of entirely arable land, its "slopes" covered with fern, gorse and grasses, where every year the peasants would come and clear the space for several fields, which would soon disappear again' [33]. These heaths constitute great natural grazing areas which made it possible to suppress the common pastures and therefore fallow land on the ploughed areas. Moreover, inheritance and matrimonial custom had preserved the landholding against the fragmentation which elsewhere held back the movement towards enclosure [30]. A comparison of the reviews of the Bearnais economy drawn up by Intendant Lebret in 1703 [34] and Prefect Serviez [35] at the end of the century shows the scale of the transformation of techniques and crops resulting from this movement. At the same time, there were endeavours to clear uncultivated land, favoured by the Edicts of Clos and sometimes even common lands. These attempts were encouraged by the Intendants and the local authorities (especially d'fetigny). Marc Bloch has shown how egoistically the Beam lords fought against the collective rights; but no study tells us what the attitude of the communities was [36 and 37]. The suppression of fallows, the introduction of fodder plants and especially maize, mentioned by L. Godefroy, contributed to a considerable improvement in living standards, which was assisted by the relatively low population growth [17]. And so it is understandable that in 1787 Arthur Young was able to find in Beam the spectacle of a prosperity found nowhere else in the realm of France: 'Take the road to Moneng [Monein, ten kilometres from Lesquire] and come presently to a scene which was so new to me in France that I could hardly believe my own eyes. A succession of many well-built, tight, and comfortable farming cottages, built of stone and covered with tiles; each having its little garden, enclosed by clipped thorn hedges, with plenty of peach and other fruit trees, some fine

104

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

oaks scattered in the hedges, and young trees nursed up with so much care that nothing but the fostering attention of the owner could effect anything like it. To every house belongs a farm, perfectly well enclosed, with grass borders mown and neatly kept around the cornfields, with gates to pass from one enclosure to another. The men are all dressed with red caps, like the highlanders of Scotland. There are some parts of England (where small yeomen still remain) that resemble this country of Beam; but we have very little that is equal to what I have seen in this ride of 12 miles from Pau to Moneng. It is all in the hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to occasion a vicious and miserable population. An air of neatness, warmth, and comfort breathes over the whole. It is visible in their new-built houses and stables, in their little gardens, in their hedges, in the courts before their doors, even in the coops for their poultry and the sties for their hogs. A peasant does not think of rendering his pig comfortable if his own happiness hangs by the thread of a nine years* lease. We are now in Beam, within a few miles of the cradle of Henry IV. Do they inherit these blessings from that good prince? The benign genius of that good monarch seems to reign still over the country; each peasant has the fowl in the pot.. .' [38, pp. 375-6]. Thus, improved living conditions seem to have reinforced the economic bases of peasant society and helped to maintain a class of smallholders in which no doubt a hierarchy is found, but certainly not the sharp oppositions that are observed in other regions. If Beam society has retained its distinctiveness, this is perhaps because it has remained outside the great modern economic movements, resulting from the development of towns, and more generally because of its marginal situation. But above all this society has always manifested an acute awareness of its values and a strong determination to defend the foundations of its economic and social order. There are indeed few societies in which this determination has been expressed in such a conscious and also institutionalized way. The commune was a besiau, in other words 'a set of neighbours who possessed the right of neighbourhood'. Each best had the right to graze his livestock, cut wood, gather acorns, fern and undergrowth from the common lands. He had the privilege of taking part in the assemblies of the community and was alone eligible for the positions of responsibility. The right of neighbourhood, a personal right in towns, was in the countryside a real right attached to possession through inheritance of a house and with it an estate; the community, concerned to maintain a constant number of besis and properties, very strictly regulated accession to the title of besi. The right of neighbourhood could be acquired by the newcomer (the poublan) only with the consent of the

Bibliographical notes

105

community assembly, after swearing an oath and paying a sum of money [39 and 31]. These assemblies no doubt reflected the social hierarchy: the jurats, who generally belonged to the peasant 'great families', had duties and responsibilities proportionate to their rights and to the consideration that the collectivity granted them. These were so many signs of a considerable social integration. It is understandable that a society so strongly organized to defend its own foundations should have been able to conserve its heritage of customary rules virtually intact through the upheavals introduced by the Revolution and the Civil Code [14].

Thematic bibliography Works devoted to Beam custom 1 De Maria, 'Memoires sur les dots de Beam', with appendix: 'Memoires sur les coutumes et observances non ecrites de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 2 De Maria, 'Memoires et ficlaircissements sur le for et coutume de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 3 Labourt, 'Les Fors et coutumes de Beam', MS, Pau municipal library. 4 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des dots suivant les principes du droit romain, confere avec les coutumes de Beam, de Navarre, de Soule et la jurisprudence du Parlement (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below], p. 15). 5 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des biens paraphernaux, des augments et des institutions contractuelles avec celui de Vavitinage (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below]). 6 A. Mazure and J. Hatoulet, Fors de Beam, legislation inedite du Xle au Xllle siecley with facing translation, notes and introduction (Pau: Vignancour; Paris: Bellin-Mandar, Joubert, n.d. [1841-3]). 7 P. Roge, Les Anciens Fors de Beam (Toulouse and Paris, 1908). 8 J. Brissaud and P. Roge, 'Textes additionnels aux Anciens Fors de Beam\ Toulouse, 1905 (Bulletin de VUniversite de Toulouse, memoires originaux des facultes de droit et des lettres, serie B, no. III). 9 L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam (Bordeaux, 1909). 10 G. Dupont, 'Du regime successoral dans les coutumes du Beam', thesis, Paris, 1914. 11 A. Fougeres, 'Les Droits de famille et les successions au Pays basque et en Beam, d'apres les anciens textes\ thesis, Paris, 1938. 12 P. Luc, 'Vie rurale et pratique juridique en Beam aux XlVe et XVe siecles\ thesis, Toulouse, 1943.

106

Bachelorhood and the Feasant Condition

13 F. Le Play, L'Organisation de la famille selon le vrai modele signale par I'histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps, with an epilogue and three appendices by E. Cheysson, F. Le Play and C. Jannet, 3rd edn, augmented by new documents by Ad. Focillon, A. Le Play and Delaire (Paris, 1884). 14 J. Saint-Macary, *Les regimes matrimoniaux en Beam avant et apres le Code civiP, thesis, Bordeaux, 1942; 'La desertion de la terre en Beam et dans le Pays basque', thesis, Bordeaux, 1942. 15 J. Bonnecaze, La Philosophic du Code Napoleon applique au droit de la famille. Ses destinies dans le droit civil contemporain, 2nd edn (Paris, 1928).

Studies in the history of Beam and the Pyrenees region

16 J.-B. Laborde, Precis d'histoire du Beam (Pau, 1941). 17 T. Lefebvre, Les Modes de vie dans les Pyrenees atlantiques orientates (Paris: A. Colin, 1933). 18 H. Cavailles, La Vie pastorale et agricole dans les Pyrenees des Gaves, de I'Adour et des Nesles (Paris: A. Colin, 1931). 19 P. Tucoo-Chalaa, Gaston Febus et la vicomte de Beam (1343-1391) (Bordeaux: Biere Imprimeur, 1960). 20 J.-B. Laborde and P. Lorber, 'Affranchissement des besiaux, fondation des bastides en Beam aux XDIe, XJVe siecles', Revue d'Histoire et d'Archeologie du Beam et du Pays Basque, 1927. 21 J.-B. Laborde, 'La fondation de la bastide de Bruges en Beam', Revue d'Histoire et d'Archeologie du Beam et du Pays Basque (1923-4), and offprint, Pau, 1924. 22 P. Raymond, 'Enquete sur les serfs en Beam sous Gaston Phebus', Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pauy 2nd series, 7 (1877-8), and offprints, Pau, 1878. 23 P. Raymond, 'Le Beam sous Gaston Phebus, denombrement des maisons de la vicomte de Beam', extract from vol. 6 of the summary inventory of the Archives des Basses-Pyrenees, Pau, 1873. 24 H. Fay, Histoire de la lepre en France, vol. 1: Lepreux et cagots du Sud-Ouest (Paris, 1909). 25 P. Tucoo-Chalaa, 'Les institutions de la vicomte de Beam (Xe-XVe siecles)', in F. Lot and R. Fawtier (eds), Histoire des institutions au Moyen Age, vol. 1: Les Institutions seigneuriales, ch. 13 (Paris: PUF, 1957). 26 L. Cadier, Les Etats de Beam depuis leur origine jusqu'au commencement du XlVe siecle (Paris: Cadier, 1888). 27 M. Bordes, Contribution a I'etude de Venseignement et de la vie intellectuelle dans les pays de Vintendance d'Auch au XVIIIe siecle (Auch: Cochevaux, 1958). 28 M. Bordes, D'£tigny et I3Administration de Vintendance d'Auch (17511767) (Auch: Cochevaux, 1957). 29 M. Bordes, 'Recueil de lettres de l'intendant d'£tigny', thesis, Paris, 1956.

Bibliographical notes

107

30 H. J. Habakkuk, 'Family structure and economic change in nineteenth century Europe', Journal of Economic History, 15 (1955) (includes an extensive bibliography). 31 J.-B. Lafond, 'Essai sur le Beam pendant Padministration de d'£tigny\ Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 37 (1909), pp. 1-263. 32 Abbe Roubaud, ^'Agriculture, le commerce et l'industrie en Beam en 1774' (repr. from Journal de ('Agriculture, du Commerce, des Arts et des Finances), Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 39(1911), pp. 207-26. 33 M. Bloch, Les Caracteres originaux de Vhistoire rurale francaise, 2nd sdn (2 vols, Paris: A. Colin, 1955). 34 M. Bloch, 'Memoire publie par Soulice', Bulletin des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 33 (1905), pp. 55-150. 35 Serviez, Statistiques du departement des Basses-Pyrenees (Paris, an X ;i801-2)). 36 H. Durand, Histoire des biens communaux en Beam et dans le Pays basque (Pau, 1909). 37 De Boilisle, Correspondance des controleurs generaux desfinancesavec } es intendants des provinces (3 vols, Paris, n.d.). 38 A. Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788 and 1789: undertaken "nore particularly with a view ofascertaining the cultivation, wealth, resources md national prosperity of the kingdom of France (London, 1792). 39 J. Tucat, Espoey, village bearnais, sa vie passee et presente (Pau, 1947).

Appendix II Changes in population, 1836-1954

Between 1836 and 1954, the population fell by a half. The rural exodus is directly linked to the crisis of agriculture, with a 16 per cent decline in the total population between 1881 and 1891. It is known that between 1884 and 1893 there was a series of bad years for farming: 'They sowed wheat and didn't even recover the seed corn. There was frost, rain, no fertiliser, poor tools, only the scratchplough (aret). Many farmers had to borrow money. They were at the mercy of the money-lenders, "the eaters of the poor" {lous minjurs de praubes), who forced a good number of them to sell up. Bo. had loaned 500 francs. He fell out with his debtor. He sent a summons to pay. Then he had the property seized. The daune already owed 1,800 francs to another lender. In short, Bo. wasn't even paid. In 1892, a very bad year, La. (a big landowner in the bourg) hired some labourers without feeding them - the men at 1 franc a day, the women at 12 sous [60c]. They had to form a chain to bring up the earth from the vineyards in small baskets. The men filled the baskets and the women passed them from hand to hand. He had 30 labourers. He didn't hire any more. There were too many people' (J.-P. A.). Between 1891 and 1896, the decline slowed very considerably (1.7 per cent). The year 1893 was another very bad one. For years afterwards there was talk of 'the drought (sequere) of '93'). 'The years 1894 and 1895 were very good, the wheat was plentiful, with the coming of the fertilisers. It had rained on 1st May. There was no more rain before the maize harvest. It was a very good maize crop.'

Changes in population, 1836-1954

Year

Bourg

Hameaux

B/H as %

Total

1836 1866 1881 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1921 1931 1936 1946 1954

499

2,330

21

471 407 374 322 328 293 259 262 258 303 258

1,997 1,666 1,665 1,056 1,624 1,601 1,408 1,371 1,363 1,277 1,093

24 24 23 19 20 18 18 19 19 19 18

2,829 2,541 2,468 2,073 2,039 1,978 1,952 1,894 1,667 1,633 1,621 1,580 1,351

109

Decline (%)

10.1

2.8 16.0

1.7 2.9 1.6 2.9 11.4

2.0 0.7 2.5 14.4

Until 1914, the rate of decline remained more or less steady. 'Around 1905, there were some very good years. The strikes by the wine growers in the Midi led to a turnaround. From then on, everything was better. The price of wine kept rising. Wine from the Midi, second-vintage, watery stuff, would reach Oloron at 1 sou a litre. The peasants went on strike against the traffickers. Here, you couldn't sell wine. Before 1905, a good barrel of wine was sold at 25 or 30 francs a litre. After 1905,100 francs a litre. Wine from the Midi was sold at 4 sous and the local wine had gone up. People lived well' (J.-P. A.). The 1914-18 war led to a new and sharp drop in the population (11.4 per cent). There were 94 war deaths for the commune as a whole. Between 1921 and 1946, the rural exodus again slowed down. Except in 1932, those years saw good harvests. After 1945, the exodus resumed on a scale comparable to that of 1881-91 (14.4 per cent), but with quite different causes. Previously driven from the land by poverty, the peasants were now drawn to the city. The essential factor in the demographic slump was departure for the towns, although the decline in the birth rate also played a part (cf. table on family size, p. 72). Beam has always been a region that younger sons would leave. But in the past they left for lack of land, whereas now there is a lack of manpower. 'Tenant farmers, sharecroppers and labourers have become extremely rare. The sons and daughters of truque-tarrocs aus cams dous autes (the breakers of clods on the fields of others) have gone off in search of an easier life, or at least a more secure income' (P.-L. M.). The newest phenomenon is the exodus of girls who have had enough of peasant occupations.

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

The decline that can be observed in Lesquire is a general phenomenon in all the rural cantons of Beam. Between 1946 and 1954, the Basses-Pyrenees departement gained 4,200 inhabitants while the towns doubled in size, which gives a measure of the overall depopulation of the rural areas. Those cantons which do not overlap an urban zone or do not have an active industrial centre have lost inhabitants. The commune of Lesquire is one of those most affected by emigration, since the decline there is 14 per cent compared to 11 per cent for Accous, 10 per cent for Aramits and 9 per cent for Lembeye.

