ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTATION AND
THE IMAGE OF LIMITED GOOD IN THE FRENCH ALPS
Richard Vernon Wagner
INTRODUCTION
This paper tests the applicability of Foster's (1965, 1967, 1972) Image of Limited Good to the tradi-
tional peasantry of the French Alps, using the memory culture of informants in the Valley of Barcelonnette
and documentation covering the region as a whole from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries.
Foster takes the defensive Image of Limited Good as a model for the cognitive orientation of traditional
peasants everywhere, contrasting it with the aggressive orientation of Western industrial society, as modeled by
McClelland's (1963) n Achievement. I will show that both the Image of Limited Good and n Achievement
were present in the cognitive orientation of the traditional peasants of the French Alps, the first as a defensive
summer strategy for subsistence agriculture on submarginal mountain holdings, and the second as an aggressive
winter strategy for the exploitation of cash markets in the plains. In conclusion, I will suggest that, if the
Image of Limited Good is to be made to apply to the French Alps as a model of traditional peasant cognitive
orientation, then it must be reinterpreted to embrace not only the defensive interpretation given it by Foster,
but an aggressive interpretation entailing n Achievement as well.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE
In the French Alps nine-tenths of the land is unfit for cultivation. The good soil is scattered about in
sloping, alluvial pockets filled with rocks and subject to the floods, slides, and avalanches which the extreme
and variable climate makes frequent and damaging. Cultivating such sloping, rocky ground takes more energy
than cultivating good soil in the plains. Cultivation also increases the tendency of the surface to slide down-
ward under gravity, so that periodically more energy must be spent bringing the soil back up again. Additional
energy, unnecessary in lowland cultivation, must be expended in simply climbing from plot to plot.
The high relief, with its quick changes of level and the depth of its erosion features, breaks every peasant
holding into tiny, isolated parcels whose integration into an efficient enterprise is difficult. It also fragments
the land by differentially affecting its relationship to the sun, whose heat is most intense on the southern
slopes, where its rays strike normal to the ground, and least on the northern slopes, where they lie parallel. The
exposition pattern is like a crazy quilt, torn and patched still further by the shadows that cliffs and peaks
make, shadows which in some cases rob the surface of sunlight for months at a time. The resulting mosaic of
microclimates does not yield the scale benefits associated with agriculture in the plains.
To these difficulties from broken relief must be added others stemming from the climate. In their study
of rural problems in the Alps Cepede and Abensour (1961 ) write:
The long winter reduces the growing and active working season very considerably. It
means that land at high altitudes has to be left lying fallow. The fact that the sowings for
the coming year have to be done before the crops for the current year have been
harvested makes it impossible to cultivate the same piece of land for two successive
years. Consequently, this halves the usable arable land. It also means that livestock
must be kept in sheds for many long months and obliges the mountain farmers to gather
in great quantities of hay during a very short summer. The endless winter without work
was, not so very long ago, one of the main causes of winter emigration, which had
instilled in the mountain people the habit of migrating.
Acknowledgement: In 1964-65, as Foster's student at Berkeley and predoctoral fellow of the NIH, I studied social cohesion in
the Valley of Barcelonnette. I returned to the same area in 1970-1971 while teaching at the University of Provence and with
some financial aid from a small NIH grant.
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WAGNER
Winter is no colder in the French Alps than in Minnesota, but crop agriculture is confined to summer,
which is as short and cool as the summers of northern Norway. Summer is therefore a season "during which
the mountain people are overloaded with all sorts of conflicting tasks: tilling the soil, harvesting the hay,
driving their livestock to the mountain pastures. Their work day is endless, and they get practically no rest,
especially when the weather is bad" (Cepede and Abensour, 1961).
Sometimes an early rain will fall on late snow, bringing the snowpack down the river in a few hours, or a
cloudburst will drive a torrent of mud through dozens of dams, wiping out fields, roads, canals, bridges, and
buildings, or a frost will settle on the land in the middle of summer, killing the crops. As one of my informants
pointed out, such prospects make cropping for cash highly problematical:
The damage done by frost limits what you can grow. Take fruit, for example. Of course,
there's some for the cultivator himself-a little just for the fun of it-but you don't dare
speculate on fruit. Why? Because you can count on damage one year in three. And you
don't dare truck garden. Even the potatoes suffer from the frost. On the 10th of July,
1954, the potatoes were completely destroyed. That's not every year, certainly, but it's
frequent. The cereals also suffer. Usually the earliest to flower is the rye. If there's a
frost, it loses its kernels, and you either have to cut it for forage or accept a dead loss.
