2
Protourbanization of the Countryside, Culture, and Politics in the Golden Age of the Vine

If one could have looked at an eastern Audois vinegrowing village like Coursan from the air in about 1850, it would have appeared as a dark center of red-roofed houses, shops, and workshops, with a few houses and shops radiating out along the main road, the whole surrounded by a vast, flat plain of vines and pasture. In the center of town cafés, shops, and the church ringed the village square, where the broad, thick leaves of plane trees provided shade from the hot meridional sun. Old men gathered to play boules , and ambulatory merchants sold their produce, just as they do today. Unlike the dispersed villages of the mountainous regions of the Massif Central or the Pyrénées, the hamlets of the Dordogne or the Nivernais, Mediterranean villages formed densely populated agglomerated settlements. Dwellers in these nucleated, protourban villages enjoyed regular contact and communication, both with each other and with neighboring villages. The midcentury agricultural revolution not only brought wealth and upward mobility, allowing vinedressing to emerge as a skilled profession; it also brought rural dwellers into closer touch with market towns and urban culture. By midcentury, some vineyard villages had acquired the status of gros bourgs . As Ted Margadant has pointed out, "Just as proto-industrial workers participated in an urbanizing society without, themselves, working in factories, so 'proto-urban' craftsmen and cultivateurs participated in an urbanizing society without residing in cities."^[1] In the crucible of the protourban village, itself a

product of the agricultural revolution, artisans, vinedressers, and petty bourgeois vineyard owners forged a republican political tradition.

Culture and Society in the Protourban Village

Density of habitation in agglomerated settlements shaped community culture and sociability in protourban villages in the golden age of the vine. Around the center of town, artisans and vinedressers lived side by side in two- or three-story dwellings often containing as many as three households. Most owners of the large vineyards lived either on their estates or in large centers like Narbonne and Carcassonne; a few lived in the village center, as did professional men—lawyers, doctors—and small landowners. Cultivateurs , artisans, and independent proprietors lived in split-level dwellings that earlier, in the mixed agricultural economy, had housed animals and agricultural tools as well as the farm family. Now these men converted the ground floor or storerooms into wine cellars to house winemaking equipment and large vessels for storing wine.^[2]

In these dense villages, artisans, small proprietors, and vinedressers lived in close proximity to one another and shared the life of the community just as they shared the fortunes of the vines. On hot summer nights, neighbors gathered in the street or in cafés; popular cercles and chambrées flourished year-round for reading and discussing newspapers and politics. By the 1840s and 1850s village cafés had become not merely venues of village sociability; they also served as centers of political organization. By 1878 Coursan, already a large bourg and chef-lieu de canton , had five cafés, which had begun to acquire their own political colors and class associations.^[3] Rural dwellers in the vinegrowing Aude shared an associational life comparable to that of town and city dwellers.

The rhythm of the vineyard year also engendered a culture of community sociability. The harvest constituted an occasion for celebration in which virtually the entire working population of the village took part (even as it increasingly involved immigrant labor over the century). Here the fast-paced, strenuous collective effort of three to four weeks' duration was interspersed with

equally vigorous drinking, eating, pranks, and rituals such as the fardage , in which young harvesters, especially women, could be given an involuntary bath in crushed grapes. During the harvest future spouses met and couples formed. More than one estate manager deplored the debilitating effects of nocturnal festivities on the following day's work. Overall, the harvest confirmed and reinforced the community's collective interest in the vineyards.^[4]

In addition to the harvest, the village fête provided another occasion for individuals to reaffirm collective ties to village and region. Although July 14 did not become a national holiday until 1880, for centuries rural dwellers celebrated village festivals in summer before the harvest with street dancing, feasts, and parades. After 1870, as the working-class population of the Aude's vineyards grew, in some villages the fête involved singing the "Internationale" and other songs describing workers' struggles. Saints' days, carnival, Ash Wednesday, and the first of May all served as occasions of popular festivity in the Aude, as in the rest of Languedoc, and brought protourban rural dwellers into contact with one another. As we shall see, these celebrations sometimes took on political significance as well.^[5]