Appendix III Dialogue between a villager and a peasant n*s

He arrives in the square in front of the church just before midday. He is pushing a muddy bicycle in dingy colours, with the bags stuffed with provisions (groceries etc.), and a large cboyne (a 2-kilo loaf of bread) across the handlebar. His walks heavily, wearing an old worn suit that has seen much service on Sundays and market days, a beret rendered shapeless by the weather, and striped trousers frayed at the bottoms, revealing discoloured socks in rubber clogs. 'Not going home for an early lunch?' 'Oh no . . . but I had a good breakfast before I set o u t . . . We have a hot meal about nine in the morning.' 'And you're the one who does the shopping?' 'Yes, maman is 80. She said to me: "You can go on your bike, go and fetch the bread and the groceries.'"1 'You don't have a mobile grocer who comes round your way?' 'We're too far out, the grocery and bread van only goes as far as the Pes' farm; but we only just missed him. It was a nuisance to have to change and come all this w a y . . . It's almost six kilometres from us to the carrere'1 'You haven't got a neighbour who comes to the bourgV

1

Tu que pots courre en bicyclete, ben me cotteille lou pa e las epiceries. nies que se labem manquat per prim . . . 0/; que m'embestiabe d'em cbamya et de ba lou cami... quy a pres de 6 kilometres de nouste a la carrere.

1

112

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

'Just imagine . . . I'm alone with my mother. My neighbour Ja. works as a labourer on my land. He's abandoned the plot he inherited undivided with Ja.. .. Since his uncle died, what do you expect him to do alone in that house? At 40 he can't take or even find a wife. The other neighbour, Remi, lives alone with his mother, who's 80. His house is falling into ruin and so there won't be a single room left that can be lived in.' 'It sounds like a scene of desolation.' 'You could say so. The Di. farm was occupied by the El. son until marterou [All Saints' Day].' 'And now he's left the land too?' 'He liked being there: the plot is "smiling" (gauyous) though it has a steep slope. He had got himself well organized. His sister came and did his laundry.3 Ja. would go and look after his cowshed when he went to the bourg for his supplies, or go and play cards with him of a Saturday evening. He couldn't carry on like that for ever and he really had to find a wife . . . ' 'I wonder how a man on his own could keep going in such a remote spot.' 'He had a will of iron. Very skilful and adroit; he wept when the bailiff brought him notice to quit.' 'He was afraid of change?' 'He was sick at heart at getting rid of his animals. The soil had been well worked and he could have expected good harvests. He had the impression that the reasons given for the notice to quit (lou counyet) weren't valid.' 'Didn't he make an appeal?' 'He's too proud, and stubborn as a Basque! He sold everything and went off to Pau to work in a firm.'4 'So there's no one left in the neighbourhood?'5 'Now that the Ju. family, the nearest neighbours, have gone, there's no one left to do the shopping for us.'6 'Oh yes, the Jus, the big family that filled the place.' 'They were right to leave. The youngsters, four brothers and a sister, had bikes and motorbikes, even an old car in the end. How else would they get to the bourg} We have 800 metres of lousy track 3 L'endret que y gauyous bien here en penen. Que s'ere organisat. La so deu Moult queou biene ha la bugade. 4 Quey trop fier et cabourrut count, u basquou! Qua d'a benut tout et quey partit ta Pau tribaiha dens ue entreprese. 5 Dens lou quartile n'y soun pas arres mey? 6 Despuch que la famille deou Ju. - lou purme best - e soun partits, n'abem pas arres mey t'as ha las commissious.

Dialogue between a villager and a peasant

113

that is almost impassable. A camiasse (bad road) cut up by the streams. They didn't find it easy to pay for those machines and all the rest... It was a good thing for them that they were forced to sell their little farm for a song. Anyway the youngsters are earning good wages and they are still well married in Pau or Toulouse.' 'Can't you get that road repaired?' 'I meant to do so when I came back from POW camp. A kilometre of road is a big job, I only have Ja., P. and Mo. to help me! . . . If I were younger . . . but the War cost us years of our lives . . . And now I'm all alone . . . Who would I be doing it forV1 'You ought to have found a woman . ..' 'You're right there.8 But with that War and the prison camp . . . Yes, I should have! My father had more taste for working.9 But a man on his own, all alone, is lost on the land. Preparing the meals, doing the washing, leading and guarding the animals. Seeing to the lamps in the house. Going to market, keeping the door open. Women nowadays don't want a peasant!'10 'But why not? They wouldn't be unhappy with hardworking chaps like you .. .'" 'The problem goes back a long way. They know what goes on in a farm! They hear their parents complaining. You have to accept that where you sow, you don't always reap. Nothing is certain. You have to have a lot of patience with the old people who always hold the purse strings. And you need money to equip yourself! I had to buy a "mechanical mower" and I cut everywhere, however steep the slope, but you have to steer a straight course to keep going.'12 'But you got help?'13 'Yes, the Credit Agricole [bank], rural development.14 But you have to pay the interest, and repay the loan fairly quickly. Girls hear all about that at home. The parents talk and often they argue: "The 7

Et puch que souy tout soul. Ta qui ha tout aco .. . Qu'abet raisou. 9 Lou me pay que tribailhabe dap mey de gous. 10 Guida e guarda lou bestia. Ha luts dens la may sou. Ha lous marquats., tiene la porte uberte. Ouey ne bolin pas mey d'u paysa la hennes. 1 ' Mes perque... f Pourtan ne seren pas malerouses dap garcous serious count bous.... 12 Lou semia n'ey pas toustemt lou recoultat: arre de fixe - que cau here de patience dat lous bieilhs que toustem tienen lous sous. S'en yaabans des poude equipa! Qu'ey poudut croumpam ue 'faucheuse mecanique' et que coupi pertout per tan penen que sie mes que cau tira de dret ta s 'en sourti. 13 Mes quet aydats? 14 Qui, lou Credit agricole, lou genie rural. 8

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

neighbour's bought a tractor!"15 So all the girls leave the "hut" as soon as they can and go to the town for a wage of 20,000 francs, with good board and lodging. No more mud on their clogs and they can go to the cinema.'16 'You've never courted any of them?' There used to be lots of girls in my neighbourhood - those were the days! My sister got married fairly young to a fine elder son in the Rey neighbourhood. She liked dancing and had great fun at the dances. For men of my age, that War and then imprisonment stopped us setting up a household. While we were away, the women of our age got themselves set up in town, a few in the country. Those who were left looked at the "position", the "courtyard door" [the symbol of the importance of the house], as much as the man.'17 'I can see that the taste for work is lost in those conditions.'18 '"You must get married," people say.19 You can understand that those who can find something better, even without looking, just leave; that happened with the Ju. family, and lots of other girls. Elsewhere they get a month's pay, however small... and then, rightly or wrongly, the peasant's job is much decried.'20 'And more's the pity!' 4 Yes, it hurts to hear some of the discouraging things people say. I'll keep going as long as I can, but then? I'm rambling. I'm wasting your time . .. You have work to do too. Come and call on me if you'd like to but when the weather is better. Maman will think I hung around drinking {apintoua's, from pintou, a half-litre of wine).'21 'Goodbye, sir.' He disappears into the cul-de-sac behind the La. house, where, traditionally, the men from his neighbourhood change their shoes and arrange their loads on their motor bikes or bicycles before setting out on the long route to their houses.

15

Lou best qua crownpat lou tractur. N'an pas mey 'la hangue' aus esclops et que podin ana tau cinema. 17 Qu'espiaben la pousissiou, lou pourtau autan coun I'homi. 18 Que compreni que lous gous deu tribail ques per hens aqueros counditious. 19 Quet cau maridat, se disen lou mounde. 20 Ailhous que toque 'u mes' per petit que sie... .Et puch a tor ou a raison lou mestie de paysa here descridat. 21 Que tirerey tan que pousqui, mes apresf Que m 'escapi... . Je vous fais perdre votre temps - vous avez du travail vous aussi. .. venez me voir sip he plase mes cuan lou terns sie mey beroy. Mama que ba pensa quern sout apintouat.. .. 16

Appendix IV Another dialogue between a villager and a bachelor 'You see, the other day I visited Ra., one of the richest farmers around here. I said to him, "You think you are the master of your farm, right? You think that all these fields and vines belong to you? You think you're rich, do you? Well, let me tell you, you are the slave of your tractor. What have you got, with all this land? Yes, you've got 4 or 5 million [old francs] in land. And then? Work out what you earn. Yes, take a pencil and paper. You see, the old ways are finished. A peasant who doesn't calculate, who doesn't always have a notebook and pencil, is washed up. Work out how much you give per hour of work to your father, your mother and your sister, who all help you, work out how much you earn. You'll see that you will take your wallet and fling it into the courtyard. Imagine you fall in love with a girl. Do you think she'll want to come here, to slave all day and come back in the evening to milk the cows, fed up with toil (harte de mau)} Peasants' daughters know the peasant life, they know it too well to want to marry a peasant. And get up at five every morning? Even if she loves you, she'd rather marry a postman, right? Yes, a postman or even a gendarme. When life is too hard, a couple don't even have time to make love. You slave away all day. Where's the love? What does that mean? You come home whacked. What kind of life do you think that is? There is no girl who wants that kind of life. There is no more feeling, no more affection. And then there are the old folks. No one wants to hurt them. You'd like to cuddle them, stroke them. But you end up arguing with them because there are too many cares, because you're too tired. Young women want their independence, they want to be able to buy something they like without having to justify it. No, there isn't a single one who would wanj to come here."'(L. C.)

Appendix V The exemplary tale of a younger son from a modest family ^•v/ Lo., born in 1895, is the second of seven children living on a small property (about 20 hectares). He went to school until he was 12. In 1916 he was taken prisoner and worked in the mines in Essen until 1918.' 'When I came back, my elder brother was married. I spent two years working on the family farm. We had a lot of fun after the War. I didn't dance, but we played cards endlessly and stayed up all night in cafes. In 1923,1 left the family home. Why? It embarrassed me to have to agree a wage with my parents or with the eldest brother's new family. I went off to become a servant in the wider family, for the elder brother of my sister's husband. He was the same age as me and was alone in charge of a big property. He had come back an invalid from the War and had a large family. He died in 1960. The widow and the children - they are grown up now - regard me as the head of the property.' 4 Why did you never marry?' 'I would have had to find an heiress. I had no money to set up on my own. And besides, I was happy like that, I was attached to that house, the terre mayrane [ancestral land], and the neighbourhood. What would I have gone and done elsewhere? I get a war pension and, since I became 65, the retired workers' pension. I'm in good health and I'm very happy to be able to keep myself busy, without 1

Only rhe significant details arc reproduced here. The autobiographies dwell a great deal on military service and the War.

Younger sons

117

being troubled by anyone, working in thefields.I've loved these fields for the 40 years I've been working them, whereas the neighbouring properties are abandoned.' Another younger son from a modest family (interview in Bearnais)

J. Lou., born 16 November 1896 in Sa.: 4In our time, life was very hard. I was the last but one in a family of six children. My parents weren't very canny and found it hard to make a living. They were sharecroppers at the Ha. house where they had a small property that they had to sell to pay their debts. So, when I was still young I was "placed" like my brothers. My turn came at the age of seven and I went to earn my crust at the Ba. house. I looked after the animals in the forest. I had some fine stomachs out of fear and hunger (de bets bentes de pou y de hami). School? Most of the time, the women of the house or the neighbours would be wanting me to lead the cows in the fields or run errands! My wage of 10 francs a year was often "committed in advance" (crubat dfavance)\ The main meal was half a salt sardine with sometimes some boiled potatoes. Ah, people these days don't know their luck. The more they have, the more they complain (mey en an me es plagnen)l When I was about 12,1 had myfirstcom munion in that house. I was not called up for military service on grounds of weak constitution. I didn't like dancing. What misery! I knew a few women, mothers of large families, who "gave themselves" for a couple of sous. With that, they bought their bread. When I could go out, I had no money to buy clothes! The small property that I've lived in for a long time now came to me thanks to my grandparents. They had given my mother a dowry of 2,000 francs on condition that it was used to buy land, which could not be sold so long as she was alive. My brothers and sisters pestered me for their shares. They had to wait until my mother died in 1929. Then I had to give them their shares although I had laboured and sweated blood on that land. Marriage? There wasn't a sou. How could I marry? (Quin se cale maridaf) We would go and spend the nights in the inns of Lesquire (quanabem, noueyteya en las auberyes), sometimes in Pau. I was one of the famous cupeles. That was what they called the men who had been dispensed from military service and who were "recuperated" for the Army in 1916. When I came back, I farmed my small property with the help of some women workers. I spent some wild nights with mates from the neighbourhood, who were bachelors like me or unhappily married.'

Appendix VI Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood ^•^/

The Se. family The father belonged to a grande famille. He was quiet, very well brought up, refined; he drank a little. He married a very young woman (partly thanks to his war pension). She was from a very grande famille, pretty and somewhat pretentious. They had four children. He never dared to go against his wife's wishes. Because there was some money (the pension) she led rather an extravagant lifestyle. She would go to market every Monday and Thursday to keep up with the local gossip and keep up the reputation of the family in Pau. The children were very disciplined. They were made to feel they belonged to a family that counted for something. They were in awe of their mother, who took all the decisions. In all important matters, the sons would side with the mother. The daughter went out with a gendarme. She was kept confined in the house for two years on the pretext that she was ill. The mother was against the marriage because the gendarme came from too "small" a family. In that area, a mother has her way. Normally a man has to think about the barn more than the house. The animals are sacred. Often the cowshed and barn are better cared for and more important than the house; but now the barns are falling down, one after another. A house run by a woman is soon on the ground. There are some things that a woman cannot decide and does not know how to decide. The girl eventually married.

Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood

119

One of the boys managed to marry G. He had had to leave, his father's pension stopped when he died (in 1954). With the help of a mason the sons rebuilt part of their barn. Now they have no chance of marrying. They don't have the slightest personality. They never go out. There's no question of improving the equipment. They've just bought a reaper. The meadows are in a wretched state, full of rushes. The trees haven't been attended to. I saw them the other day, patching up a wooden harrow! The house is falling to pieces. The mother is still determined to keep up the prestige of a grande famille, which is quite out of line with the current state of the property' (A. B.).

