In French history one theme has often dominated discussions of both the structure of national life and the coming of modernity, namely the centralizing role of the state. The state’s importance in creating a unified territory and nation cannot be gainsaid; it occupies a major part in the account developed in Chapter 3 and it will continue to do so here. But recent writers have made it clear that one reason why centralization has so often taken center stage in France, both in actual life and in the way historians have portrayed it, is that regional and local contrasts and the independence to which they testify have persisted too, providing the continuing material on which centralizing efforts have worked. François Guizot, as we saw above, justified the role he assigned to the state in creating national unity in part on grounds that the new monarchy still faced many of the internal divisions confronted by the old one, and a number of recent historians have emphasized the enduring power of local differences in French history; a short list would have to include Eugen Weber, Pierre Rosanvallon, Stéphane Gerson, Susan Carol Rogers, and Gérard Noiriel. Here we draw on their work in order to sharpen our focus on the ways people whose lives were often dominated by their local situations came to be drawn into the expanding and thickening networks that opened the way to new forms of modernity and of bourgeois life during the nineteenth century.