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In the southwest of France, about 20 miles (about 30 kilometers) from the city of Toulouse{Too-looz’}, is the village of Vieillevigne. Nestled against the gentle hillside, it is partly covered with umbrella pines and semitropical vegetation. In 1750, the village had a population of about 100 people. Almost all of them were peasant farmers growing wheat and maize. Some few of them had jobs as skilled workers, at least part time. The village of Vieillevigne was economically self-sufficient. That is, everything needed for the life its people knew was produced right there in the village.
Some 15 cottages, each with its tiny garden behind, clustered along a single dirt road. The cottages were very modest. Each had only two or three rooms, one serving as a barn for the farm animals. There were few windows since glass was a luxury. Most light came from the doorway, over which a blanket might be draped in winter. A single fireplace provided the only heat. Smoke and soot filled the cottages in the cold months of the year. Most of the cottages had no flooring. The furniture consisted of one large bed for the whole family, a table, a few chairs, and a large cabinet, or chest, to store the few wooden kitchen utensils and a few clothes.
We can picture a peasant family huddled around the fire on winter evenings. All the members are eating from the same bowl, dipping their crusts of black bread, and touching the one piece of floating lard. Black bread, some beans and cabbage, cornmeal gruel, goat's milk, and a little weak wine were the mainstays of the diet. Meat was reserved almost entirely for religious holidays, when a pig or sheep might be taken to slaughter. Beef was almost entirely absent, and white bread was only for the rich.
In a corner of the cottage one might see a spinning wheel for turning wool and flax into yarn. In a few cottages there might also be a small handloom for weaving cloth. During the long winter months the entire family might spin and weave coarse woolens and linens. These would be used to clothe themselves or to sell to a cloth merchant from a distant town, who came through the country villages each spring.
If one left these dark and cramped cottages for a walk about the village, one would soon see how self-contained it was. The windmill in one direction ground the grain into flour. The miller was an important man because all the grain to be ground had to pass through his hands. He had to know how to count and weigh the sacks of wheat, and how to keep the mill in repair. He was a kind of expert, or even a village leader. At any rate, he was a strong, tough individual, not always liked. He usually charged a peasant who wished to grind grain in the mill one-twelfth, or one-thirteenth, of the flour. Sometimes he cheated when he weighed the grain, and since he had a monopoly of the milling, many villagers grumbled about him.
At the opposite side of the village stood the village bread oven, where the flour from the mill was baked into bread. But not all the grain was ground and baked at Vieillevigne. The best of it was put into carts and carried to the landlord as rent. In some parts of France a few bushels were carted to the nearest market town and sold. In the neighborhood of Vieillevigne, it was common for the grain broker, who had a mule or two, to come through the villages at harvest time to make a purchase on' the spot, and then to carry the grain by mule back to the market town.
The village also had a winepress. There the grapes from the vineyards were mashed into pulp and the juice wag collected in wooden barrels, or, casks, to ferment. Almost all French peasants grew some grapes and stored the wine for their own use. Water was frequently impure. Wine gave needed energy and helped fill half empty stomachs. There were years when the grain harvest was so bad that peasant villagers consumed more wine than bread -not the most balanced of diets, to say the least. Vieillevigne also operated a brick oven, where the local red clay was baked into brick. Cottages, mills, farm buildings, and even the manor houses of the region were built of this red brick. The city of Toulouse itself is still known as the ville rose("pink city") because there is so much red clay in the soil, of the region. Finally, the village had a small-iron forge, where the blacksmith repaired the plows, the harrows, and a few hand tools. There were no horses to be shoed at Vieillevigne; all farming was done with oxen. Simple as these utilities may seem - the mill, the oven, and the forge - they made the village almost entirely self-sufficient.
In Vieillevigne, or in any other village in rural France, 85 per cent of all people in France worked the land in the timeless, routine manner of their ancestors. Indeed, there was no essential difference between the farming methods of 1750 and those described by Virgil in ancient Rome.
Animal manure, the only-known fertilizer, was too scarce to be spread on the earth more than twice a year. The wheel-less wooden plow was the main farm tool. Only the tip was of iron. In the south of France it was drawn by two rather thin oxen, and in the north, by horses. The lightness of the plow meant that the earth was not turned over completely and the furrows were left shallow. (We have since learned that deep plowing and finely broken soil help greatly to increase grain yields. Only a few advanced English farmers knew that in 1750.) Other tools were equally primitive-two wheeled carts, a few wooden harrows to rake the earth, and the usual spade, hoe, pick, and shovel, each having a minimum of iron. Even pitchforks were unknown.