Nonetheless, the unity of the village community in popular celebration should not be overemphasized. Village territory was divided into male and female space. The wine cellar, the barn, and blacksmith's forge were all traditionally meeting places for men, as were the café and the cercle . Custom and tradition in principle excluded women from these areas (although women could and did enter cafés, it was not common for them to meet there to socialize). Women's sociability was specific to the home, the laundry area at riverbank or in the washhouse, and the market. In addition to the gendering of social space, by midcentury class divisions could be seen in villages like Coursan as well, in the kinds of cafés villagers frequented and the kinds of social clubs they joined. In the golden age of the vine, however, prosperity, the high status of vinedressers, and widespread property ownership masked or at least blurred class differences.^[6] Sociability and sense of community, then, characterized southern protourban villages. Markets linked them to nearby urban centers.

The flourishing of regional markets under the expanding vineyard economy, together with the building of new railway lines linking Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Castelnaudary with Toulouse to the north and Béziers and Cette in the Hérault to the east, facilitated the protourbanization of the Aude. With the exception of Castelnaudary and Toulouse, these towns were important centers of the wine trade, with weekly markets that attracted local producers, wine merchants, artisans, and villagers, as consumers.

By 1913 Narbonne had the largest number of wine dealers in the south (117, as opposed to 80 in Béziers).^[7] In this bustling market center the commercial rituals of the wine trade developed. Large proprietors regularly frequented the markets and in establishments with names like Café des Négociants and Café des 87 Départements they made their business deals over a glass of gros rouge that might well have come from their own vines.^[8] In many cases, business and friendship overlapped: large proprietors were often related to dealers. Moreover, as Rémy Pech has pointed out, important subtleties in social status distinguished various levels of viticultural capitalists. Medium and small proprietors or worker-proprietors appeared less frequently in Carcassonne or Narbonne than large owners; they simply did not produce enough wine to warrant a regular presence at markets. Late in the century, however, after economic crisis struck southern viticulture, worker-proprietors could ill afford to lose a day's work to "faire le marché." As Pech has noted, "aller faire le jeudi [ou] faire le mardi" became a mark of social status.^[9]

Not surprisingly, wine dealers became increasingly familiar figures in village communities in the period of vineyard expansion. Not only did they become conspicuous in the economic life of towns (they often owned large vineyards themselves), but they also organized carnival celebrations and lent money for village fêtes ; after the turn of the century they organized the first rugby clubs in Narbonne. Until the late 1840s they dominated political life in the Aude, along with large proprietors, sitting on municipal councils and on the departmental general council. At the end of the century, some, such as Bartissol of Narbonne, made successful political careers.^[10]

Apart from the sale of wine, local markets also served as the

point of exchange for products not found in village commerce, such as textiles, clothing, and manufactured items, as artisanal production geared exclusively to viticulture replaced the more diversified industrial and protoindustrial activity of the previneyard days. Centers like Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Béziers thus drew villagers from the surrounding area and provided a setting in which rural dwellers' consciousness broadened through regular contact with townspeople and the larger commercial world.

The agricultural revolution not only favored the growth of markets and urban influence; it also led to tremendous population growth, migration, and subtle changes in the occupational structure of vinegrowing villages. A shift of population in the Aude from west to east (Table 8) coincided with the expansion of vineyards: with the decline of rural industry in the arrondissements of Castelnaudary and Limoux, and as farmers and agricultural workers sought profits and higher wages in the vineyards, population in the west of the department stagnated while the wine-producing Carcassonnais and Narbonnais grew (the latter at a rate three times that of the department as a whole between 1872 and 1881). Between 1861 and 1881 the population of Coursan grew 60.5 percent, from 2,154 to 3,458 (Table 9), largely as a result of immigration. Relatively few foreigners could be counted among migrants to the Aude in the 1870s, however. In 1876, for example, only 2.5 percent of the popula-

tion of Narbonne was non-French, only 1 percent of the population of Coursan, and only 1.4 percent of the population of nearby Cuxac d'Aude (this situation changed in the 1880s, as we shall see).^[11] The majority of newcomers came from surrounding departments.

