Role of Peasants in the French Revolution

Ironically, the dispute which had prevailed before the Revolution between the peasants and the monarchy focused on the modernization efforts of the monarchy in the realm of agriculture and the peasants' resistance to such efforts. As we read in Goodwin, "In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the French peasants were almost as unprogressive in economic matters as the nobility were reactionary in politics. This was because (the peasants) considered that the progress of scientific agriculture would jeopardize their accustomed means of livelihood . . . The agrarian problem in France at this period arose mainly from the clash between the monarchy's efforts to improve agricultural productivity and the determination of the peasants to retain their traditional methods of cultivation and communal rights" (Goodwin 19-20).

While it is true that the French peasant farmer prior to the Revolution was "personally free and . . . has also often become an owner-occupier of the soil," it is also true that this relative freedom and the peasants' common ownership of land did not in any real sense give the farmers a measure of economic security.

In fact, "There can be little doubt . . . that the majority of the rural inhabitants of France were wretchedly impoverished . . . The vast majority of pe

. . .
since the spring of 1989, when the electoral situation and, in particular, the food shortage, had caused the peasants to react violently against payment of seigneurial dues: the cahiers de dole'ances or lists of grievances drawn up on their behalf were almost certainly a much watered-down version of their real feelings" (Furet and Richet 82). As a result of these intermingling crises, the rural areas of France began in late July of 1989 to experience uprisings among the peasants, who were also threatened by the growing numbers of the poor who had to take to illegal measures to live in the face of economic collapse. While it is true that in some regions the revolution of the peasants, in response to these crises, took an overt form, it is also true that, as stated, the revolution in this category was more subtle and complex. In the districts of Normandy, Alsace, and elsewhere---more "wooded" areas, the peasants openly revolted. In Saone, "armed peasants attacked the local manor or abbey and gleefully set fire to the seigneurial archives, the title-deeds of their ancient bondage, as if by destroying them they were ridding themselves forever of the hated tithe" (Furet and Richet 83). On the other hand, in most of the regio
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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