Volume 24, Number 19 · November 24, 1977
The Destruction of the Peasants
By Theodore Zeldin
Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914
by Eugen Weber
Stanford University Press, 615 pp., $20.00
There are two kinds of history. There is the history which is exclusively about the past, which describes what is dead, and aims to re-create people, issues, and crises in their own terms. There is also the history which is as much about the present as about the past, because it takes the controversies of today and tries to understand them with the help of past experience. The former kind has, until very recently, been more approved of, at least in academic circles. To be completely impartial seemed to be the necessary ideal for historians seeking professional respectability. But impartiality can easily verge into a narrow specialization, triviality, and detail for its own sake. It is good when historians are not too frightened to stick their necks out, to give answers to questions that their contemporaries really care about, and to do more than simply entertain them with anecdotes.
Review, 2399 words
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