Peasant radicalism and the Second Republic (1848-1851)

Dr Chris Pearson

Slightly revised essay deadlines:

• Short Essay 1: 12pm Tuesday, Term 1, Week 7

• Short Essay 2: 12pm Tuesday, Term 2, Week 2

• Short Essay 3: 12pm Tuesday, Term 2 Week 7

President Sarokzy grappling with the issues at the Salon international de l’agriculture

Source: www.lepost.fr/article/2009/10/27/1762235_l-identite-nationale-et-la-terre-vues-par-petain-et-sarkozy.html

Lecture outline

• The crisis in rural France in the first half of the nineteenth century

• Peasant responses

• The rise of the rural left

Impact of Revolution on countryside

• End of seigneurialism and tithes ended a huge burden (sometimes 30% of income)

• Peasants share of land increased – in the Nord, peasants share of land from 30% to 42%

• Diversification – cows in Normandy and wine in the south

• Greater independence due to abolishment of seigneurial courts

• Hunting no longer a preserve of the aristocracy

France: A rural country

In 1831 26.35 million people, or 81% of the population lived in rural communities of 2,000 or less

[N.B. not all farmers – includes teachers, merchants etc]

(MacPhee, Social History of France, p.147)

Jean-François Millet, Les glaneuses (1857)

Rural inequalities

The largest 100,000 land holdings (1% of

the total) controlled 28% of the land

MacPhee, Social History of France, p.147

Pressures on the countryside:

• Demographic: population increases

• Financial: struggle to pay back loans taken out to pay for additional plots of land, unfair taxation system

• Loss of pasturing rights in communal forests as state asserts control over forests (1827 Forest Code)

Forest code (1827) – an attack on the peasants?

‘The state is taking over control of communal woods only in order to assure their perpetuation via regular management… It is impossible for [communities] to administer their woods by themselves and to assure proper surveillance.’Quoted in Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (2000), p.35

The peasants fight back…

La guerre des Demoiselles (Ariège), 1829-1932:

‘In their struggle to define and use the forest, the peasant men took on an abbreviated feminine identity as a sign of the feminine and disorderly forest itself.’

Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites (1994), 58.

The Second Republic (1848-51)

• Male universal suffrage –peasants get the vote

• Within the context of financial woes/land tax revolts, peasants vote overwhelmingly for Bonapartism: in December 1848 Louis-Napoleon gets 75% of the vote

• Karl Marx: ‘a peasant revolution by proxy’

Rural socialism

• Redistribution of taxes along progressive lines

• Greater access to land and education

• Mutual aid societies to protect the sick and unemployed

• Cheaper credit

• Repeal of wine taxes and forest code

Votes for démos-soc list, 13 May 1849

Good villagers, vote for the Mountain:

They are the gods of poor winegrowers,

Because with them, good country folk,

The drink tax will be swept away…

Free schools there’ll also be,

And money at most at two per cent

Claude Durand, ‘Song of the Wine-growers’ (1850)

It’s in two years, scarcely two years,

That the Gallic cock will crow;

Incline your ear towards the plain,

Can you hear what it will say?

It’s saying to the children of the earth

Who are crushed by their burden:

Here is the end of misery,

Eaters of black bread, drinkers of water

Pierre Dupont, ‘Song of the Peasants’

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power, 2 December 1851

Map of resistance to 1851 coup

What explains peasant radicalism?

• The socio-economic grievances of the peasants:

• Poor harvests, price collapse of wine and other cash-crops, struggles to repay debts – dem-socs offered a solution through cheap credit and tax cuts

• View advanced by Philippe Vigier in the 1960s

Age old hatreds and the feudal structures of the countryside?

Some peasants ‘had indeed been brought into national politics; but they had been carried there by traditional-type leaders – men whom they respected and trusted, and whom they followed because they took their word. Local notables committed to a particular ideology or political stance mobilized their allies and their clients who trusted or obeyed them in a feudal sense. The allegiance, the personal relationship, were surely more important than any ideology that they were made to serve.’

Weber, ‘The Second Republic, Politics, and the Peasant,’ FHS (1980) p. 546

Modernization a factor?

• Ted Margadant in French Peasants in Revolt (1979) suggests that a degree of modernization in certain rural areas, in particular the Midi (or Southern France), had encouraged radicalism

• “Proto-urbanization” meant contact with urban dwellers and concern with national economic issues

Cultural synthesis between tradition and modernity?

• Radicalism explained by contact between peasants and bourgeois, such as artisans and migrants, in the Midi

• Cultural brokers, such as teachers, politicized traditional peasant ceremonies (such as Carnival)

• Maurice Agulhon, La République au village (1970)

Multiple reasons?

• Economic and social factors important, especially contact with urban areas

• Recent history: memories of the revolution

• Peasants had agency – not simply manipulated by urban elite

Peter MacPhee, The Politics of Rural Life (1992) and A Social History of France (2004)