The French Rural Riot of the Eighteenth Century

The seventeenth century in France had been rent by popular disturbance, above all by the periodic rebellions of disaffected peasants. In Richelieu's time, there had been the desperate uprisings of the croquants—or "poor countrymen"—of the 1620's, '30's and early '40's, involving whole provinces in bloody clashes with tax collectors and recruiting sergeants; and the peasants' war in Normandy, known as that of "Jean Va-Nu-Pieds," which aimed to abolish all new taxes levied in the past thirty years. After the dissident princes and parlements had had their turn in the civil wars of the Fronde (1648–52), peasant disturbances broke out again in the early years of Louis XIV, culminating in the great insurrection of the 1670's, which, starting over the salt tax {the hated gabelle) in the region of Bordeaux, carried the torch of rebellion through ten provinces in the south and west of· France. A final wave attended the last twenty-five years of the "Great Monarch'"s reign, with its wars, famines, and religious persecution. This was the age of the great peasant insurrection in Calvinist Languedoc, known as the war of the Camisards, the last of the French religious wars. But it was more than that, because it was also fought over the peasant's manorial obligations to his lord; and, soon after, in Catholic Quercy and Périgord, peasants were challenging the whole existing order by refusing to pay taxes to the King, tithe to the Church, or to perform servile manual labor (corvée) for the upkeep of the roads. Louis' long reign ended in a final outburst of peasant riots over the disastrous harvest and famine of 1709 and the further exactions of tax collectors for the War of the Spanish Succession.

Surprising as it may seem, the eighteenth century, which ended in the great social and political upheaval of the Revolution, was rarely marked by disturbances of such violence, scope, or magnitude. In the seventy-odd years separating Louis' death from the pre-revolutionary crisis of 1788, such fundamental questions as those raised by the peasants of Normandy, Languedoc, and Perigord in Richelieu's and Louis' time far more rarely appeared as issues in popular disturbances. Basically, peasant claims remained unsatisfied: the most onerous of the royal taxes—the gabelle and taille (land tax)—continued to he levied on unwilling peasants; and the holders of seigneurial fiefs continued to exact feudal obligations (though rarely servile labor other than the corvée) from their tenants; and in fact, aided by their lawyers, they were able to revive old claims, or to invent new ones, as the century progressed. So fundamental rural discontents continued to simmer beneath the surface; yet more peasants acquired land as freeholders or tenants, rural incomes rose, and Louis XV's reign, in particular, saw a degree of general agrarian prosperity unknown in earlier times.

In one sense, the great turning point was 1709, the year of the last great famine of the Old Régime: after this, nationwide starvation disappear e d a s a recurring phenomenon from the French countryside. Admittedly, rural distress continued, and agricultural prices, which had begun to fall about 1660, continued to fall till 1730; and there was a final backlash of widespread peasant disturbance, reminiscent of earlier years, that convulsed large parts of the country in hunger riots during the Regency in the 1720's. Soon after, how ever, the rural producer began to find a continuously expanding market for his g rain and wine; and Professor Labrousse has convincingly shown us that the forty -five years between 1733 and 1778 were years of steadily advancing prices and prosperity for rural proprietors and tenant farmers, or anyone else in the countryside whose holding was large enough to enable him to sell in the market. For ten years after 1778, partly because of France's entry into the War of American Independence, prices tended to fall again, with results that were often disastrous to wine-growers; but only in 1787 was France afflicted by a series of had harvests and other attendant calamities that stirred the whole countryside into a renewed outbreak of rebellion, which played a vital part in the revolutionary crisis of 1789.

In 1789, then, it was once more economic distress that forced the old traditional and basic grievances of the whole rural population to the surface; and, as Alexis de Tocqueville has insisted, the explosion may have been all the more violent because of the comparative prosperity and freedom enjoyed by many peasants in the preceding sixty or seventy years. Even in the prosperous years, however, when age-old discontents due to tithe, tax, and seigneurial exaction were dormant rather than active, a large part of the peasantry, even if cushioned against actual starvation, could still only scrape a meager existence from the cultivation of the soil. These included not only the hosts of landless laborers, cottagers, and métayers (sharecroppers)—accounting between them for over half the rural population—but many thousands of small proprietors who, even though they owned their land outright, did not possess the thirty acres or more that alone would yield a surplus for sale on the market. Such persons, therefore, like the bulk of the wine-growers and the people of the cities, depended for their survival on the purchase of bread or grain. Many cottagers and stripholders might be vitally concerned at the tendency of the larger proprietors and farmers to enclose the commons and encroach on their traditional rights of gleaning and pasture; but all, being buyers rather than sellers of food, would be concerned with the need for cheap and plentiful bread—indeed, this was their overriding preoccupation. As bread was the staple diet and accounted, even at its normal price of 2 sous a pound, for something like 50 percent of the poor man's budget, he was naturally alarmed, and might even suffer serious hardship, when it rose appreciably higher. In fact, whenever harvests were bad, or when the needs of war or a breakdown in communications led to shortage, hoarding, or panic buying, a large part of the rural population, like their fellows in the cities, were threatened with...