Chapter V - PEASANTS

Summary

The twentieth century, if one is to believe Eric Wolf, is a century of peasant wars; but the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries were great peasant ages tout court. On the Continent, the overwhelming majority of the population – 80 to 90 per cent – lived in the country and for the most part worked on the land. The time is past when peasant society could be compared – as in Marx's epigram – to a ‘sack of potatoes’, incapable of the solidarity, the consciousness or the existence ‘in itself’ or ‘for itself’ of a social class. Let us not get involved in a futile debate about the essence of a social class, but simply note that research on seventeenth-century revolts, on the Chouans, and on the peasant wars of our own time has shown quite clearly that peasants are capable, when they feel themselves threatened, of reacting as one against their enemies of the moment, whether nobility, church, townsmen, or the bureaucracy of an absolute monarch or a totalitarian state. The peasantry does indeed exist as a distinctive group of men tied to the land, growing crops and raising stock, whether to sell their produce on the market, or, more commonly, to consume it themselves or to barter it. This was the situation throughout Europe in the whole period covered by this chapter, from 1500 to 1950.