Rural France in the nineteenth century was first and foremost a mosaic of regions. The landscape provided an immediate image of diversity: mountains and forests looked down on lush valleys and plains; pays de vignoble stood out from surrounding arable and grass lands; maritime France differed from continental France. Most importantly of all, the great open-field systems characteristic of the north and east could be distinguished from the enclosed bocages of the west and the irregular ‘square’ fields more common in the south. Adolphe Blanqui, writing during the 1850s, depicted such contrasts between neighbouring pays in terms of oases in the desert: ‘Thus, the Limagne of the Auvergne shines like a diamond at the foot of the wilderness of Cantal; the Vaucluse plain at the entry to the terres brûlantes of Provence; the Médoc at the threshold of the Landes; the Touraine close by the Sologne; the gardens of Annonay at the exit from the gorges of Forez.’

These physical differences were matched by an equally wide variety of social structures. In much of northern France, on the vast open fields of the Ile-de-France, Picardy, the Beauce and parts of Normandy, the concentration of farms meant that a few wealthy tenant farmers and laboureurs held sway over a vast army of dependent agricultural labourers. Elsewhere, in the Mediterranean coastal district, the south-west, the Massif, Brittany and Flanders, society was nearer the Jacobin ideal of a ‘republic of peasants’.