Fven the grass sometimes gets damaged. You have years where the grass is rotten at the
first mowing. But we suffer just as much from drought. In the dry years you have a fifty
percent reduction in hay. There isn't enough water in the smaller streams to irrigate
with, and there are few reservoirs here for handling such variations. During the last war
there was a period of great dryness, with a catastrophic drop in the forage. The livestock
were reduced to two-thirds or a half of what they had been.
The roads, buildings, and other structures essential to agriculture are as vulnerable as the crops, and they
are more expensive to build and maintain than equivalent structures in the plains. In his memoire on Alpine
transport and communication, Neuville (1955) writes that:
in general one can estimate the construction cost of a mountain road at twenty or thirty
times that of a road on flat terrain running in a straight line between two points. Indeed,
the length of the bed is often four or five times the straight distance, while the price per
kilometer has to be multiplied by four or five, taking into account the associated struc-
tures.... Maintenance is fifty or a hundred times more difficult.... As to trans-
port,... one can evaluate the cost, still with respect to an ideally straight passage, at
more than a hundredfold. Even calculating by kilometer actually travelled, which does
not really face the problem, the cost of travelling on an average mountain road proves to
be three or four times greater than on an average road in the plains.
It should be clear from this array of facts that the French Alpine cultivator had little chance of
competing on an equal footing with lowland cultivators. As Cepede and Abensour (1961) conclude, "FAO's
study on economic and social conditions of the population in the Alps has shown that this may be considered
a relatively underdeveloped region and that as a result of technological and economic evolution this fact will
become more and more pronounced" (my italics).
I have italicized the last clause because it gets to the heart of the problem: the French Alpine difficulties
were not due to peasant backwardness, but to an inescapable principle of the free market economy according
to which ingenuity and enterprise tend not to reduce, but to increase the inequalities between regions, for
what works well under disadvantage works even better under advantage.
INTERREGIONAL COMPETITION AND RESISTANCE TO EMIGRATION
The Swedish economist Myrdal (1957) discusses this principle, pointing out that, contrary to the
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ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTATION AND LIMITED GOOD
presuppositions of traditional economics, there are no countervailing forces called into play by the free
market itself to undo, or compensate for, regional inequalities:
The main idea I want to convey is that the play of the forces of the market normally
tends to increase, rather than decrease, the inequalities between regions. If things were
left to market forces unhampered by any policy interferences, industrial production,
commerce, banking, insurance, shipping, and, indeed, almost all those economic activi-
ties which in a developing economy tend to give bigger than average . . . would cluster in
certain localities and regions, leaving the rest of the country more or less in a backwater.
Mydral then brings his argument to bear upon agriculture itself. In the poorer regions, . . . not only
manufacturing industries and other nonagricultural pursuits but agriculture itself show a much lower level of
productivity than in the richer regions."
In the French Alps, it cost more to produce agricultural goods in the mountains than in the plains, and
the disparity increased as technology improved. In the lowland market place, therefore, the highlander had to
accept a smaller return, perhaps even a loss. By Myrdal's argument, this fact should have led to voluntary
highland emigration; however, for hundreds of years the French Alpine peasants resisted emigration. Then, in
the twentieth century, they began leaving in such numbers that, had the vacation trade not intervened, the
mountains would have been depopulated. Why did Myrdal's argument concerning emigration hold for the
twentieth century, but not before? Why, for that matter, had the mountains been so heavily populated in the
first place?
In the early Middle Ages, before the rise of the modern market economy, the French Alps were at least
as densely populated as the adjacent lowlands, because they served as a refuge from the military turmoil of the
plains. In those days, political conflict was the important factor, not economic competition. It was political
consolidation, bringing peace and restoring trade, that stimulated the lowland competitive advantage to assert
itself. The population of the plains thereupon expanded. But why did not the mountain population then
decline? Leaving aside the demographic collapse of the fourteenth century, it remained almost stationary,
even rising somewhat, although only a little, because, writes Baratier (1961), while
the Alps probably retained a high birth rate and a mild death rate, their resources did not
permit them to support an enlarged population, for we note, from as early as the Middle
Ages, the phenomenon of the seasonal migration, foretelling definitive departures. Once
peace had been reestablished and its economy restored, Basse Provence naturally
attracted the overflow from the mountains ... After the drainage and irrigation works of
the sixteenth century, the plains of the West, the Rhone Valley, and the coastal zone,
where economic life was more and more flourshing, offered expanding resources to an
always more numerous population. Right up until the eighteenth century, the popu-
lation density kept rising in Basse Provence, while it remained almost stationary or
increased but little in the high country. In our days, the mountains have been almost
completely depopulated at the expense of the great coastal cities.
