Chapter 33 Part Two Results Chapter Eight Land 2

2 As we have seen, the abolition of French feudalism was a product of the Revolution.Agricultural pressure and Jacobinism pushed agrarian reforms beyond the limits of capitalism's advocates.France as a whole thus became a country neither of landowners and farm labourers, nor of commercial farmers, but mainly of peasant landowners of various types.They became the main supporters of all political systems that did not threaten to take the land thereafter.The number of homesteaders increased by more than 50 percent (from 4 million to 6.5 million), an earlier estimate that seemed probable but not easily verified.We know, of course, that the number of such yeomans did not decrease, and that in some districts it increased more rapidly than in others, but did the Moselle, which increased by 40 per cent during the Norman Eure is more typical and needs further study.Overall, the condition of the land is quite good.Even in 1842-1848 the peasants faced no real difficulties, except for some hired labourers.So little surplus labor flowed from the countryside to the towns, and this fact hindered French industrial development.

In Europe, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and western Germany, where most of the Latin peoples lived, the force for the abolition of feudalism was the French conquest determined to "proclaim immediately in the name of the French nation ... the abolition of tithes, feudalism, and lordship" army, or the local liberals who collaborated with and inspired by it.Thus, before 1799, the legal revolution had triumphed in the countries adjacent to eastern France and northern and central Italy, and such victories usually only completed an evolution that had already progressed. After the failure of the Naples Revolution in 1798-1799, the restoration of the Bourbon family delayed the abolition of feudalism in southern Italy until 1808.British occupation excluded French power from Sicily, but feudalism on the island was not formally abolished until 1812-1843.In Spain, the parliament formed in Cadiz by the anti-French liberals abolished feudalism in 1811 and certain limited successions in 1813, though usually in those countries heavily French influenced by their long incorporation. outside the region.However, the restoration of the ancien regime delayed the actual implementation of these principles.Thus, the rule of law in northwestern Germany east of the Rhine and in the Illyrian provinces (Istria, Dalmatia, Ragusa, and later also parts of Slovenia and Croatia) As far as the revolution is concerned, the reform of France is only the beginning or continuation, not the completion.These areas were not under French rule or control until after 1805.

However, the French Revolution was not the only force in favor of a complete revolution in agrarian relations.A purely economic theory in favor of the rational use of the land had impressed the enlightened despots of the pre-revolutionary period, and arrived at a similar answer.Under the Habsburgs, Joseph II had effectively abolished serfdom and had secularized many ecclesiastical lands in the 1780s.For similar reasons, coupled with persistent uprisings, the serfs of Russian Livonia were formally reverted to the yeoman status they had enjoyed earlier under the Swedish government.This did them no good, however, as the almighty and greedy landowners quickly turned emancipation into a tool that could only be used to exploit the peasantry.After the Napoleonic Wars, the peasants' meager legal protection was wiped out, and between 1819 and 1850, they lost at least one-third of their land, while the nobility's territory increased by 60%-180%. It is cultivated by a group of landless hired laborers.

These three factors, the influence of the French Revolution, the economic rationality of government officials, and the avarice of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia in 1807-1816.The effect of the French Revolution was clearly decisive, for the French army had just smashed Prussia and demonstrated with the most dramatic force the hopeless incompetence of the ancien régime that had not adopted the modern, that is, the French, way.As in Livonia, emancipation and the abolition of the modest legal security previously enjoyed by the peasantry were fundamentally inconsistent.In return for the lord's promise to abolish forced labor and feudal taxes, and to grant them new property rights, the peasant was compelled, in addition to his losses, to pay one-half or one-third of his old land, or an equivalent amount which was already lost. Much money was given to the previous lord.A long and complex process of legal transformation, which was far from being completed until 1848, but the situation has become clear that the lords benefited the most, a small number of well-off peasants also benefited somewhat due to their new property rights, and the majority of peasants clearly deteriorated, and landless hired labor Rapid increase. (Lack of regional industrial development and one or two exportable crop products [mainly cereals] gave rise to large estates and landless labor. Such circumstances could easily foster such structures [in Russia, at the time 90 per cent of the exported commodity grain comes from the territories, and only 10 per cent from self-cultivated land]. Conversely, where regional industries have developed, growing and varied markets have been created for the grain products of nearby towns, farmers or small farms The master would have the upper hand. Thus, the emancipation of the Prussian peasants was the exploitation of the serfs, while the Bohemian peasants gained independence from the emancipation after 1848.)

