Abstract

In his early works, Agulhon developed a methodology that mixed social history and ethnology to study democratic phenomena in rural environments. This phase of his production deals with the department of Var, in eastern Provence, between the mid-18th and 19th centuries. Here, he reconstructs the modalities of a broad politicization that passes through the circuits of the popular village sociability. Subsequently, Agulhon goes on to study the spread of bourgeois circles in provincial French cities. While the concept of sociability he developed found rapid success among historians of Mediterranean Europe, Agulhon achieved widespread fame as a historian of the Second and Third Republic in France. He also launched original studies on republican political symbolism, which became an exemplary model for a discipline in its beginnings: cultural history. Finally, he moves on from the study of object, drawings and statues representing the Republic to their living symbolization embodied by the figure of General De Gaulle.