French Alpine population did not decline, save as a result of the fourteenth century, because there was a
noneconomic factor at work leading the peasants to resist emigration. They resisted, because descending to the
plains without property meant losing their status as independent owner-cultivators. It meant becoming prole-
taires, living at the beck and call of others, losing one's self-respect. Life in the plains was not then what it
would become in the twentieth century with industrial expansion and the personal security brought by the
welfare state, when the peasants would at last emigrate without fear and almost in a body. Jobs were few, job
seekers many, and more often than not, proletaires went begging.
But as population rose in the Alps and the peasant householders were pushed beyond the break-even
point, they made a compromise, descending willingly into the plains each winter as proletaires in order to
avoid having to do so permanently. The French economist Briot (1896) tells us that in 1823 a Brian9on
statistician
calculated the budget of a rural family in each of the five cantons of the arrondissement.
Basing his estimates only on local resources, he found an excess of expenditures over
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WA GNER
receipts variable from 310 to 54 francs per household, except in the canton of Briancon
itself. where there was a balance. He deduced from this the impossibility of living
without the proceeds of the winter emigration.
That the winter migration was indeed a response to overpopulation is suggested by Baratier (1961), who
calls attention to its apparent disappearance during the demographic collapse of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, its reappearance during the population expansion of the sixteenth century, and its culmination
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when population had recovered, or even surpassed, its thir-
teenth century values.
The vestiges of peasant resistance to emigration are still visible at Barcelonnette, where, a thousand feet
above the town, a line of abandoned hamlets runs around the valley at the high water mark of permanent
settlement. In earlier times these hamlets were temporary abodes for work in the summer pastures. Then, as
population rose, they became the permanent homes of peasants who tried to grow grain even above the
timberline, right up. as one observer put it. to the limits of common sense. In the twentieth century these
highest and least viable holdings were the first to be abandoned, and it is not surprising to learn that the largest
contingent of seasonal migrants came from the higher settlements. It is as though the valley were circled,
somewhere between its floor and the surrounding peaks, by a kind of break-even line, above which costs
always exceeded revenues in crop raising.
RFDUCTION IN THE SIZE OF HOLDINGS
The winter migration and the upward extension of cultivation were not the only effects of the peasants'
reluctance to emigrate. Even at the lower altitudes, holdings tended to become marginal, because family lands
were divided at inheritance, or because pieces of property had to be detached and sold in order not to lose
everything.
In his investigation of the nineteenth-century distribution of real property in the French Alps, Vigier
(1963) found that the cantons and communes of the Valley of Barcelonnette closely approached either the
commune-type of Aiguilles in Hautes-Alpes or that of Saint-Julien-en-Quint in the Dr6me:
Aiguilles covered 3,846 hectares, of which 1,890 were pastures and moors, 1,071 woods, 559 meadows,
and only 307 cultivable land. The woods, pastures, and some of the meadows belonged to the commune, while
the remaining 801 hectares were divided among 336 individual proprietors. Sixty-four of the individual
properties were from 2 to 4 hectares, only ten larger than 10, and none larger than 15. Vigier notes the "great
importance of communal property," the "total absence of large holdings," and the "overwhelming prepon-
derance of small holdings." Then he goes on to sketch the commune:
Aiguilles is the very type of the high mountain commune with its principal settlement in
the valley, where the cultivable land is also found, easily watered thanks to a network of
well-maintained canals; here we find agricultural enterprises of very modest dimen-
sions. ... and fragmented into a great number of microscopic parcels; also the value of
land here is very, even too high. On the other hand, the great slopes which dominate the
valley, rising to 3.000 meters and forming the larger part of the communal territory,
comprise the domain of meadows, woods, and pastures, belonging in large part to the
commune itseltf Certainly these little owner-cultivators cannot live entirely on the pro-
duce of their holdings. Not only is the revenue they have always drawn from the
communal property indispensable to them, but the largest number must look to the
winter migration for a needed supplement to their resources; and, indeed, the Inquest of
1848 emphasizes the precarious situation of the inhabitants of the canton. It is therefore
the small property anid the small enterprise, not sufficient to the owner-cultivator's own
need that dominates at Aiguilles. Only a dozen or so "middle cultivators." with holdings
of 10 to 15 hectares. are able-thanks essentially to the products of their flocks (raised in
part on the communal lands)-to meet their own needs, or to furnish temporary employ-
ment to the few agricultural workers in the commune.
At Saint-Julien-en-Quint, the second commune-type, the woods and high pastures were privately, rather
than communally, owned, giving the average holding a larger size and carrying a few into the category of larger
properties. But. Vigier cautions, "these larger holdings-larger by area-are properties laid out on sterile
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ground. So much so that, even in these last communes, it is above all the small property that characterizes the
arrondissement-and with it, the necessity for the largest part of the mountaineers to find other sources of
income, particularly through migration to distant places."