The Ja. family The father was a pensioner, a fine old man who liked a drink from time to time. He had poor health and was very fat. But what had done for him was the [1914-18] war, and he had no influence in the house. His wife had the upper hand in every aspect of the household. Very authoritarian. She went regularly to the markets, every Monday and Thursday, to keep up with the gossip, cultivate her connections, get herself seen, play the dauneya. Wasted time, money spent buying things . . . and then, when the woman is away, the house is empty. A complete mess. With their chattering and their photo magazines, women bring other preoccupations into the house. Inside, it is abandoned and neglected. The farmhouse isn't cared for. The woman keeps going off to sell a few dozen eggs so as to have an excuse to go to Pau. The men start doing a bit of cooking. That dishonours a man and it's not in the rules. They gradually get demoralized and start going off to work a bit later. It's the woman who holds a farmhouse together. She's the one who prepares the meals and makes sure the men look presentable. Conflicts always come from women. Potential daughters-in-law are always afraid of battles with the old ladies. The old ladies say, "They ought to get married." But that's a way of asserting themselves. There are also lots of bachelors who say, "As long as Mum is there . . . ! " The old lady takes on too much importance. The presence of the mother makes marriage less urgent. And she can also hold it back In conditions like that, everything goes downhill. The equipment is rudimentary and the income is minimal. Keeping the tools up to scratch is very important. The equipment comes before the house. A woman can't keep an eye on things like that, jammed axles and so on. The house, which used to count for a lot, is in disrepair, the roof

120

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is leaking. They are afraid to borrow money from the Credit Agricole because they are already in debt and then maman ne bou pas (Mum doesn't want to). The mother more or less holds the purse strings. They can't buy anything. They couldn't easily pay for the mother's funeral (in 1959). They are victims of their upbringing. Time seems to eat up everything. The three brothers feel more and more powerless every passing day, despite help from outside. It's as if they were powerless. They are crushed under the ruins. In those conditions, marriage is out of the question. Thefinancialsituation is difficult, the reputation poor, marriage is impossible for any of the brothers. There was talk of a possible marriage for the eldest (aged 48) with a girl from the neighbourhood, of Basque origin, 22 years younger than him. He's a fine lad but too quiet and too clumsy alongside thatfierylittle Basquaise! Yet they have a nice-looking property on the edge of a big wood. Now they do their own washing, as well as the work in the fields' (A. B.). When his mother died in 1959, the eldest son, born in 1922, took charge of a 30-hectare farm including 10 hectares of woodland and fernland; he had attended the village school to the age of 13, then worked on the family farm, with the aid of his younger brothers, until his military service. He was called up into the Chantiers de Jeunesse [the Vichyite work scheme] in 1942 and sent to work in Germany in 1943. He worked as a turner in a factory in Saxony 'Much harder work than in the fields.' He was freed in 1945. 'When my mother died, the three of us found ourselves alone. And how could we marry? We've never danced. We sometimes went to the dance hall to watch. Life isn't always much fun. We have big problems, what with the cost of roof repairs. We aren't rich. I cook the meals, I mend the clothes and do the washing. For the pele-porc [the slaughter and processing of the pig] the neighbours come and help. It's not a very enjoyable day. The neighbours, especially the women, don't miss a chance to rub salt in the wound.'

Appendix VII An attempt to generalize: bachelorhood in 16 rural cantons in Brittany niK/

In order to ascertain whether it is possible to generalize from the phenomena observed in Beam, it was decided to study 16 cantons in central Brittany (totalling 135,433 inhabitants), in which the population fell by more than 10 per cent between the censuses of 1948 and 1954.1 This study, carried out in collaboration with Claude Seibel, a senior statistician at INSEE, shows significantly a low rate of marriage among men throughout the area studied. Because it was not possible to distinguish more precisely between the inhabitants of relatively densely populated areas and those in sparsely populated areas, it was decided to exclude communes of more than 1,000 inhabitants. Finally, the rural sector of the area was broken down according to the socio-occupational category of the head of the household (see table overleaf).

1

The cantons [administrative divisions of a department] chosen are as follows - in the Cotes du Nord departement: Bourbriac, Callac, Coiiay, Gouerec, Mael-Carhaix, Rostrenen and Saint-Nicolas-du-Pelem; in Finistere: Carhaix, Chateauneuf-du-Faou, Huelgoat, Pleyben and Sizun; and in Morbihan: Cleguerec, Le Faouet, Gourin and Guemene-sur-Scorff. Within those cantons, the following communes, which each have more than 1,000 inhabitants, were excluded: in rhe Cotes du Nord, Callac and Rostrenen; in Finistere, Carhaix, Chateauneuf-du-Faou, Huelgoat and Pleyben; in Morbihan, Le Faouet, Gourin and Guemene-sur-Scorff. Of rhe 123 communes within the area studied, 114 were thus chosen, all of them rural and characterized by low population density (average 45 inhabitants per sc). km).

head of household wife children ascendants other Widowed and divorced of which: head of household ascendant other

53.4% 43.6 3.7 3.1 3.0 19,865 43.1% 38.7 2.9 0.9 0.6 3.5% 1.9 1.3 0.3

Unmarried of which: children head of household other relatives pensioners &c servants Married

of which:

46,122 100.0

TOTAL POPULATION Percentage

44.4% 39.2 1.1 2.9 1.2 19,838 47.3% 0.3 42.1 3.4 1.1 0.4 8.3% 4.6 3.3 0.4

41,936 100.0 45.3% 38.6 3.9 1.4 1.4 10,096 47.8% 44.8 2.4 0.2 0.4 6.9% 5.7 0.7 0.5

21,131 100.0 35.8% 27.4 5.4 1.7 1.3 10,390 39.7% 1.4 35.6 2.2 0.3 0.2 24.5% 21.8 1.9 0.8

26,244 100.0

Female

Male

Male

Female

SOC of head of household non-agricultural

SOC of head of household agricultural

50.9% 42.0 3.8 2.6 2.5 29,961 44.5% 40.6 _ 2.7 0.7 0.5 4.6% 3.1 1.1 0.4

67,253 100.0 41.1% 34.6 2.8 2.5 1.2 30,228 44.3% 0.7 39.6 2.9 0.8 0.3 14.6% 11.2 2.8 0.6

68,180 100.0

Female

Overall Male

16 cantons in central Brittany

Proportions of unmarried men and women: comparison between central Brittany and the city of Rennes

51.4% 48.6 _ 1.8 0.2 0.7 3.4% 2.6 0.3 0.4

45.2% 38.7 2.7 0.6 3.2

51,203 100.0

Male

43.4% 33.7 4.5 1.2 4.0 26,702 43.4% 1.1 40,0 1.7 0.2 0.4 13.2% 10.7 1.8 0.7

61,514 100.0

Female

Rennes overall

17,500 41.7

100.0 32.7% 27.8 0.7 2.4 1.8 65.5% 0.3 56.4 7.4 0.8 1.8%

20,637 44.8

100.0 52.0% 38.9 4.3 3.8 5.0 47.3% 40.2 6.3 0.8 0.7%

Percentage of total

Unmarried of which: children head of household other relatives pensioners &C servants Married of which: head of household wife children other Widowed and divorced

SOC=socio-occupational category

AGED 18-47 100.0 38.9% 29.9 4.2 1.9 2.9 59.9% 53.3 6.0 0.5 1.1%

7,836 37.1 100.0 26.0% 18.5 3.5 1.6 2.4 69.8% 2.0 60.7 6.7 0.4 4.2%

8,134 31.0 100.0 48.4% 36.4 4.3 3.3 4.4 50.8% 43.8 6.2 0.7 0.8%

28,473 42.4 100.0 30.5% 24.8 1.5 2.2 2.0 66.9% 0.8 57.8 7.6 0.7 2.6%

25,634 37.6 100.0 29.2% 17.0 4.7 1.1 6.5 69.3% 64.1 — 4.1 1.1 1.5%

22,086 43.1

100.0 31.6% 17.6 5.2 1.4 7.4 64.5% 1.6 58.5 3.8 0.6 3.9%

26,730 43.5

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It can be seen that, within the agricultural population, the percentage of unmarried men aged 18-47 is 52% - of which 38.9% are the sons of the head of the household and 5% are domestic servants - as against 38.9% in the non-agricultural population and 29.2% for the city of Rennes. In the age group 29-38 the percentage of bachelors declared as sons of the head of the household is particularly high in the agricultural population: 28.3% (out of 41.0%) as against 5.7% (out of 11.8%) in Rennes for the same age bracket. The percentage of unmarried women, which is always lower than for men - 32.7% as against 52% in the agricultural categories, 26.0% as against 38.9% in the non-agricultural categories - does not appear to be independent (in relative terms at least) of place of residence and socio-occupational category. Their curves show a remarkable correspondence between the rates of the different categories, whereas comparison of the two curves shows how different are the situations of the men and the women.2 Thus, on a larger scale and in a different region, onefindssituations identical to those observed in Lesquire: men in agricultural occupations have one chance in two of remaining unmarried, whereas women avoid the determinisms related to residence or occupation. Although the explanations put forward in relation to Lesquire have every likelihood of accounting for the overall phenomena, one cannot assume that identical effects derive from identical causes, and sociological analysis of the particular conditions would be required.

2

For a comparison with the data for France as a whole, see the journal Population 2 (1962), pp. 232ff\

Ploughing The women are not only in charge of the farmyard, and more especially the livestock, but also play an important part in the work in the fields - haymaking, harvesting and grape-picking. They lead the oxen during the ploughing, a particularly demanding task when the animals have to be trained.

Aerial view of the western part of the bourg of Lesquire The houses of the bourg are packed tightly together, forming a continuous line of facades along the main street. Almost all of them have retained the arched gateway, wide enough for haycarts to pass through. In the inner courtyard, behind the house, are the pigsty and the rabbit hutch. Beyond it is the barn, with the cowshed, the wine-press and the hayloft. Behind the barn is the garden, a strip of land as wide as the house and a hundred metres long, delimited on each side by a row of climbing vines.

The eastern part of the bourg of Lesquire

The centre of the bourg

An isolated farm in the hills The farmhouse and the barns surround the farmyard on all four sides, giving the whole the appearance of a fortress.

A large abandoned farmhouse

The ball of the agricultural fair Standing at the edge of the dancing area floor, forming a dark mass, a group of older men look on in silence. All aged about 30, they wear berets and unfashionably cut dark suits. As if drawn in by the temptation to join the dance, they move forward, narrowing the space left for the dancers. There they all are, all the bachelors. On the day of the agricultural fair, everyone is 'on the promenade' and almost everyone dances, even the 'old-timers'. But the bachelors still do not dance, though they are less conspicuous, because the men and women of the village have come, the men to chat with friends, the women to spy and gossip and speculate endlessly on possible marriages.

Part Two Matrimonial Strategies in the System of Reproduction Strategies

The beneficiary of the entail, the eldest son, belongs to the land. The land inherits him. K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The fact that the practices through which the peasants of Beam tended to ensure the reproduction of their lineage and the reproduction of its rights over the means of production present clear regularities does not entitle one to see them as the product of obedience to rules. One has to break away from the legalistic kind of thinking which, to this day, haunts the entire anthropological tradition and tends to treat every practice as an act of execution - the execution of an order or a plan in the case of naive legalism, which proceeds as if practices could be directly deduced from expressly constituted and legally sanctioned rules or from customary prescriptions coupled with moral or religious sanctions;1 the execution of an unconscious 1 Among countless other proofs of the fact that ethnology has borrowed from the legalistic tradition not only concepts, tools, and problems but also theory of practice, which is most obvious in the relationship it establishes between the 'names of kinship' and the 'attitudes of kinship', one only has to cite Radcliffe-Brown's euphemistic use of the term jural and recall that Radcliffe-Brown still said father-right and motherright for patriarchy and matriarchy). 'This term [jural]', observes Louis Dumont, 'is difficult to translate. We shall see that its meaning is more than just "legal" or "juridical". It applies to relationships that can be defined in terms of rights and duties customary rights and duties, regardless of whether they involve legal or only moral sanction, possibly in conjunction with religious sanctions. In short, it applies to relationships which are subject to precise, binding, strict prescriptions, whether concerning people or things' (L. Dumont, Introduction a deux theories d'anthropologic sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 40). Obviously, such a theory of practices would not have survived in an ethnological tradition that speaks the language of the rule rather than that of strategy, if it had not been in tune with certain assumptions that are inherent in the relationship between the observer and his object and that are part of the process of defining the object so long as they are not themselves explicitly taken as an object. Unlike the observer, who does not have a practical mastery of the rules he is trying to discern in practices and words, the informant perceives the system of objective relationships - of which his words or his practices are so many partial

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model, in the case of structuralism, which revives the theory of practice of naive legalism under the guise of the unconscious and treats the relationship between structure and practice, like that between language and speech, according to the model of the relationship between the musical score and the execution of the music.2 In fact, the system of dispositions inculcated by the material conditions of existence and by family upbringing (the habitus), which constitutes the generating and unifying principle of practices, is the product of the structures which these practices tend to reproduce. As a consequence, agents can only reproduce - that is to say, unconsciously reinvent or consciously imitate, as self-evident or more appropriate or simply more convenient - the already tried and tested strategies, which, because they have always governed practices ('from time immemorial'), seem to be part of the nature of things. And because all these strategies, whether for the handing on of the undiminished indications - only as profiles, that is, in the form of relationships arising one by one or successively in the emergency situations of daily life. Thus, when asked by the ethnologist to reflect in a quasi-theoretical manner on his practices, the best-informed source will, even with the ethnologist's help, produce a discourse combining two opposing systems of lacunae. Inasmuch as it is a discourse of familiarity\ it will not say all the things that 'go without saying'; inasmuch as it is a discourse for an outsider, it can only be intelligible if it excludes all direct reference to particulars (and this means roughly all information directly related to proper names that evoke and summarize an entire system of pre-existing information). The informant is willing to use his natural language of familiarity freely only if he feels that the observer is familiar with the world of reference of his discourse (a familiarity that is revealed by the form of the questions asked, either detailed or general, informed or ignorant). This explains why ethnologists are usually virtually unaware of the distance between the scholarly reconstruction of the world of their 'native' informants and the native experience of it. The latter can only be inferred from the silences, ellipses and lacunae of the discourse of familiarity, which is fully understood only in a restricted universe where the same knowledge is shared by practically everyone, where all individuals are proper names and all situations are 'common places'. The very conditions leading the ethnologist to an objectivating perception of the social world (in particular his situation as an outsider, which implies the real performance of all the breaks that the sociologist who does not want to be trapped in the illusions of familiarity has to perform as a matter of methodical decision) tend to prevent him from reaching the objective truth of his objectivating perception itself: access to that third kind of knowledge presupposes that one secures the means of seeing what causes the objective knowledge of the social world to be radically irreducible to primary experience of that world by constructing the truth of all native experience of the social world. 2 To cite just Saussure: 'Neither is the psychological part wholly involved: the executive side is left outside, for execution is never the work of the mass; it is always individual and the individual is always the master of it; we shall call it speech' F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 30.

