When you start reading Martine Segalen’s Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, you might think she’s taking on straw men. Surely no one believes any more that peasant families were unemotional, wholly practical alliances of economic value only, or that children were not loved or treated as human to quite an age, or that the views of the 19th-century folklorists about the “backwardness” of traditional cultures would be given any weight.
Then you look at the publication date (1980 in French), and the foreword by Peter Laslett which explains how Segalen set up the “magnificent” exhibition on Mari et femme dans la France rurale traditionelle in 1973, and you realize that you are reading a modern classic, a revolutionary text, one that well-deserved being translated into English.
As you get into the text you realize that it deserved to be translated not just because of the revolution in theory it helped to create, but also because it has a cracking good story to tell. One of Segalen’s main sources is traditional proverbs, sayings, rituals, and practices. What a rich storehouse they are — and often a surprising one, too.
On courtship, she notes how the practices in most places – thought by the 19th-century observers to be crude, rough, even violent – were in fact a practical way for both sides of the potential relationship to test out each other. The romantic explanation (yes, the peasants did do romance) was that the force of the interaction reflected the strength of emotion, but as Segalen says, this was a practical test. “The sense of what is beautiful is guided by the essential prerequisites of a society based on manual labour applied with both strength and skill.” She quotes Henri Massoul: “Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large. A ben groussiere (buxom) woman, a ben rougeaud (ruddy) man, this is the criterion of beauty.”
And she says that while in a society where words were rare and
often little used, courtship often relied on gestures, and when words were used, “the metaphors were often borrowed from the world of peasant objects.” You might not want to try this Vendean effort out on your own beloved, but it certainly worked at the time: “I think you’re so lovely, my great big darling: and then you’re so fresh, that I can’t do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through.”
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