In sum, the winter migration of the French Alpine peasants was more than a way of conserving
household resources and using excess labor. It was a vigorous defense of the status of land ownership,
threatened by agricultural submarginality and competitive economic disadvantage. As such, it formed part of
an integrated economic strategy also embracing mountain subsistence agriculture. It remains to show that
these two substrategies-subsistence agriculture and the winter migration-were diametrically opposed, the first
defensively constrained by the Image of Limited Good, the second aggressively oriented towards achievement.
THE DUAL ECONOMY
Had both population density and the price of land been low enough, the fields of the Alps might have
been used for forage, tuming the mountain peasant into a specialist in "grass farming and stock raising," as
agricultural experts like Cdpede and Abensour (1961) have consistently recommended. There had to be some
stock raising, anyway, since the animals were needed for their manure. Much of the wool, hide, milk, and meat
used or sold was simply a by-product of the manure-generating process, but a by-product which also made
good trade items, easy to move over the trails, relatively durable (milk as cheese, meat on the hoof), of high
value by weight, and amenable to the adding of value through cottage industry. Moreover, stock could be
raised on the otherwise useless moors and the grasslands too high for cultivation. Great numbers of animals
were placed on these grasslands every summer, then stabled for the winter at lower elevations, where they were
fed on hay taken from the grasslands by limiting summer grazing or from cultivable land by restricting
subsistence crops.
A small population specializing in the raising of stock might have been able to trade highland animals for
lowland subsistence goods at no competitive disadvantage, pitting the cheapness and abundance of mountain
land against lowland productivity. But population was never that low and land never that abundant or cheap.
A unit of land cultivated for cash must always have been less productive in subsistence terms than the same
unit cultivated for subsistence directly, and so the French Alpine peasant, whether poor or well-to-do, prac-
ticed a dual economy, with one segment for cash and another for subsistence. Moreover, since the caloric yield
of livestock per hectare is lower than grain, his subsistence economy was focused on crops, and he made an
effort to confine the animals he needed to the uncultivable communal grasslands.
True, he did have to commit some of his crop land to hay for the winter stable, but to deliberately
extend the growing of forage for the cash economy into subsistence land was counterproductive, because
purchase of the displaced subsistence goods cost more cash than was gained. If he could not confine his
animals to the communal lands, therefore, he would give up stock raising for the market and tum for cash to
the export of his excess winter labor.
Should even the proceeds and economies of the winter migration prove insufficient, he would be forced
to borrow from the well-to-do peasants at rates of interest understandably high in this land where, in line with
Myrdal's argument, capital investment yielded almost nothing. Such borrowing, looked on with a kind of
horror in the Alpine valleys, often meant the beginning of a downward slip, first into local dependency, and
then into the lowland proletariat.
STOCK RAISING AND TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURE
Exclusion of most of the peasants from the livestock trade was inevitable in the long run, because, with
population rising, less and less communal land was available for nonsubsistence purposes. But this eventually
was forestalled by the passage of control of the communal lands into the hands of a few well-to-do peasants.
Therese Sclafert (1959) has noted the beginning of this change in the mountain valleys, when, after the
demographic collapse of the fourteenth century,
1'3
WAGNER
a new conception of stockraising appeared: they began to admit foreign flocks to their
territories, and even to call for them, whereas during the course of earlier centuries the
rural population had shown the most violent hostility to livestock coming from the
outside. Thus, in 1386, the men of Barles . . . got Queen Marie to grant them full liberty
to rent, sell and lease their mountain pastures to foreign flocks. A few years later (1391),
the inhabitants of Colmars asked the Count to authorize the renting of their pastures to
outside stockmen.
This admission of foreign flocks would limit the capacity of the peasants to expand their own flocks by
depriving them of pasture not only in the mountains, but also in the plains, where they had been accustomed
to take their animals during the winter months. Dealing in livestock was to become highly competitive,
demanding not only wealth in stables and hay, or in lowland winter pasture, but sophistication in affairs. In a
metaphor on Myrdal's argument, control of the trade would pass into the hands of already favored few.