At planting time the peasants, with their sacks on their backs, threw the seed into the furrowed soil. They trusted to the rhythm of their arm swings rather than to any machine or tool to plant and space the seed. All the harvesting was done with a short sickle. The long scythe cut the grain too close to the ground. This would remove the short stalks (or "stubble") used by the poor. Millet in his famous painting The Gleaners shows the poor women of the village plucking this stubble from the fields after the harvest.
After the grain was cut, the kernels were broken off the stalks by marching mules over the bundle of grain. This is what we call threshing. In some parts of France threshing was done by beating the sheaves of grain with a long stick called a flail. The kernels were then separated from the chaff by shoveling the broken grain against the wind. The heavy kernels would fall in a heap and the lighter chaff would blow a few feet away. This is exactly how grain was harvested in biblical times. Little had changed in the fields for 2,000 years.
Before any grain was sent for grinding at the mill, some of it was set aside for the next year's planting. The people who had gathered in large numbers for the harvesting were paid not in coin, but in grain and straw. Their share was usually about one-tenth of the harvest. The remainder was divided on the spot among the landlord, the peasants, and the Church. So at least four separate piles of grain lay in the farmyard, each assigned to a different owner. The lord's portion was carried to his chateau to be stored in the cellar or in any empty room. The portion left for the peasants was packed in the lofts of their cottages. They were happy people whose lofts were brimming full for the winter ahead. Most of the grain was not even put into sacks. It was kept in lofts or open bins-an invitation to the rats to eat the meager harvest before it could be sold or eaten by the villagers.
The processes of farming and dividing the harvest may seem awkward and inefficient. But an even greater problem was the fallow field. When people gave up nomadic hunting for agriculture, they learned to leave their -fields fallow, or unplanted, after one or two years of seeding grain. Letting the land rest was the only known way to refresh the soil. Planting crops year after year exhausts a field so that nothing grows on it. But the system of fallow has a disadvantage. It means that a half or a third of the land is unplanted at any given time.
For centuries, much of the labor of farming in a village such as Vieillevigne had been done by communal methods. All the peasants worked together at planting or harvest time. Over the years the land had been broken up into pieces so small that it could hardly be worked with a plow. Hence for efficient farming, the land had to be worked as if it were a single field. The owners of all the tiny parcels of land had to work together by a single plan. Crop rotation, for example, had to be coordinated among all members of the community. Thus individual peasants had to plant what the community decided on for that season. But small plots also meant the community had to supply peasants with wood for their fires and forage for their animals.
Finally, in many parts of France, the villagers owned large tracts of woodland and meadows. On these tracts villagers had “communal rights.” The peasants could take firewood and hay from this land by following certain rules laid down by the village. For example, the peasants could take dead wood from the forest, but they could cut only certain trees, replacing them with new plantings. A village Shepard had to make sure that one person 's livestock did not eat all of the hay or grass in a common meadow. Members of the village community who owned livestock and no land were especially dependent upon these communal areas. The “commons” that we still see in some New England towns today are a reminder of this form of communal property.
In addition to communal land, there was the communal right to use any field after the harvest. All members of the community, rich or poor, had the right to pasture their livestock on this empty field until it was again seeded in grain. Depending on the crop planted, a field might be under common pasture for as long as six months. Unfortunately, this particular communal right also had a disadvantage. It made it difficult for the owner, or proprietor, to plant new crops, or to attempt different rotations, because the fields had to be opened to the village livestock for certain periods during the year. Understandably many landlords objected to this "right." Understandably, also, poorer members of the village fought to keep it. It is clear, then, that the 18th- century village was something more than a collection of isolated and self-contained family units. Consideration for the poor was not only a question of Christian charity. It was also a communal or village obligation of long standing.
