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In the course of the 18th century, and more markedly after 1750, changes took place in the countryside. Because the appearance of the village is usually the last thing to alter, one must take a very close look at life in the village to see what happened. We will, in fact, find subtle changes in the minds and in the attitudes of the peasants, as well as in their' actions. Some of these changes had to do with population growth and new difficulties in making a living. Some had to do with new types of individuals in the countryside: people who were carriers of new ideas and new attitudes toward the land, toward the law, and toward life in general. Other changes came from the growth of the central government at Paris and from the new ways of tax collection. The Catholic Church, the rural seigneur, and the village council, each with its older, timeless ways, were faced with new problems. Many of these problems came from outside the village, and the ordinary peasant farmers had to come to terms with them. In groping to find solutions to new problems, or simply to adjust to the problems, the peasants began to change. Let us see how this happened.
After 1750 the population of France began to increase rather rapidly. This growth was not caused by better medical care, better food, or more sanitary conditions. There were simply fewer very bad harvests and fewer epidemics. At first glance this would seem to be good news. Indeed, as the death rate began to decline, popular attitudes toward youth and old age began to change. Old people were respected less for their wisdom because there were now more of them. Children began to gain more attention. When less than half the babies born reached adulthood, parents simply had to harden themselves to this fact. No one child could be the object of special attention and emotion. But as more babies survived the dangerous early months of life, parents began to give more attention to their children. They could afford to become more attached to them. By the end of the 18th century, parents wanted a better education for their children. This education was not only to prepare sons and daughters to be farmers like their parents. Efforts to improve oneself seemed more worthwhile now that more people survived and lived longer. No doubt this fact had something to do with a relate development a decreasing concern with religion and the afterlife.
Increasing population also had less favorable effect. Unfortunately, French agriculture did not keep up with the population boom. Villages all over France, like Vieillevigne, simply did not increase food production to feed all the new mouths. While more people survived, they survived badly. Furthermore, with more people bidding for food, the price of bread and other farm produce rose rather steadily. This is what we call "inflation," but no French villager knew that word in 1780. The villager knew only that providing for a family cost more every year.
Owner-occupiers 2,000,000
Large tenant farmers (fermiers): 1,000,000
Small tenant farmers 12,000,000
Day-laborers 8,000,000
Total 23,000,000
Inflation affected all classes of peasants. There were, in fact, at least four types of farmers working the land. Each type faced the growing problem of food scarcity in a- different way. The table at the bottom of this page gives the approximate number in each category throughout France in 1789.
The owner-occupiers were those fortunate farmers who owned enough land to feed their families and still have extra (a surplus) to sell on the market. Since they were sellers on the grain market, their families profited from the inflation. These families were very hard working, proud of their 30-acre farms (about 12 hectares), and very economical. In the 40 years after 1750, most of them were able to hide away a little money in the walls and rafters of their cottages, and to keep a few extra sacks of grain in the loft for winter. They were also able to own a plow team, which was the very symbol of the independent owner.
Owner-occupiers were in a distinct minority. Far greater in number were peasant farmers owning cottages and only a little land. They were fortunate to be able to keep the whole of the crop except for taxes and the dues owed the seigneur. But their farms often only two or three acres (about one hectare) were too small to support their families. Therefore, they rented land from large landowners. Since they rented more acres than they owned, we call them tenant farmers. But it is important to recognize that these families had some sense of ownership, however tiny their holdings.
In the north and east of France, most of these small tenant farmers paid their rent in coin. This fact proves that they had some contact with a town market, for they had to sell grain to obtain the money for their rent. But the rented plots were not large, rarely more than 30 acres (about 12 hectares). They were often in tiny pieces of less than an acre each. Thus, just enough was left over after rent, taxes, dues, and farm expenses to feed a family.