Sclafert uses the minutes of a sixteenth century notary at Barcelonnette to show the bias in favor of the
well-to-do in the way the communal pastures were leased: "Each year they were put up for auction by the
consuls. Those who acquired them were inhabitants of Barcelonnette or its hamlets: merchants, notaries,
stockmen rich enough to pay in Italian gold crowns of four florins each." In short, it was the notables who
controlled the local cash economy, those with know-how and connections. For the most part, they were
ambitious and successful peasants, Vigier's "middle cultivators" turned manipulators and money lenders. In
the seventeenth century, for example, there were from 40 to 70 notaries in the Valley of Barcelonnette. Wrote
Fran,ios Arnaud (1897), himself a notary of the town: "It seems impossible that sixteen notaries could have
lived at Revel and Meolans, where in our days one alone has great trouble making ends meet. Most of these
notaries were well-to-do inhabitants who had bought the title in order to enjoy the substantial privileges
associated with it, but who acted little or not at all." That is, they acted little in the "technical" sense
associated with the notariat, but they were experts in negotiation. Certain lucrative public offices were limited
to notaries, who acted also as the financial representatives of private citizens, managing affairs, negotiating
contracts, and lending money. These were the people who monopolized what little industry was present in the
mountains. They were achievement oriented, and their presence among the peasants of the Alps raises in itself
a question about Foster's model.
The well-to-do were not, however, like the poorer peasants, compelled to embrace the Image of Limited
Good in subsistence agriculture. With more cultivable land than needed, they could, if they wished, convert
the excess to still more stock raising, increase their cash, and buy more land. But, as Vigier (1963) observes,
"the relatively high cost of land compared to the income one can derive from it has always dissuaded the
owners of capital from acquiring real property in the mountain ranges." This must have been especially true in
the case of men whose negotiative know-how and lowland business contacts offered them far more lucrative
investment opportunities in the plains. Which may in part explain the scarcity of large holdings in the Alps
noted by Vigier, for sooner or later, the well-to-do emigrated to the lowland regions at an acceptable,
landowning level of status.
The poorer peasants had to behave differently. With too little subsistence land, they could not gain cash
from stock raising. The winter emigration was an attempt to compensate, but their dual economy could fail
either if they were insufficiently aggressive in the plains or caught off guard in the mountains. Since the two
economic segments were linked, maximizing gains in the one was no more critical than minimizing losses in the
other. The poorer mountain peasants therefore practiced "traditional agriculture," the kind of agriculture
Foster associates with the Image of Limited Good.
In the French Alps, traditional agriculture was (a) a refuge economy, geared to avoid the consumer
pitfalls of the plains; (b) a deficit economy, whose losses had to be paid for in hard-earned cash, and whose
goal was less to make a profit than to minimize losses; and (c) a zero-sum economy, in which the success of
some peasants entailed the failure of other.
With too few subsistence resources and too little cash, the poorer French Alpine peasants had to use
every factor to the break-even point and cut consumption to the bone. Since there was no margin for error,
taking risks was suicidal. The best strategy was to cleave to the tried and true, eschew innovation, and dodge
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ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTATION AND LIMITED GOOD
the kind of social relationships that might give others a lien on one's property. Occasional modifications of the
system-irrigation, fertilizers, and so on-failed to solve the problem of regional disadvantage, for the same
improvements worked even better in the lowlands. Traditional agriculture was a hopeless affair. At best it
delayed the inevitable. But the delay was worthwhile, because it gave the peasants time to put down roots
elswhere through the winter migration.
In sum, economic disadvantage led the mountain peasant to stock raising for cash and crop raising for
subsistence, but control of the communal lands by the well-to-do and continuing overpopulation forced the
poorer peasants to abandon stock raising and turn to the winter migration for cash. Their subsistence
economies, now operating at a deficit, had to be managed so as to minimize losses.
THE WINTER MIGRATION
In his preliminary view of the European highlands as a culture area, Burns (1963) notes the dualism of
the Alpine economy, finding its rationale in the winter dead season and in "the relatively precarious, marginal
nature of Alpine mixed farming. Thus, for centuries-alternating with the subsistence focus for summer-the
activities of the winter season have effectively constituted a second, supplemental economy, oriented
wholly to the extemal market."
He then describes two distinct but related aspects of winter economy, "cottage industries and
migration," observing that:
against this background, past and present, of artisan skills, urban contacts, marketing and
small shopKeeping, the Alpine peasant emerges as a quasi-bourgeois. Other upland pat-
terns in sociopolitical organization and education ... lend further support to the charac-
terization... . The peasant's complete overt conversion to the urban mode of life is a
very real potentiality as has been borne out by the pattern of emigration from the
uplands over the past century and a half. Armed with a certain cultural flexibility, he
even tends to sidestep the urban wage labor force (or to disengage himself from it rather
quickly) and to enter directly into entrepreneurial acitivities more easily than emigrant
peasants from other areas. As an illustration as well as a confirmation of his tendency in
this regard, the Alpine uplander has a national reputation, in both France and Italy, for
unusual success in both business and politics.
