The centralization in place since the establishment of power in the capital had created a hierarchy of space which opposed the centeridentified as its capital --to the periphery, considered as the rest of the country. La province referred to that periphery. Encompassing France's multiple regions and their singular cultural identity, la province gathered them as one whole as the collective noun suggests. It was defined in opposition to Paris, therefore as the negation of the characteristics

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... buted to the capital. The dichotomy between center and periphery originated with the centralization of power in the capital or nearby Versailles, which under the absolute monarchy turned la province into as space of deprivation due to the subjects' distance from the monarch. Constructed as a space of obscurantism, an anxiety of contamination accompanied prolonged stays in la province by seventeenth-century Parisian subjects such as Mme de Sévigné who during her short exile in Brittany, feared to lose the use of French because of her contact with provincials whom she referred as "gens de l'autre monde." 2 If provincials were despised or mocked in some of the writings of the ancien régime because of the stigma associated with this space, la province became a topos in nineteenth-century texts, turning provincials into a type. The massive project of the physiologies of Les français peints par eux-mêmes illustrates this tendency. Presenting itself as an inventory of the different types of individuals of the society of the July Monarchy, the physiologies, although mostly focused on the urban context, devotes nevertheless three volumes to la