Vichy's reconstruction program was combined with two policies that affected the whole of French society: the emphasis placed on the regions and the local by a state that, moreover, was never so centralizing; and the celebration of rurality, through the figures of the village and the peasant.
In response to the Petainist injunction to "return to the land", architects developed a wide variety of strategies. Conservatives were keen to celebrate the spontaneous virtues of "rural and bourgeois" architecture, the subject of a best-selling book by Georges Doyon and Robert Hubrecht.
Architects more committed to the pursuit of modern approaches proposed other interpretations, emphasizing geographical and social determinations, and advocating functional constructions. They did so, in particular, through the 1425 site, with which Georges-Henri Rivière's Musée des arts et traditions populaires conducted a decentralized survey of rural buildings.
In the Somme region, the team led by urban planner Paul Dufournet and architect Jean Bossu worked on a territory-wide project for the commune of Le Bosquel, which was burnt down in 1940, drawing up an overall project that was crucial to the modernization of the rural world.
