Daily Life During the French Revolution (38 page)

Besides having rights over common land and game, in many
regions lords had other privileges, including the right to harvest timber on
common lands, to ride over peasants’ fields in pursuit of game, such as deer,
without paying compensation for destroyed crops; the right to a special pew in
the local church; the right to have special prayers said for his health and
wealth; and the right to a weather cock on the manor house. Sometimes his
rights involved the dispensing of justice in a seigneurial court. In some
places, he chose the village officials or convened the village meetings, with
himself or his agent in charge.

By the late eighteenth century, more and more peasants were
challenging their lords and taking them to court, backed by royal justice, to
contest required payments such as those imposed to maintain the lord’s
fortifications, the exaction of extra dues for the use of the communal bread
ovens, and the payments demanded for festivities and dowry when the seigneur’s
daughters were married.

It was in the royal interest to support the peasants, since
the less they paid to the lord, the more the government could collect in taxes.
Nevertheless, the peasants lost the great majority of their court cases but
often found the money to continue pursuing them. As peasant resistance grew,
especially among the younger generation, the landowners fought back. One case
taken to court by a lord who charged his peasants with illegal sheep grazing
dragged on from 1760 to 1784. In the community of Villerouge-Termenes, the
agent of the archbishop who owned the land began a lawsuit against the village
in 1775 that continued sporadically on into the revolution. It concerned
whether or not a relatively new food crop, the potato, was subject to dues and
tithes.

DEPUTIES, ESTATES-GENERAL, AND THE
CAHIERS

Even in the poorest hamlets, the meeting of the
Estates-General was looked forward to with some anticipation. Peasant
cahiers
were generally presented in simple, plain language and expressed not only
peasants’ distress and hopes but also their love and respect for the king.

While the nobility and the clergy elected their deputies
directly, the Third Estate, made up mostly of provincial deputies, was more
complicated. From January 1789, local assemblies under the medieval name of
bailliages
(bailiwicks) were convened, about 1 for every 100 voters, who had to be at
least 25 years old and taxpaying residents. Usually held in the village church,
the assemblies drafted their
cahiers
and elected deputies to represent
them at a higher assembly, which then elected deputies to the Estates-General
that would meet at Versailles. Those elected to the final prize were
overwhelmingly lawyers and public officials, along with a few physicians and
notaries and the occasional businessman. The rural
cahiers
were mostly
concerned with the daily matters of taxes, justice, the draft for the militia,
and the game laws.

On February 25, 1789, the inhabitants of Ménouville, in the
Paris basin, were called together, and the curate read out the king’s letter
summoning the Estates-General. These excerpts are typical of peasant
cahiers
:

We
beg his Majesty to have pity on our farmland because of the hail we have had.
Also we have a great deal of waste land which is covered with juniper, and this
causes much trouble on account of the rabbits which are very numerous; it is
that that makes us unable to pay the dues we owe to His Majesty. We have no
help from anyone to bring us relief . . . we can expect help from no one but
His Majesty. We have only a few good fields very remote from the village, the
rest is wretched land very full of game and this causes very small harvests. We
have one small meadow which only produces sour hay, the animals refuse to eat
it, this is why we cannot raise stock.

The soil is so bad that you cannot plant
fruit trees . . . they don’t grow.

We
state that salt is too dear for poor people. We state that there should not be
any tax men. We state that there should be no militia duty because this ruins
many families; it would be better if His Majesty laid a small tax on each young
man. We inform His Majesty that our goods are too heavily burdened with
seigneurial and other charges.

The
cahier
continued to complain of the bad main
road, begun eight years earlier with
corvée
work. Eighteen months ago,
however, a large pile of stones had been carted in and left in the road, with
no one to do the work; travelers instead walked through the grain fields beside
the road, causing much damage.

From the Norman village of Vatimesnil, where spinning
jennies threatened the livelihood of peasant households, came the following
cahier
:

We
represent to His Majesty that food is too dear and that trade is not moving and
that taxation is too heavy and that we can give no help to the State. And we
would like to ask His Majesty for the good of the public to abolish spinning
machines because they do great wrong to all poor people. And we present to his
Majesty some ways which could restore the state to health: such as the clergy,
because we have seen communities of four or five religious enjoying thirty or
forty thousand livres without usually giving any of it away in charity; and fix
a decent income for them and let His Majesty take the surplus. And we do not
know of any other ways in which His Majesty could do good to all his people.

It is from the
cahiers
that the complaints of people
were made known to the royal court and the Estates-General. Some of the most
pertinent suggestions presented in them were as follows:

The Estates-General should be
called periodically.

Separation of powers should be instituted in the
government, with legislative power held by a National Assembly.

Any new taxes should be agreed
upon by the Assembly.

Liberty of person, thought, utterance, and publication must
be guaranteed.

Lettres de cache
t should be abolished.

No forms of arbitrary justice such as military tribunals
should be permitted.

No censorship should be in
force.

No interference with mail should be allowed, as this is an
assault on liberty.

The annual publication of government budgets should be
mandatory, with each department of state fully accounted for.

Venal office should be
abolished.