In spite of hard labor and cooperative efforts, the villagers' rewards were small compared to those that present-day workers can provide for their families, The production of wheat throughout France averaged 10 bushels an acre. Compare this to 25 bushels in Kansas, or 40 bushels in Western Europe today. Worse yet, differences of output among regions meant -that if an average was 10 bushels per acre, some areas produced 14, while others produced only six. Furthermore, the bar vest in 'all regions varied from year to year, depending on the weather. In a bad year, the soil might produce only two bushels an acre. Here was an amount barely large enough to supply the seed for the following year. The royal government tried to lessen shortages by stocking grain for the bad years, but storage space was very limited. Big cities like Paris were much better supplied than were the smaller towns and villages. In populated centers, the government feared grain riots. In any case, it was too expensive to ship grain overland by wagon for any great distance. Roads were impassable most of the year. Only canal and river barges could ship grain effectively and cheaply. While a remote and hilly province might starve, the Paris area might have a surplus. We sometimes 'forget what railroads have meant to regions of constant food shortage.
People everywhere in France were aware of this problem. Bread was "the staff of life." There were almost no substitutes for it. Vegetables were few, fruits were limited to certain areas, and meat was almost nonexistent for average people in town or country if the price of bread rose, people easily panicked. They suspected that the reports of next year's harvest were bad and that existing stocks were limited. Those who held a surplus of grain tended to keep it off the market. They held it for themselves, or to sell later at an even higher price. Fear of shortages led to panic and then to riot, especially in the towns. In the countryside, cartloads of grain were prevented from leaving for the town market, or were sometimes robbed. Mobs of women in town or village became dangerous once they were convinced that there was not enough food for their children. The saddest fact of all was that most peasant farmers had to buy grain to feed their families. How could this be? The answer is that the vast majority of French peasants who owned, any land, owned plots too small to supply an entire family livelihood. A good guess would place the average plot at only five acres (about two hectares), not enough to support a family of five after taxes and other expenses. Hence, most peasants had to supplement their farm income from other sources. Some villagers hired out as harvest hands o r day laborers whenever work was available. Many worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, stonecutters, roofers, masons, or cobblers. Others spun yarn or wove cloth during the winter, selling their products in the spring to the traveling cloth merchants. All villagers attempted to provide more food for their families by renting some land, however small the piece, in addition to what they might own.
All the villages of France had some local government. Sometimes it was very simple and with little power. Much depended on the importance of the local noble landlord. At Vieillevigne, the village government was largely under his thumb. The villagers were allowed to nominate eight men for the village council. He then selected the four he wanted as village elders. They seldom acted without consulting him.
Like many other villages in the west and southwest of France, Vieillevigne had a weak village government because it owned little or no communal property. Without tracts of forest or meadow of its own, the village had no income from the sale of wood or forage. And without income the village could not hire lawyers to defend itself or even to pay local officials. However, in the east of France, villages often owned considerable amounts of communal land. In these villages one hears of frequent meetings. They were made up not only of a few village elders but also of the entire adult male population. Such villages had a taste of local democracy.
Besides managing communal property and enforcing communal rules, the village government supervised the local utilities(mill, oven, winepress, iron forge, brick oven). It also had charge of the local grain market, the payment of a school teacher, road repair, and the division of taxes. This last function was extremely important since it touched the pocketbook of every person in the village.
Meetings of the village government were often held in the church on Sunday after Mass. The local priest acted as chairman. From the pulpit of the church he announced the new royal orders (edicts) as well as, local regulations. He might also act as secretary and take down the minutes of meetings. The priest did not necessarily control the village assembly, however. Examples are frequent of quarreling among various groups in the community. These arguments often fell into endless family feuding Local democracy was not always a smoothly operating affair. In spite of the self-sufficiency and self-direction of the village community, important outside influences affected it. The first of these was its own lord. The second important outside influence was the remote royal government in Paris. Let us turn first to the lord, or seigneur, {Sen-ydr'} as he was called in French.
On the crest of a hill adjoining the village of Vieillevigne stood the chateau, or manor house, of the local lord seigneur. It once had been a feudal fortress. There the villagers had sought refuge from bands of thieves, foreign knights, or Saracen raiders. By 1750, it had long since been rebuilt. Windows pierced thick walls, towers were covered, and the moats were filled in. Now there was a front terrace studded with the palm trees and the semitropical vegetation of southern France. From here the local lord could look out over "his village." This man was the Marquis d'Escouloubre, {es-ca-loo-bro}a nobleman whose ancestors were military men like himself.
