• Currently a data journalist with CityLab
• St. Paul resident
• Generalist nerd
• Previous Nerd Nite presentations:
  • “The Accidental Republic: A Case Study in History and Democracy”
  • “Talking, Texting & Trump”
  • “The Fast and the Mapped: A Demo of Digital Mapping”
  • “When In Doubt: An Introduction to Skepticism”
• @dhmontgomery / dhmontgomery.com

The Siècle covers French history from 1814 to 1914 — the hundred years between Napoleon and World War I in which the modern world was born.

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading about early 19th Century Europe, and especially France. So we’ll focus on French peasants today.

www.thesiecle.com

• The word means “people of the land,” from the French paisant (or paysan), based on pais/pays, or “land.”
• It generally refers to preindustrial subsistence farmers — people who rely on their produce to eat, rather than selling to the market
• But as you’ll see, rural peasants were often quite plugged into the market
• Some “peasants” were desperately poor, struggling to survive. Others have been called “rural bourgeoisie”
• There was also an element of social class to go along with economics

“Rural France is almost infinitely diverse, & almost any generalization about the peasantry becomes partially false as soon as it is formulated.” — Gordon Wright

• The most important question for a peasant: do you own the land you farm?
• This could vary widely!
• France had somewhat higher rates of peasant land ownership than other countries, partially (but not entirely) due to the Revolution
• In some regions, as few as one-third of households owned land. In others, more than 75% did.

• Land assessed <20 francs per year is not enough to a family.
• In one poorer community, 63 farmers divided up 114 cultivable acres — 1.8/person. Most owned less: only 16 people owned 2+ acres.
• Wealthier areas might see 10-20 acre plots

The answer is that lots of “subsistence farmers” weren’t actually subsistence farmers. They did a whole host of things to earn a living.

A typical family might:

• farm a small plot of around an acre
• rent another small plot or two from someone else
• the wife would work in the home, spinning or sewing for the market
• the husband would work part time as a day laborer for other landowners, or pursue a part-time craft like making clogs
• children would begin working in earnest around age 12
• everyone might do a little foraging in nearby wild areas (legally or not)

One farmer wrote that “the use on his farm of eight hectares of a new type of plough and the planting of clover had increased his income by 519 francs and his livestock from eight to 12.”

So why didn’t peasants use more modern farm equipment? They actually had some pretty good reasons.

• Newer tools cost money peasants didn’t have, or required expertise they lacked
• Old tools could be repaired themselves; new tools like modern plows were too complex and had to be sent to specialists
• Externalities — the scythe was 2-3 times faster than the sickle, but produced less “waste” that peasants would gather up and use for straw
• Old tools were optimized for styles of planting and working — changing them changed everything
• Tenant farmers have little incentive to invest in improvements
• “Today, to farm with profit, one has to know a lot” — J.A. Barral, 1870

What did peasants eat? The simplest answer is, “not enough.”

In the early part of the 19th Century, France’s average per-capita calorie consumption was 2,000 per day. That’s the average, which means many people ate less. And even 2,000 isn’t enough for someone engaged in manual labor, as most poor Frenchmen did.

“To sustain themselves for their strenuous work, peasants relied mainly on bread, as much as a kilogram per person per day, baked at home. This staple was supplemented with boiled porridge, vegetable soup (seasoned with lard), greens and roots, and (only after the late eighteenth century or so) potatoes; meat, especially beef, was a rarity reserved for illness and holidays. To drink, peasants had only water — which they usually had to haul from a fountain — or cider, rarely wine or even coffee.” — Christine Haynes

• In eastern France, for example, dwellers in mountainous regions often ate a “meagre diet of ’mixed’ bread, lentils, ‘séret’, the residual whey of their cheese production, a little salt pork and smoke-cured meat, not forgetting the berries gathered in the forest.”

• In eastern France, for example, dwellers in mountainous regions often ate a “meagre diet of ’mixed’ bread, lentils, ‘séret’, the residual whey of their cheese production, a little salt pork and smoke-cured meat, not forgetting the berries gathered in the forest.”
• In the west, “the peasant of Maine usually lived in a dark hovel, baked a coarse bread every week, drank a sour cider, and filled up with soup. The peasant of Anjou was not housed much better, but his bread was often made of wheat, and he had vegetables, onions, broad beans, and cabbage to go with it.”

• In eastern France, for example, dwellers in mountainous regions often ate a “meagre diet of ’mixed’ bread, lentils, ‘séret’, the residual whey of their cheese production, a little salt pork and smoke-cured meat, not forgetting the berries gathered in the forest.”
• In the west, “the peasant of Maine usually lived in a dark hovel, baked a coarse bread every week, drank a sour cider, and filled up with soup. The peasant of Anjou was not housed much better, but his bread was often made of wheat, and he had vegetables, onions, broad beans, and cabbage to go with it.”
• “In the Romanche valley… Adolphe Blanqui found villages so short of fuel that they used dried cow dung to bake their bread and prepared the loaves only once a year. He himself saw in September a loaf he had helped begin in January. That sort of bread had to be cut with an axe, a hatchet, or an old sword, and you could not count yourself a man until you had the strength to cut your own bread when it was stale and hard.”