For historical documentation, Burns turned to the geographer Blanchard, whose study of Aiguilles
(1922) had led him to investigate the winter migration generally, tracing it, as did Baratier, back to the Middle
Ages. By the early nineteenth century, the winter migration pattern was so well established that Villeneuve De
Bargemont (1815) found at Fours that "no one remains except the elders, the sick, the women, and the very
young children," the men traveling north through Burgundy to Belgium, Holland, and even Scandinavia
(Provence, 1931). In the course of its development, the seasonal trek everywhere changed its nature from
begging and labor to such ambulatory trades as umbrella-fixing or knife-sharpening, and finally to commerce
and shopkeeping.
In his later work Blanchard (1956) concluded, as I did also after listening to my Barcelonnette inform-
ants, that throughout Alpine history the seasonal migration had often served as a springboard for permanent
emigration:
The emigrant who finds himself each year once again in the milder climate of the
lowlands, who lives there in a more open economy, where money is more plentiful and
easier to come by, makes comparisons unfavorable to his native country. 'Used to the
more fertile lowlands,' the Queyrassins are already telling the fifteenth century com-
missioner, 'and having compared their wealth to the poverty awaiting them on high, they
no longer want to tear themselves away.' Moreover, from their constant voyaging, such
people have acquired the habits of uprootedness. The foreign no longer frightens them.
They are familiar with the low countries they visit each year, have established relations
there, and are already acclimated, so that a light jolt is enough to fix them in place. What
can one say of those who have opened a prosperous shop and accustomed themselves to
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WAGNER
prolonged absences but that one day or another the bond holding them to the village will
be broken. Reinforced by such observations, we repeat without hesitation that the
seasonal displacement prepares the way for emigration.
Of course, in order to avoid becoming an emigrant permanently, the Alpine peasant had to accept
becoming one temporarily. In this context, Chatelanin (1970) has distinguished the temporary from the
permanent proletaire. How, he asks, can we classify as uprooted those
who temporarily migrate for the purpose of avoidinig the abandonment of their homes
and villages? It is precisely this phenomenon of regular displacements which forestalls
definitive departures. The fact that lots of rural migrants are found in the 'slums' does
not at all imply that they are poor and that they belong to the lowest levels of the social
hierarchy. Among them are landowners with property in the sun of the Alps, the Massif
Central, or the plains of Lorraine, and who own flocks. If they migrate it is so as not to
remain unoccupied during the long bad season; it is to secure some cash (because they
sell very little of their agricultural production); it is to economize their funds so as better
to 'hold' during the periods of difficulty. If they go into the 'slums,' it is to spend as
little as possible and to bring home the greatest gain at season's end.
Francois Arnaud (1891) has documented the winter migration from the Valley of Barcelonnette, where
he found it associated in the seventeenth century with the expansion of the local textile industries, whose
production in excess of valley needs laid the basis for winter cloth peddling, first in the adjacent lowlands of
the Dauphine, Provence, and Piedmont, and then all the way from Burgundy to the Baltic. Villeneuve de
Bargemont (1815) found that it was "the poorer class that always left the country," and he was told by one
returning party that the winter migration permitted them "to pay their taxes and enlarge their tiny capital,"
while Fremont-Garnier (1822) observed that the cash brought back in spring "forms the larger part of the
money to be found in the valley." The natives told him that roughly a fifth of the migrants either died en
route or settled down permanently in some lowland country, and Arnaud (1891) estimated that three-fourths
of the Barcelonnette heads of household were emigrating during this period: "Some remained a long time on
the road, settling down and sinking roots. Take the annuaries of Bruges, Breda, Amsterdam, Dijon and you will
find there, in the highest ranks of commerce, the Ricauds, the Arnauds, the Goins, the Jauffreds, the Manuels
of Fours; at Lyon the biggest house of silks ... came from Sauze d'Enchastrayes."
During the early nineteenth century, several Barcelonnettes found their way to Mexico, where they set
up a number of retail stores in cloth goods, calling out others from the valley to help them. Family, village,
and valley networks underlay the rapid expansion of the venture, which by mid-century had branched into the
wholesale trade and by century's end had founded 110 houses of commerce in Mexico and would eventually
go on to textile manufacturing and banking. By the turn of the century, half the young men of the valley were
going to Mexico, and overpopulation was no longer a problem.
EDUCATION AS A STRATEGY
Obviously, the French Alpine peasants' winter orientation was not of the defensive and conservative sort
detailed by Foster, but rather an achievement orientation based on belief in hard work, thrift, and the quest of
opportunity. Their focus on achievement is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the stress they laid on
education. This is one of the ten Alpine traits outlined by Burns (1963), who writes of "the longstanding
emphasis placed by much of the upland society on literacy, formal schooling, and municipally financed
systems of public education. The pattern is one which is extremely well-documented over a period of more
than five hundred years in some sectors."
