In my experience the issue is history - France (and Europe) have long 'lags' by US standards. Even though two places may look similar TODAY, when I dig deeply enough they were not when the differences emerged.
Mostly the differences are among different regions (not villages). For example, the "Midi Radical" has been left since the Revolution while the West and Alsace have been conservative for just as long (as the Communards found out). Sometimes there are pockets within Regions and, very occasionally, between villages but even then I often find there's a history that has lots of socio-economic foundations. Occasionally, the differences are "subjective" issues (the organizational strength of the Church is a good tracker and I find it tough to sort out the Communist\Socialist split among peasants in the South) but mostly its the a mix of some solid socio-economic factors underneath some subjective and organizational ones.
There is a pretty big literature on this but I don't know it well enough to be a source. My sense is that most French social scientists (including the Marxists) would say that while the peasants could "go either way", which way they do go is very much a matter of historical forces and the persuasiveness of a political program put before them.
Paul
Michael writes:
As I understand it, the French peasantry was unpredictable. You would have two villiages in recent years seeming very similar in every sociological and economic indicator: one would be solidly communist and one would be very right wing. Nobody in France could explain this to me.
Marx's interpretation of populism, as I understood it, said that populists could go either way. In the case of farmers, sometimes they would identify with ownership, sometimes with labor.
Rushing off to class. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
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