The economic results are beneficial in the long run, though costly in the short run, as is often seen in major land reforms.By 1830-1831, the number of cattle and sheep in Prussia had just returned to the level of the beginning of the century, and the landlords now had a larger share of the land, while the peasants had a smaller share.On the other hand, during the first half of the century, cultivated land roughly increased by more than a third, while productivity increased by half.The rural surplus was clearly rising rapidly, and since rural conditions were dire (the famine of 1846-1848 was perhaps worse in Germany than anywhere but Ireland and Belgium), there were plenty of incentives to emigrate.Of all the peoples, the Germans did indeed furnish the greatest immigration before the Irish famine.

Thus, as we have seen, most of the practical legal steps to protect the system of bourgeois landed property were carried out between 1789 and 1812.With the exception of France and some neighboring regions, the results of these steps appear to have been rather slow, largely because of the reactionary social and economic forces following Napoleon's defeat.All in all, every step forward of liberalism moves the legal revolution from theory to practice, and every restoration of the ancien regime delays this revolution, especially in Catholic countries where liberals are pressing for the sale of church lands.Thus in Spain the temporary victory of the Liberal Revolution in 1820 brought a new law of "Desvinculacion" (Desvinculacion) allowing the nobility to freely sell their lands; Once again the Liberals triumphed, they were reaffirmed, and so on.Thus, except in areas where middle-class buyers and land speculators were willing to actively take advantage of opportunities, the actual number of land transfers was limited, if we could count them, during the period covered by this book.In the plain of Bologna (Northern Italy), noble lands fell from 78% of the total value in 1789 to 60% in 1804 to 51% in 1835.Conversely, 90 per cent of all Sicily remained in the hands of the nobility until much later. (There seems to be good reason to think that the social class "actually directing and manipulating Italy's unity" is the powerful rural bourgeoisie, inclined by its own agrarian orientation to theoretical free trade, which made Britain's unification of Italy Good opinion, but also hampering the industrialization of Italy.)

There is an exception here, namely church land.These vast, almost always underutilized, laissez-faire territories (it is said that around 1760 two-thirds of the Kingdom of Naples was ecclesiastical) had few caretakers and were roamed by countless wild wolves.Even after the collapse of the enlightened despotism of Joseph II, there was no proposal in the reaction of Catholic Austrian absolutism to return the secularized and allocated ecclesiastical lands.Thus, in an autonomous community in Romagna (Northeast Italy), church lands fell from 42.5 percent of the region's land area in 1783 to 11.5 percent in 1812, but the lost land not only to the bourgeois landowners (from 24% to 47%), but also to the nobility (from 34% to 41%).It is not surprising, then, that even in Catholic Spain, intermittently liberal governments were able to sell more than half of the ecclesiastical lands before 1845, especially in the provinces with the greatest concentrations of ecclesiastical property or the most economically advanced. obvious. (In 15 provinces, more than three-quarters of the ecclesiastical territories have been sold.)

Unfortunately for liberal economic theory, this massive redistribution of land did not, as might have been expected, create an enterprising, progressive class of landowners or homesteaders.Why should middle-class buyers (urban lawyers, businessmen or speculators) go to the trouble of investing in land and trying to run it into a good commercial enterprise in an area where the economy is underdeveloped and roads are hard to reach? From the former aristocratic or ecclesiastical landowners, he loosely took the positions from which he had hitherto been excluded, and then exercised the power of these positions over money rather than tradition and custom.In the vast areas of southern Europe, a group of more extensive new "barony territories" have further strengthened the characteristics of the old aristocracy.The concentration of large territories has been slightly reduced in some places, as in southern Italy; it has not changed in some places, as in Sicily; and it has even been strengthened in some places, as in Spain.In such societies, the legal revolution thus reinforces the old feudalism with the new; and all the more so for the small purchasers, especially the peasants, who profit little from the sale of the land.In much of southern Europe, however, the ancient social structures remained so strong that even the idea of ​​mass immigration was impossible.Men and women live in the land of their ancestors, and starve to death there if they have no other choice.The mass emigration of southern Italy occurred half a century later.

But even when peasants actually acquired the land, or were identified as titleholders, as in France, some parts of Germany, or Scandinavia, they still did not automatically transform into a class of enterprising peasants, as might be expected.And it is for this simple reason that when the peasant wants land, he seldom also wants a bourgeois agricultural economy.