Chapter 34 Part Two Results Chapter Eight Land 3

3 As far as the traditional old system is concerned, although it is tyrannical and inefficient, it still has considerable social necessity, and at the lowest level, it also has some kind of economic security, not to mention that it is enshrined by customs and traditions.Periodic famines, labor burdens that make men decay at forty and women at thirty, are natural disasters; it is only in times of famine or revolution of extraordinary hardship that they become the man-made disasters of those responsible.From the peasant's point of view, the legal revolution gave nothing but some legal rights, but took away a lot.Thus in Prussia, the emancipation granted the peasants two-thirds or half of their old arable land, and freed them from forced labor and other taxes; but at the same time, the emancipation formally deprived the peasants of the following rights: the right to ask the lord for help in case of poor harvest and rinderpest; The right to collect or buy cheap fuel in the lord's forest; the right to ask the lord for help when building a house; the right to ask the lord to help pay taxes when you are poor; the right to graze livestock in the lord's forest, etc.For a poor farmer, this seemed like an extremely harsh deal.Church land may have been poorly managed, but the very fact that it was popular with farmers, who could enjoy traditional rights on that land.Policies such as commons, pastures, forest divisions, and enclosures are merely means of depriving the poor farmer or tenant of the resources and reservations to which he (rather as part of the community) is entitled.A free land market means that farmers may have to sell their land to survive; the formation of a rural entrepreneurial class means that a most ruthless and smart class replaces the old lords, or continues to exploit farmers outside the old lords.In short, the introduction of liberalism on the land was like some kind of silent bombing that shattered the former social fabric of the countryside and left nothing but the rich.This is a kind of nothingness called freedom.

The most natural reaction, then, was that the poor peasantry or the entire rural population resist as far as they could, and in the name of the symbols of stability of traditional society, namely, the Church and the orthodox king.If we exclude the Peasant Revolution in France (and even in 1789 it was generally neither against the Church nor against the Monarch.), all important peasant movements during the period covered by this book that were not directed against foreign kings or the Church, Obviously both favor priests and rulers.The peasantry and the urban proletariat of southern Italy, together in 1799, in the name of the Holy Religion and the House of Bourbon, waged a social counter-revolutionary movement against the Neapolitan Jacobins and the French; The slogans of the Partisans of the Green Forest of Apulia and Apulia, as they were later against the unification of Italy.Priests and forest heroes also played peasant leaders in Spain's anti-Napoleonic guerrilla wars.Churches, kings, and, in the early 1800s, an extremely eccentric traditionalism, inspired the Basque, Navarre, Castile, Leon, and Aragon's Royal Legitimacy partisans, engaged in their seemingly endless war against liberalism.The Virgin of Guardalu, who led a peasant uprising in 1810. In 1809, the church and the emperor, under the leadership of the Tyrolean republican Andreas Hofer, fought against the Bavarians and the French.The Russians fought for the Tsar and the Holy Orthodoxy in 1812-1813.The Polish revolutionaries in Galicia knew that their only chance of mobilizing the Ukrainian peasantry was through the Greek Orthodox or Uniate: a sect that recognized the authority of the Pope while still retaining Greek Orthodox rites and custom) of the clergy; they failed in the end, because the peasants preferred emperors to nobles.In France, republicanism and Napoleonism attracted a significant section of the peasantry between 1791 and 1815; and even before the Revolution the Church was in many places in decline.Outside of France, few places (perhaps most notably those where the Church had long played the role of unpopular foreign rulers, such as papal Romagna and Emilia) had what we would today call Leftist peasant movement.Even in France, Brittany and the Vendée were strongholds that welcomed the Bourbons.The reluctance of the European peasantry to rise together with the Jacobins or the Liberals—that is, lawyers, shopkeepers, land managers, officials, and landowners—doomed the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in A nation that acquires land, or that acquires it but fears that it will be lost again, or that is equally inactive because it is already satisfied.

Of course, the peasants did not fight for the real kings whom they knew little about, but for the ideal kings who would rise up and punish their subordinates and lords if they knew of their overreach.Yet peasants often rose up and fought for the actual church.For the rural clergy were one of them, the saints were of course theirs and no one else's, and even the shaky clergy were sometimes more tolerant landowners than the greedy laity.Where peasants have land and freedom, as in Tyrol, Navarre, or the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, the traditionalism is to protect relative freedom against the infiltration of liberalism.Where the peasant has no land and no freedom, the peasant is more revolutionary.Any call to resist the conquest of foreigners and the bourgeoisie, not only by priests, kings, or others, may not only lead to the ransacking of the houses of the gentry and lawyers in the city, but even the peasants will carry drums and gongs and banners of saints. Go forth in a mighty way to carve up the land of the landlords, slaughter the landlords, rape their women, and burn legal documents.Peasants who considered their poverty and landlessness were undoubtedly against the true will of Jesus Christ and the King.It was this solid foundation of social revolution that made the peasant revolution such an unreliable reactionary ally in areas of serfdom and large estates, or in areas where private land was small and subdivided.All it takes to move the peasantry from a formally orthodox revolution to a formally leftist revolution is a realization that the king and the church have fallen to the side of the local rich, and that a man like them speaks in their own language revolutionary movement.Garibaldi's popular activism was perhaps the first of its kind, but the green woods of Naples continued to celebrate the Holy Church and the House of Bourbon while they ardently celebrated him.Marxism and Bakuninism, perhaps the more militant one, but before 1848 peasant uprisings had hardly begun to move from the political right to the left.For the force that turned local peasant revolts into national uprisings, that is, the enormous influence of the bourgeois economy on the land, did not begin to manifest itself until after the mid-nineteenth century, especially after the Great Agricultural Depression of the 1880s.