Peasants into Frenchman Review From Peasants into Frenchmen tries to explain and show the massive amounts of change that brought the common man into the modern world and does so to a good extent. The book also shows that in bringing the common peasant into modern life, many injustices and sacrifices were forced on the French countryside. True, many people moved into the cities in search of better lives, but most stayed behind on their farms isolated to what was going on outside of their little world of the village. In the introduction the author illustrates how different the two worlds of the city and countryside had been. Also, he begins to describe how divided France was and how it changed through modernization to within forty-four years becoming a unified European nation. Mr. Weber also informs his audience about his fascination with how there existed two cultures within France during this time period.For the first part of the book, Mr. Weber illustrates in detail how daily life was prior to 1870, giving a good indication of how difficult creating a nation from these circumstances would be. Mr. Weber showed how afraid people were of disease, how most people did not travel far from the place of their birth for their entire lives, how difficult it was to just survive let alone prosper, how a significant portion of peasants couldn’t speak French and even those who could couldn’t read or write it, and how local currencies were maintained and how little currency mattered because of the more important use of bartering. These first chapters help illustrate the tiny amount of change had occurred from the time of feudalism to the middle of the nineteenth century. In chapters one and two Mr. Weber shows just how ignorant, superstitious, and depressed the average peasant was and how the French peasant wasn’t really French at all. One example of his opinion “The peasant did not reason; he was selfish and supers...