Coste (1932) writes that the public schools of the Valley of Barcelonnette can be traced back to the
beginning of the sixteenth century, when "each of the communities maintained-on its own budget, or by
virtue of legacies-at least one permanent and absolutely free primary school. And from the fifteenth century
it was the custom, even in the tiniest hamlets, to provide temporary winter schools.from All Saints' Day to
Easter."
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In 1646 a college was endowed for the use of the entire valley and located at Barcelonnette. Its meaning
to the mountaineers was made clear by the people themselves, who, during the Revolution, after the college
had been seized and closed, and when it was heard that Paris was considering founding such schools itself, took
quick action:
The Municipal Council of Barcelonnette was immediately convened and insistently
pleaded for the installation of a secondary school in the arrondissement of Barcelonnette
as an establishment of absolute necessity: '1. because, until 1792, it had always had a
college to compensate for the poverty which left nine-tenths of its people unable to send
their children to be educated on the outside; 2. because the region, having, from the
rigor of its climate, very narrow and infinitely uncertain territorial resources, public
instruction opened avenues into private industry, as well as into the liberal professions;
3. because this is- the only means which gives to those who are forced to leave their
homes the hope of living honorably in better countries, and because it is the only thing
that can save them from the capriciousness of fortune' (My italics; Amaund, 1893).
Villeneuve de Bargemont (1815) reported that even in remote corners of the valley most of the peasants
were literate, Fremont-Granier (1822) made a similar observation: "They almost all know the Civil Code. It is
their favorite reading matter. And when necessary they can draught a few legal acts-something, it is true,
which gives them a taste for chicanery. It is without a doubt for this reason that their neighbors call them the
lawyers."
Bergese (1959) tells us that an 1848 commission found 90% of the natives, men and women, able to read
and write. The valley was a veritable nest of priests and school teachers. By mid-century, with only 7% of the
department's population, it was furnishing 63% of the teachers. As Burns indicates, the story was similar in the
Queyras and throughout the high French Alps in general. Yet these were among the poorest, most remote, and
most agriculturally backward regions of France, accessible only by mule pack well into the nineteenth century.
In sum, it is clear that both the poor and the well-to-do peasants of the French Alps were imbued with
the spirit of Western capitalism, the first as promoters in the plains, the second as negotiators in the mountains
themselves. Moreover, both types can be traced all the way back to the Middle Ages. To pay their taxes, the
French Alpine peasants had to earn cash in lowland markets where the cost of mountain agriculture put them
at a disadvantage. But since emigrating without property meant falling into the proletariat, they overpopulated
the Alps, thereby reducing the quality of their holdings and increasing their disadavantage.
Population was too high to permit specialization in stock raising, the least disadvantaged form of
highland agriculture, so the peasants raised stock for cash and for subsistence raised crops, which have a higher
caloric yield per hectare. As population continued to rise, and as a few well-to-do peasants gained control of
both the non-cultivable grasslands, the livestock trade, and negotiation in general, the subsistence lands of the
poorer peasants became submarginal, forcing them to avoid further risks in mountain agriculture and to
minimize losses, while turning from stock raising to the winter migration for cash.
In mountain agriculture the poorer peasant had something of value to lose through incaution and
carelessness, but nothing at all in the seasonal migration to the plains, where he had no rights and could gain
nothing without application and resourcefulness. The strategic demands on him in the two areas were there-
fore antithetical: above, he was an insider, warding off aggression, below, an outsider and himself the aggres-
sor. In the plains he had to push, scheme, and finagle or go home half-starved and cashless. If he schemed well
and pushed effectively, he would not only save his highland property, but also lay the groundwork for his own
ultimate "status salvation" by acquiring the lowland connections and expertise that would one day make
possible emigration on his own terms.
For hundreds of years, n Achievement in the lowlands and the Image of Limited Good in traditional
highland agriculture made up the tried-and-true cognitive orientation of the French Alpine peasantry.
CONCLUSION
I have shown that the French Alpine peasantry both did and did not conform to Foster's model. This
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paradox arises because Foster really presents two models, one of cognitive orientation-the Image of Limited
Good-and the other of socioeconomic behavior, what Foster (1976:310ff) calls "peasant behavior as a
function of the 'Image of Limited Good."' The second model, he tells us, has two variants: "People who see
themselves in 'threatened' circumstances, which the Image of limited Good implies, react normally in one of
two ways: maximum cooperation and sometimes communism, burying individual differences and placing
sanctions against individualism; or extreme individualism" (My italics). He then adds that "peasant societies
seem always to choose the second alternative," perhaps because they neither need to cooperate nor harbor the
kind of leadership which cooperation requires. Foster adds that such individualism has antisocial consequences
and then postulates three kinds of "self-correcting mechanisms that guard the community balance": an
"individual and family action" mechanism based on discretion, and two kinds of group action, one informal
and unorganized-entailing gossip, back-biting, witchcraft, and the charivari-and the other institutionalized in
the form of social pressures leading to the redistribution of wealth through ritual extravagance. The last is a
cooperative, rather an individualistic strategy, which involves "burying individual differences and placing
sanctions against individualism." Thus, the individualistic and cooperative tendencies in Foster's "classic"
peasant society are pitted against one another to generate a kind of developmental "stalemate" or equilibrium.