At Vieillevigne, as in most of the south and west of France, these small tenant farmers were sharecroppers. That is, they worked the land for, a share of the crop. They paid their rent in grain as a proportion of the harvest. The sharecroppers who worked for the Marquis d'Escouloubre paid him about one-half of their harvest of wheat. In other regions, sharecroppers paid three-fourths of the crop to the landlord. Even more than the small tenant farmers in the north, such sharecroppers were bare-subsistence farmers. After paying their rent and other expenses, and supplying their own small needs, they almost never had a surplus. In fact, they were usually in perpetual debt to the landlord. They were extremely dependent on men like the Marquis d'Escouloubre, whom they called their master. In some ways this relationship resembled that between the poor black sharecropper and the white planter in our Old South. In France in 1780 about two-thirds of all rented land was worked by sharecroppers. These farmers rarely sold any grain. More frequently they had to borrow seed and even food to last them through the winter. Inflation in food produce made them increasingly dependent on their landlords.
Yet if the small tenant-farmer families were hard pressed, the third group of tillers of the soil were even worse off. These men were the day laborers. Sometimes they owned a scrap of land, a fraction of an acre, a row of vineyards, or, more likely, a few sheep and goats. They worked at odd jobs during the cold winter months and as harvest hands during July and August. They usually slept in a loft and walked from village to village. In bad years, they were often in extreme want, since there was little work to be had. They were paid by the day, usually a handful of coins plus some food. When there was no work, they had no reserve of any kind to fall back on. If a day-laborer fell ill, there was always someone else able and willing to take his job.
As the price of food rose in France after 1750, the plight of this particular group became increasingly desperate. In very bad years, they often flooded into the towns. There they could hope to find some charity, either from the government or from the Church. If they took to the road, they blended in with the large number of wandering poor, vagabonds, and paupers. In a very bad harvest year, to own even a few acres placed a person in a far better position than that of these miserable rural laborers.
Understandably, these penniless people sometimes turned to crime or smuggling. Others became beggars who went from village to village asking for a crust of bread. But the average villager did not greet them with great charity. Most villagers did not have very much themselves. They regarded wandering beggars as either dangerous, of lazy and immoral. Particularly if large numbers of beggars appeared, the Villagers were inclined to force them to move on, even using the police if necessary. In any event, there was a certain hardness toward poverty, especially since it seemed so widespread and insolvable. Only the Church seemed willing and able to do something for the vast numbers of poor, and usually only in the larger towns.
Thus, the vast majority of the farmers of France were worse off by 1780 than they had been in 1750. Only two groups among the farmers were stable and even improving their economic position. These two groups were the owner-occupier already discussed, and the large tenant farmers called the fermiers, {fer-mya'} to whom we will soon turn.
It is easy enough to make clear the changing economic condition of various farmer groups. It is harder to show how outside influences were bringing new ideas into the villages. But the slowly changing, attitudes of the peasants were quite as important as the changes in their incomes.
How were new ideas brought into the village? In a number of ways. Wool and grain merchants came from the towns to buy up extra grain at harvest time. They also came to buy the woolen cloth woven over the winter in peasant cottages. When they came, they reported on events in the outside world. But more important were the fermiers and the country lawyers living in the neighborhood but acquainted with towns and business. Their influence on the villagers deserves more detailed discussion.
The fermier was usually not a landowner. But he was rich enough to lease a considerable amount of land-often the entire domain of a noble landlord-and to pay for it in money rent. That he could afford to pay for it in coin proved that he had considerable resources. In addition to leasing land he was usually a grain merchant. He and his family lived in the countryside, but he had more money, more education, and a more important social position or status than most of the small farmers around him. His house was often better built than those of the other villagers; hence the common French expression: "the roof of tile (belonging to the fermier) amidst the straw (belonging to the small peasant)." He was, in fact, a social mixture: part businessman and merchant, part farm-manager. Unlike the small tenant farmer he had a margin of grain to sell after he paid his rent, and that margin brought higher prices each year.
There were large numbers of these fermiers in north of France, especially in the grain belts around the large cities. Many of them operated what were very large farms by French standards - 500 to 1,000 acres (about 202 to 405 hectares). They were able to make profit by selling their grain for more than the amount of rent they paid. A fermier not only managed the domain farms of his landlord. He also collected the seigneur's dues. If these dues were paid in grain, he stored it along with other grain he had harvested. Then he waited to sell until the price rose, usually in the winter. Here was his advantage over the small farmers. The small farmers, even if they had some wheat to sell, had too great a need of ready cash to be able to wait for higher prices.
