Making politics in the European countryside : 1780s-1930s

"This book offers a fresh look at the so-called "politicisation" of the European countryside, from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s, in the context of waning monarchies, rising and staggering parliamentary nation states, and fascist and communist dictatorships. The concept "politicisation", however, is misleading. The book argues that Europe's rural societies were far from immobile spaces, set in routines, that had to be politised from outside and against the grain. The thirteen articles in the volume demonstrate that, instead of politicisation from scratch, political thinking and acting of country dwellers - from Scandinavia to Spain, from Moravia to France - evolved in a constant, dialectical relationship with their urban, regional and national surroundings: they reacted to wars, revolutions and shifting borders, their political loyalties changed, so did their political agendas, their repertoires of collective action and their role in the establishment, successes and failures of political parties, separate agrarian parties included." Front Matter 1 Corinne Marache, Laurent Brassart, Juan Pan-Montojo & Leen Van Molle. General introduction 13 PART I. The shock of wars and revolutions, 1780s-1850s 21 Laurent Brassart. Introduction 23 Jean-Pierre Jessenne. 1. Consensus or conflict? Politics in towns and villages between the Seine and the North Sea, c. 1780-1830 33 Laurent Brassart & Maxime Kaci. 2. From rural homelands to national bordered lands, 1789-1815? 59 Niels Grüne. 3. Social inequality and the dynamics of political translocalisation: rural communities in nineteenth-century Germany 75 Jesper Lundsby Skov. 4. Peasant politicians and democracy: how the peasants contributed to the democratisation of Denmark, 1788-1849 101 PART II. Shifting repertoires of collective action 121 Juan Pan-Montojo. Introduction 123 Alexandre Dupont. 5. A war within the war: peasant attacks against the forests during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871 135 Óscar Bascuñán Añover. 6. Punishment meted out by the community:politics and popular justice in rural Spain,1895-1923 153 Nadine Vivier. 7. Electoral practices in French villages at the time of male universal suffrage: from rural collective action to individualism 171 Édouard Lynch. 8. Collective peasant struggles under the Third Republic in France: learning and inventing new protest tactics 195 PART III. Political parties in the countryside 213 Leen Van Molle. Introduction 215 Milan Řepa. 9. Between the nation and self-interest: the Czech peasantry in Moravia at the daybreak of civil society, 1848-1914 223 Florencia Peyrou. 10. Spanish republican discourses on the countryside, 1840-1874 247 Jordi Planas, Raimon Soler-Becerro. 11. Agricultural associations and political parties in the transition to mass politics in Catalonia, 1890-1936 271 Erik Bengtsson, Josefin Hägglund. 12. Agrarian politics in Sweden, c. 1850-1950 293 Miguel Cabo. 13. Agrarian parties in Europe prior to 1945 and beyond 313