Escouloubre was a provincial nobleman, not rich and powerful by the standards of Paris. He was, however, a man of some distinction in the nearby provincial capital of Toulouse. Without question he was the richest landowner in the village of Vieillevigne. In this village, and in the neighboring villages of Saint Rome and Gardouch, he owned over 600 acres (about 240 hectares) of grain land and meadow. This acreage was ten times the amount of his closest rival, a non-noble resident of Toulouse. Again by the standards of the royal chateaux -like those in the Loire Valley today -the manor house, of the marquis was modest. No land was wasted in elaborate parks or huge lawns. Right up to the walls of the chateau grew the lines of vineyards. Only a short avenue of umbrella pines served as a promenade. The Marquis d'Escouloubre was not a Parisian courtier. He was a stem provincial country gentleman, who took his land very seriously. He was "Seigneur of Vieillevigne and other places." This title was on all his documents, Ai directly owned by the marquis. Some of this land he rented out to sharecroppers. The rest he farmed, using day laborers supervised by his agent, or by his own sons. Centuries before the seigneur of Vieillevigne had owned all of the parish. But over the centuries, his heirs had sold pieces of it to the villagers. By 1750, only a part of it remained wholly his. Over the villagers' plots, however the seigneur still claimed important rights.
The right of justice gave the seigneur or his agent the privilege of judging all legal controversies in the village. The seigneur could also collect quitrents, dues paid by every member of the village community. At Vieillevigne most of these dues were paid in grain. That is, so many sacks of grain were paid depending on the amount of land owned by the peasant farmer. Even though very small, sometimes only a fraction of a bushel of wheat, these payments could be a real burden for a man who owned only a few acres. In addition, the seigneur could claim a payment every time a peasant sold or exchanged a piece of land. He could -even halt the sale and buy the land himself at the price originally agreed upon.
The marquis also had certain honorific privileges. For example, he led all processions during a village festival. He also occupied a special front bench in the parish church and received the sacraments before the other parishioners. He was supposed to be treated with respect. People moved aside and removed their hats when his coach passed by. He called them by their first names; they referred to him as "Monsieur le Marquis," (My Lord the Marquis). There was, nothing unnatural about this behavior. It had been the custom for centuries.
Frequently, when the marquis returned to his chateau after a long absence, there was a village celebration. Here was an excuse to break the long hard farm routine. On occasion the seigneur helped -the peasants in hard times, lending them seed, giving them bread, or, sometimes, providing them with medical care. To be sure, the seigneur no longer protected the villagers by armed force as his ancestors once did. The royal government and the local police took care of that. Yet the seigneur's privileges, stemming from this protection, remained.
Did the average villager find anything curious and unjust about this?
Before 1750, probably not. The change in the lord’s function from military protector to rural seigneur had taken place very slowly. Furthermore, how remote and important that chateau must have seemed beside the two- or three-room cottages of the average peasant! The seigneur had a standard of living, a style of life, and a social superiority that made him appear very different from the average villager.
ON THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY
The French government was one of the most highly developed of its time. Nevertheless, in the 18th century there were not enough officials to supervise every village in France. Most villagers never saw a royal official. Officialdom, however, was never far away.
For example, every year the king's taxes had to be raised. Each year the royal government decided upon a sum of money due from each village of France. Since there were not enough tax collectors to go around, often the villagers themselves had to decide who paid what amount of the total sum, and then they had to collect the tax money. This was not easy. No one wanted the responsibility of collecting from neighbors, so the task was done by a lottery system. Every village man who could count or read took his turn collecting. Moreover, he had to guarantee the entire amount assigned to his village. That is, he was held personally responsible for producing the money. Imagine the problems of collecting money from a richer, and probably more powerful, neighbor. Or, worse, one to whom the collector himself owed money. The result was that those best able to pay often got off the easiest, while the poorest, who could not bargain with the tax collector, paid to the full.
In addition, the same tax lists often were used for decades, and even generations. Even if property had changed hands and some people had become richer and some poorer, the tax rate remained unchanged. Those few taxpayers who could afford lawyers were able to go to court to protest. For most villagers, however, there was little hope of securing fair treatment.
Little wonder, then, that the peasant of rural France tried to hide his wealth from the government. A story is told by the famous 18th-century writer Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau paid a visit to a peasant home in rural France. Rousseau's peasant host apologized for having nothing but black bread to offer his guest: However, as the peasant came to see that Rousseau was not a royal tax collector, he produced better things to eat cheese, wine, and white bread appeared from beneath the floorboards of his modest cottage. Indeed, the villager's fear of the tax collector accompanied fear and suspicion of all outsiders. Although the royal government sometimes provided food in bad years, the royal official meant to the peasant tax collection. Therefore, the government was more a potential enemy than r potential helper in the mind of the peasant.