It was the fermier's close connection with the market that made him so different from the family-oriented villagers, who produced only what a household could consume. The fermier might own no land, but he invariably owned the vital livestock, tools, and seed. He was needed not only by the large landlord but by the modest villagers as well. He often marketed their grain and wine, for he had contacts and friends in the market towns, as well as the carts, and oxen to carry the farm produce. Moreover, he usually had the extra seed and ox team that the poor peasants needed when hard times came. So he, lent his farm capital to the peasants at 5 per cent interest.
It might seem that the villagers would be grateful for the help the fermier could give them. But this was not the case. The fermier was often resented and even hated by the villagers who so depended on him. They were frequently in debt to him. More important, he represented a threat to their own existence as independent family farmers. In fact, his policies worked to break down the traditional village life that the small farmers knew and loved. Many fermiers were able to buy out smaller farmers. In some cases they consolidated their smaller pieces into large compact fields. Then they chased off the village livestock and even experimented with new crops, or more modern methods of agriculture. Thus the fermier threatened communal rights to pasture animals on vacant fields. The small peasant, furthermore, was not pleased with new methods. They lessened the need for human labor and the amount of land available for renting or grazing.
Thus the fermier's practice of buying up land and livestock, charging interest for his loans, and hoarding grain in his barns made him appear greedy. As an agent of change in the village, the fermier was no doubt important especially as the promoter of new farming methods. But he earned only the envy and suspicion of the rest of the villagers. On his side, the fermier regarded the villager as a "pigmy" farmer, stubborn and stupid, incapable of moving with the times.
The life of the fermier and the villager interacted in another important way. Because he had a broader view of the world, the fermier could bring to the village the new ideas that gradually helped to change the peasant's outlook. He traveled to the regional grain market and sometimes he even visited the provincial capital. Here he met other grain merchants. He also established contact with professional people-lawyers, local officials, veterinarians and learned something about the city. He had to be literate, to have read laws, pamphlets, and perhaps books. Surely many a fermier did not limit his reading to business matters. He had to be aware of government affairs, and these must have led him to political ideas. And when he returned to the village, he must have talked about some of these ideas in the village tavern. Thus, whether he was liked or not, the fermier was an agent of change, not only in the economic sense of making farm improvements, but also as a bearer of knowledge about politics and government.
In parts of France there were large tracts of forest and mineral resources, often owned by absentee landlords. Here the fermiers were tenant farmers of a different kind. In this case they served as managers of mines and forges, and of the large tracts of woodland that provided an essential fuel for iron making. Coal was only just beginning to be used in France; wood was much preferred. Often the fermier was ironmaster and wood merchant combined. He was a kind of rural industrialist, and he had to have considerable technical skill. Though he paid a rent to his landlord, often a great nobleman in Paris, he depended entirely on himself for skill and capital. Sometimes he would form a partnership. A relative or a merchant in a town might help him to obtain the capital that he needed in order to run his forges or mines.
Like the fermier who managed grain land, this man was disliked by most of the peasants around him. Theirs was not simply envy of his wealth and commercial activity. It was opposition to him as an ironmaster, or as a wood merchant, taking large amounts of precious forest the traditional source of heating fuel for the peasant's cottage and wood for his buildings. The small villager feared that the forests in France were being used up by this greedy fermiers and ironmaster Here we see again a conflict between the small villager with a communal and self-sufficient outlook and the large-scale fermier with an individualist and commercial viewpoint. The conflict was not new, but in the years after 1750 there were reasons why it became more intense.
Another important person bringing new ideas to the villagers was the local lawyer. Like the fermier, he was often regarded with suspicion and dislike. His legal fees seemed high, his law cases were unnecessarily drawn out, and his legal talk mysterious and threatening to the simple peasant. Yet the local lawyer was very useful to the village. He had contacts with the royal courts outside the village that made him another link with the outside world. Of course, the lawyer had a legal education. Naturally he had to know something about royal policies and national politics. Thus he was probably a more important channel than the fermier for the spread of new ideas in the village.
In addition, many lawyers had learned how to address large audiences. Like the village priest, the lawyer was likely to be on his feet in the meetings of the village assembly. Though in the smallest villages, such as Vieillevigne, the local lawyer was little more than a scribe, in the larger villages he was more important. Especially in the east of France, many lawyers became attorneys or advocates. On occasion they would become the spokesman of the community as a whole.