Matrimonial Strategies

135

patrimony and the maintaining of the family's position in the social and economic hierarchy, or for the biological continuity of the lineage and the reproduction of its labour power, are by no means necessarily compatible, even though they have the same functions, only the habitus, the system of schemes orienting every decision without ever becoming completely and systematically explicit, can furnish the basis for the casuistics required to safeguard the essential at all times, even if it should become necessary to violate 'norms' which exist only in the legalistic thinking of ethnologists. Thus, a transgression of the principle of male predominance, such as the act of conferring upon women not only part of the inheritance but the status of heir (herete, masculine, heretere, feminine), is most likely to catch the attention of an observer who is aware, that is, forewarned, of all the strategies deployed to defend the (socially defined) interests of the lineage or - and this amounts to the same thing - the integrity of the patrimony. Just as the ethnologists have reduced the marriage patterns of Berber and Arab societies to marriage with a parallel cousin, because this type of marriage, which represents only one among a number of marriage strategies and not even the most frequent, appeared to them as the distinctive trait of that pattern by reference to the classificatory system of the ethnological tradition, so most of those who have analysed the Beam system of inheritance have characterized it as 'integral right of the eldest', likely to favour an eldest daughter as much as an eldest son, because the legalistic bias induced them to see a mere transgression against principles as the distinctive feature of the entire system, even though these very principles were still operating in such cases. In reality, only the absolute necessity of keeping the patrimony in the lineage can bring about the desperate solution of entrusting a woman with the task of transmitting the patrimony, which is the very basis for the continuity of the lineage. Such a solution can only be produced by a single, extraordinary circumstance, namely, the absence of any male descendant. For we know that the status of heir does not fall to thefirst-bornchild, but to thefirst-bornson, even if he is last in the order of birth. This reversal of the traditionally held view becomes incontrovertible as soon as one ceases to treat the rules of inheritance and marriage as legal norms, like the historians of law who, even and especially when they base their work on the study of notarial documents, which provide them with no more than the actual or potential failures of the system, are still very remote from the reality of the practices; or like the anthropologists who, through their reified taxonomies, usually derived from Roman law, produce

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spurious problems, such as those involving a canonical distinction between unilineal systems of succession and bilateral or cognatic systems.3 There are, on the contrary, very strong reasons for postulating that marriage is not based on obedience to an ideal rule but comes about as the end result of a strategy which, implementing the strongly internalized principles of a particular tradition, is able to reproduce, more unconsciously than consciously, one or another of the typical solutions explicitly contained in that tradition. The marriage of each one of its children - eldest or younger, boy or girl - presents every family with a specific problem it can solve only by weighing all the possibilities for perpetuating the patrimony offered by the traditions of succession and marriage. Acting as if this supreme function justified any means, the family could avail itself of strategies which the classificatory system of anthropological legalism would consider totally incompatible. It could, for example, disregard the 'principle of the predominance of the lineage', cherished by Meyer Fortes, and entrust women with perpetuating the lineage. It could also minimize or even entirely nullify - if need be, by means of legal artifices - the consequences of inevitable concessions to a bilateral succession that would normally be fatal to the patrimony. In a more general sense it could even manipulate the relationships objectively present in the genealogical tree in such a way that they would, ex ante or ex post, justify such kinship relations and alliances as were necessary to safeguard and augment the interests of the lineage, in other words, its material or symbolic capital. They have discovered that they are very close kin to the Xs,' said one informant, 'ever since the latter have become important through the marriage of their daughter to the son of the Ys.' It is too often forgotten that, especially in illiterate societies, genealogical trees exist as such only when they are constructed by the ethnologist, who is the only one capable of calling forth this complete network of relationships over several generations tota simul, that is, 3

The errors inherent in juridism are most clearly evident in the works of the historians of law and custom. Their whole training, together with the nature of the documents they study (particularly the notarial documents representing a combination of the legal precautions produced by the repositories of a learned tradition, the lawyers, and the procedures actually envisaged by those who availed themselves of their services), leads such historians to elevate inheritance and marriage strategies to the status of strict rules (cf. the bibliographical notes, particularly numbers 9, 10, 12, and 14, pp. 160-3).

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all of it at the same time, in the form of a spatial schema that can be perceived uno intuitu and followed in every direction, starting at any one of its points. The network of relationships between contemporaneous relatives is a system of relationships that may or may not be used and represents only one part of the entire network.4 The kinship relations that are actually and presently known, recognized, practised and, as people say, 'kept up', are to the genealogical construct what the network of roads that are presently built, travelled, kept up and therefore easy to use - or, better, the hodological space of actual comings and goings - is to the geometric space of a map furnishing an imaginary representation of all the theoretically possible paths and itineraries. To carry this metaphor even further, all genealogical relationships would soon disappear, like abandoned paths, if they were not constantly maintained, even if they are used only intermittently. It is often pointed out how difficult it is to re-establish a relationship that has not been kept up by visits, letters, gifts, and so forth ('You don't want it to look as if you only went there to ask a favour'). Just as the exchange of gifts dissimulates its objective purpose as long as it is spread out over time, although its reversible nature as an act of 'give so that you may be given' becomes cynically evident when gifts are exchanged simultaneously, so the fact that kinship relations are continually kept up as if for their own sake dissimulates their objective function, which would be unmasked by the discontinuous use of the assurances that are always involved in them. Because the upkeep of kinship relations is clearly incumbent on those who, standing to profit most from them, can keep them in working order and at the same time camouflage their true function only by continuously 4

The Kabyles make an explicit distinction between the two points of view under which kinship relations can be considered, depending on the circumstances, i.e. depending on the function imparted to these relations. They distinguish between thaymath, the group of brothers, and thadjadith, the group of descendants of one real or mythical ancestor. Thaymath is invoked when it becomes necessary to oppose another group, for example if the clan is attacked. It is an actual and active bond of solidarity between individuals united by real bonds of kinship spreading over two or three generations. On the other hand, the group united by thaymath only represents one section, larger or smaller depending on the circumstances, of the total unit of theoretical solidarity that is referred to as thadjadith, the totality of genealogically based kinship relations. 'Thaymath is of today,1 they say, 'thadjadith is of yesterday.' This clearly indicates that the role played by 'brotherhood' {thaymath) is infinitely more real than the reference to a common origin, for the latter attempts an ideological justification of a threatened unity while the former expresses the sense of a living solidarity.

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'cultivating' them, the proportion of 'working relationships' among the 'theoretical' relatives figuring in the genealogy almost automatically grows ever larger as one moves closer to the top of the hierarchy recognized by the group. In short, nepotism is created by nephews. Indeed, we only have to ask ourselves how and why the powerful have so many nephews, great-nephews and great-great-nephews to realize that if the great have the greatest number of relatives and if 'poor relatives' are also poor in relatives, it is because, here as elsewhere, wealth attracts wealth: the memory of cousinship and the desire to maintain it are a function of the material or symbolic advantages to be obtained from 'cousining'.5 Let us imagine that in the society under consideration here the marriage of each of its children represents the playing of a card in a card game. It is clear that the value of this 'move' (measured by the criteria of the system) depends both on the quality of the hand that the family has been dealt, whose strength is defined by the rules of the game, and on the greater or lesser degree of skill with which this hand is played. In other words, given that matrimonial strategies (at least in the most advantaged families) were always designed to bring about a 'good marriage' rather than just any marriage, that is, to maximize the profits and/or to minimize the economic and symbolic costs of the marriage as a transaction of a very particular kind, these strategies are in every case governed by the value of the material and symbolic patrimony that can be committed to the transaction and by the mode of transmission of the patrimony, which established the systems of interests of the various claimants by assigning differential rights to the property to each of them according to sex and birth rank. In short, the matrimonial opportunities generically open to the descendants of the same family by virtue of that family's position in the social hierarchy - a position mainly, though not exclusively, based on the economic value of its patrimony - were specified by the mode of succession that introduced such criteria as birth rank. While thefirstand most direct function of the matrimonial strategy is to reproduce the lineage and thereby its labour power, it also has to assure the safeguarding of the patrimony, and to do so in an

5 This means that the use of genealogy for the ideological purpose of justifying existing political structures (as in the case of the Arab tribe) is only a particular - but particularly interesting - case of the functions that can be assigned to kinship structures.

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economic environment dominated by the scarcity of money.6 Since the share of the property to which a descendant is entitled by tradition and the compensation paid at the time of marriage are one and the same, the value of the property determines the amount of the adot (from adouta, to make a donation, to give a dowry), which, in turn, determines the matrimonial ambitions of its holder. By the same token, the size of the dowry demanded by the family of the future husband depends on the size of its own property. It follows that, through the mediation of the adot, the economy governs matrimonial exchanges, with marriages tending to take place between families of the same rank in economic terms. It is true, of course, that extensive property is not enough to make a 'great' family: such 'letters of nobility' are never granted to houses that owe their elevation and their wealth only to their meanness, their hard work, or their lack of scruples, and that are unable to exhibit the virtues that one is entitled to expect from the 'great', in particular, a dignified bearing, a sense of honour, generosity and hospitality; conversely, the standing of a 'great' family can survive impoverishment.7 The gulf between the mass of the peasantry and an * The investigation on which these analyses are based was conducted in 1959 and 1960 and again in 1970 and 1971 in a village of Beam we shall call Lesquire. It is situated in the centre of the hill country, between the two Gave rivers. 7 Awareness of the social hierarchy is most clearly expressed in the relations between the sexes and at the time of marriages: 'At the dance a younger son of a modest family (u caddet de petite garbure) was careful not to pay too much attention to the younger daughter of the Gus [rich farmers]. The others would have immediately said, "He's pretentious. He wants to dance with the great heiress." Some of the servants, if they were good-looking, would sometimes ask heiresses to dance, but that was rare' (J.-P. A.). Does this very strongly felt distinction between 'great houses' and 'small peasants' (lou paysantots) correspond to a clear

level in the local hierarchy, one 'had', so to speak, to be church-going and conservative, and, for a well-off peasant, regular church attendance, and providing the priest with the communion wine, was a question of pourtale, the 'entrance gate', social standing). In other words, the position occupied in the social space by this microcosm, with its own social hierarchies, its dominant and its dominated agents and its own 'class' conflicts, had no practical effect on the representation that the peasants had of their world and their place in it.1 The unification of the market in economic and symbolic goods has the primary effect of sweeping away the conditions of existence of peasant values capable of presenting themselves, in the face of the dominant values, as antagonistic, at least subjectively, and not simply as different (to evoke the old Platonic opposition between enantion and heteron, which would suffice to clarify many confused discussions about 'popular culture'). Limited and masked dependence progressively gives way to a deep, perceived and even recognized dependence. There have been many descriptions of the logic and effects of the reinforcement of the domination of the market economy over small-scale agriculture (which would include the 'biggest' among the peasants of Lesquire). For its production, an agricultural undertaking depends ever more on the market in industrial goods (machines, fertilizer, etc.) and it cannot muster the investments needed to modernize the productive equipment and improve yields except by resorting to loans that are likely to jeopardize its financial equilibrium and confine it to a particular type of products and outlets. To market its products, it again depends more and more closely on the market in The categories 'right' and left', which are characteristic of the central political field, do not have at all the same meaning in the macrocosm and in the local microcosm (if indeed they have any meaning at all in that context). It is the structural allodoxia which results from the relative autonomy of the locally based units, and not spatial dispersion (as Marx suggests, with the metaphor of the sack of potatoes) that explains the constant singularity of the political positions taken by peasants, and more generally by country-dwellers. To account fully for that allodoxia, the effects of which are far from having disappeared, one has to consider a whole set of characteristics of the peasant and rural condition, which can only be sketched here: the fact that the constraints inherent in production present themselves in the form of natural relationships rather than through social relationships (the schedules and rhythms of production are determined exclusively by the rhythms of nature, and independently of any human will; the success of the farming enterprise seems to depend on climatic conditions more than on structures of ownership or the market, etc.); the fact that the universal dependence on the judgement of others takes a very particular form in these closed worlds in which everyone feels constantly under the gaze of others and condemned to coexist with them for life (this is the argument 'You have to learn to live with it', invoked to justify prudent submission to collective verdicts and resignation to conformism). etc.