Wine producers had always relied on temporary migrants for planting and harvesting—mountain dwellers from the Tarn and the Ariège who made a tour de France , traveling to the vineyards in spring to cultivate, then to the Camargue and Provence for summer fruit harvests and back to the vineyards in the fall to pick grapes.^[12] Yet as vineyard owners pruned and cultivated their vines more intensively in the 1860s and 1870s, they came to rely on a more permanent labor force. Workers who formerly came to the vineyard plains of the Aude on a temporary basis as mésadiers now stayed on for longer periods of time, and many settled there permanently.^[13] Other migrants to the Aude were cultivateurs and workers from the Gard and the Hérault escaping the phylloxera that attacked their vines in the 1860s and 1870s.

In fact, the rural population of the Mediterranean region was highly mobile in this period. As Table 10 shows, growing numbers of vinedressers and cultivateurs who married in Coursan came from outside the arrondissement of Narbonne or from other villages in the immediate region. By 1871–1880 about one-third of those marrying in the village had been born outside Coursan. In 1876, 40 percent of the population of Narbonne was not originally Audois, whereas in Carcassonne arrondissement, where vines did not take over the local economy, only 20 percent of the population had been born outside of the department.^[14]

Vines drew people. Moreover, the social composition of temporary migrants changed as unemployed urban workers made their way into the vineyards to pick grapes and eventually settled in vineyard villages in the Aude.^[15] These newcomers also enhanced the contacts between rural dwellers and urban culture, as did the spread of education in the age of vineyard expansion.

Education, Religion, and Standard of Living

The expansion of vineyards in the eastern Aude brought with it an eagerness for education. In the Narbonnais, young boys

attended school in greater numbers and more regularly than in nonvineyard areas. School inspectors in the west of the department shook their heads in dismay at parents who kept their children out of school to watch the sheep or work in the fields. One village schoolteacher in the isolated mountain town of Axat went so far as to practice his trade of shoemaking during class hours while his thirteen-year-old brother-in-law "taught" the poorly attended class.^[16] But in the prosperous eastern vineyard plain school inspectors applauded the high level of school attendance and quality of education from the 1850s on, linking the desire for education to the booming economy.^[17] In fact, by the late 1870s and early 1880s the literacy of young conscripts from the Aude proved higher than the national average (over 88 percent literate, and over 96 percent literate in the Narbonnais, compared to the national average of 84 percent). By 1885–1886, 96 percent of the boys in the Aude between the ages of six and thirteen attended school (in the Narbonnais that figure was 98 percent; the national average was 82 percent).^[18] This sterling record did not apply to girls in the early years of vineyard expansion under the Third Republic; inspectors complained in the 1870s that parents attached no importance to the education of their daughters, and if their observations for Coursan are to be believed, in 1878–1879 no village girls attended school. This situation changed after primary school attendance was made compulsory in the early 1880s, when girls' school attendance in vinegrowing villages shot up.^[19]

If some local officials attributed the desire for education to the prosperity of viticulture, others blamed the golden age of the vine for religious indifference. Under the Second Empire, religious officials continuously deplored low church attendance (five times lower for men than for women) and the spread of civil marriage. "A large proportion of the population displays a spiritual lethargy close to death," wrote one priest. This situation, he averred, resulted from "unrestrained luxury, a passion for dancing, and an exceptional attachment to land." Such vices afflicted not only the "lower social orders," but "a notable portion of men belonging to the classe dirigeante " as well. There was some truth to these observations. Attendance at Easter service, generally taken as a reliable indicator of religious practice, declined by 50

percent in vinegrowing cantons between the early 1870s and the early 1880s.^[20] The urban café culture of wine-producing towns nourished religious officials' views of moral degeneracy. "In the Narbonnais, prosperity contributes to the proliferation of cafés concerts and dance halls that we have vehemently denounced; the Alcazar, for example, a public place, is the scene of every conceivable pleasure, a veritable brothel, where men drown in their own wealth."^[21]