A word of warning must be sounded. One must not exaggerate the importance of fermiers and the lawyers. Most villagers continued to be concerned only with the everyday tasks in the field or at the artisan's bench. Yet new ideas did not come to the peasants by newspapers or by reading. Most peasants couldn't read, and there were few newspapers in rural France. Even in large provincial towns it was hard to find one outside of a few cafes, where it was sometimes read aloud. This does not mean that villagers were totally deprived of national news, but what they received was filtered through such people as the fermier, the visiting cloth merchant, the local lawyer, and the village priest. News came by word-of-mouth from these people who had some familiarity with the world outside of the village.
A third factor that helped change the attitudes of village people was related to taxes. The peasants paid most taxes. Why was this so? Because, in the Middle Ages, people belonged to one of three legal classes. Each class had its duty. The armed knights had the duty of defending the king and their property, including the peasants on it. The Church had its duty to pray for the common welfare and the king. Neither knights nor churchmen were expected to pay taxes. It was the rest of the population-the third class of so-called "commoners"-who paid the taxes. Thus, to be taxable was to be un-noble, or to be considered incapable of great action. The principal royal income tax in the 18th century was the taille {Ti}. Everyone trying to climb the social ladder made exemption from the taille the first goal.
In 18th-century France, armed knights no longer existed. This "noble" class of persons was represented by landlords like the Marquis d'Escouloubre of Vieillevigne. Few nobles lived the year round in their country chateau. The Marquis d'Escouloubre spent the winter months in the nearby provincial town of Toulouse. He returned to the village in the spring and stayed until late fall. Here was the pattern of residence for most provincial noblemen. The wealthiest and most important noblemen lived in Paris and seldom visited their lands at all. An agent or fermier lived in part of their chateaux and collected their rents and seigniorial dues.
The Catholic Church-the first "estate" or class in society-was another absentee landlord. It owned about a tenth of the soil of the kingdom and an even larger portion of the nation's urban property. In the countryside most Church land, often pasture or forest, was held by the monastic orders. Like the lands of the great Paris nobility, they were leased out to fermiers. As in the Middle Ages, the Church in 18th-century France paid no taxes.
A third group of absentee landlords were townspeople. These persons were often lawyers, officeholders, or merchants. They owned land in the countryside that they rarely visited. Unfortunately for the resident villagers, these absentee townspeople paid their taxes in the towns where they lived. They did not pay in the countryside where their land was. Since the town tax officials had no way of knowing exact how much land the absentee landlords owned, they were unable to make them pay their share of the village taxes. Worse, many towns granted exemption from the taille to privileged individuals. People who lived in town and had a certain social status were called "citizens" or "bourgeois" {boor-zhwa'} of the town. Such persons were freed from the taille for their rural holdings as well as for those in the town. Remember that the government levied its tax on the village as a whole. When townspeople were not required to pay their share, every villager had to pay just a little more. As one official said about the suburbs of La Rochelle in 1779:
Gradually all the Inhabitants of La Rochelle are buying land in the neighboring countryside with real advantage since they do not pay the taille, while the unfortunate day laborers and small peasant farmers find their taille increased every year because of the acquisitions made by the "Bourgeois de La Rochelle." Unfortunately, this abuse is spreading to many towns in the district.
Outsiders were never liked by the resident villagers. Outsiders who did not share the burden of local taxes were especially resented.
The three groups of absentee landlords owned about 60 percent of the soil of France. Since they represented less than 10 per cent of the total population, they were obviously the largest landlords. Yet they were absentees who paid greatly reduced taxes or none at all. Tax exemptions for the nobility and the Church were of long standing, and townspeople had often gained partial exemptions since at least 1500. Therefore, at what point would average modest peasants object to the extra tax burden that these exemptions put upon them? At what point would they think that nobles, Church, and rich townspeople should pay taxes, as did everybody else?
Since 1750 the royal government had tried to tax the nobility and other privileged groups. This effort was not very successful. But a few villagers must have come to think it was possible to tax the rich and the influential. By 1789 we know that many villagers believed that even the "great" should pay taxes. They probably changed their views on taxes because of the actions of the royal government. Through its numerous officials, it was increasingly entering the peasant's life.