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agricultural products and, more precisely, agribusiness (in the particular case, the milk distribution industry). Because their operating costs depend on the general movement of (mainly industrial) prices, over which they have no control, and particularly because their income increasingly depends on guaranteed prices (such as those for milk or tobacco), the ups and downs of the economic situation tend to take the place, both in reality and in their world view, that was formerly occupied by the vagaries of nature: through the economic intervention of the authorities - in particular, price indexation - a political action, tending to arouse political reactions, has made its appearance in the quasi-natural world of the peasant economy.2 This has the effect of inclining the peasants to a more politicized vision of the social world, but one whose anti-state colouring still owes much to the illusion of autonomy which is the basis of self-exploitation. The split and even contradictory representation that these small landowners, now converted into quasi-wage-earners, have of their condition and which is often expressed in political position-takings that are simultaneously in revolt and conservative, is rooted in the objective ambiguities of a profoundly contradictory condition. Having remained, at least in appearance, the masters of the organization of their activity (unlike the industrial worker, who brings his labour power onto the market, they have products to sell) and also the owners of means of production (buildings and equipment) which may represent a very large invested capital (although it can never in fact be turned into cash), they often secure an income less than that of a skilled industrial worker from work that is hard, demanding and symbolically unrewarding, although more and more skilled. Through an unintended effect of technocratic policy, particularly as regards aid and credit, they have been led to contribute, through their various investments, to the establishment of a production system that is in practice as strongly socialized as those of what are called socialist 2

Although it is always masked, even in the eyes of those responsible for it, under technical justifications, price policy fundamentally depends on the weight of the peasantry in the balance of political forces and the interest that the dominant may have in the existence of a pre-capitalist agriculture that is expensive but politically reliable and therefore profitable in another sense (and necessary, as was discovered in the 1990s, in order to maintain the aesthetic charm of the countryside). Would the technocratic desire to accelerate the rural exodus so as to reduce waste and to throw onto the labour market the workers and capital now 'diverted' into small-scale agriculture be so brutally asserted if the urban petite bourgeoisie, eager for upward mobility and concerned for respectability, had not taken the place, in the system of political alliances, of a peasantry which is thus thrown back into forms of protest, both violent and localized (in particular because of its isolation from other social forces), in which all its contradictions are expressed?

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economies, particularly through the constraints that bear on prices and on the production process itself, while conserving nominal ownership of and also responsibility for the production apparatus, with all the incitements to self-exploitation that flow from this. The growing subordination of the peasant economy to the logic of the market would not have sufficed, in itself, to determine the profound transformations of which the rural world has been the site, starting with massive emigration, if this process had not itself been linked, in a relation of circular causality, to a unification of the market in symbolic goods which tends to induce the decline of the ethical autonomy of the peasants and, thereby, the withering away of their capacities for resistance and refusal. It is acknowledged that, in a very general way, emigration from the agricultural sector is a function of the relationship between wage-earners in agriculture and in non-agricultural sectors and of the supply of jobs in these sectors (measured by the rate of industrial non-employment). One might also put forward a simple mechanical model of the migratory flows by positing on the one hand that there is a field of attraction with differences of potential which vary with the gap between the economic situations (income level, rate of employment), and on the other hand that agents present an inertia or resistance to the forces of the field which varies according to various factors. But this model cannot be found completely satisfactory unless one forgets the preconditions for its functioning, which are in no way mechanical. For example, the gap in incomes between agriculture and non-agricultural activities exerts an effect only in so far as comparison, as a conscious or unconscious act of seeing one thing in relation to another, becomes possible and socially acceptable, and in so far as it works to the advantage of the urban way of life, where income is only one dimension among others - in other words, in so far as the closed, finite world opens up and the subjective screens which made any kind of comparison between the two worlds impossible progressively fall away. To put it another way, the advantages associated with urban life exist and attract only if they become perceived and appreciated advantages - only if, therefore, they are apprehended through categories of perception and appreciation such that they cease to be unnoticed, passively or actively ignored, and become perceptible and appreciable, visible and desirable. And indeed, the attraction of the urban way of life can only work on minds converted to its attractions: it is the collective conversion of the world view that confers on the social field that is drawn into an objective process of unification a symbolic power grounded in the recognition unanimously accorded to the dominant values.

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The symbolic revolution is the cumulated product of countless individual conversions, which, beyond a certain threshold, drag each other in an ever faster race. The banalization induced by familiarity causes one to forget the extraordinary psychological labour presupposed, especially in the initial phase of the process, by each departure from the land and the house; and one would need to describe the effort of preparation, the occasions tending to favour or trigger the decision, the stages of a mental distancing that is always difficult to achieve (a part-time job in the bourg as a postman or driver providing for example the jumping-off point for departure to the town) and sometimes never completed (as shown by the lifelong efforts of forced emigrants to 'get closer' to the homeland). Each of the agents concerned passes, simultaneously or successively, through phases of self-certainty, of more or less aggressive anxiety and of crisis in self-esteem (which is expressed in the ritual laments of the end of the peasantry and the 'land' ('the land is blighted'). The propensity to move more or less quickly through the psychological trajectory that leads to the reversal of the table of peasant values depends on the position occupied in the old hierarchy, through the interests and dispositions associated with that position. The agents who put up the weakest resistance to the external forces of attraction, who perceive earlier and better than the others the advantages associated with emigration, are those who are subjectively and objectively least attached to the land and the house, because they are women, younger sons, or poor. It is again the old order that defines the order in which people move away from it. Women, who, as symbolic objects of exchange, circulated upwards and therefore found themselves spontaneously inclined to be eager and compliant towards urban injunctions or seductions, are, together with younger sons, the 'Trojan horse' of the urban world. Less attached than the men (and the younger sons themselves) to the peasant condition and less involved in work and the responsibilities of power, therefore less restrained by concern for the patrimony to be 'kept up', better disposed towards education and the promises of mobility it contains, they bring into the heart of the peasant world the urban gaze that devalues and disqualifies 'peasant qualities'. Thus, the restructuring of the perception of the social world that is at the heart of individual and collective conversion is interlinked with the ending of the collectively maintained psychological autarky that made the closed world of familiar existence an absolute reference - a reference so totally undisputed that the selective distancing of those who, as poorer younger sons or daughters, had to abandon the soil for and through work and marriage was still a homage paid to

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the central values and recognized as such.3 The collective conversion that leads to an ever growing number of departures and which will eventually affect the survivors themselves is inseparable from what has to be called a Copernican revolution: the central, immutable site, the seat of a hierarchy no less immutable and unique, is now merely a point like any other in a larger space, indeed, worse, a low, inferior, dominated point. The commune, with its hierarchies (for example, the opposition between the 'big' and 'small' peasants), is recreated in a larger social space within which the peasants as a whole occupy a dominated position. And the very ones who held the highest positions in that suddenly relegated world will end up - having failed to perform the necessary conversions and reconversions - bearing all the costs of the symbolic revolution which strikes at the old order in a strategic point, the matrimonial market; because farming is situated in an economic market and a labour market that condemns it to have only domestic labour as its labour-power, this market does indeed very directly govern the reproduction of agricultural labour-power and, through it, the peasant enterprise.

3 The symbolic rout of peasant values is now so total that one needs to recall some typical examples of their triumphant assertion: for example, this denunciation of loss of status uttered just before the First World War by the wife of a 'great inheritor' in Denguin, referring to another 'great inheritor': 'X. is marrying his daughter to a factory worker!' (in realty a smallholder from Saint-Faust employed as a clerical assistant at the Maison du Paysan); or another cri du coeur with reference to a great family in Arbus whose daughter had been married to a civil servant: 'Dop u emplegatV (To a clerk!').

The unification of the matrimonial market

As a quite particular market, in which it is persons, with all their social properties, who have a price directly set on them, the matrimonial market constitutes, for the peasants, a particularly dramatic occasion to discover the transformation of the table of values and the collapse of the social price that is assigned to them. That is what was revealed, in a particularly dramatic way, by the Christmas ball, the starting-point for the whole research undertaking, which appears - at the end of a long effort of theoretical construction, broadened as it proceeded to empirical objects that phenomenally are quite different - as the paradigmatic realization of the whole process leading to the crisis of the peasant order of the past.1 The ball is indeed the visible form of the new logic of the matrimonial market. Being a culmination of a process through which the autonomous and self-regulated mechanisms of a matrimonial market whose limits extend far beyond the peasant world tend to take the 1 In relation to this example, one needs to try to clarify what is ordinarily called intuition. The concrete scene through which the problem presents itself is a veritable behavioural paradigm which condenses the whole logic of a complex process in a perceptible form. And it is not without importance that the highly significant character of the scene only offers itself, initially, to an interested perception, a perception that is even profoundly biased, as the treatises on methodology put it, because it is charged with all the affective resonances and emotional colourings that are implied in sympathetic participation in the situation and in the painful point of view of the victims.

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place of the regulated exchanges of the small local market subordinated to the norms and interest of the group, it manifests, concretely, the most specific - and most dramatic - effect of the unification of the market in symbolic exchanges and the transformation which, in this area as elsewhere, accompanies the transition from the local market to the market economy.2 As Engels puts it, the agents have 'lost control of their own social interrelations'; the laws of competition impose themselves on them 'in spite of anarchy, in and through anarchy'.3 The great inheritors condemned to bachelorhood are the victims of the competition which now dominates a matrimonial market previously protected by the (often resented) constraints and controls of tradition. By inducing an abrupt devaluation of all the products of the peasant mode of production and reproduction, of everything that peasant families have to offer, whether land and country life or the peasant's very being, his language, his attire, his manners, his bearing and even his 'physique', the unification of the market neutralizes the social mechanisms which, within the confines of a restricted market, ensured him a de facto monopoly that could provide him with all the women necessary for the social reproduction of the group, and only those. In marriage as in any other form of exchange, the existence of a market in no way implies that transactions only obey the mechanical laws of competition. iMany of the institutional mechanisms tend to give the group control over exchanges and to protect it against the effects of the 'anarchy' to which Engels refers, and which is often forgotten, because of the sympathy spontaneously accorded to the 'liberal' model, which, as in classical comedy, liberates lovers from the dictates of domestic raison d'etat. Thus, under the old matrimonial regime, because the initiative in marriage lay not with the interested parties 2

The informants explicitly contrast the two ways in which the relationships leading to marriage are set up: negotiation between the families, often on the basis of previous links, and direct contact, which almost always takes places at dances. The price of the freedom that results from direct interaction between the parties, who are no longer subject to family pressures and economic or ethical considerations (such as the girl's 'reputation'), is the submission to the laws of the market of individuals abandoned to their own resources. 3 The distinction that Karl Polanyi makes between 'isolated markets' and the 'market economy', and more precisely between 'regulated markets and the 'self-regulating market' (K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (1944), 7th edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 56-76), brings an important refinement to the Marxist analysis of the 'anarchy' of 'socialized production' in which 'the product governs the producers': the existence of a market is not sufficient to make a market economy so long as the group retains control of the mechanisms of exchange.

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but with their families, the values and interests of the 'house' and its heritage had more chance of prevailing over the whims and accidents of sentiment.4 All the more so because all familial education predisposed young people to comply with parental injunctions and to evaluate potential suitors in accordance with specifically peasant categories of perception: a 'good peasant' was identified by the rank of his house, inseparably linked to the size of his property and the standing of his family, and also by personal qualities such as authority, competence and aptitude for hard work, while a 'good wife' wasfirstand foremost a 'good peasant woman', industrious and willing to accept the position she was offered. Never having 'known anything else', the girls of the neighbouring bameaux and the whole area of the hills were more disposed to put up with the lot that marriage held out for them; born and brought up in a zone relatively cut off from external influences they were less likely to judge their potential partners in accordance with heterodox criteria. Thus, before 1914, the matrimonial market of the peasants in the bameaux around Lesquire extended to the region between the Gave de Pau and the Gave d'Oloron, an economically and socially very homogeneous set of communes consisting, like Lesquire, of a small bourg with a still strongly peasant character and farms scattered on the hillsides and the lower slopes of the mountains.5 The group's control over exchanges was asserted in the restriction of the size of the matrimonial market measured in geographical distance and, more importantly, social distance. Although, in this domain, like others, the peasant world never had the total autonomy and autarky that ethnologists have often attributed to it, if only by taking the village as their object, it had been able to retain control of its reproduction by making almost all of its matrimonial exchanges within an extremely narrow and socially homogeneous 'pertinent market'; homogeneity of the material conditions of existence, and therefore of habitus, is indeed the best guarantee of the perpetuation of the fundamental values of the group. 4

The most typical institution of the old matrimonial regime was of course the quasiinstitutionalized matchmaker (called the trachur or talame). In a universe in which the separation between the sexes, which was always very marked, probably only grew stronger as a result of the weakening of traditional social bonds, especially in the bameaux, and the declining frequency of the traditional opportunities for meeting, such as all the collective work, the laissez-faire of the new matrimonial regime could only strengthen the advantage of the urbanites. 5 The different neighbourhoods of Lesquire had, within the common area, specific sectors defined by a tendency to shop in the same markets and attend the same festivities, or, more precisely, to use the same buses (which took the inhabitants of the different neighbourhoods in different directions and gave rise to contacts among the passengers).

