Barnett Singer - Village Notables in Nineteenth-Century France Priests, Mayors, Schoolmasters [1983]

It is fifty years since Gabriel Chevalier chronicled the uproar created by Barthelemy Piechut's great project – the public urinal for Clochemerle. Small town or village mayors like Piechut, together with his fellow notables, the schoolmaster, Ernest Tarfadel, and the cure, Augustin Ponosse, are figures of fun, albeit affectionate fun. Now Barnett Singer sets out to explore the originals of these characters and their traditional squabbles, and to highlight their role in the development of French rural society in the century before the First World War.
Singer recognises the problem of generalising about the outlook or mentalite of his subjects, especially in a country of such regional diversity as nineteenth-century France; but, drawing on information from a variety of French archives and an impressive number of secondary sources, he suggests some illuminating conclusions about the origins of mayors, priests and schoolmasters, about their differing world views, about the undoubted loneliness and isolation of many rural clergy and teachers. His subjects were, he emphasises, 'In-betweeners' – in the village, but not always of it. Theirs was often a dual loyalty: on the one hand they owed allegiance to the State or the Church which had appointed them and entrusted them with their respective tasks; on the other hand they had a duty, toward the community and the locality in which they lived and worked. As anti- clericalism grew and as Church and State contested with each other, especially after republicans took over the management of the Third Republic in the mid 1870s, so the squabbles of these small, rural notables, assumed political overtones. In places the book looks as if the copy editor was one of the notables' inferiors, more at home with a rural patois than a national language, but Singer has produced a useful addition to the fast-growing literature on rural France.