Perhaps the most powerful influence changing the attitudes of French villagers in the last half of the 18th century was the growth of the national government. Throughout Europe, royal bureaucracies government bureaus and their staffs were expanding. In France, the number of officials had been growing by leaps and bounds since 1500. Indeed, France produced some of the finest administrators and public servants of the time. But the government expanded in other ways as well. It entered the fields of public works, assistance to the poor, and education. It gave technical training and aid to agriculture, industry, and commerce. These many new activities were accompanied by more systematic fact gathering. The government's growing number of officials went into the villages to take stock of local resources. Their activities had the effect of bringing the government closer to the lives of the villagers.
Government officials were concerned first about efficient tax collection. They attempted to substitute a single tax list, with a single standard, for the existing dozen or so. Then they went a step further. They encouraged the local villages to reform their tax lists. The poor should be relieved and the well-to-do should pay their share. Officials had come to believe that tax privileges should be abolished and that even the nobility should pay a share. Finally, officials tried to levy an income tax of 5 per cent on all landowners.
These actions gradually affected local attitudes. Dimly at first, but more and more clearly, the villagers saw that the government was trying to bring about greater fairness in tax collection. They began to look upon privileges as inefficient and unfair. In a sense the villagers were learning what equality meant. More important, they were learning it was possible to improve their lot with the help of a strong central government.
In many cases, when the village was permitted to reform its tax assessment, the villagers took part in large numbers in this reassessment. There are ever, examples of illiterate day laborers sharing in this work. Sometimes government officials referred to the villagers not as peasants but as "citizens." We cannot say full-fledged democracy suddenly blossomed in the villages of France. But we can say that the villagers were slowly learning what it meant to take part in a small way in the work of government.
Again, in 1787, the royal government decided to make a major change in local administration. Its purpose was to reorganize village finances and reduce village debts to the central government. Most villages owed large sums of back taxes to Paris. The government's purpose was efficiency, but the unintended result was to give the local villagers a certain political experience. Villages that previously had no assemblies were now encouraged to form them. Villages that already had active assemblies were now forced to fight to keep them from being replaced by new ones. Either way, a new political awareness, a sense of taking part in local government, arose.
Although tax policies probably affected peasants more deeply than other issues, other state actions also awakened the peasant to possible improvements. The government dispatched agricultural information to local landlords. It built roads and canals. It gave aid to education, to the poor, and to new industries like mining, iron-making, glass-making, and silkworm cultivation. The humble peasants began to feel that their importance to the nation was somewhat greater than it had been in the past.
In the 18th century four major wars occurred. It was the peasant man who was called to fight on land and sea. Did he come back a changed person? In foreign lands did he see another way of doing things? During the American Revolution, for example, many peasants fought in the French forces sent to North America. Did these peasants notice the way of life of the America farmer? Did they note there were no noble privileges the 13 English colonies? That there were no nobles all? Were they aware of the power of the colonial assemblies? At least one historian has suggested that French veterans did see and hear new things. This historian has suggested that the men returned to their country more dissatisfied than before. Even the process of travel might alter an outlook or habit of thought. While the effects of military service cannot be stated exactly, we can assume it changed the peasant's frame of reference in subtle ways.
Along with the influences of military service and tax reform, another matter was disturbing the whole nation. A series of conflicts was taking place within the Catholic Church; the official "established" church of France. We can say the average winegrower or sharecropper or rural artisan was only dimly aware of this religion unrest. Yet the life and thought of each of these individuals were no doubt touched by it at a number of points.
For most villagers, the Church and the Catholic religion were not only a matter of personal belief. Religion was a part of their daily life. They never questioned the sacraments that gave meaning to the various stages of life-baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial rites. The yearly drama of the events in the life of Christ, revealed in Church services from Christmas to Easter and then to Ascension Day, taught them the Christian story. They helped them gain whatever understanding they had of the deeper meaning of Christianity. The quiet beauty of the church service was no doubt a welcome relief from the drabness of life. And, finally, much of social life in the village revolved about the Church. Marriages and feast days highlighted the otherwise monotonous yearly round of toil. The villagers were attached to the local priest. He was their confessor, adviser, and paternal authority. He was also, of course, the Man of God who raised the chalice at the altar on Sunday. In short, the priest was the natural leader of the village. The villagers turned to him when a schoolmaster had to be found. They rallied around him when the Church dime (the part of the harvest set aside for the Church) was taken from the village instead of being used there to feed the poor.