If one asks what could take place, given the individualistic response alone, one could well say it would be
economic differentiation. The individualistic response to the Image of Limited Good vertically differentiates
society in terms of wealth, particularly wealth in land, rewarding those who have the competence, drive, and
will to brave disapproval in order to make "significant economic progress," even though they "do so at the
expense of others." But this process is precisely what Foster (1967:320) associates with n Achievement when
he speaks about peasant resistance to change and the prerequisites of development:
The breaks on change are less psychological than social. Show the peasant that initiative
is profitable, and that it will not be met by negative sanctions, and he acquires it in short
order. This is, of course, what is happening in the world today. Those who have known
peasant villagers over a period of years have seen how the old sanctions begin to lose
their power. Local entrepreneurs arise in response to the increasing opportunities of
expanding national economies, and emulative urges, with the city as the model, appear
among these people. The successful small entrepreneurs begin to see that the ideal of
equality is inimical to their interests, and presently they neither seek to conceal their
well being nor to distribute their wealth through traditional patterns of ritual extrava-
gance. N Achievement bursts forth in full vitality in a few leaders, and others see the
rewards and try to follow suit (Italics mine).
Thus for Foster also, n Achievement leads to economic differentiation as the leveling mechanisms break
down and the attitude of "each against all" is permitted to express itself aggressively. But this means that n
Achievement and the Image of Limited Good are compatible. However, if n Achievement is compatible with
the Image of limited Good, how can its antithesis in traditional agriculture also be compatible?
The answer, I believe, is that achievement orientation is aggressive; traditional agriculture defensive. The
winter migrant in the French Alps was a businessman driving to penetrate a new market, the mountain
cultivator a businessman endeavoring to cut the losses of a bad venture. The rules of the game were the same in
both cases, but the situations and the strategies were different. The "classic" peasant, tied to a free market
economy, was constrained to follow strategies which, if variable, were nevertheless proper to such an econ-
omy. Therefore both peasant and bourgeois are guided by the Image of Limited Good in their mutually
competitive quests after scarce goods. Indeed, Foster's description of the "classic" peasant's defensive reaction
reads like the "businessman's" behavior in a tight market: "extreme caution and reserve, a reluctance to reveal
true strength or position," "suspicion and mutual distrust, since things will not necessarily be what they seem
to be," and so on. In fact, Foster's "classic" peasantry may be another aspect of the free market economy, like
Lewis' (1966) Culture of Poverty, a dependent socioeconomic structure spawned by the kind of regional
inequality Myrdal's argument considers. This would seem to have been the case in the French Alps, where the
peasantry, though better educated, more "citified," and more enterprising than their lowland counterparts,
were also poorer and more agriculturally backward. In any event, while the cognitive orientation of the French
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Alpine peasantry included the Image of Limited Good, it did not, as Foster supposed, exclude n Achievement,
but included them both.
In conclusion, I would make the following points:
1. The French Alpine peasantries were not "transitional," but constituted a well-defined and long-
established "classic" type in Foster's sense, a type characterized by intense economic dichotomization into
traditional agriculture for subsistence and the winter migration for cash, each of the two subeconomies being
associated with its own strategy, defensive in the first case, aggressive and achievement oriented in the second.
2. Both strategies were variants of a single orientation, the Image of Limited Good, which is here taken
as the point of view fundamental to the competition for scarce goods, which Foster himself links to the
"classic" peasantries.
3. The dual economy of the French Alps, with its contrasting defensive and aggressive strategies, was the
product of compulsory participation in regional market economies, within which the Alpine peasant's sub-
economies were grossly disadvantaged. He accepted this lopsided competition only to stave off eventual
proletarianization in the lowlands.
4. While pursuing Foster's Image of Limited Good, however, the French Alpine peasants did not behave
in all the ways Foster's model (based primarily on his study of peasant communities in Mexico) predicted they
should, for the cooperative strategy of redistribution was not effectively developed in the French Alps.
Instead, the mountaineers were veritable adepts of achievement orientation.
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