It is not clear, however, that vineyards fostered religious indifference. Gérard Cholvy's work has shown that in the Hérault patterns of economic and social change similar to those in the Narbonnais did not necessarily cause villagers to withdraw from religion. Parishes around the vineyard plains of Montpellier, for example, remained strongly Protestant. Raymond Huard's recent study of the republican movement in the Gard has likewise found that Catholicism persisted in the plains of the eastern Gard, where vineyards prospered during the Second Empire.^[22] Nor were the radical politics of the vinegrowing Aude decisive in the region's de-Christianization. In other vineyard areas of the south that experienced the development of radical politics and parties religious practice remained strong. In fact, in the Aude weak religious observance predated the vineyard expansion. During the revolution of 1789 there, parish priests and villagers alike accepted the civil constitution of the clergy, and in 1794 the municipality of Narbonne authorized the dedication of the Cathedral of St-Just to the celebration of Reason. Unlike some rural areas such as the Vivarais and Guévaudan, the Aude's contributions to the church were among the lowest in France under the Restoration.^[23]

During the golden age of the vine, moreover, villagers in the Aude indulged in their own forms of popular religion, occasionally mixed with superstition. Processions to honor Saint Vincent, patron saint of the vines, took place in times of economic depression, and sailors and fishermen in the coastal town of Gruissan regularly prayed to the Virgin for protection from the dangers of the sea. In Gruissan, young women devotees of Saint Salvaire threw stones onto a rock intoning, "Saint Salvaire, donnez-moi un amoureux, ou je vous fiche un coup sur le nez!" ("Saint

Salvaire, give me a lover or I'll give you a punch in the nose!"). When the inhabitants of Mailhac wanted rain in 1874, they asked the local priest to lead a procession to St-Jean-de-Caps, the ruins of an old sanctuary; and during droughts, villagers in Puzols carried a statue of the Virgin two miles to a natural spring.^[24] Finally, during the disastrous phylloxera crisis that struck the Aude in the 1880s, Narbonnais villagers claimed to have had visions of the Virgin in their vines. These forms of popular religion suggest that neither rural protourbanization nor vineyard expansion had eliminated religious belief from the lives of local inhabitants, low church attendance notwithstanding.^[25]

Perhaps what bothered local officials most were the new forms of sociability and urban temptations that made their way into the countryside. Republican officials echoed local priests in their association of immorality and prosperity as they, too, deplored the expansion of music halls and the apparent growth of prostitution in wine towns. One local observer, writing just after the turn of the twentieth century, looked back with a critical eye at the golden age of the vine. It was, he wrote, "l'âge de la folie d'or"—a period of decadence and debauchery:

In Coursan there were two music halls with private boxes and closed curtains. Cultivateurs in their work clothes, boots covered with mud, drank and talked loudly in patois without paying any attention to what was going on on the stage. After the show, they would unleash their entire repertoire of patois abuses on the women performers and spit on the dresses of those who protested. There was gambling everywhere and even a baccarat table in the attic.^[26]

Others expressed different concerns about the consequences of prosperity and noted that although workers enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, their relations with their employers showed signs of strain in the tightening labor market. "More sought after, more necessary than ever before, vinedressers have become more demanding. The taste for material pleasures, the result of rising wages and spreading wealth, dominates them more and more."^[27] Vinedressers and cultivateurs who bought pianos for their wives and daughters and frequented cafés con-

certs and music halls had adopted urban forms of entertainment. These protourban villagers also developed a political culture that paralleled national political movements of the age.

In these densely populated villages of the winegrowing Aude, a community of interests in support of vineyard capitalism fostered the growth of republicanism and eventually of radicalism as the dominant political forces. This development was especially significant in that the revolution of 1789 had revealed much of lower Languedoc to be strongly royalist. Purged of Jacobinism by the White Terror, the local Audois welcomed the Restoration and ultimately seesawed from Legitimism to Orleanism and back again under the influence of local notables and large landowners. Well before the agricultural revolution was complete, however, peasants and farmers in the Aude shifted away from royalism. Under the July Monarchy several Saint-Simonian groups appeared briefly around Narbonne, and by the late 1840s Orleanist officials worried less about legitimist opponents in the department than about "socialists" and democratic republicans, also known as démoc socs .^[28]

Republican Politics in the Rural Community

Republicanism in the rural Aude during the golden age of the vine developed in three stages: first, with the beginnings of a republican opposition in rural communities under the July Monarchy and in 1848; second, with underground political associations during the repressive phase of the Second Republic; and third, with the Narbonne Commune, which clearly divided republicans in the Aude, much as the Paris Commune divided republicans nationally.