For most of the villagers of France their priest was the only Church official they ever saw. The bishops of France seldom visited the rural parishes. They preferred life in the cities, especially Paris. For the villagers the "real" Church was a few rows of wooden pews, an old bell tower, and their priest: a hard-working man in a threadbare black robe. It was not a complex organization run by clean-shaven, fine-mannered Church officials in the cities.
In the 18th century, there were many tensions within the national French Church. First, the interpretation of Christian doctrines was under debate. The radicals within the Catholic Church were called Jansenists, after their original leader, Jansen. Jansenism lessened the importance of the sacraments the means by which one obtained salvation and emphasized salvation by faith. More important for the average peasant, Jansenist teachers stressed the virtue of the simple life and condemned luxurious and loose living as sure signs of damnation. There was a moral earnestness and self-righteousness in jansenist thinking that appealed to the simple peasants. Why? Because the peasants, while remaining loyal Catholics, began to wonder about the worldly life of the bishops and upper clergy in the distant and sinful city.
Here was another conflict within the Church. It centered around the lives of such high Church officials as the bishops. In France, bishops were selected almost entirely from among the younger sons of the upper nobility, mostly Parisians. They were not chosen primarily for their spiritual qualifications, but for their noble birth. Unfortunately, some of them lived like the rich nobles they had been born to be. Men like the Archbishop of Strasbourg, for example, spent a great deal more time entertaining either in Paris or in their country houses than in visiting their territories (dioceses). In fact, it became the custom of the bishops to entrust the everyday supervision of the dioceses to, assistants known as vicar-generals, Thus the bishops could spend most of the year enjoying Paris, continuing the life they had known as children of nobility.
For the parish priest, as for the average villager, the bishop was far distant in wealth, status, and space. He was also distant in any understanding of the problems of the local village parish. Criticism of the worldly lives of the bishops and of their indifference to duty became widespread. The suggestion was even heard that they be elected by local communities, as in the early days of the Church, and no longer be appointed by the king.
Points of conflict became known to the villagers through the parish priest. It was his view of the Church that he shared with them. Sometimes, no doubt, he sought their help for an appeal to the bishop or a royal official.
The local priest had reason for discontent. The difference in income between the village priest and the city bishop was enormous, even by the standards of the time. The average bishop received about 20,000 livres a year; the average parish priest, 700 livres. (A livre was equal to roughly one dollar in today's money.) The parish priest, far from being the son of a nobleman, was from a more humble family, often the son of a local peasant or small-town artisan. Cut off as he was from much contact with his bishop, he had no other authority to which to appeal. The national and provincial assemblies of the clergy were completely dominated by the upper clergy. These assemblies were more concerned with defending the privileges of the Church against the king than with reforming Church discipline, or with aiding the parishes. The parish priests, for their part, were most concerned about the collection and expenditure of Church money. They saw the Church dime collected from the fields by Church officials from outside the village and carted away. They could only wonder where it went. Very little money seemed to remain in the village for charity and education. Was it going into the pockets of the upper clergy so that they could live like Parisian nobles?
It is not difficult to understand why the parish priest was unhappy with the way the French Church was run. Many villagers, knowing his dissatisfaction, could well agree with him. Thus, to some extent, the troubles of the French Church were influencing the way of thinking of French peasants.
The inflation and unfair taxes of post-1750 would have been accepted by the peasants as they had been in the past. But changes of a nonmaterial kind, changes in attitude, made such an acceptance more difficult. The activities and example of the fermier, the local lawyer, the local official, the local priest, and, perhaps, even a touch of Jansenism, had changed and widened the peasant's outlook. These persons and ideas made the villagers critical and restive, and also more confident in themselves.
A further influence for change was also at work. This factor was the increasing frustration and resentment the villagers felt against the noble seigneur. To understand this hostility, we must turn next to the role of the nobility in French society.
