Summary Of Peter Mcphee's Revolution And Environment In Southern France

Peter McPhee offers a compelling social history of the Corbiers in his Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres 1780-1830. Sadly, the “Environment” portion is severely lacking. He makes up for this rather serious weakness in the robustness of his argument surrounding the class struggle between former peasants and their former seignior and the emergence of a peasant capitalism surrounding wine production. This emergence of peasant capitalism and the passions it brings with it are at the center of McPhee’s work. While an intensely local historical work he examines and draws his conclusions from trends in the surrounding area and similar circumstances elsewhere in France. He argues that the peasantry of the Corbiers used the environment and land clearing to exercise political and economic agency over the urban bourgeoisie. Further he argues that through seizure of the garrigues, or rough hillsides, peasants advanced their own economic
Its absence is painfully noticeable in which the title promises both revolution and environment. In the first two chapters McPhee briefly speaks to the problems surrounding soil erosion and depletion. Unfortunately McPhee does not contextualized these environmental facts to the same degree as the political and economic problems of the peasantry. McPhee condignly argues the emergence of peasant capitalism surrounding the production of wine and chronicles the passion this newfound wealth infused in an excellently recounted micro-history. McPhee supports his argument with a wide range of sources and methodology. Oral history, the Cahiers de Tolerance of this and surrounding communities, policy and writings from the National Assembly, local clergy, seigniors among others, a keen eye for regional trends, and as in most social history a reliance on charts and graphs and other mathematic/empirical