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Painting of Social Relationships and the Invention of the Eternal Peasant : the two Themes of Jean-François Millet On the basis of the peasant themes in the work of J-F. Millet, this article suggests that far from accepting the stereotype of a painter of the eternal peasant, we ought to view his paintings as depicting social relationships that can be situated in a specifie historical and geographie context. The major opposition around which his work is constructed is that between an agricultural proletariat from a region of large-scale farming (open fields) and an independent peasantry from a region where pasture-land (closed fields) predominates. The constitution of the social image of Millet's work, governed, in the final analysis, by historical developments, results in both an internal evolution in the work itself and an external evolution in the interpretations of it (selective reading of the paintings, definition of the corpus considered representative of the painter). This process may be viewed as a work of political neutralization which, by blunting the opposition between the two types of peasantries, leads to a progressively abstract representation of the peasant attitude as a general disposition in the face of the social relations in which it develops and takes on meaning. The result is the creation of a composite ethic : asceticism and toughness in coping with physical hardship, cuit of domesticity ; Christian Stoicism and acceptance of one's lot. And, at a moment of crisis in the integration of the lower classes into a new socio-political framework (passage from the Second Empire to the Third Republic), this ethic could be presented to the whole range of the lower classes as the ethic of the humble, the ethic of hard work and of resignation.

Pleasant Perspectives. The Invention of Landscape and the Elimination of the Peasant. In this article Raymond Williams studies the «invention» of the country-house landscape garden in England in the eighteenth century as a moment in the development of the social image of the countryside . He shows that the proper way to examine this aesthetic innovation is not by internal art-historical analysis, but by reference to the perceptual categories of an enlightened agrarian bourgeoisie engaged in carrying out a capitalist transformation of the countryside, especially through the rationalization of farming. Consequently, while seemingly opposed to the productive exploitation of resources (by its cuit of the «natural» and its preference for the curved line), this form of land-scaping is profoundly influenced by the same philosophy, with its emphasis on mastery of nature and rationality. But it expresses these values by the creation of a world freed from all trace of productive labor and of all reference to producers. The «natural» landscape is a way of obscuring the social relationships between an agrarian bourgeoisie and the various levels of the peasantry affected by the transformations (notably enclosures) required by the enlightened agronomy of this bourgeoisie.

Schoolteachers, Peasants, and the Republican Order This work is based, in part, on an analysis of the autobiographies of primary school teachers collected by Jacques Ozouf as part of the survey he conducted in 1964 among surviving schoolmasters of the Belle Epoque. It draws, as well, on a study of republican ideas about mass education as revealed especially in the methods used to train student teachers at normal schools during the period of the development of the «teaching corps» which was to take the place of the «teaching individuals», in the words of Jules Ferry. The author considers the relationship of the republican schoolteacher to his profession (vocation and mission) and the vision that he has -and transmits- of the social world (cultural vision of the social world and social moralism). He shows that it is possible, if these factors are related both to the sociological characteristics of the teacher's original milieu and to the professional training imposed on him, to analyze them in such a way that they remain free of the moralizing interpretations which make the schoolmaster of the beginng of the Third Republic into either the champion of social conservatism or the artisan of the liberation of «the people». While the professional ethic rests simultaneously on the inculcation of respect for «high culture» and on the conviction of the modesty of their knowledge, thereby defining legitimate cultural territories for the «primary» school teachers -who are constantly reminded to conform to the cultural order-, the teachers family histories themselves generate a consciousness of limits. Personal social experience of the liberating potential of schooling having thus prepared them to adhere to the republican theses of meritocracy and of the liberation offered by education, the elementary school teachers are likewise predisposed to view the rural world with the eyes of an observer, an esthete, or an ethnologist - sign of a solidarity unlikely to be found in their original milieu.

Images of the Peasantry in the Rural Novel at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Before the subject of the city and the countryside became part of the domain of the social sciences, ideological representations of rural and urban life were elaborated primarily in the artistic and literary field. At the end of the nineteenth century the treatment of these themes was especially flourishing in the novel, whose «rustic» variant, describing the living conditions of the peasantry, enjoyed a considerable success, reflected in the large in-crease in the number of titles published in this vein The resuit was a renewal of the literary problematic, but also, more broadly, in keeping with the social and political significance of some of these books, the introduction of a certain diversity in the social images of the peasantry and in the perceptual categories applied to the rural world. The present article examines this process through an analysis of La Terre by Emile Zola and of the principal novels of Rene Bazin, Eugene Le Roy, and Emile Guillaumin. These authors have in common the fact of breaking with the two traditions which previously dominated the rustic novel -that of the pastoral novel and that of its counterpole, the realistic novel- by depicting the peasantry as a social category threatened in regard to both its material existence and its System of values. The appearance of new themes such as the exodus from rural areas and the development of class struggles in the countryside should be related to the economic crisis that French agriculture under-went after 1880. The sudden blossoming, arising from this concern with common problems, of different and even contradictory images of the peasantry is interpreted here as a function of a number of factors, the most important of which are the structure of landed property in the regions des-cribed in the rustic novels (regions of sharecrop-ping and of small proprietors farming their own land), the social trajectory of the authors, and their position in the literary field.