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This closed world in which people felt themselves to be among like-minded people has gradually opened up. In the hameaux of the main area of marriages, as in the hameaux around Lesquire, women increasingly look to the town rather than their own or neighbouring hameaux. Being quicker than men to adopt urban models and ideals, they are reluctant to marry a peasant who offers them exactly what they want to escape from (among other things, the authority of the parents-in-law 'who will not let go' and more especially the tyranny of the old daune who intends to keep the upper hand in the household, particularly if the father lacks authority because he has married upwards). Finally, and most importantly, they have more chance of finding a match outside the peasant world, first because, in accordance with the very logic of the system, they are the ones who circulate, and who marry upwards. It follows that matrimonial exchanges between the peasant hameaux and the bourgs or towns can only go in one direction. As is shown by the presence in the small country balls of young urban males whose ease and charm give them an incalculable advantage over the peasants, the matrimonial market that was formerly controlled and quasi-protected is now opened up to harsh and unequal competition. Whereas the urbanite can choose between several hierarchized markets (towns, bourgs, hameaux), the peasant in the hameaux is confined to his own area and has to compete even here with rivals who are better endowed, at least symbolically. Far from the recent extension of the matrimonial area of the peasant men giving access to a greater degree of freedom and leading, through the enlarged space of possible marriages, to increased chances of marriage, it quite simply expresses the need that the least well-endowed have to expand the geographical area of prospection, but within the limits of social homogeneity (or, rather, to maintain that homogeneity) and to direct their expectation, unlike their sisters, to the remotest hameaux of the Basque country or Gascony.6 6

Without claiming here to offer a general theory of matrimonial exchanges in socially differentiated societies, I would simply like to indicate that the description of a process of unification of the matrimonial market in no way implies subscribing to the model of the unified matrimonial market that is at work, in the implicit state, in common theories of the 'choice of spouse'. This model, which assumes the homogeneity of the functions of homogamy, without seeing that it can have opposite meanings depending on whether it takes place among the privileged or the dispossessed, makes the attraction of like for like, as suggested by common-sense intuition ('birds of a feather flock together'), i.e. the pursuit of homogamy, the universal but empty principle of homogamy. But nor should one succumb to the opposite illusion of treating the different matrimonial markets (for example, the 'peasant' market, which continues to function, more or less well) as so many separate worlds, free of any dependency. Just as one can account for the variations in wages by region, branch or occupation only by

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As regularly happens when a social order starts, often imperceptibly, to fall apart, the old-timers contribute to their own decline. Either they comply with the sense of statutory dignity which forbids them to demean themselves and to make the necessary concessions in time, or indeed to resort to the strategies of despair that the crisis forces on the most disadvantaged - this is the case with those heirs to good families who resign themselves to bachelorhood after several fruitless attempts to marry girls of their own rank or those who, while they are still sought after and courted, miss their moment, the turningpoint of the 1950s when marriage was still an easy matter for 'big' peasants ('Many girls he disdained would suit him very well now,' an informant said of one of them); or they confront the new situation with old principles that lead them to act out of phase. This is true of the mothers who busy themselves with finding a husband for their daughter when they should be thinking of their son, or the even larger number who reject as misalliances marriages that they should have welcomed as miracles. The responses of the habitus, which, when it is in phase with the world, are often so marvellously adjusted to that they can make one believe in rational calculation, may on the contrary be quite inappropriate when, confronted with a world different from the one that produced it, the habitus runs, so to speak, in neutral, projecting the expectation of the objective structures of which it is the product on a world from which they have disappeared. The mismatches between the habitus and the structures, and the misfirings of behaviour that result from it, can no doubt sometimes trigger critical revisions and conversions. But the crisis does not necessarily provoke the awakening of consciousness; and the time needed to understand the new course of events is no doubt proportionate to abandoning the hypothesis of a single, unified labour market, and refusing to artificially aggregate heterogeneous data, and instead aiming to discover the structural laws of functioning specific to the different markets, so one cannot understand the variations observed in the chances of marriage in the different social categories, i.e. the price set on the products of their upbringing and education, unless one sees that there are different hierarchized markets and that the prices that may be assigned to the different categories of 'candidates for marriage' depend on their chances of entering the different markets and on the rarity, and therefore the value, they have on those markets (which can be measured by the material and symbolic value of the matrimonial goods for which they have been exchanged). Whereas the most advantaged may extend the geographical and social range of their marriages (within the limits of misalliance), the least advantaged may be condemned to extend their geographical area to compensate for the social restriction of the social area in which they can find partners. It is in terms of this logic, that of strategies of despair, that one can understand the 'bachelors' fairs', the first of which was held in Esparros, in the Baronnies, in 1966.

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the degree of objective and subjective attachment to the old world, the interests and investments in the stakes that it offers. This explains why, so often, privilege is reversed. In fact, at different speeds according to the interests they have invested in the old and the new systems, with forward and backward steps, the different agents pursue the trajectory that leads from the old to the new matrimonial regime, at the cost of a revision of the values and representations associated with each. And the most characteristic effect of the revolutionary crisis, which is expressed in prophylactic prophecies, forecasts intended as exorcism - in the form 'the land is blighted' - is that kind of doubling of consciousness and conduct which leads people to act successively or simultaneously according to the contradictory principles of the two antagonistic principles. Thus the statistics establish that when the sons of peasants manage to marry, they marry the daughters of peasants, whereas the daughters of peasants often marry non-peasants. These matrimonial strategies show, in their very antagonism, that the group does not want for its girls what it wants for its boys, or, worse, that it does not want these boys for its girls, even if it wants some of these girls for its boys. In resorting to strictly opposite strategies depending on whether they are giving or taking women, peasant families reveal that, under the effect of symbolic violence, the violence of which one is both object and the subject, each of them is divided against itself: whereas endogamy manifested the consistency of criteria of evaluation, and thus the agreement of the group with itself, the duality of matrimonial strategies brings to light the duality of the criteria that the group uses to assess the value of an individual, and therefore its own value as a class of individuals. In accordance with a logic analogous to that governing processes of inflation (or, at a higher degree of intensity, the phenomena of panic), each family or each agent contributes to the depreciation of the group as a whole, which is itself at the root of its matrimonial strategies. Everything takes place as if the symbolically dominated group were conspiring against itself. By acting as if its right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, it helps to set up the conditions for the bachelorhood of the inheritors, and for the rural exodus, which it elsewhere deplores as social calamity. By giving its daughters, whom it used to marry upwards, to town-dwellers, it shows that it consciously or unconsciously accepts the urban representation of the peasant and anticipated value of the peasant. The urban image of the peasant, always present but repressed, imposes itself even in the consciousness of the peasant. The collapse of the certitudo sui that the peasants had managed to defend against all symbolic aggressions, including those of the Republican 'school as an integrating force',

186

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reinforces the effects of the attack that provokes it: the crisis of 'peasant values', which finds the opportunity to express itself in the anarchy of the exchanges of the matrimonial market, intensifies the crisis of the value of the peasant, his goods, his products, and his whole being, on the market in material and symbolic goods. The internal defeat, felt at the individual level, which is at the root of these isolated betrayals, performed under cover of the anonymous solitude of the market, leads to this collective, unwanted outcome, the flight of the women and the bachelorhood of the men. The same mechanism underlines the conversion of the peasants' attitude towards the educational system, the main instrument of the symbolic domination of the urban world. Because the school is seen as the only agency capable of teaching the aptitudes that the economic market or the symbolic market demand with ever-increasing urgency, such as the manipulation of standard French or mastery of economic calculation, the resistance previously put up against schooling and scholastic values is fading." Submission to the values of the school reinforces and accelerates the renunciation of the traditional values that it presupposes. In this way, the school fulfils its function of symbolic domination, helping to win a new market for urban symbolic products. Even when it does not succeed in giving the means of appropriating the dominant culture, it can at least inculcate recognition of the legitimacy of that culture and of those who possess the means of appropriating it. The correlation that exists between the rates of school enrolment and the rates of bachelorhood among farmers (aggregated at the level of the region) should not be read as a causal relationship. That would be to forget that the two terms of the relationship are the product of a single principle, even if education can in its turn play a part in reinforcing the efficacy of the mechanisms that produce bachelorhood.8 The 7

The steady decline in the value of the vernacular languages on the market of symbolic exchanges is only a particular case of devaluation affecting all the products of peasant upbringing: the unification of this market has been deadly for all these products, manners, objects, garments, which are cast into the order of the old-fashioned and vulgar or artificially preserved by local scholars, in the fossilized state of folklore. The peasants go into the museums of popular arts and traditions or into 'ecomuseums' resembling exhibitions of stuffed yokels, as they fade from the reality of historical action. 8 At the level of the region it is barely possible to apprehend the system of explanatory factors that determine the matrimonial strategies of the farmers. Given the heterogeneity of the farming units, even within the region, one would need to be able to take into account all at once the size of the property, the life-cycle of the family, the number of children, their distribution by sex, their respective scholastic success, etc. Thus a farmer with a 25-year-old son, owning 20 hectares of land, cannot retire at 60 and leave the farm to his son, who would willingly have taken it on. If he

The unification of the matrimonial market

187

unification of the economic and symbolic market (of which the generalized recourse to the educational system is one aspect) tends, as has been seen, to transform the system of reference through which the peasants situate their position in the social structure. One of the factors of peasant demoralization, which is expressed as much in the school enrolment of their children as in emigration or the abandonment of the local languages, is the collapse of the screen of locally based social relations which helped to mask the truth of their position in the social structure - the peasant apprehends his condition by comparison with that of the junior civil servant or the factory worker. The comparison is no longer abstract or imaginary, as it once was. It arises in concrete confrontations even within the family, with the emigrants and, perhaps especially, in the relations of real competition in which the peasants find themselves measured against non-peasants, at the time of marriages. By giving practical preference to town-dwellers, the women underline the dominant principles of social hierarchization. Measured by that standard, the products of peasant upbringing, and particularly of peasant ways of behaving towards women, are of little worth: the peasant becomes a 'peasant' in the pejorative sense that the urbanite gives to the word. In accordance with the logic of the racism that is also observed between the classes, the peasant is constantly obliged to reckon, in his practice, with the representation of himself that urbanites present to him; and he still recognizes himself in the denials with which he counters the devaluation that the townsman forces on him. It is immediately clear how the educational system can accelerate the circular process of devaluation. First, there is no doubt that it possesses in itself a capacity for diversion which can suffice to defeat the reinforcement strategies through which families seek to direct their children's investments towards the land rather than the school - if the school itself has not been sufficient to discourage them through its negative sanctions. This effect of deculturation is brought about not so much through the pedagogic message itself as through the experience of study and the condition of quasi-student. The raising of the school-leaving age and the prolongation of study turn farmers' children into 'high-school pupils' and even 'students', cut off from peasant society by their whole lifestyle and especially by their temporal rhythms.9 This new experience tends to de-realize had a larger farm, he could divide it temporarily in two; if there were a greater age gap with his son, he could leave it to him at 60. 9 The longer that farmers' children remain in the educational system, the more likely they are to leave the farm. Among farmers' children, those who have pursued technical or general, secondary or higher education are those most inclined to turn away from farming, as opposed to those who have only received primary schooling or

188

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practically the values transmitted by the family and to direct affective and economic investments away from reproduction of the lineage to reproduction by the singular individual of the position of the lineage in the social structure. Here too, it is above all through the effects on the daughters that the school affects the farmers' sons who have to reproduce the peasant family and property: the action of deculturation finds a particularly favourable terrain among the girls, whose aspirations always tend to be organized around marriage and who are consequently more attentive and more sensitive to urban fashions and manners and to the whole set of social markers defining the value of potential partners on the market in symbolic goods, and therefore inclined to derive from scholastic education at least the external signs of urban civility. And it is significant that, as if, once again, the peasants were acting as the accomplices of their objective destiny, they send more of their daughters to school and for longer.10 As well as having the effect of cutting off farmers from their means of biological and social reproduction, these mechanisms tend to favour the appearance, in the consciousness of the peasants, of a catastrophic image of their collective future. And the technocratic prophecy which announces the disappearance of the peasants can only reinforce this representation by giving meaning and coherence to the countless fragmentary indices provided by everyday experience. The effect of demoralization exerted by a pessimistic representation of the future of the class contributes to the decline of the class which produces it. It follows that the economic and political competition between the classes also takes place through the symbolic manipulation of the future: forecasting, the rational form of prophecy, tends to help bring about the future that it predicts. There is no doubt that,

agricultural training. Not only have they been explicitly or implicitly prepared to enter a non-agricultural occupation or live in an urban environment, but they suffer economically if they enter farming below certain thresholds of surface area or capital. Finally, they are the ones best placed to be well aware of the opportunities for nonagricultural employment and to move to areas where the income prospects are greatest (cf. P. Dauce, G. Jegouzo and Y. Lambert, La Formation des enfants d'agriculteurs et leur orientation hors de Vagriculture. Kesultats d'une enquete exploratoire en Uleet-Vilaine (Rennes: INRA, 1971)). 10 In 1962,41.1 % of farmers' daughters aged 15-19 were in education, as against just 32% of the boys (cf. M. Praderie, 'Heritage social et chances d'ascension', in Darras, Le Partage des benefices (Paris: Minuit, 1966), p. 348). While the rates of schooling for boys and girls are fairly close for those aged 10-14 and 20-24, one notes that girls aged 15-19 and especially those whose father runs a farm of more than 10 hectares are much more likely to be in school than the boys (cf. 'Environnement economique des exploitations agricoles franchises', Statistiques Agricoles, 86 (Oct. 1971) (supplement, £tudes series), pp. 156-66).

I he unification of the matrimonial market

189

through the effect of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, simply by bringing to light the laws of the economic market which condemn small farmers, small craftsmen and small shopkeepers, and making them widely known even among those most directly 'interested', economic information helps to produce the phenomena it describes. Demoralization is never anything other than a particular form of self-fulfilling prophecy. The peasantry is a limiting case, and, as such, a particularly interesting one, of the relationship between objective determinisms and the anticipation of their effects. It is because they have internalized their objective future, and the representation that the dominant, who have the power to bring it about through their decisions, have of it, that the peasants behave in ways that tend to threaten their reproduction. What is at stake in the conflict over representations of the future is nothing other than the attitude of the declining classes to their decline - either demoralization, which leads to a rout, a sum of individual escapes, or mobilization, which leads to the collective search for a collective solution to the crisis. What can make the difference is, fundamentally, the possession of the symbolic instruments enabling the group to take control of the crisis and to organize themselves with a view to a collective response, rather than fleeing from real or feared degradation in reactionary resentment and the representation of history as a conspiracy.11 11 In general terms, the economic alienation that leads to the reactionary violence of conservative revolt is at the same a logical and philosophical alienation: agents in decline turn towards racism and, more generally, towards the false concretization that locates the source of their present and potential difficulties in a scapegoat group (Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, etc.), because they do not possess the explanatory schemes that would enable them to understand the situation and mobilize collectively to change it rather than falling into the panic of individual subterfuges. In the particular case, it is clear that regionalist or nationalist demands constitute a specific and sensible riposte to the symbolic domination resulting from unification of the market. I say this in opposition to the various forms of economism which, in the name of a restricted definition of the economy and of rationality, and having failed to understand as such the economy of symbolic goods, reduce the specifically symbolic demands that are always more or less confusedly involved in linguistic, regionalist or nationalist movements to the absurdity of passion or sentiment (cf. for example this typical declaration by Raymond Cartier in Paris-Match, 21 August 1971, on the demands of the Irish Catholics: 'Nothing is more absurd, the departure of either would mean economic disaster. But it is not self-interest, alas, that drives the world. The world is driven by passion'). In fact, what is absurd, and what casts three-quarters of human behaviours into absurdity, is the classic distinction between passions and interests, which ignores the existence of symbolic interests that are quite tangible and capable of giving a (symbolic) rationality to behaviours seemingly as perfectly 'emotional' as linguistic struggles, some feminist demands (such as the battles over pronouns in English) or some forms of regionalist demands.