There was no such thing as “peasant culture.” Traditions and habits, both big and small, varied wildly from region to region.

• In some areas, peasants lived in giant, multi-generational households. In others, the nuclear family was the norm.
• In some areas people lived in villages and walked to their fields; elsewhere, homes were dispersed.
• Some regions were intensely patriarchal; others had traditions of relative gender equality.

In general, peasant life often revolved around communal activities, from men drinking in taverns to the whole village gathering together at night to tell stories and work on crafts.

Like everyone else, peasants got it on, as evidenced by the high rates of births less than 9 months after weddings. (They also did participate in romantic love, contrary to some arguments that this was a bourgeois invention.)

You might be surprised to learn that highly Catholic peasants used birth control!

Not any kind of birth control we’d recognize today, of course, that would prevent pregnancy. But it was effective at making pregnancy rarer. French families would use the rhythm method, pulling out, and what people at the time called “Onanism” and what we today call “pulling out.” Testament to its prevalence are the numerous records of priests fulminating against Onanism, which was nicknamed “the French sin” in preindustrial Europe.

When all that failed, women could turn to abortion and even infanticide, certainly much more common than official statistics record.

You might think that the question of “What language did French peasants speak?” is an easy one.

Before the late 19th Century, “French” as a language was spoken in big cities and the immediate vicinity of Paris. Everywhere else, language and dialect changed as you walked from village to village.

“To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible. The people who saw the sun set behind [Mount] Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk-weavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass.” — Graham Robb

As we’ve seen, life could be tough for peasants even in ordinary times. But worst part of being a subsistence farmer wasn’t scraping by — it was when you couldn’t scrape by.

• “On average, one year in four, the size of crops failed to allow what today would be termed a minimum caloric intake” — Peter McPhee

• “A considerable number of indigents have been forced to eat bran and some rather disgusting herbs, and they felt happy when they were lucky enough to add a little butter or cheese to this not-very-nutritious mixture.” — Joseph Victor Alexandre La Magdelaine, prefect of the Orne, 1812

When food shortages happened, death rates soared up, and birth rates dropped as young people delayed marriages and partook of the French sin.

People would respond by turning to begging and charity, both from the government and from private individuals.

There aren’t any more peasants in western Europe. Lots of farmers, but no peasants. What happened to them?

• Many moved to big cities, thus becoming not-peasants
• But even the people who stayed farmers stopped being peasants. A few things happened:
  • Improved communication, travel, literacy and education drew cities & countryside together
  • Declining population meant consolidation of the remaining land
  • Machinery, fertilizer and new techniques made farming better! No more subsistence farming = no more peasants.

• This talk: dhmontgomery.com/files/peasants.html
• My podcast: thesiecle.com
• Further reading:
  • Montgomery, David. “Obscenities and Oaths: French Languages Before the Revolution.” dhmontgomery.com.
  • Corbin, Alain. The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
  • Weber, Eugen. Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.
  • McPhee, Peter. A Social History of France: 1789-1914. 2nd ed. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  • Segalen, Martine. Love and Power in the Peasant Family. Translated by Sarah Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

• “Are the peasants revolting?”: Brant Parker & Johnny Hart, The Wizard of Id
• “The Reaper”/“Le Moissonneur”: Jean-François Millet
• “End of the Working Day”/“Fin du travail”: Jules Breton
• “Buckwheat Harvest: Summer”: Millet
• “Shepherd Tending His Flock”: Millet
• “Labour”: Jules Jacques Veyrassat
• “Shepherd’s Star”: Breton
• “The Reading”/“La Lecture”: Breton

Generally speaking, if you were a peasant, you couldn’t vote and had no political power.

Many European countries were absolute monarchies. Those that did have elections almost always imposed a property requirement for suffrage — you could only vote if you owned enough property. (And were a man.)

The levels of these property requirements varied, but essentially always excluded peasants.

But that’s not to say peasants didn’t care about politics. Even with low literacy and poor communication, peasants found out about important issues and formed opinions about things that affected them — taxes, conscription, the threat of reintroducing abolished “feudal dues.”

Deprived of the vote, peasants would express political opinions through protest and rioting.

Why were peasants denied the vote? In part, it was because liberal reformers believed peasants were superstitious and conservative — likely votes for right-wing candidates.

The truth was more complicated, but it wasn’t entirely wrong. In 1848, France let every adult male vote for the first time — and peasants overwhelmingly rejected liberal candidates in favor of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the candidate of a conservative alliance.

But in the long run, there were left-wing peasants and right-wing peasants, and peasants who voted based on local issues rather than the spectrums drawn up by urban intellectuals.