Kill a Pig, roast a Prussian  Michael Burns    • The Village of
Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 by Alain Corbin,
translated by Arthur Goldhammer     Polity, 164 pp, £25.00, July
1992, ISBN 0 7456 0895 7   The small commune of Hautefaye, in
the north-east corner of the department of the Dordogne,
prospered under the Second Empire: livestock prices increased;
low-lying areas continued to produce abundant chestnut crops;
and not all the small mines and forges of the Périgord region
had fallen victim to the concentration of industry that would be
achieved by the century’s end. In the 1860s a third of the
population still used local patois and could neither read nor
write French, but whatever the language, they had no trouble
understanding the material gains secured under the Empire.
Louis-Napoleon had swept out the Second Republic, and for
peasants who equated that brief regime with onerous taxation
(Republicans were ‘despoilers of the public treasury’) it was
good riddance. While country people in oth