Beyond the main outlines it allows to draw, research of historical conditions under which a culture shared by peasants of a given country has been produced points out social inequalities between groups ; these inequalities are evicted as well by the technocratic criticism of "traditional mentality" as by the populistic celebration of "peasant wisdom". By comparing agriculture of Brittany which is an exemplary case of conversion of peasantry to intensification, with agriculture of department of Sarthe which is an impoverished variant of the "Norman agricultural pattern", the author shows that resistances to innovation both are the expression of habits imbedded in regional cultures and the product of handicaps - not only economic ones - very inequaly shared out among the various farmers categories.