No exemptions from taxes because of rank or privilege
should be allowed.

Nobles and clergy should have
no special privileges. Tax farming or custom houses should be abolished. All
citizens should be equal before the law.

The
corvée
should be
abolished.

Enlightened people hoped that increased prosperity on the
land made possible by the use of updated methods of farming would create
surplus and wealth, enabling the peasantry to become consumers of manufactured
goods and materials.

A number of aristocrats shared similar views to those of
the lower classes, agreeing that titles and privilege should be abolished,
along with venal offices, but this was not the case with the poorer nobles in
their chateaux out in the country who had little but their titles to cling to
for the esteem they cherished. They refused to elect deputies to the Estates;
they were not enamored of the idea of their inherited rank dissolving into the
simple position of “citizen.”

THE GREAT FEAR

In late summer 1789, after the fall of the Bastille, and as
harvest time approached, what became known as the Great Fear began to envelop
the countryside. Many peasants were aware that the National Assembly was doing
nothing to promote their interests, and rumors circulated that the aristocrats
were sending an army of brigands against them. In panic, villagers armed
themselves, attacked and burned chateaux, and destroyed the records of taxes
and duties they owed to the local landlords. Nobles who resisted were killed or
driven from their homes, and another wave of aristocratic refugees streamed
across the borders of France to join other self-exiled
émigrés
.

During the afternoon of July 28, dust seen in the distance
aroused the citizens of Angoulême. Every able-bodied man was called upon to
defend the city. Thousands took up arms (whatever they could find) and scoured the
areas for culprits. There were rumors that nearby towns had already been burned
to the ground. When no brigands were found after several days of searching, it
was concluded that the swirl of dust seen earlier had been created by the mail
coach on the high road to Bordeaux.

The alarm created by this incident induced the city of
Angoulême to take steps toward the formation of a citizens’ army to protect
itself and the countryside. Other towns followed suit, putting themselves on a
military footing. It was also brought home that the nobility had failed to
perform its traditional role of protecting the peasants, who, turning against
their masters, called again for the abolition of noble privileges, which were
no longer justified.

From then on, everyone anticipated the arrival of bandits
coming to ravish their fields and steal their property. As rumors spread from
village to village, peasants fled into the hills at any sign of strangers
approaching their farms and hamlets. The numbers grew in the telling, with as
many as several thousand (imaginary) renegades on the move in some areas. Armed
with pitchforks, axes, and knives, the inhabitants of one village went to the
aid of another nearby that they had heard was under attack. The inhabitants of
the village supposed to be under siege thought those coming to help them were
the anticipated brigands. Those who fled the besieged village rushed on to the next
one to report the attack. And so panic based on rumor and mistaken information
spread throughout entire regions.

The Great Fear was an illusion, but nevertheless it was
very real to the people. The aristocrat brigand or the vagrant in his pay was a
phantom figure, but revolutionaries nonetheless helped spread the rumors of an
aristocratic plot. The threat helped cement national cohesiveness by uniting
peasants and their villages against the aristocracy and giving the people some
idea of their strength in the event that it became necessary to defend their
hearths.

On August 4, 1789, the viscount de Noailles, brother-in-law
of Lafayette, proposed the abolition of seigneurial feudal rights. The Assembly
wasted no time in passing the legislation. By late August, the chaos in the
countryside had eased, and the Great Fear had passed. It had left its mark,
however: revolutionaries in the towns had sent out their newly created National
Guard to protect crops and property, and the rebellious peasants had forced the
National Assembly to take notice of, as well as action on, one of the
fundamental issues of the revolution—the ancient privileges of the nobility.

A CHANGE IN PEASANT SOCIETY

The new regime became somewhat organized in 1790, and the
country people’s lives underwent a degree of transformation. The peasants now
stopped removing their hats, lowering their heads, and addressing their masters
as
Monsieur le comte
. They often increased their small plots of land by
confiscating and taking over parts of abandoned noble estates and began killing
the rabbits, chickens, geese, and ducks that had eaten their cabbages and
lettuces in the past while they watched helplessly. Similarly, they began to
hunt wild animals and birds, all once the property of the lord of the manor,
with newly acquired firearms that they had up to now been forbidden to possess.

The rents on land were just as legal under the
revolutionary government as they were under the old regime, but under the new
circumstances they were not paid regularly. Young says that in August 1791 he
was informed by a person of authority not to be doubted that “associations
among tenantry, to a great amount and extent, have been formed, even within
fifty miles of Paris, for the non-payment of rent.” The obvious feeling among
these peasants was that they were now strong enough to resist payments and that
the landlords were powerless to collect them.

The revolution had changed France and its country people in
other ways. The peasant could now be governed by an Assembly that he had helped
elect. He could take his grievances to courts that would, at least in concept,
respect all men as free and equal. He could work when and where he chose and no
longer paid duties to an aristocratic overlord or to the church. In the eyes of
the law, the peasant was as respectable as the priest or the highborn. Anyone
could buy and sell land if he had money enough. The lowborn could now play a
role in village life and even aspire to elective positions. In theory, the
peasants had achieved a great step forward, although there was little obvious
improvement in their general standard of living.