Was the French Revolution a net positive for the peasantry?

by _windup

So I remember learning in history classes about the conditions that led up to the French Revolution. Famine, the bankruptcy of the state, that one probably fake Marie Antionette line about cake.

But in the end, did things actually get better as a result of the revolution? On average, did quality of life rise for those people? If not, what actual impacts did it have?

MySkinsRedditAcct

Great question! As with most things in history... it depends! However it's definitely something we can approach answering!

For this discussion, I'll keep it specifically tailored to the peasants (aka the vast majority of the population) as per your question, but if you're curious I also did a similar write-up that traced the fortunes of the sans-culotte throughout the Revolution: "How did life change for the sans-culottes under Thermidor?

One important thing to note before starting out, is that the 'French' constituted a massive array of peoples, many of whom had little in common with their 'French' brethren other than that they shared the same king. Interesting side note, but this was a monumental struggle for the Revolutionaries to surmount, in that once they deposed and killed the King, there was very little tying together the patchwork quilt that was France. France was not a monolithic country that had existed from time immemorial-- most of the territories were acquired piecemeal through marriage, inheritance, or conquest, and some territories had been a part of France for less than a century at the time of the Revolution (indeed 'French' was not widely spoken in many areas that had local dialects, or who spoke different languages altogether). These territories were absorbed into the state on various terms depending on how they were acquired. This meant that on the eve of the Revolution each province had its own special rights, responsibilities, and privileges, that could be markedly different from its closest neighbors, let alone those across the vast territory of France.

This massive variance in pre-Revolutionary life will play a huge factor on how I, a peasant, view the major outcomes of the Revolution. Though the Revolution did many political things, like opening up civil service to talent rather than birth or wealth, instituting universal male suffrage (1792), completely restructuring the bureaucracy, completely restructuring the court system, completely restructuring the physical layout of France, and so on, these political gains don't mean much to me. Sure, I nominally can vote, but how the hell am I supposed to do that when the harvest is needing to come in? I can't afford hired hands like some of the wealthier landowners can, my family and I have to do it myself, so I can't go to town and participate in voting that may take weeks! (<---- Not being quaint here, many farmers weren't able to vote if it took place during harvest, given that the two-tiered electoral system meant they'd have to be away from their farm for more than a week).

So what do I, a peasant care about? What truly effects me? Well most of my life is spent working to pay tithes and taxes and to feed my family, but I do rest on Sundays, and celebrate Saint's Days. So if the Revolutionaries touched anything to do with what I pay, or how I pray, then I'd have feelings about it.

(continued in comment below!)

amp1212

Short answer:

There is no one answer to this; no single entity "the peasantry" with one ledger to net out. The Revolution was vastly different in different places; in some places peasants revolted against it and were suppressed in a bitter civil war. They generally were pleased with the end of feudalism, they just weren't that happy with what replaced it.Wherever they were, many would have died in the quarter century of mass conscription and war between the storming of the Bastille and Waterloo.To the extent that any "net effect" can be seen in the countryside- its massive loss of life and the rise of a small peasant farmer/proprietor; a distinctly French but not particularly "revolutionary" character.

Discussion:

The impact on the peasantry of the Revolution itself was small compared to the impact of the wars of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars which follow. France is at war for the better part of the quarter century from the Bastille to Waterloo. For a peasant it would be the endless war, not the Revolution itself, that shaped his experience of life at the time.

With that said, there are places where the peasants revolted against the Revolution, particularly in the West of France. Rural communities were often deeply attached to their Catholic faith, and the irreligiousity of the Revolution was galling. So you have, for example, the Chouannerie -- the specific incitement that causes the first of the revolts is the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which effectively nationalize the French Catholic Church)-- this lead to a peasant rebellion in support of their bishop. This is part of a larger revolt in many provinces in the West that continues for years. This civil war is extraordinarily brutal and left a profound scar in the society of the West; it continues to echo in Breton nationalism.

