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Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700

University of California Press

[In the pre-industrial era,] those engaging in popular disturbances are sometimes peasants.…but more often a mixed population of what in England were termed “lower orders” and in France menu peuple. . . ; they appear frequently in itinerant bands, “captained” or “generaled” by men whose personality, style of dress or speech, and momentary assumption of authority mark them out as leaders; they are fired as much by memories of customary rights or a nostalgia for past utopias as by present grievances or hopes of material improvement; they dispense a rough-and-ready kind of “natural justice” by breaking windows, wrecking machinery, storming markets, burning their enemies of the moment in effigy, firing hayricks, and “pulling down” their houses, farms, fences, mills or pubs, but rarely by taking lives.

Thus, in sixteenth-century France, we have seen crowds taking on the role of priest, pastor, or magistrate to defend doctrine or purify the religious community—either to maintain its Catholic boundaries and structure, or to re-form relations within it. We have seen that popular religious violence could receive legitimation from different features of political and religious life, as well as from the group identity of the people in the crowds. The targets and character of crowd violence differed somewhat between Catholics and Protestants, depending on their sense of the source of the danger and on their religious sensibility. But in both cases, religious violence had a connection in time, place, and form with the life of worship, and the violent actions themselves were drawn from a store of punitive or purificatory traditions.…Even in the extreme case of religious violence, crowds do not act in a mindless way.

All of these [seventeenth-century French] risings involved significant numbers of peasants, or at least of rural people. Their frequency, and the relative unimportance of land and landlords as direct objects of contention within them, require some rethinking of peasant rebellion. The universal orientation of these rebellions to agents of the state, and their nearly universal inception with reaction to the efforts of authorities to assemble the means of warmaking, underscore the impact of statemaking on the interests of peasants.…In the seventeenth century the dominant influences driving French peasants into revolt were the efforts of authorities to seize peasant labor, commodities, and capital.

One of the most significant developments in European historical studies in the last four decades has been the explosion of research that allows us to take ordinary people seriously as political actors long before the creation of stable parliamentary democracies. Inspired variously by such well-known examples as George Rudé’s project of identifying the “faces in the crowd,” Natalie Zemon Davis’s careful elucidation of the “meaning” of riots and popular protests, and Charles Tilly’s account of the changing patterns of “popular collective action,” literally hundreds of scholars have set off to the archives to discover the particulars of what we might label the history of popular politics. Over the years their research has not only enriched our sense of the variety of actors but also revealed the diversity of their political messages and the range of their actions. Never before have ordinary people—which is to say, those who were excluded from the realm of officialdom; subjects as opposed to rulers—seemed so active and noisy, so eminently capable of shaping their own history.

So what kind of history did these ordinary Europeans make? In what concrete ways did ordinary people influence and shape their political destinies? To what extent can ordinary Europeans be said to have created their own political futures rather than being condemned merely to suffer the impositions of their more powerful superiors? Given the richness and diversity of the accumulated research, it may be somewhat surprising that there have been very few attempts to synthesize the results, but on the face of it, most historians will find questions like these to be hopelessly broad and impractical. To date, those authors who have sought to reassemble the myriad pieces of popular microhistory into larger packages have either limited their work to a certain category of events—such as urban riots or peasant rebellions—or focused on a relatively bounded territory—typically the domain, or some subunit, of a modern national state. Given the large and linguistically diverse literature, such limiting strategies are obviously practical, but the history of popular politics surely transcends the territorial boundaries of provinces, national states, and linguistic groups and defies the categorical limits that separate “riots” from “rebellions,” “revolts” from “revolutions,” and the whole lot of such events from merely nonviolent action. Indeed, unless we intentionally ask questions that transcend the categorical limits and the territorial boundaries of the current literature, we will never find the answers and thus squander the excellent opportunity we now have to replace the old elite-centered histories of European politics with something significantly new.

Building on the accumulated studies of popular collective action, then, this book attempts to synthesize what might usefully be called the social history of European politics during the particularly tumultuous era that began with the Protestant Reformation and ended with the so-called Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. If social history is concerned with how ordinary people actively “lived the big changes” in history (Tilly 1985: 11), then the “early modern” period is an especially valuable laboratory, not only because of the voluminous literature on popular political behavior, but because it is replete with “big changes.” Besides the disintegration of the Roman Catholic church and the consequent reshaping of the European cultural and political landscape, this period also witnessed both the rise of a European world economy and a military revolution that inaugurated the era of European domination on a global scale (see Wallerstein 1974, 1980; Parker 1988). In highlighting the political action of ordinary people in relation to the transformation of the cultural and political landscape of Europe, this study naturally takes issue with a number of scholarly interpretations of these big changes. It explicitly undermines elite-centered accounts of both the Reformation and the consolidation of a peculiarly European system of states, but it also questions more implicitly the direct correlation of capitalist development and changes in warfare with the emergent patterns of state formation in early modern Europe. In a far more constructive sense, however, my primary goal is to describe and account for the variety of ways in which ordinary people, by breaking their rulers’ exclusive claims to political and cultural sovereignty and boldly entering political arenas that were legally closed to them, helped to shape the cultural and political landscape of modern Europe.