I think I'll echo what Fab said, with the exception that perceiving "rural France" as some uniform entity as deeply conservative (which is not what Fab meant, I'm sure) is wrong: the Montagnard vote in 1849 was quite rural, the biggest opposition to the 1851 coup came from rural areas, there were plenty of 'radical' rural areas (though perhaps not 'radical' in a Marxist sense).
My other main point when I read this paper is that I did not really have a feel in your introduction of sorts what your thesis was, and it only became clearer in the last paragraph(s). One thing which came to my head when reading it and which Fab pointed out well is this:
France has had a problem to adopt real democracy, even when it adopted a republican form of power, even when it ruled a Declaration of Human Rights (from the top and practically used against "the enemies of Liberty", whereas it was a theoretically perfect text).
Philippe Auguste, Louis XI, Louis XIV still live in a way in our political system and ideas since the French Revolution...
In a way, after 1750, France said it changed fundamentally its regime, whereas it only modified the formal way its power is organized...
There is an inherent contradiction in a country which prides itself in chopping the head of a monarch but continues to exercise deference in reference to powerful figures: nobility are still often referred to with their title (Monsieur le Comte, Monsieur le Vicomte etc), there is deep respect in conservative milieus of authority figures to the point where it is ridiculous (some people we knew were all up in arms when we referred to "Mr. Chirac" as "Jacques" or even "Chirac").