Underground republican opposition to the July Monarchy had acquired enough of a following that in the Aude, as elsewhere in France, the February revolution of 1848 immediately catapulted republicans into key administrative offices, and democratic socialist clubs burst into activity.^[29] These "rouges" (also called démoc socs or "montagnards") supported universal male suffrage under a democratic republic, the right to work, and social and economic reforms for the laboring poor. Their leaders included the socialist Armand Barbès, known as an alleged con-

spirator in the Fieschi plot and as a member of the Société des droits de l'homme, and elected deputy in April 1848; Emile Digeon, also a démoc soc active in the leftist Club de l'union in Narbonne; and Théodore Raynal, who took over as subprefect of the Aude in February 1848 and became republican deputy for the Aude the following April.^[30] In the démoc soc clubs that appeared in market towns and rural bourgs in 1848, peasants and artisans discussed republican and socialist ideas and mobilized support for republican candidates.^[31] They ended their meetings with torchlight processions, sometimes parading a small statue of the Marianne—revolutionary symbol of the republic—singing the "Marseillaise," or shouting, "A bas les blancs!" "A bas les chouans!" "Vive Barbès!" "Vive Ledru-Rollin!" Women joined these processions from time to time dressed as goddesses of liberty. Their presence symbolized the ambiguity of female representation within early republican political culture: they symbolized the republic but were excluded from it. Women did not join these political clubs, nor did Audois démoc soc clubs address the issues of work, civil liberties, and political rights for women that political groups elsewhere raised in 1848.^[32]

Groups analogous to the Club de l'union sprang up in villages throughout the Aude. In Coursan, Cuxac d'Aude, Ornaisons, Ouveillan, and Salles d'Aude démoc soc clubs drew small landowners and artisans, vinedressers, schoolteachers, café owners and wine wholesalers.^[33] These groups showed that the petty bourgeoisie, workers, and artisans had begun to challenge the "official" structures of political authority and were able to act independently of powerful conservative notables.^[34] In addition to clubs, a left republican political press, notably Théophile Marcou's La Fraternité in Carcassonne, spread republican ideas. Drawing on the symbols and images of the revolution of 1789, Audois republicans addressed each other as "citoyen commissaire" and used the term montagnard to describe the left-wing republican deputies in the Constituent Assembly. Republican electoral propaganda proclaimed the reign of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

Despite their agreement on certain fundamental issues, republicans in the Aude, like republicans in the Haute Garonne and elsewhere, represented a mixture of class interests. These

differences are important because they typified two divergent views of the Republic.^[35] On one side were Armand Barbès and Théophile Marcou, who represented the radical democratic socialist wing of republicanism; Marcou's La Fraternité supported universal suffrage, the right to work, the equal distribution of property, the abolition of usury, and the establishment of a progressive income tax.^[36] In their propaganda for the elections of April 1848 addressed to peasants and vinegrowers, démoc socs pledged to reorganize taxation, establish cheap credit and free education, and abolish the hated wine tax, a sentiment immortalized in Claude Durand's popular "Chant des vignerons," sung in many areas of France. A year later they added to their platform nationalization of transportation, banks, and mines, foreshadowing the radical republicans' electoral promises of the 1880s.^[37] The depression of 1846–1847, which brought falling wheat and wine prices, made peasants and farmers especially receptive to republicans' promises to abolish the wine tax and reform taxation. The fact that in the south the agricultural depression hurt not only farmers and vinegrowers but also urban artisans and workers (unlike in the north, where lower agricultural prices benefited urban workers) helped to create political alliances between these groups in the late 1840s and early 1850s; both formed the base of a démoc soc constituency.^[38] On the other side, Théodore Raynal represented the more moderate republicanism of property owners and professionals—those who disdained political privilege but at the same time were concerned to protect their property and status. Writing in his short-lived newspaper Le Populus (begun in August 1849), Raynal rejected "the distribution of wealth that the Communists dream of" and pledged to oppose any improvement for the laboring classes that threatened the right to property.^[39] These two strains of republicanism in the Aude followed national patterns and formed the foundations of radicalism and moderate republicanism later in the Third Republic.

