Sarah Farmer. Rural Inventions

After 1945, the French countryside underwent a radical transformation. The introduction of tractors made the millennia-old partnership between humans and horses obsolete, and industrialized agriculture decimated small-scale agriculture. Peasants either modernized their operations or moved to the city in search of work. By the 1960s, a now urbanizing nation tried to make sense of this transformation. Many observers, like the sociologist Henri Mendras, noted the passing of the peasantry and, therefore, the decline of rural life. In Rural Inventions, Sarah Farmer pushes back against the assumption that “the end of the peasantry” signaled the end of rural life. “Rural society,” Farmer maintains, “continued to be reinvented by rural people who remained and by newcomers” (120). From the 1960s onward, uses of the countryside multiplied: now not only a site of industrialized agriculture, the countryside also became a site of tourism, political activism, and environmental preservation. In this light, Rural Inventions is a book about the dynamic relationship between city and country, about how their supposed opposition “is not as durable as imagined” (120).

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