ABSTRACT
France, like England, Germany, Belgium, the United States and other western countries, urbanized during the nineteenth century, but France alone remained essentially a nation of peasants at least until well into this century. Daniel Roche left unstated the importance of identifying the relationship between urbanization and the political transformation of France, while the Marxists have emphasized the economic and social bases of political conflict in the nineteenth century. French urbanization proceeded at a much slower pace than that of England, the United States or Germany. France urbanized in the nineteenth century, as its urban population doubled. More than any other French city, Saint-Etienne seemed to replicate the British model of the nineteenth-century industrial city. The centralization of the French state was a long process, often resisted during the course of the nineteenth century as peasants, provincial artisans and other ordinary people battled tax collectors, forest guards, gendarmes and grain merchants for control of local resources.
