Chapter 4 Part One Development Chapter One The World of the 1780s 2

2 The world of 1789, as it is, is absolutely a rural world. This is a basic fact, and no one can be said to know the world if he does not recognize this.In countries like Russia, Scandinavia, and the Balkans, cities have never been particularly prosperous, rural populations account for 90% to 97% of the total population, and in some places the cities have declined, but the urban Tradition is still strong.Even in such areas, the proportion of the rural or agricultural population is particularly high.In Lombardy, northern Italy, 85 percent of the population is rural; in Venice, 72 to 80 percent; Asia (Lucania), this proportion increased to more than 90%.In fact, except in some areas where industry and commerce are very prosperous, it is difficult to find a large European country where the agricultural population is less than four-fifths of the total population.Even in Britain, it was not until 1851 that the urban population surpassed the rural population for the first time.

Of course, the word "urban" is ambiguous.By our modern standards, in 1789 there were only two European cities that could properly be called metropolises: London and Paris, with populations of about 1 million and 500,000, respectively.There are about 20 cities with populations of 100,000 or more, of which two are in France, two in Germany, about four in Spain, about five in Italy (the region along the Mediterranean Sea is traditionally home to cities), Russia Two, and one each in the European parts of Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Scotland and Turkey.What we call a city also includes the numerous small local towns in which the majority of city dwellers actually live.The center of the town is the Church Square, surrounded by public buildings and noble mansions, and people can walk from the square to the farm in just a few minutes. In 1834, the second half of the period covered by this book, 19 per cent of Austria's population lived in towns, but even then three-quarters of the urban population lived in small towns with a population of less than 20,000. About half of them live in small towns with a population size of 2,000-5,000.These are the cities that French short-term workers roamed about on their Tour de France.Due to the depression and stagnation of the ensuing centuries, the 16th-century appearance of these towns has been preserved as vividly as flies in glass, and their serene colors are the background that awakened the German Romantic poets to express their enthusiasm.In Spain, cathedral spiers tower over small towns; in these muddy towns, where the Chassidis Jews worship their miraculous Rabbi, and the Orthodox Jews worship the holy law The minutiae of Gogol's novel is debated; the imperial envoy in Gogol's novel drives into the city to terrorize the rich and powerful, and Chichikov ponders here buying the souls of the dead.But it was also from such towns that young men with enthusiasm and ambition came to make revolutions or make their first fortunes, or were revolutionaries and millionaires at the same time.Robespierre came from Arras, Gracchus Babeuf from Saint-Quentin, Napoleon from Ajaccio.

These local towns, though small, are still cities.The real city folk, quick-witted and well-informed, look down on the brawny, slow-moving, ignorant country folk from the surrounding countryside. (By the standards of the practical minds of the world at the time, dead country towns had little to boast about. A lot of German pop comedy treats backwater towns [Krahwinke] as harshly as country bumpkins [apparently he's more rustic] sarcasm.) The line between town and country, or rather between urban occupations and agricultural labour, is quite clear.In many countries, tax barriers, and sometimes even old city walls, separate the two.In some extreme cases, as in Prussia, the government, eager to bring the taxpayer under proper supervision, managed to separate urban activity from rural activity virtually completely.Even where administrative distinctions were not made so sharply, one could usually recognize a man from a city or a farmer by his appearance.On the vast expanses of Eastern Europe, the city dwellers were like islands of Germans, Jews, or Italians floating in a sea of ​​Slavs, Magyars, and Romanians.Even if they have the same religious belief and belong to the same ethnic group, the appearance of the city people and the surrounding peasants just look different, and they dress differently.Indeed, except for those engaged in indoor manual labor and handicraft labor, most of the urban people are tall, although their bodies may be more slender. (For example, in 1823-1827, the average height of urban residents in Brussels was three centimeters higher than that of nearby rural residents, and in Louvain, urban residents were on average two centimeters taller than those from rural areas. , we have plenty of military statistics to back it up, although all are from the 19th century.) They were quick minded and highly educated, and they could, and certainly were, proud of it.However, their way of life is almost as closed as that of the rural people, and they are as ignorant of what is going on in the outside world as the rural people.

The local town remained practically subordinate to the economy and society of the country in which it was located, living (with very few exceptions) from the surrounding peasants and from its own labor, and had little else to live on.The professional and middle classes in the cities were usually grain and livestock traders, agricultural processors, lawyers and notaries (who were landed nobles who dealt with their property matters or endless lawsuits.), merchant-business families (who provided raw materials and procured products for the weavers in the countryside), as well as respected government agents, nobles and ecclesiastical figures.The artisans and shopkeepers in the city provided services to the nearby farmers and the urbanites who depended on them for their livelihoods.Small local towns had a golden age in the late Middle Ages, but since then it has sadly declined.It was no longer a "free city" or city-state, no longer a manufacturing center supplying products to a wider market, no longer a relay station for international trade.As it declines, it insists more and more stubbornly on its local monopoly of the market, shelters the market and excludes all outsiders.The kind of provincialism ridiculed by young radicals and big-city dwellers arose largely out of this movement for economic self-defense.In southern Europe, squires and sometimes even nobles lived in small towns, living off land rents.In Germany, there are countless small princes' territories, which are nothing more than some big manors. The bureaucrats in the princes' territories rely on the money collected from honest farmers to satisfy the desires of the princes. The local town was probably still a prosperous and developing society in the late eighteenth century, and although stone buildings of classical or Rococo style dominated the cityscape, they still bear witness to parts of Western Europe.Their prosperity comes from the countryside.