'Sound opinions of the people'

Having said often enough that spontaneous sociology should be regarded with suspicion, and being more than ever inclined to reject all the forms of everyday chatter on everyday life that have again become current in a cycle of intellectual fashion, I feel entitled to point out that the despair or indignation of those most directly involved often points to problems that research frequently ignores or avoids. This is true of the bachelorhood of elder sons, which, in the 1960s, when some populist discourse was proclaiming the emergence of a new peasant elite, seemed to focus all the anxiety of rural families. Indeed, if one accepts the argument that the biological reproduction of the farming family is one of the conditions of the functioning of the farming enterprise in its traditional form,1 then it can be understood that the crisis of the matrimonial institution, the keystone of the whole system of reproduction strategies, threatens the very existence of the peasant 'house', that indissociable unity of a heritage and a household. Many of the middle-ranking landowners who, according to the national statistics, have been the great beneficiaries of the slight concentration of land ownership made possible by the decline 1

Cf. A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy> ed. D. Thorner, B. Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, 111.: Irwin, 1966), esp. the introduction by B. Kerblay, also published in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, 5, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1964), pp. 411-60; D. Thorner, 'Une theorie neo-populiste de Peconomie paysanne: l'£cole de A. V. Gajanov', Annates, 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1966), pp. 1232-44.

Sound opinions of the people3

191

of smallholdings and who have shown themselves to be the most modern-minded, both technically and in their involvement in associations or unions, have been affected by enforced bachelorhood. In leaving so many properties without heirs, the bachelorhood of eldest sons has brought about what the effects of economic domination and the (at least relative) decline in farming incomes could not have achieved on their own.2 If, having read these analyses, one is persuaded that the symbolic domination that occurs as a result of the unification of the matrimonial market has played a decisive role in the specific crisis of the reproduction of the peasant family, then one must recognize that the attention given to the symbolic dimension of practices, far from representing an idealistic flight towards the ethereal spheres of the superstructure, constitutes the condition sine qua non, and not only in this case, for a real understanding (which one may call, if one wishes, materialist) of the phenomena of domination. But the opposition between infrastructure and superstructure or between the economic and the symbolic is simply the crudest of the oppositions which, by confining the analysis of power to fictitious alternatives constraint or voluntary submission, centralist manipulation or spontaneist self-mystification - make it impossible to fully understand the infinitely subtle logic of the symbolic violence that is set up in the self-obscure relationship between socialized bodies and the social games in which they are engaged.3

2

At the end of a study of the factors in the disappearance of farm enterprises, Andre Brun concludes that 'the "exits" of farmers are essentially the result of mortality and retirement' ('Perspectives sur le remplacement des chefs d'exploitation agricole d'apres l'enquete au l/10e de 1963', Statistique Agricole, supplement 28 (July 1967). In Lesquire, in 1968, 50% of the farmers were over 45, more than half of them were unmarried, and the peasant population showed a net decline due to the birth deficit resulting from non-marriage and late marriage. In 1989, the generation directly affected by the crisis of the 1960s is beginning to die out, and a very large proportion of the properties will disappear with their owner. 3 Although I do not much like the typically scholastic exercise of reviewing, so as to distinguish oneself from them, all the theories competing with the argument that is proposed - among other reasons, because it can suggest that the latter may have had no other principle than the pursuit of difference - 1 should like to point out all the difference that separates the theory of symbolic violence as a misrecognition based on the unconscious adjustment of the subjective structures to the objective structures, from Michel Foucault's theory of domination as discipline and training - or, in another order, the difference between metaphors of an open, capillary network and a concept such as that of the field.

Men Women All

Unmarried women Married women All women All

4 12 16 23 30 14 8 22

3 3 7 2 5 7

3 1 4

n.a.

3 4

1 7 8 34 4 12 16 1 9 10 26 60

14 12 26

Eldest

170 275 27 21 48

16 72 88

105 14 68 82

64 8 51 59

11 51 62 121 185 12 10 22

35 27 62 7 36 43

All

18 14 32 6 26 32

Younger

Small (30ha.)

8 8 10 25 2 2 4

2 2

15

5 4 9 2 4 6

All

15 3 10 13 2 10 12 25 40 8 10 18

8 8

7

5

2

Other1

The data for domestic servants and farmhands, craftsmen and shopkeepers, and civil servants (postmen, gendarmes, etc.) could not be analysed here.

Deceased

Stayed+left

Left

Stayed

Unmarried men Married men All men Unmarried women Married women All women All Unmarried men Married men All men

Father's occupation

58 46 104 13 62 75 179 18 90 108 18 108 126 234 413 41 35 76

Distribution of persons born in the hameaux of Lesquire before 1935 by place of residence in 1970 (Lesquire or elsewhere), sex, father's occupation (and, for farmers, size of farm), birth rank and marital status

Appendix

POSTSCRIPT

A class as object

Pague paysa! (Pay up, peasant!) If there is a truth, it is that the truth of the social world is at stake in struggles- because the social world is, in part, will and representation; and because the representation that groups make of themselves and of other groups plays an important part in shaping what groups are and what they do. The representation of the social world is not a given, or (which amounts to the same thing) a recording or a reflection, but the product of countless acts of construction, always already made and always to be remade. It is deposited in common words and phrases, performative terms that make the meaning of the social world as much as they record it, watchwords [mots d'ordre] which help to produce the social order by informing thought about that world and producing the groups they designate and mobilize. In short, the social construction of social reality is carried out in and through the innumerable antagonistic acts of construction that agents perform, at every moment, in their individual or collective, spontaneous or organized struggles to impose the representation of the social The Bearnais expression in the opening subheading is used in very varied contexts simply to mean that breakages have to be paid for, or more specifically, that it is always the little man, the peasant, who foots the bill. According to the folk etymology, which is probably right in this case, it is the exclamation uttered when the state levies new charges.

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world that best corresponds to their interests. These are very unequal struggles, of course, because agents have a very variable mastery of the instruments of production of the representation of the social world (and, even more so, over the instruments of production of these instruments); and also because the instruments that are available to them ready-made - in particular, ordinary language and the words of common sense - are, through the social philosophy they convey in the implicit state, very unequally favourable to their interests, depending on the positions they occupy in the social structure. This is why the social history of social representations of the social world forms part of the critical preliminaries of the science of the social world, which - particularly in the oppositions it brings into play (GemeinscbaftlGesellschafty folk/urban, etc.) in order to think the social world or in the divisions through which it organizes itself (rural sociology and urban sociology, etc.) - brings in the whole social philosophy that is inscribed in the most ordinary oppositions of ordinary experience of the social world (town/country, rural/urban, etc.). The unconscious is history, as Durkheim more or less said; and there is no other way of fully appropriating one's own understanding of the social world than by reconstituting the social genesis of concepts, historical products of historical struggles which the amnesia of genesis reifies and eternizes. Social history or historical sociology would (perhaps) not be worth an hour of one's time if it were not inspired by the intention of a reappropriation of scientific thought by itself which is constitutive of the most contemporary and most active scientific intention.1 This historical sociology of the schemes of thought and perception of the social world is opposed, as much in its intentions as in its methods, to the different variants, according to the taste of the day, of the history of ideas and particularly the one which gives itself airs of critical radicalism by flaying dead and buried adversaries. 'It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and similar things in general terms, and to give vent to high moral indignation at such infamies. Unfortunately all that this conveys is only what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they played in 1 Concretely this means that when it is reduced to a positivistic accumulation of more or less anecdotal information about the specialists of former times, outside of any reference to the works they produced, the social history of the social sciences is almost totally devoid of interest.

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195

history.'2 If it is unable to grasp the necessities which endow institutions and behaviours with their historical necessity, the historical 'research' that ought to be able to provide the means of tracking down the class unconscious merely provides it with a mask, one which moreover becomes somewhat transparent when, for example, a writer seeks to show that the educational system, an invention of priests and pastors, perfected by petit-bourgeois, functions with the aid of repressive petit-bourgeois to transform the workers into bourgeois more bourgeois than the bourgeois.3 In this case as elsewhere, bourgeois indignation against the petit-bourgeois and against the proletarians whom they bourgeoisify with their schools or their trade unions is made possible and, whatever one may think of it, necessary, not only by the dispositions of the bourgeois habitus but also by an ignorance of the social conditions of production of the agents and of the institutions that they serve, or, more precisely, an indifference to the specific forms that exploitation takes in the different categories of the exploited and in particular among the petit-bourgeois whose specific alienation resides in the fact that they are often led to make themselves the accomplices, at once constrained and consenting, of the exploitation of others and of themselves.4 So it is that the horror stories of bourgeois grandmothers become the cock-and-bull stories of granddaughters at odds with the bourgeoisie. But this is not all: retrospective indignation is also a way of justifying the present. Indeed, by denouncing - as another author 1

F. Engels, Anti-Diihrmg, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), vol. 25, p. 168. One might also have cited Antonio Gramsci on this point. •' Cf. A. Querrien, Genealogie des equipements collectifs, les equipements de normalisation, Vecole primaire (Paris: CERFI, 1975). Those who think this a facile resume might consult pages 111 and 135 for the portrait of the primary teacher as a scribbler stultified by filling out registers or as an onanistic and sado-masochistic petitbourgeois; or pages 140 and 145 for the lesson in bourgeois deportment offered to petit-bourgeois primary teachers and their dreams of power. 4 The very intention of grasping 'the reasons why' \les raisons d'etre], as well as being excluded by class contempt, presupposes something quite different from the consultation of a few picturesque texts encountered while browsing the catalogues of the Bihliotheque Nationale. One only has to know what efforts it cost the historians (cf. J. Ozouf, Nous les maitres d'ecoles. Autobiographies d'instituteurs de la Belle tpoque (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1967), and F. Furet and J. Ozouf (eds), Lire et tLcrire. L'Alphabetisation des Fran$ais de Cabin a Jules Ferry (Paris: Minuit, 1977)) to answer a question that is peremptorily settled in passing (Querrien, Genealogie, p. 151), to be persuaded that, as with Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and Freinet according to Anne Querrien, innovation is, for Querrien and all authors in the same vein, lthe product of the will not to fatigue oneself {Genealogie, p. 145).

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does5 - brutal methods in the age of gentle methods, the charitable lady who read Baron de Gerando in the age of the social worker who quotes Lacan, this liberated history (history liberated from the labour of historical research) helps to legitimate the latest state of the institutions of domination that owe the most specific part of their efficacy to the fact that they remain profoundly misrecognizable - among other reasons because they define themselves precisely against the 'superseded* rearguard.6 In order for social history to have the value of a psychoanalysis of the scientific mind and of the social consciousness, it must recreate completely, that is to say through an effort that is strictly speaking interminable, the social conditions of production of the social categories of perception and representation of the natural or social world that may be at the root of the very reality of this world when, transformed into an artistically constructed tableau and an architecturally organized landscape, nature itself imposes the norms of its own perception, its own appropriation, and when perspective ceases to be an ordering point of view on the world in order to become the very order of the world. In his admirable book The Country and the 5

Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1979); originally La Police des families (Paris: Minuit, 1977). 6 'And, of course, as in the past, it was upon working-class families that they were to perform their mission of propagating these new norms that had done so well by them. "Sexual freedom", birth control, the relational demand, and pedagogy were to be spread along the same lines, according to the same technocratic interventionism that was once used to sell savings banks and schooling; the promotional goading and attendant blaming of families who, through their resistance, were ruining the members' chances. The launching of Family Planning echoed a discourse that was more than two centuries old...' (Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 221, italics added). This lofty history brings together all the conditions for high symbolic yield on the market in cultural products: the incessant to-and-fro between complicitous references to the present - tending to produce the effect of a 'radical critique' - and disconnected, decontextualized references to the past - tending to lend an air of 'scholarship' - and the consequent confusion of demands dispenses the author both from any systematic inquiry into the present - which would only rob the discourse of its philosophical elevation - and from any in-depth research into the past - which, by resituating institutions and practices in the system from which they receive their meaning and their sociological necessity, would constitute the past as past and nullify the object of retrospective indignation. And, to ground the objectivist overview which completely evacuates study of the agents and the sometimes interminable research that it requires, one only has to hand over to that kind of negative finalism which reduces history to the mechanical process of timeless, impersonal agencies [instances] with allegorical names: i n shon, we must try to understand the socially decisive effect of social work [elsewhere called 'the assistantial'] from the standpoint of the strategical disposition of the three agencies that compose it: the judicial, the psychiatric, and the educative* (Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 99 [italics in original]).

rosiscripi: A class as ovject

ly/

City J Raymond Williams points out not only that the perception of the natural world itself has nothing natural about it - which has long been known, in particular thanks to the veritable social genealogy of the categories of perception of the natural world given to us to Erwin Panofsky8 - but also that it is indissociable from a relation to the social world; that the view of the natural world and, a fortiori, of the social world depends on the social height of the viewpoint from which it is taken. Thus the bourgeois representation of the social world, whether it be the 'natural landscape' of landscape gardening or the apparently ahistorical psychology of the novels of Jane Austen or George Eliot as analysed by Raymond Williams, delivers in an objectivated form the truth of the bourgeois relation to the natural and social world which, like the distant gaze of the stroller or tourist, produces the landscape as landscape, that is, as a decor, a countryside without country-people, a culture without cultivators, a structure structured without structuring labour, a purposefulness without purpose, a work of art. The mystery of the 'eternal charm' of bourgeois art vanishes if one sees that everything which, in literature or painting (not to mention music), functions as a denegation (in Freud's sense) of social relations predisposes the work of art to be reactivated, if not indefinitely, at least so long as it is asked for nothing more than it was originally predisposed to offer, that is, a neutralized evocation of the social world which speaks of that world in a mode such that everything takes place as if it were not speaking of it. The dominated classes, dominated even in the production of their self-image and therefore their social identity, do not speak, they are spoken. Among other privileges, the dominant have the privilege of controlling their own objectivation and the production of their own image - not only inasmuch as they possess a more or less absolute power over those who contribute directly to this work of objectivation (painters, writers, journalists, etc.); but also inasmuch as they have the means of prefiguring their own objectivation through a whole labour of representation, as it used to be called, that is, a theatricalization and aestheticization of their persons and their conduct which are directed towards manifesting their social condition and above all imposing the representation of it. In short, the dominant is the one who manages to impose the norms of his own perception, to be perceived as he perceives himself, to appropriate his own objectivation by reducing his objective truth to his subjective intention. By contrast, one of the fundamental dimensions of alienation lies in the 7

R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). " E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone, 1991).