After the moderate republicans triumphed in the Aude in April 1848 (except that Barbès, too, was elected), the Aude became a political battleground in the struggles between republicans and conservatives. In formerly tranquil villages, disgruntled conservatives, encouraged by the slaughter of Paris

workers in June, demonstrated against republicans during the August municipal elections. In Ginestas, a mob attacked the republican national guards stationed at the ballot box; in Lézignan, conservatives tried to tear down a red flag that had been draped in the public square; and in Narbonne, where republican Théodore Raynal was elected, a crowd stormed the town hall demanding a ballot recount.^[40] The continued effects of the nationwide agricultural depression of the late 1840s, combined with the shock of revolution, resulted in a political shift to the right: the "peasant insurrection" of December 10. Whether as the defender of order in the wake of revolution or as the beneficiary of the Bonapartist legend, Louis-Napoléon garnered strong support in the Aude (over 75 percent of the vote, somewhat higher than the national average) from peasants hostile to the wine tax and the 45 percent surtax on land (he opposed both).^[41]

In the Narbonnais, however, leftist republicans did not hesitate to express their hostility to the new president. The Club de l'union in Narbonne openly proclaimed its opposition by transforming a carnival masquerade on Ash Wednesday, February 21, 1849, into a political demonstration. The procession included the Garbage Cart of the Reactionary Press; the Cattle Car of the Moderate Party; the Chariot of Justice, carrying a scale with balances of unequal lengths; a masked man carrying an empty chest inscribed with the words "Treasury-Savings Bank"; and finally, the pièce de résistance, another masked man riding backward on a donkey (a traditional symbolic form of humiliation in charivaris and English rough music), representing the president of the Republic.^[42] The transformation of traditional popular cultural forms such as carnival into vehicles of political protest constituted an important stage in rural dwellers' assimilation of national politics. But demonstrations like these also touched off a wave of repression that included the dismissal of both the sub-prefect of the Aude, Théophile Vallière, suspected of collaborating with the démoc socs who staged the demonstration, and the National Guard of Narbonne. The resurgence of the right persisted through the May 1849 elections, which dealt a blow to the démoc socs and strengthened Bonapartists in the department.^[43]

In some areas, employers threatened to dismiss workers if they refused to vote for conservative candidates.^[44] Although

repression of left-wing organizations made it more difficult for démoc socs to organize, they continued to receive support from woodcutters and small farmers in the Corbières hills, who had been hurt by the alienation of public forests; from similar groups in the Montagne noire north of Carcassonne; and from small farmers and agricultural workers in the Narbonnais. Likewise, textile artisans in Chalabre backed the left, and démoc socs won all four major towns in the Aude, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Limoux, and Castelnaudary, where the combination of markets and industrial depression made their program appealing and facilitated the establishment of a base among urban artisans.^[45] These economic conditions permitted a left constituency to survive despite the authoritarian and repressive policies of the Napoleonic Republic and early Second Empire. Thus the politics of peasants and rural artisans began to acquire a certain autonomy, apart from the influence of local notables.

Repression and Persistence of Leftist Opposition in the Countryside

The "agony of the republic"—the progressive destruction of left republican and démoc soc opposition groups that accompanied the decline of the Second Republic—touched the Aude just as it touched the rest of provincial France in 1849–1852.^[46] Between November 1849 and the summer of 1851, thirty-five republican mayors lost their posts, and in 1851 both Raynal and Marcou fled to Barcelona.^[47] Nonetheless, in the countryside, continued economic depression created a climate in which popular democratic socialism survived. When police arrested agricultural workers for singing revolutionary songs such as the "Marseillaise" and shouting "seditious slogans," workers adopted new symbols of opposition. They wore red sashes while working, and when the police seized their sashes, they made new ones. Dress functioned to articulate political solidarity in the fields or at the worksite. In the fields just outside Narbonne, a group of fifty workers bearing a red flag marched to tend the vines of a comrade imprisoned for his left-wing political activities; others used funerals as occasions for political demonstrations. Even after the

coup d'état of December 2, 1851, démoc soc activities continued underground.^[48]

