Nov 12, 2005
Frenchmen and Peasants
Some analysts of military affairs have lately argued that the world is seeing the rise of"fourth-generation warfare," an emergence of significant non-state military actors whose confrontation with formal government will challenge the very legitimacy of the state. Such"warfare" doesn't always look like the kinds of activity we associate with that word. At the website Defense and the National Interest, the deeply conservative (and highly provocative) writer William Lind finds in the recent riots in France a perfect example of the"4GW" phenomenon:"Here we find ourselves peering over the crater of the Fourth Generation volcano directly into its heart, the transfer of primary loyalties away from the state."
What's remarkable, in the coverage of the riots, is how little anyone has noted the historically recent nature of those loyalties to the state. I'm thinking in particular of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, which depicted a 19th-century France in which many nominally French peasants spoke provincial languages, knew no French at all, and paid little attention (and little money) to the central French administration. I'm not trained in French history, read very little in the field, and am several thousands of miles away from my copy of Weber's book, so my discussion here will be awfully limited. But isn't the jealous protection of putatively French culture by the French state -- such as the much-noted practice of teaching every child in France that their ancestors were Gauls -- a likely product of the tenuousness, the historical recentness, of the very idea of"French culture" or a shared loyalty to the French state?
What's remarkable, in the coverage of the riots, is how little anyone has noted the historically recent nature of those loyalties to the state. I'm thinking in particular of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, which depicted a 19th-century France in which many nominally French peasants spoke provincial languages, knew no French at all, and paid little attention (and little money) to the central French administration. I'm not trained in French history, read very little in the field, and am several thousands of miles away from my copy of Weber's book, so my discussion here will be awfully limited. But isn't the jealous protection of putatively French culture by the French state -- such as the much-noted practice of teaching every child in France that their ancestors were Gauls -- a likely product of the tenuousness, the historical recentness, of the very idea of"French culture" or a shared loyalty to the French state?