198

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fact that the dominated have to reckon with an objective truth of their class that they have not made, with the class-for-others that is imposed on them as an essence, a destiny, fatum, that is, with the force of what is said with authority. Endlessly invited to adopt others' point of view on themselves, to bring to bear on themselves the gaze and judgement of strangers, they are always liable to become strangers to themselves, to cease to be the subjects of the judgement they make on themselves, the centre of perspective of the view they take of themselves. Of all the dominated groups, the peasant class, no doubt because it has never given to itself or has never been given the counter-discourse capable of constituting it as the subject of its own truth, is the example par excellence of the class as object, forced to shape its own subjectivity from its objectivation (being very close in that respect to the victims of racism). These members of a class dispossessed of the power to define its own identity cannot even be said to be what they are, since the most ordinary word [paysan] used to designate them can function, even in their own eyes, as an insult; the recourse to euphemism (agriculteur, proprietaire terrien ['farmer', 'landowner']) testifies to this. Confronted with an objectivation that tells them what they are or what they are to be, they have no choice but to take on the definition (in its least unfavourable form) that is imposed on them or to define themselves in reaction against it. It is significant that the dominant representation is found at the heart of the dominated discourse itself, in the very language with which the peasant speaks of and sees himself: the [French] bouseux, cul-terreux, pequenot, plouc, peouze who speaks with an accent du terroir has his almost exact equivalent in Bearnais in the paysanas empaysanit, the 'empeasanted peasant' whose clumsy efforts to speak French (francimandeja) are mocked and whose heaviness, blundering, ignorance and lack of adaptation to the urban world make him the favourite hero of the most typically peasant comic stories. The formation of a fundamentally heteronomous, reactive and therefore sometimes reactionary identity is all the more difficult because the images with which it has to reckon are contradictory, as are the functions that those who produce them make them serve. It is certain the peasants are almost never thought of in and for themselves, and that the very discourses that exalt their virtues or those of the countryside are never anything other than a euphemized or indirect way of speaking of the vices of the workers of the town. Being a mere pretext for favourable or unfavourable prejudices, the peasant is the object of expectations that are by definition contradictory, since he owes his existence in discourse only to the conflicts that are fought out over him. Thus, at the present time, the various sectors

Postscript: A class as object

199

of the field of ideological production offer him at one and the same time the most incompatible images of himself. This paradox is particularly striking in the order of culture and especially language, where certain fractions of intellectuals, carried by the logic of their specific interests, are asking the peasants to return, for example, to their vernacular languages at a time when the tacit demands of the economic, matrimonial and scholastic markets are insisting, more brutally than ever, that they be abandoned. But perhaps the contradiction is more apparent than real, since the subjectively most irreducible divisions can organize themselves objectively as a division of the labour of domination: folklorization, which thrusts the peasantry into the museum and converts the last peasants into the guardians of a nature transformed into a landscape for city-dwellers, is the necessary accompaniment of dispossession and expulsion. It is indeed the laws of differential profit, the fundamental form of the profit of distinction, that assign to the peasants their reserves, where they will be free to dance and sing their bourrees and gavottes, for the greater satisfaction of ethnologists and urban tourists, so long as their existence is economically and symbolically profitable. It is clear that there are perhaps few groups whose relations with their own identity are less simple, who are more condemned, in a word, to 'inauthenticity' than these 'simple folk' in whom all conservative traditions seek the model of 'authentic' existence. There is nothing new in the fact that the peasants, unceasingly confronted with the inseparably economic and symbolic domination of the urban bourgeoisie, have no choice but to play out, for city-dwellers and also for themselves, one or other of the images of the peasant, whether it be the respectful peasant with a line in popular populism, speaking of his land, his house and his animals in the tones of a primary school essay; or the Heideggerian peasant, who thinks ecologically, who knows how to take his time and cultivate silence, and who astonishes the urbanites visiting their holiday homes with his deep wisdom, springing from one knows not where; or the empeasanted peasant who takes on, not without a hint of irony or contempt, the role of the 'bumpkin', or 'yokel', the good savage or even the poacher, sometimes something of a magician, who astonishes urbanites as much by his skill in finding mushrooms or setting snares as by his talents as a bonesetter and his archaic beliefs. Moreover, the constitution of the collective identity poses problems for the peasants (and for social science) that are no simpler than those of individual identity. One thinks of the exemplary history of those peasants in western France who were the bearers of the most radical demands in 1789 but who only a few years later provided the fiercest

200

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supporters of the Vendee counter-revolution.9 Obliged to constitute themselves 'against', first against the clergy and its properties, then against the urban bourgeoisie, the great swallower-up of lands and revolutions, the peasants (to whom one should add those fractions of the rural world who in a sense represent its limiting cases, such the forest workers, the absolute antithesis of the inhabitants of the bourg) seem condemned to these rearguard battles against the revolutions they have sometimes served, because the specific form of the domination that they undergo means that they are also dispossessed of the means of appropriating the meaning and the profits of their revolt. Without claiming to see in them invariants of a peasant condition whose immense variety only urban blindness can ignore, the fact remains that the narrowness of the field of social relations, which, by favouring false contextualization, often misdirects their revolt, the closure of the cultural horizon, the ignorance of all forms of organization and collective discipline, the demands of the individual struggle against nature and the competition for possession of the soil, and so many other features of their conditions of existence, predispose the peasants to that kind of anarchist individualism which prevents them from thinking themselves as members of a class capable of mobilizing itself with a view to imposing a systematic transformation of social relations. This is why, even when they play their role as a force of revolution, as in so many recent revolutions, they have every likelihood of appearing, sooner or later, as reactionary, because they have failed to impose themselves as a revolutionary force.10

9 P. Bois, Paysans de VOuest, des structures economiques et sociales aux opinions politique* depuis Vepoque revolutionnaire (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1960). >° P. Bourdieu, 'Une classe objet', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 17-18 (Nov. 1977), pp. 2-5.

Index

Tables are indicated by italic page numbers. adot calculation of 15-17, 141n as compensation 142 flexibility of rules regarding 1424, 146 impact on of inflation 44 and property value 139 right of return 21, 150 size of 151-2, 153 threefold function 21-2 agricultural fair, ball of 128-9 agriculture 175-7 alienation 189n, 197-8 authority of parents 20-1, 29-31, 45, 146-8 bachelorhood in Brittany 121-2, 122-3 changing views of 38-9 due to restructuring of system 51n effect on peasant farming 92-3, 190-1 and emigration 171-2

and excessive maternal authority 118-20 extent of 9-10, 10 of modern farmers 91 as social diminishment 91-3 of younger sons 156-7 see also marriage bachelors, at the Christmas ball vii, 82-3 balls 82-7, 128-9, 180 Beam description of by Arthur Young 103-4 distinctive economic and social order 104-5 £tats de Beam 101-2 history of 100-5 as independent state 101 land ownership 103 law of 97-8, 160-1 Middle Age institutions of 101-2 population changes (1936-54) 108-10, 109 population increase 102-3 stability of society 102

202 Bearnais language 74-5, 198 birth of daughters 19, 149 Bloch, Marc 100, 103 bodily hexis 84-6 body and gait of peasants 84-6 bourg differentiation from hameaux 72-5 family size 71-3, 72 food provision 68 houses in 66-7 language used 74-5 layout of 63-4 livestock and land ownership in 66 marital status of inhabitants 42 marriage area of men from 59 marriages with hameaux residents 54-62, 61 occupations in 64-5, 65 Sunday morning in 71 unmarried men in 40, 43 unmarried women in 43 views of Lesquire 126 Brittany, bachelorhood in 121-4, 122, 122-3 Christmas ball vii, 82-3, 180 church attendance 175 Civil Code 98-9, 162 civil servants 75-80 collective labours 69 cultural particularism 174-5 customary law of Beam 97-8, 160-1 dances and dancing 69-70, 82-7 daughters, birth of 19, 149 day labourers 155 dialogues villager and bachelor 115 villager and peasant 111-14 differentiation between families 26-9 domestic servants 33-4, 39-40n

Index Donzelot, Jacques 196nn downward marriages 22-4, 141, 151-2 dowry see adot Dumont, Louis 133 education 186-8, 195 eldest children, rights of 14—15 eldest sons as bachelors 29-31, 34, 47 lack of freedom of 146-8 opposition with younger sons 51-2 primacy over younger siblings 145 upward/downward marriages 141 emigration 47-50, 48, 49, 170-2, 177-9 emotions, expression of 88 Engels, Friedrich 181, 195n ethnologv, observations of 133^4n extended families 72-3 families contradictory objectives of 38 organization of 98-9, 161-2 principle of differentiation 26-9 size of 71-3, 72 farms, hill 64, 127 and bachelorhood 92-3, 190-1 feelings, expression of 88 fertility strategies 149,155 folklorization of peasants 199 food provision in the bourg 68 Fors de Beam 97-8, 160-1 Fortes, Meyer 136 Foucault, Michel 191n French language 74-5, 198 funerals 68-9 Furet, Francois 195n gait of peasants 84-6 genealogical trees and relationships 136-8

Index girls see women Gramsci, Antonio 195n habitus of the peasant 84-6 Halbwachs, M. 90n hameaux auberges (inns) 68 bonds of neighbourhood 68-70 car usage in 70-1 differentiation from bourg 72-5 family size 71-3, 72 farms of 64, 127 Lesquire 192 marriage area of men from 57 marriages between residents from 59-60 marriages in 52-3 marriages with bourg residents 43, 43, 54-62, 61 unmarried men in 39-40, 41 heiresses 52 historical sociology 194-200 house division of 15-17 name of the 15 permanence of as function of marriage 28-9 informants, list of 95-6 inheritance and stem families 99 instituting of the heir 144 juridism 133-6 kinship relations 136-8 Koyre, Alexander 174 labourers 155 Lacan, Jacques 196 land ownership in Beam 103 language 74-5, 198 law of Beam 97-8, 160-1 Le Play, Frederic 98-9, 161 legal system, increasing use of 142n

203

Lesquire 192 migration from 48, 48-50 views of 125-6 Levi-Strauss, Claude 2, 3n Maget, Marcel 2 market, unification of 175-9, 181 marriage based on strategies not rules 133-6 and continuity of lineage 12 factors disrupting system of 44-50 favoured types of 24 flexibility of rules 24, 146 and geographical location 40, 42, 42, 43-4n governing of by rules 11, 133-6 between heiress and younger son 24-6 between heirs 152 maintenance of patrimony 14, 18 opposition between bourg and hameaux 40, 42, 43 perpetuation of social hierarchy 34 prior investigations 11-12 probability of and size of property 171 restructuring of system 50-3 as safeguarding peasant qualities 36-7 social function of non-marriage 34-5 and social status 44-5 and socio-economic status 1820, 39-40, 41 statistical analysis of 170-3, 172 types of 51-2 upward/downward 22-4, 141, 151-2 see also bachelorhood marriage area 55 extension of 54-9, 57, 58 Marx, Karl 133, 175n matchmakers 35-6^ 45-6, 182n

204

Index

maternal authority and bachelorhood 118-20 Mauss, Marcel 84, 88 men bourg, marriage area of 59 hameaux, marriage area of 57 lack of attention to appearance 89 numbers in the bourg and hameaux 40, 41, 42, 43-4n primacy over women 144-5 upward/downward marriages 22-4 migration from hameaux 47-50, 48, 49 mothers, authority of 151-2

style of dress 79 Sunday morning in the bourg 71 and villagers 53-62 pedlars as matchmakers 35-6 ploughing 125 Polanyi, Karl 181n population changes (1936-54) 108-10, 109 power, domestic 151-2 price policies 176 priests as matchmakers 35-6 primogeniture, right of 14-15 property, division of 143n Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 63

name of the house 15 neighbourhoods collective labours 69, 70 distinguishing 64 funerals in 68-9 nephews 138 nepotism 138

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 133n relations between the sexes 35, 46 representation of the social world 193-200 rules, governing of marriage by 11, 133-6 rural life, history of 100-1

Ozouf,J. 196n

Saussure, Ferdinand de 134n schools 186-8 segregation of the sexes 35, 46 self-awareness of peasants 86-7 sexes relations between 46 segregation of the 35, 46 social density in the hameaux 68-70 social hierarchy 27-8, 139—41 awareness of 34 social history 194-200 socio-economic status 39-40, 41 sociology historical 194-200 primary task of 94-5 sport 84n3 stem families 98-9, 161-2 strategies, matrimonial not legal rules 133-6 and the patrimony 138

Panofsky, Erwin 197 parents, authority of 20-1, 29-31, 45, 146-8 peasants body and gait 84-6 and civil servants 75-80 economy, subordination to the market 175-7 encounters with girls 87 folklorization of 200 habitus of 84-6 identity of 198-200 internalization of body image 86 isolation of 70-1 language used 74-5 objectification of 198 opening of world of 174-9 qualities of 36-7, 46-7 self-awareness of 86-7

Querrien, A. 196n

Index as product of the habitus 157-9 Sunday morning in the bourg 71 unification of the market 175-9, 181 of the matrimonial market 180-9 of the social field 172-3 upward marriages 22-4, 141, 151-2 urban culture adoption of values from 46-7 attractions of 177 at dances 83, 84-5, 86 process of moving to 178 view of peasants from 187 values, rural v. urban 46-7 Van Gennep, A. 35n villagers attitude to peasants 78-80 as mediator between peasant and state 76-7 and peasants 53-62 villages dances in 69-70 see also bourg Weber, Max 153, 167 Williams, J. M. 71n

205

Williams, Raymond 196-7 women attention to appearance 89 causes of failure to marry 49n education of 90, 188 exodus of 47-50, 48 extension of marriage area 56-7 farm work of 125 jobs in the town 45 likelihood of leaving 171 numbers in the bourg and hameaux 42, 43 reluctance to marry into hameaux 60 upward/downward marriages 22-4 and urban culture 88-91 Young, Arthur 103-4 younger children, heritage rights 15-17 younger sons accounts from 116-17 as bachelors 156-7 as domestic servants 33-4 marriages of 154-6 marriages with heiresses 52 opposition with eldest sons 51-2 position of regarding the family 31-3