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]