Traboulsi 57for the relativity of this assumption. Let us begin with the European expe-
rience. Can we safely say that the role of the countryside in the demo-
cratic transformations in Europe can be reduced to a reactionary role,
in this case meaning an antidemocratic one? Is the French Vendée the
only model for the intervention of the countryside in the democratiza-
tion process in European societies? The answer seems to be no. Not only
because of the Jacobin feat of linking the peasant masses to the Revolution
by incorporating the land question in the revolutionary program but also
because of the fact that the ultimate sociological foundation of the French
Republic was the independent peasant and farmer.^10 Revisionist histori-
ans of the French Revolution have come to question many aspects of the
traditional, mainly Marxist interpretation of the revolutionary process.
François Furet, for instance, focuses on the role of clubs and middle class
professionals in the revolutionary process and maintains that revolution-
ary power was in fact exercised by a small militant oligarchy; yet, he still
maintains that the French Revolution was a “popular revolution.”^11
imilarly, rural social groups played a major role in the English expe-S
rience. As expressed above, the Familists called for the abolition to private
property; and the Levellers, who opposed both feudalism and capitalism,
advocated equality of all Englishmen and the representative franchise to
all males without property requirements and not the merchants of the city.
imilarly, but on a much more limited scale, in the history of the S
elective systems in the Arab world, the role of the countryside can-
not be overlooked. The Kisrawan commoners’ revolt (1858–1861), dis-
cussed above, succeeded in imposing the first electoral system on the
mutas.arrifiyya of Mount Lebanon (1861–1915), the first practice of elec-
toralism in the Ottoman Empire.
another but intimately related register, can we safely say that On
“civility” is an urban exclusivity? Gramsci distinguishes between industrial
cities and non industrial cities. Only the first are endowed with the quality
of being more advanced than the countryside whereas in the second, the
urban nuclei are drowned in a sea of nonurban inhabitants.^12 Despite the
fact that Gramsci deals with the issue in terms of progressive/reaction-
ary, this couplet can easily be subsumed into the pair democratic/anti-
democratic. Fredric Jameson puts the matter more bluntly when he says:
“Perhaps the most momentous specification of this opposition between