Introduction
In post World War II France, the postwar drive to modernize and explosive economic growth caused the collapse of the peasantry as a social class. Peasants left the countryside en masse, villages emptied out, and fields that had been cultivated for centuries were left fallow. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. Paradoxically, postwar modernization made the French yearn for imaginative and tangible connections to the life that peasants had once lived. This, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Rural Inventions explores this paradox. Nostalgia for the rural is a thread that runs through the chapters of this study. Yet Rural Inventions also shows that in the postagrarian society initiated by the postwar economic boom, the rural could become a harbinger of future possibilities. Participants in France’s peasant moment of the 1960s to early 1980s reinscribed dwelling in the countryside as an essential component of contemporary modern life.