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.