Agricultural workers, small landed proprietors, share-croppers, and smaller numbers of richer laboureurs formed the bulk (perhaps 80 per cent) of pre-industrial French society. Owning about one-third of the land, these peasants did all the agricultural work, and, until the Revolution, even when they did own plots of land, a whole range of feudal dues was attached to them, there being no outright ownership of the land in the modern sense. Tenure was by long- or short-term leases and by the widespread system of métayage (share-cropping), by which usually half of the fruits of the land went to the owner in return for the use of the land and the farm establishment.
Most peasants owned plots of land far too small to support a family; they therefore rented further plots and often plied some other trade, such as ditcher or wheelwright. They were poor, and only a few in any community were rich enough to own a plough team. In good years they survived by using the common lands, cultivating their yard for fruit and vegetables and keeping some poultry; in years when the harvest was poor and bread prices rose, many would be reduced to severe poverty and perhaps vagrancy. At such times they might resemble the ‘animals’ described by La Bruyère and Vauban during the terrible age of Louis XIV. The happy, virtuous peasants portrayed by the brothers Le Nain in the 17th c. and by Greuze in the 18th would have been the untypical richer peasants: poverty was the norm, and life was lived in poor houses with floors of beaten mud, one large bed, and little furniture. Regional variations were great, however, and in many areas—such as in the south, where polyculture was usual—the standard of living might be higher and the diet better.
In this subsistence economy the basic productive unit was the household, in which women and children had roles to fulfil. Male and female spheres of activity were closely defined, as described in Restif de la Bretonne's La Vie de mon père (1779). Rural life took place in the context of small communities of rarely more than two or three hundred inhabitants. In spite of divisions of wealth, the community had a real sense of solidarity. Everybody knew everyone else, they all went to the same parish church, harvested together, paid taxes as a community, and often had the same seigneur. Many peasants lived their whole life in a tiny locality in which culture was a matter of tradition, custom, religion, and superstition rather than of formal education. The books that were available to those who were truly literate were usually catechisms and chapbooks [see Bibliothèque bleue]. Another important aspect of life was festivity: after the harvest and at carnival time there were fêtes during which people escaped from the drudgery of life into an imaginary world of abundance and licence. Peasant revolts, or jacqueries, which were quite frequent in the 17th and 18th c. and continued into the mid-19th c., often included elements of the carnivalesque as a part of the protest.
Education by both the Church and, later, the State gradually changed rural mentalities in the 17th and 18th c., as did increased commercialization and mobility. The overwhelming grievances of the peasantry in 1789 were poverty and the seigneurial regime. The Revolution enabled many peasants to emancipate themselves from the feudal dues and achieve their aspiration of sufficient landownership. However, overpopulation quickly led to poverty; if more peasants lived on the land in the 19th c. than ever before, they were not wealthy. Even so, it was not until after World War II that fewer than 50 per cent of the population lived in the countryside.
The peasantry has long been seen as the backbone of France and the repository of sound values. Romanticism and the enthusiasm for disappearing rural values led in the 19th c. to an idealization of rural life by many writers, at a time when the peasantry was in fact under great pressure. Education and the experience of World War I turned peasants with a localized outlook into Frenchmen with wider political views by the 1920s. The trend of rural depopulation has continued since the 1940s, as predominantly small farms have become increasingly unviable. Recent years have seen political activism from farmers hard-pressed by reductions in subsidies from the European Community.
[Peter Campbell]
Bibliography
- E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (tr. J. Day, 1974)
- G. Duby and E. Wallon (eds.), Histoire de la France rurale, 4 vols. (1975)
- E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (1979)