In general, the seigneur was in a more favorable position with the royal government than the village. He could afford better the legal costs of the royal courts. He was usually more familiar with the processes of government. An average village elder, by comparison, might not even speak or write French clearly. But most important was the fact that many royal officials were connected with the local nobility. Often they intermarried. Usually they had frequent social contact. Such officials were often unwilling to enforce any law opposing the interests of a seigneur.
Finally, the local seigneur was judge in the village. If he were involved in a case himself, he was almost sure to win. Only if a law case involved a major crime - murder, for example-was the royal government likely to get wind of it and override the seigneur.
All villagers had a deep attachment to the family and the land. The peasant belonged to a very tightly knit family unit. The father was indeed master of the family. His word was law. His sons helped him in the fields as soon as they were old enough to handle a hoe, and his daughters worked long hours over spinning wheels or on hand looms. His wife worked beside him, as did his sons. Her hands became gnarled, her body muscular, and her face heavily lined. An English traveler often remarked on how prematurely old the peasant women looked. Yet the sense of unity binding this family could not be denied. All the members were proud of hard physical labor and suspicious of laziness and even of non-manual occupations. A peasant father married his sons and daughters to the sons and daughters of the men in his village, or, at most, in neighboring villages. Children were not urged to seek outside employment, even if there was a nearby town to make it possible. There was a great suspicion of the city and of outside influences.
Folklore would have it that peasants married young and had large families. The truth, however, is something quite different. In villages of France in the 18th century, men married as late as 28 and women as late as 25. Morals were very strict in the village. Late marriage had the effect of limiting the number of children. A mother might have four or five. One in four would probably die before reaching the age of 1. (Infant mortality was even greater in the crowded towns.) Medical care of young babies was almost nonexistent. No one knew that dirt bred bacteria and disease. When death was so common, a family could not expend sentiment and energy on a child who might be gone the following year. It was more important to care for the oxen and cows. Life expectancy had increased by ten years in the century before 1750, but, even so, it was only 35 years. (It is about 70 years in the United States today.) The cemetery was the center of the village, and the number of small graves was a grim reminder of the shortness o life. A person who reached 70 was considered the sage of the village. His prestige was based on the mere fact of survival.
Religion was as much a matter of village custom as it was of faith. The priest, of course, was always present at those important times in the life of the rural family- at birth, at marriage, and at death. But he also acted as teacher of the village children and as a source of charity in hard times. The bell of the parish church, signaling church services, marriages, and deaths, must have seemed as timeless and natural to the average villager as the grain fields and vineyards. For the villagers, it was the local priest, not the bishop or the church organization beyond the village, to whom they were attached. The priest was one of the few individuals outside of the family whom the villagers trusted.
Many French writers have described the French peasant as a man "obsessed." His obsession was always a passion for the land. This attitude grew in part from two quite opposite facts. First, many peasant land owners had experienced a taste for the self-esteem and sense of security that land ownership could give. Because most of their holdings were too small to support their families, however, the peasants always needed and wanted more land. This desire easily became a peasant's whole existence.
This love of the land did not load the peasants to make serious farm improvements. Why? Because a five-acre plot (about two hectares) did not allow the owner to save enough money to invest any part of it in the land. Nor did he dare try new methods of farming. Such adventuring might lessen his harvest for a year or two, even though it might be increased in later years. Another fact was equally important, however. French peasants looked upon the land in a very special way. They had no desire to produce extra food to sell in town, or, indeed, to have any relations with "outsiders." The land was an extension of their personalities. To build self-sufficient farms for their families - even if it took generations of effort, of saving, and of sacrifice-was all they asked. To raise enough to eat and to provide wood for fuel and yam for clothing was what they wanted. The farm was the symbol of the self-sufficient family. It was not a means of supply for a national economy. Family consumption, not surplus production, was its purpose.
For us, in the 20th century, it appears that the French peasants accepted a low standard of living, humiliating dependence on the seigneur, and passive obedience to the government. How could they do so? The answer would seem to be that their hard, limited lives did not allow them the extra time, or effort, to think about improving the soil, much less of standing up against seigneur, tax collector, or outsider. The peasants clung to their families and their tiny plots of ground. How could it ever be any different? But in the next chapter we will see that it was to be different. The seeds of change were already at work under the surface of this changeless village society of 18th-century France.