Similarly, there are places where the peasants are pleased with the abolition of seigneurial rents, but were hostile to the new Revolutionary Republic. While scholarship since the Second World War has tended to emphasize the counter-revolution as part of a historians' battle between Marxists and revisionists, there's a danger of the heterogeneity of rural experience getting lost in the battling agendas. There's no "net"-- they liked some changes that occurred, and disliked others and the balance of experience would have varied by place and individual. Peasants as a class wouldn't have weighed the things they liked against the things they didn't in some ledger . . . if your husband and sons were dead, you were worse off; if they survived and you now had a plot of land free of rent, you were better off..

There is an immense amount of historical work -- most in French -- on the impact of the French Revolution in the countryside, I've included a bibliography in the references [ Biard & Bianchi 1999] but it's twenty years old now, and more has been published since then. Still a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to get a sense of just how much work has been done in this field.

But wherever they were, and however they felt about the political goals of the Revolution, peasants everywhere would see their sons conscripted into the armies of France, first for the Revolution, then for the Directory, then for the Consulate, then for Napoleon. The loss of life -- and of wealthy and productivity in the countryside-- would have been the most dramatic "net" effect of the Revolution. The numbers are still a subject of historical controversy, but on the high side the 19th century historian Hippolyte Taine finds 3.1 million French deaths in the wars from 1789 to 1815; subsequent inquiries suggest the number may be a bit less, but not a lot less. The death and taxes borne by the French would have been "their experience of War".

Its notable that in many places the rural peasantry remained attached to the Bourbons - if not necessarily their direct feudal lords-- and the Catholic Church and opposed urban bourgeois. These animosities persist for decade, and motivate civil violence after the fall of Napoleon.

Some thirty years ago, Charles Issawi an economic historian, attempted to produce a unified "ledger of the French Revolution" . . . his assessment of the impact on the countryside remains the most concise and balanced I can cite:

As for agriculture, the main result of the Revolution and the subsequent wars was that of mass conscription and the acquisition of much land by the peasants. The loss of manpower must have adversely affected agricultural production and was not compensated by mechanization. The effects of redistribution of land were complex. Well before other European countries, France became a land of small peasant proprietors. This probably made its farming less responsive to agricultural improvement, such as was carried out by British landlords and Prussian junkers. Grain yields per acre on comparable land were distinctly lower in France than in England; moreover, for most cereals, yields per acre seem to have declined.

Against that, however, must be set the social benefits of diffused and much less unequal landownership - a fact to which, perhaps more than any other, France owed its social stability throughout its successive nineteenth-century revolutions. Peasant ownership is also generally believed to have been a major factor in sharply reducing the birth rate in France, the first such instance in the modern era. At the same time, the wars were not only killing off many potential husbands and fathers but probably leading to the postponement of many marriages, with a consequent decline in fertility. This resulted in a marked slowdown in population growth. From 1781 to 1789 France had nearly three times as many inhabitants as Britain (26.5 million against 9.4 million), but from 1815 to 1824 just over twice as many (30.5 million against 13.9 million), and by the end of the century, the two countries were dead even.

Sources:

Mann, Patrice. “Les Insurrections Paysannes De L'Ouest: Vendée Et Chouannerie.” Revue Française De Sociologie, vol. 30, no. 3/4, 1989, pp. 587–600.

Sutherland, Donald. “Chouannerie and Popular Royalism: The Survival of the Counter-Revolutionary Tradition in Upper Brittany.” Social History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1984, pp. 351–360.

Edelstein, Melvin, and Michel Vovelle. “LA PLACE DE LA RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE DANS LA POLITISATION DES PAYSANS.” Annales Historiques De La Révolution Française, no. 280, 1990, pp. 135–149.

Biard, Michel, and Serge Bianchi. “LA TERRE ET LES PAYSANS PENDANT LA RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE UNE ORIENTATION BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE.” Annales Historiques De La Révolution Française, no. 315, 1999, pp. 163–182.

John Markoff. "The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution". (Pennsylvania State University Press. 1996.)

ISSAWI, CHARLES. “The Costs of the French Revolution.” The American Scholar, vol. 58, no. 3, 1989, pp. 371–381.