Harriet Rosenberg is the author of a thesis entitled A Negotiated World (the best translation of this title would be "a world of compromise"), published by University of Toronto Press in 1988 and which bears the subtitle "Three Centuries of Change in a French Alpine Community", "three centuries of change in a community in the French Alps).
student in history of France and anthropology at the University of Toronto (Canada) and those in Michigan (USA), influenced by the work of historians of mentalities and the countryside, such as Le Roy Ladurie, Braudel, Duby, and by the journal Annals , she resided at Gap and shelter in the 1970s, where she consulted the departmental archives and met with Abriésois to complete his thesis.
anthropologist by training, an example of Abriès provides an opportunity to review - and criticize - the accepted theories everywhere and showing that the modernization of a society can only be the result of massive industrialization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the development of the State, etc.. Abriès precisely, it claims, shows the opposite, since a traditional society based on an agro-pastoral economy has been under the Ancien Regime, the sixteenth to the eighteenth century before the Revolution of 1789, without the bourgeoisie, without industry, without state develop democratic institutions and modern, literate most of its members, even the girls, and enable everyone to live by his work.
From this point of view, this book addresses theses very common in the history of economic ideas and policies. Thus, Harriet Rosenberg shows that the company was Abriès truly egalitarian, while the principles then prevailing in France and which justified the division of society into states were unequal rights and obligations between subjects of the King (see . egalitarian society).
Here, translated into French, Warning this book
"Shelter is a common Alpine less than two hundred inhabitants located in a region of south-eastern France named Briançon. The night train from Paris stops at a few kilometers west of Gap, the capital of the Hautes-Alpes. From there it winds up a bus to the steep and rugged valley of Queyras, the highest inhabited valley in Europe. At the bottom of the valley, surrounded by mountains dotted with abandoned villages, lies the village shelter.
The inhabitants of the plain of the mountaineers say they are enclosed - a word that means both "Closed" and "outdated." They wonder why men would go to an isolated location, except perhaps for some time camping or skiing. Officials describe the valley as a "dead country". They demean the whole area as a backward region populated by the remnants that remain with the alms of the state. Some, however, argue that tourism could revitalize - perhaps - the valley and stop the flow of emigration. The Briançon, after all, is a breathtaking beauty. Those who visit today
Abriès would be surprised to learn that two centuries ago, there lived a population of nearly two thousand inhabitants. He was an active market in association with famous local and regional fairs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants Abriésois were peasants, well educated and highly entrepreneurial. Briançon region as a whole was renowned for its high literacy rate. Villagers commitment during the long winters Alpine experienced teachers to teach their children French, Latin and arithmetic.
officials, lay and religious, Abriès also knew that, from the fourteenth century, part one former regional confederation of fifty-one villages, pleaded with the French courts. Sometimes, the trial lasted for decades and people were using EU funds to be defended by lawyers and influential men. They are opposed to new taxes, tithe, tax increases. They have resisted legal changes which discriminated against them. They fought conscription and demanded to be paid for what they provided to the army and for war damages. They often won. In Briançon, plead was not only a politico-legal, it was also a form of art and theater. Negotiators
insightful, the inhabitants of Briançon have successfully resisted the law lord and the area was sometimes called the "small republic". Some state officials have openly admired. Others are worried about their spirit of independence and, as one of them said, their "intolerable vanity, fearing they lack loyalty against the French state .
The city shelter, far from being isolated, and its prosperous villages played an important role in this dynamic system. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shelter was not a rural "traditional", if understood in the traditional sense of illiterate and liabilities, of isolated, poor. Therefore, to think of the changes that occurred in Abriès, I start by eliminating the idea that farmers are "traditionally" poor and they are not interested in politics. Poverty or prosperity of farmers, their passivity or their political mobilization, are not given. Instead, these are aspects of a peasant society that need to be explained by the historical context ".
