The postwar era, social historians have argued, witnessed not only the continuation of centuries-old European urbanization but, more significantly, the end of the sharp opposition between city and country that characterized large stretches of Europe in 1945. Rural areas, occupations, and people persisted; but after 1945 the lines between village and city blurred and the lives of villagers and city dwellers grew increasingly similar, thus blunting ancient mutual resentments. Historians and social scientists have written of the ''death of a separate peasant culture'' (Eric J. Hobsbawm) and the ''end of the peasantry'' (Henri Mendras), attributing its collapse to technological advances, urban migration, and the extension of consumer society into the countryside. The peasantry's demise has been of particular interest to historians of France, presumably because peasant culture persisted so robustly there through the 1940s, only to decline precipitously by 1970. The peasant way of life virtually disappeared, however, in every Western European country--even in authoritarian Spain, where the regime was invested in its preservation--and, though not for all the same reasons, in Eastern Europe as well. Farmers continued to form a strong bloc in European politics, yet even their protests mimicked the tactics of urban dissident movements.

If the gap between rural and urban narrowed dramatically as prosperity, tractors, and television penetrated the village, income disparities--another prominent topic in the historiography--remained wide in most Western European countries. However, inequality produced social and political consequences different from those that occurred before 1945. Class antagonism did not disappear but became milder and, when expressed, less likely to take violent, organized, or political forms. Social historians have associated this change with others: First, the gap between top and bottom did narrow to some extent. Moreover, mobility was rapid enough to assuage workers' sense of grievance. Full employment and, later, unemployment compensation also contributed to a change in workers' consciousness, as the social historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued. Workers were now linked to the bourgeoisie, as were farmers to city folk, by commonalities of consumption. Everyone shopped at chain stores and supermarkets and ever-increasing numbers of people owned expensive private goods such as a car, even if some drove a luxury vehicle and others a jalopy. . .

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