The Village Fete By observing local fetes in Mayenne the author was able to ascertain the effects of the transformations which have taken place in the world of the peasants. The change from the village fete, in which ail the inhabitants participate, to the communal fete, which, with its distinction between actors and spectators, is more like a show, can be correlated with the spread within the peasant milieu of the townsman's image of the peasantry. The organization of «fetes a l'ancienne», in which the peasants are encouraged to play themselves, is doubtless an extreme case. All the same, the mixture of serious and burlesque in the sketches that the peasants present of their way of life reveals the ambiguity of a situation in which they do not always know if they are playing at being themselves or at being someone else. They have been deprived of a hold on the social definition of their identity, and it is almost always from others that they receive the definition of what they ought to be. Through these fetes, then, the peasants return, as it were, to their origins ; are they not seeking in this way to recover a social identity of their own ?

The Social Determinants of Soil Fertility Progress in agricultural and genetic techniques has brought about a considerable relaxation in the ecological constraints on the production of crops. This progress has been accompanied by an increase in regional specialization which has gone so far that the very character of the latter has undergone a change. As agricultural steadily became liberated from «natural» constraints, the development of social constraints imposed new forms of specialization upon it. Thus, uneven technical progress in the various productive sectors has been accompanied by a phenomenon of differentiation among the Systems of crop and cattle raising governed by the size of the enterprises involved : the smaller, less mechanized farms have confined themselves to raising animais, while the cultivation of fruits and vegetables has corne to be dominated by the larger farms. The regional specialization which has thereby resulted is less the reflection of ecological factors than the expression of the economic and social System in which it is embedded. This divorce of animal breeding from the production of cash crops has led to changes in the way in which the soil is fertilized. Since straw tends to be lacking in regions where cattles raising is most highly specialized, while scarcely any animais remain in the regions of large-scale farming, the burying of manure has ceased to be a major means of producing humus. This practice is still important in cattle-raising regions where the extensive permanent and temporary grasslands contribute, in any case, to maintaining the humus level ; but in regions of large-scale farming the latter resuit is obtained by burying straws, the leaves and collars and beets, manure crops, compost, etc. Until recently, humus was procured in large quantities without resort to the marketplace. Self-sufficiency was the rule, and it was based in large part on the ready availability of cereal straws. Hence one is led to ask whether projects which promote the commercialization of straw for agricultural ends (feeding of cattle) or indus trial ends (notably as an energy source) do not constitute a threat to the fertility of the soil and the equilibrium of the national humus balance. To the degree that the accumulation of humus is by nature a long-term operation, it necessarily comes into conflict with the rhythms of the economic and social System, which tend to favor the short term. Evidence of this contradiction is becoming increasingly abundant in France today, and not just in areas of poor soil but also in those which are considered to be the richest (the Picardy plateau and the Soissonnais plateau, for example). The gravity of this kind of problem is particularly evident, moreover, in countries which have experienced colonial domination and whose organic resources were exploited in a way similar to their mineral resources.

The Linguistic Consequence of Being a Lame This article is extracted from Language in the Inner City in which William Labov tackles a concrete problem of sociolinguistics : to describe what he calls black American vernacular, that is to say, the «relatively uniform» English dialect spoken by blacks in the large cities of the United States (New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, etc.). Relatively uniform signifies here that, with the exception of certain geographie variations, this vernacular can be contrasted as a whole, on the horizontal plane, with each of the other English dialects. But this does not mean that it is un-susceptible to sociolinguistic differentiation ; for, vertically, it lies within the continuum extending from «pure dialect» to standard English. To show this, Labov chooses two groups of young blacks which are as similar as possible. All of the youths involved live in Harlem, in the same socio-cultural environment, and belong to the same social class, i.e. the lower class, the only difference between them is that those in the first group (the «members») are members of youth gangs, whereas those in the second (the «lames») live isolated lives, outside these gangs. Put in other terms, the former participate fully in a certain culture -«street culture»- while the latter, though not foreign to it, are not truly integrated in it, either. Now, this difference between the two groups, although really quite small compared to what unites them, is sufficient to cause the grammars used in them to diverge on a number of precise, formalizable points pertaining to phonology, syntax, and stylistics. This divergence is manifest in the fact that, with regard to ail these points, the «lames» are closer to the more standard varieties than the «members». Beyond the specifie problem treated here, Labov's article demonstrates the degree of subtlety that can be reached by sociolinguistic variation and, therefore, the validity of sociolinguistic research when it avoids the kind of generalities usually found in discussions of «class and language».