The same kinds of secret societies that John Merriman and Ted Margadant have described in other areas of rural France proliferated in the Audois countryside in the early 1850s, and survived by means of common symbols, rituals, and rhetoric.^[49] Republican secret societies comprised rural artisans (shoemakers and tailors), agricultural workers, and small landowners; men who read Marcou's La Fraternité , Proudhon's Le Peuple , and tracts by Armand Barbès. Their political discourse reflected a general concern for the well-being of the worker, including increased wages and lower taxes. They also served as mutual aid societies and provided benefits such as sickness insurance. Members underwent an initiation ceremony in which they knelt blindfolded and, touching the blade of a knife, pledged to defend "la république démocratique et sociale" and to keep the secrets of the society. Special greetings involved a question and response: "République?" "Universelle." "Bientôt?" "Arrivera."^[50]

These rituals and the language of ritual, reproduced in secret societies all over France, were part of a forging of national left republicanism as yet unmediated by institutional structures.^[51] The societies showed that rural dwellers had begun to develop modern forms of political organization as they used meetings, newspapers, and political pamphlets to disseminate their ideas. They also signaled the decline of older forms of personal influence that had determined the politics of the countryside for generations.

The growth of republican opposition politics was also aided as the Aude was opened more fully to the national market by the Second Empire's railway-building program of the 1850s. Vignerons and farmers could now have closer contact with the larger world of national politics. The amnesty of 1859 allowed exiled republican leaders Marcou and Raynal to reenter the political arena, and the restoration of press freedoms under the liberal Empire enabled republicans to reconstitute the left in the Aude—as the legislative elections of 1869 proved.^[52] Just weeks after the plebiscite of 1869 on the emperor's reform program, in which vinedressers and rural artisans in the winegrowing Nar-

bonnais returned a majority of "no" votes (the only district in the Aude where this was so), republicans won the municipality of Narbonne.^[53] The collapse of the Empire, the Prussian invasion, and the Paris Commune, however, accentuated already existing divisions between left republicans (heirs of the démoc socs of 1848) and moderates, further changing the political map of the Aude.

The Narbonne Commune and Sharpening Divisions in Republican Ranks

Villagers in the Aude greeted the Third Republic with celebrations and dancing in the streets; in some parts of the Narbonnais they brought out red flags and displayed statues of the Marianne in public squares.^[54] But the proclamation of the Commune in Paris had still more dramatic repercussions. The Club de l'union in Narbonne changed its name to the Club de la révolution and declared Narbonne to be an independent commune under the leadership of Emile Digeon.^[55] On March 24, 1871, Digeon took the town hall and replaced the tricolor with the red flag, "symbol of the people's rights." Just a year earlier masons and glass workers had struck in Narbonne, and in the south the Ligue du Midi had supported a regional defense against the Prussians. Digeon was convinced that a local insurrection could succeed given that urban workers had already begun to defend their rights against employers.^[56] He also appealed to the rural workers, artisans, and vinegrowers who formed the base of the left republican movement in the countryside. Speaking at the Club de la révolution, Digeon linked the Paris Commune to the defense of the nation and the Republic, and to the struggle of the poor against the rich.^[57]

If we must . . . take up arms, let it be for the work of democratic propaganda, for the way of the oppressed against the oppressors, the exploited against the exploiters. . . . Let us unite around [the red flag] to prevent the resurrection of the scaffold, to prevent the cemeteries of Africa, already filled with republicans by Cavaignac and Bonaparte, from receiving newcomers from the reaction of 1871. . . .

