Throughout history there has always been social gaps. These are seen by rural and urban populations, and the upper and lower classes. In France in the nineteenth century, this was prevalent throughout the country’s provinces. The people spoke different dialects of French and they did not really identify together as a whole. The people were separated by both class and location through oppression and progress. Hautefaye was a small village in France that was filled with agrarian peasants. It also had some aristocrats who mingled amongst the population without worry. This was controversial because the urban bourgeoisie did not socialize with the urban poor. The nobility that lived in Hautefaye had owned their property for generations. The rural village, like most villages in France, liked to host fairs where the peasants gathered in economic and social activity. The fairs were supervised by government supplied gendarmes. Fairs were known for their violence. Men took part in fairs and they drank alcohol, which was the main festive beverage. For this reason, the alcohol sometimes got the best of the men and fights were common throughout the fairgrounds. Young boys got to follow their fathers around and learn the ways of a man. The economic activity that went on at fairs was stimulating to the community and helpful to those who took part. Propaganda became a key source in swaying the masses. The bourgeoisie used it to portray the nobility as bad and arrogant. Our textbook says that Louise Napoleon ran a political campaign based on promises to every class. This means that he made promises to the lower classes, this is why the Hautefaye villagers had faith in him until the end. One of the state’s goals was to educate the rural masses. The republicans in the cities believed that peasants were still not able to comprehend certain things and make an ethical decision. However, universal manhood suffrage was put into place and Napoleon was elected president with the help of the peasants. Thus creating the Second Empire when Napoleon performed a coup and made himself emperor. He pushed for economic expansion through industrial development to progress the French agrarian economy. The textbook says that the rich got richer and poverty was diminishing, but misery in the countryside did not disappear. I do not believe that the Hautefaye fair was full of impoverished people. I do believe that the people were isolated from Paris and the main stream of information. The textbook itself states that Napoleon III’s prowess was based on the betterment of city life. I believe that the people were not educated and their city council was weak. The rural population was filled with rumors and was constantly unaware of what was going on politically. Alain de Moneys was a local noble who owned eighty hectares in Hautefaye. Alain’s father had been mayor of a local province and people on the fairground knew of him and the Moneys family. He had a cousin who was outspoken and was believed to have shouted words condemning the emperor. Alain de Moneys was tortured and burned on the fairgrounds, which is a cold blooded murder. A mob of people took place in this act and no one tried to intervene in the act’s early stages. This could be because there was no reason to believe that the mob would kill the man because in previous years many peasants had made threats, but never followed them up with actions. The mob consisted of many outsiders to Hautefaye and only three village citizens, according to court records. The murder details were released and the trial became somewhat of a spectacle because of the public’s new view against violence. This is because in the history of France, and Europe, mobs of the lower classes had always revolted and killed many people. It was acceptable to many to permit the use of violence for the mobs to get their way. The Hautefaye mob’s purpose on August 16, 1870, was to protect Napoleon III’s stake in the government. They did this by killing a Prussian, or a republican. France was involved in a war with Prussia at the time of this slaying and France was getting beat. News from the war was that the emperor had joined the front. With the emperor gone to help with the war, rumors had reached the countryside that the republicans were staging a take over of the government. For this reason, the mob felt that they were helping the emperor by ridding an enemy of the state. The peasants were once again fulfilling their political duty by showing feverish support for their leader. The peasants were definitely considered to be anti-aristocratic. They were against the nobility and the clergy. The nobility owned the land and were snobby. They were too good to congregate amongst the majority, the peasants. The nobility was also rumored in an attempt to restore the old regime and support the Prussians in defeating the French army. The clergy had been known to deny religious burials. The priests were also very restrictive of the dancing and other affairs that went on at the peasants’ fairs. It is important to note that most nobles and priests had an aristocratic right that made them exempt from the draft. The fact that the French army was losing the war also played a role in the ridding of a Prussian in their eyes. The peasants knew they could be called to the war, as all men between thirty and forty years of age and all veterans under thirty-five were being called back to active service. While the optimism amongst the people was high, the war news was negative. The peasants knew that the emperor’s life was in danger at the war front. The anxiety among the general population was high as they knew that at any moment their families could be stripped apart as the men left for war. Rumors that the Prussians would sack the peasants land and harm their women gave them reason to kill a Prussian. Corbin believes that the murder took place because there was a lack of leadership in the community. Peasants were known to succumb to the town mayor or priest in times of chaos. This absence of authority is what allowed the escalation to reach violence. The problem that I find with this theory is that both the mayor and priest tried to intervene multiple times. Yes, the story is that both of these individuals turned Moneys away at one point or another. The mob’s leaders were just too persuasive to the other members of the attack to allow the torture to be stopped. The engagement of hundreds of people in the torture allowed everyone to think that everyone else but themselves were actually killing Moneys. The authority figures probably believed that just like in the past, the people would not be able to escalate to murder, therefore the authority figures remained blind and oblivious to what was going on around them. I believe that the men who led the mob in torturing and killing Moneys were disturbed individuals. They thought that the emperor was divine and that he supported killing any enemy of the state. They manipulated the thoughts of the other people in the mob to where they too believed that Moneys was an actual Prussian, not a respectable citizen of Hautefaye. The people in the mob were going through psychological problems due to events such as: a bad drought was on going, a war was occurring, and the people were struggling to maintain their political identity. This political identity was going through a transformation. Before universal male suffrage, the common man’s political expression was through violence. However, now this form of expression was frowned upon because every man could vote. This misunderstanding of their political identity led to the murder of Alain de Moneys.