Workers, laborers of Narbonne, go to the countryside, tell the peasants that their interests are the same as yours, that the Revolu-

tion . . . means the emancipation of those whom misery oppresses under the yoke of the rich. . . . Tell them that the Revolution means peace by the abolition of permanent armies, by the abolition of taxes for the small proprietor, and for the day laborer.^[58]

The Narbonne commune did not become a mass movement, however. The sudden prosperity of the vineyards hardly created a favorable climate for insurrection. Audois vinegrowers gathered full harvests and enormous profits even as the phylloxera ravaged the vineyards of the Gard and the Hérault. Vinedressers and other rural workers likewise enjoyed the highest wages they had ever seen. The relatively small group of three hundred men and women who occupied the town hall, supported by two hundred fifty soldiers, did not hold out for long. After less than a week, on March 30, President Thiers sent a regiment of Algerian sharpshooters to Narbonne to force the insurrectionists out of the town hall, and police arrested thirty-two activists, including Digeon.^[59]

Both nationally and locally the repression of the communes allowed some French citizens to accept the Republic as the guardian of order; for others the Communards became martyrs who died defending workers' and artisans' rights and the rights of local communities against arbitrary state authority. These differences corresponded to the divisions between radical republicans and moderates. Radicals continued to organize in the Aude, building on the political organizing techniques of their démoc soc predecessors: they held nighttime meetings in barns or fields in an attempt to attract peasants and rural workers, and occasionally they used village cafés as meeting halls.^[60] Radicals helped to found urban artisans' political associations such as the Cercle de l'union des travailleurs in Limoux, and the Fédération radicale tried to organize urban and rural artisans elsewhere in the department. Their organizing efforts bore some fruit as landowners, vinedressers, and urban workers sent radical republicans to the Chamber of Deputies in 1871 and 1873.^[61] Moderate republican officials linked the growth of radicalism (as left republicanism came to be known) to the passionate Latin temperament of local voters and to the prosperity of vineyard workers and bourgeois alike, deploring the fact that men of

property and standing eagerly took part "in this worker and agricultural radicalism."^[62] In truth, however, the success of radicalism in the Aude owed more to the crises of viticultural capitalism than to its fortunes.

The nearly total domination of vineyards made the local economy especially vulnerable. By the mid 1870s the phylloxera, a tiny aphid that kills vines by living off their roots, had already ravaged vineyards elsewhere in the south, but it had not yet touched the Aude. Vinegrowers, desperate for government assistance to prevent phylloxera from spreading, warmed to the interventionist position of southern radicalism. Although the radicals' national program, following the ideas of Louis Blanc and Georges Clemenceau, did not address the concerns of vineyard owners specifically, many of its features, recalling the social program of 1848, would have directly or indirectly benefited vignerons : the defense of individual rights, and especially the rights of small producers; the nationalization of railroads and the Canal du Midi; the lowering of taxes and transport rates for both industrial and agricultural goods; the creation of credit facilities; and the regulation of working hours and working conditions.^[63] In July 1878, just after phylloxera first appeared in the Audois villages of Ouveillan and Argelliers, the radical majority in the Chamber of Deputies passed legislation that gave significant financial support for treatment of vines attacked by the insect.^[64]

By the late 1870s, then, the growth of the viticultural bourgeoisie and the prosperity of vinedressers and urban artisans had helped to transform the politics of the Aude in three ways. First, densely populated, agglomerated rural villages in the Aude provided a welcome setting for démoc socs and republicans to organize and establish a base among rural workers, artisans, and small landowners, who shared an interest in the fate of the vines. The viticultural petty bourgeoisie's economic security during this golden age enabled it to escape the influence of the local notables who had shaped rural politics for generations. Second, the expansion of markets, the protourbanization of the countryside, the spread of education, and the unparalleled prosperity of the growing vineyard economy brought vinedressers and workers

into contact with urban political leaders and new organizing techniques and facilitated political alliances between rural dwellers and town folk. Third, new political ideologies and movements began to take root in protourban villages, with republicanism prospering where vineyards grew. Ultimately the defense of the vine drew cultivateurs and the viticultural petty bourgeoisie to radicalism. Once the vineyard economy crumbled under the impact of the phylloxera crisis, however, the underlying class divisions of peasant society came into sharper focus. This process in turn paved the way for the development of socialism in the Aude.