Common_Land_Wine_and_the_French_Revolution_Intro.pdf

8/17/2019 Common_Land_Wine_and_the_French_Revolution_Intro.pdf

1/13

Introduction

The French Revolution, the Peasantry and

Village Common Land

Few events have evoked as much passion, rage and debate than the French

Revolution has for more than two hundred years. Historians have disagreed over

the origins, causes, outcomes and signicance of the Revolution ever since it

began in 1789. The social interpretation developed in the early twentieth century

by Jean Jaurès and Albert Mathiez focused on the struggle between the allegedlyrising bourgeoisie and the declining nobility.1 This Marxist interpretation focused

on the class conict between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and became the

dominant way to view the French Revolution until the 1960s when a revisionist

attack was launched led by Anglo-American scholars.2 The revisionist offensive

reached its height during the bicentenary celebrations in 1989.3 This interpretation,

led by William Doyle, François Furet and Keith Michel Baker, has produced an

overwhelmingly negative account of the Revolution, largely because, in their

view, it failed to produce a political order based on freedom and individual rights.4

Indeed, Doyle ends his Oxford history of the French Revolution with the assertionthat it was ‘in every sense a tragedy’.5 However, the revisionist approach has been

increasingly criticized for focusing too much on elite culture and for completing

eschewing the social dynamic that was part of the Revolutionary experience. For

example in Simon Schama’s Citizens, arguably the most popular and best-selling

book ever written on the French Revolution, the common people of France, peasants

and artisans, do not even appear in the index – yet the entries for Marie Antoinette

run to almost half a page.6 This has led many historians, such as William Sewell,

1 J. Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, 8 vols. (Paris, 1923–39) and

A. Mathiez, La Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris, 1932–33).2 There are many reviews, articles and books charting the classic social and revisionist

historiography of the French Revolution, for one of the best see T.C.W. Blanning, The

French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois? (London, 1987).3 To trace the history of the bicentennial commemoration see S.L. Kaplan, Farewell,

Revolution: The Historians’ Feud: France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca, NY, 1995).4 W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980), F. Furet, Interpreting the

French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981) and K.M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).

5 W. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 425.6 S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989).


2/13

Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution2

Olwen Hufton and Susan Desan to prescribe a ‘return to the social’ because they see

it as dangerous to confuse the attitudes of the philosophes, novelists and statesmen

(gleaned from their printed works), with the actual experiences of peasants and

urban workers.7 Rebecca Spang is concerned that revisionists have concentrated

too heavily on ‘the discourse of revolution’ and have overlooked ‘the question of

how people’s lives were changed by their experiences of the revolutionary period

itself’.8

In the last two decades many works have been produced from a post-revisionist

perspective, focusing once again on the majority of French people and the impact

that the Revolution had on their lives. Many of these studies have taken the form

of a revitalized social history, which has been identied as ‘neo-liberal’ because it

approaches the French Revolution from the liberal democratic tradition. This new

historiography focuses on the problems of transforming a society of hierarchy to

one of civil equality as well as emphasizing the role of free will and human choicesin determining the outcome of the French Revolution.9 Much of this work has also

focused on rural France. Historians, such as Peter Jones, John Markoff and Peter

McPhee deem the peasantry and their engagement with national politics as central

to understanding the French Revolution in its totality.10 All of this work deals with

the tangible and intangible changes that the revolutionary decade wrought in the

lives of country dwellers. The abolition of seigneurialism, along with the creation

of a new legal and judicial system, the widespread acquisition of land, either

through sales of biens nationaux or privatized common lands, had signicantly

transformed the lives of the majority of people. Thanks to the Revolutionarydecade, there was an extraordinary shift in cultural meanings and social behaviours

which forever changed French civic life. For McPhee, the abolition of privilege

7 W.H. Sewell, Jr. ‘Whatever Happened to the “Social” in Social History?’ in J.W. Scott

and D. Keates, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science

(Princeton, NJ, 2001) and the Introduction to his A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The

Abbè Sieyes and “What is the Third Estate?” (Durham, NC, 1994); O. Hufton, Women

and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992); S. Desan, ‘What’safter Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography’ FHS 23:1 (2000),

pp. 163–96.8 R. Spang, ‘Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution’

American Historical Review 108:1 (2003), pp. 119–47.9 G. Kates, ‘Introduction’ in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New

Controversies (London, 1998), pp. 1–20 and J.D. Popkin, ‘Not Over After All: The French

Revolution’s Third Century’, Journal of Modern History 74 (2002), pp. 801–21.10 P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1988) and Liberty

and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared, 1760–1820 (Cambridge,

2003); J. Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA., 1996); P. McPhee, Revolution and Environment

in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780–1830 (Oxford,

1999) and Living the French Revolution, 1789–99 (Basingstoke, 2006).


3/13

Introduction: The French Revolution, the Peasantry and Village Common Land 3

and the introduction of participatory politics permanently altered the way in which

‘French people made sense of the world around them’.11

Yet this view of the Revolution’s more positive and transformative impact on

the lives of country people has also been challenged. Tim Le Goff has claimed that

if a poll were taken in 1799, ‘a clear majority would have qualied the Revolution

simply as a disaster’.12 Donald Sutherland has argued that the Revolution was

primarily an urban phenomenon that left many people poorer and more miserable

than before it began; moreover, he has insisted that if there was a rural popular

movement during the French Revolution, then it was counter-revolutionary,

Catholic and royalist.13 The sentiments of Le Goff and Sutherland echo what

Richard Cobb claimed over thirty years ago – that the Revolution was essentially

‘irrelevant’ to the lives of most people as they were still just as destitute, poor and

hungry before 1789 than a decade later.14 Colin Jones, in a critical appreciation of

the work of Olwen Hufton and Richard Cobb, argues that Cobb is part of a largerDickensian paradigm of the French Revolution, inspired by A Tale of Two Cities,

which is decidedly British and which views the Revolutionary decade as a tragedy.

The British revisionists Doyle and Schama are also part of this tradition, according

to Jones.15 Indeed, those who believe the French Revolution was a disaster, tragedy

or irrelevance in the lives of country people seem to have dismissed or are unaware

of the peasantry’s role in the Revolution throughout the 1790s.

It is without doubt that the peasantry played a signicant part of the French

Revolution. Much of our understanding of this is due to the work of one of

the greatest historians of the Revolution, Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959).16 Lefebvre wrote on various aspects of the French Revolution, but lamentably

only one large-scale volume on the peasantry. Les Paysans du Nord , which

is best described as a histoire totale of the peasant experience of Revolution

in the department of the Nord, was the rst work to present the peasantry of

1789 as a conglomeration of widely differing social groups rather than a single

11 McPhee, Living the French Revolution, p. 202.12

T.J.A. Le Goff, Review of P.M. Jones’ The Peasantry in the French Revolution. Journal of Modern History 64:2 (1992), pp. 400–402.13 D. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oxford,

1986) and The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford,

2003).14 R. Cobb, The Police and People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford,

1970) and Reactions to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1972), esp. chapters on ‘The

Irrelevance of the French Revolution’ and ‘ La Vie en Marge: Living on the Fringe of the

Revolution’.15 C. Jones, ‘Olwen Hufton’s “Poor”, Richard Cobb’s “People” and the Notions

of the longue durée in French Revolutionary Historiography’, Past and Present (2006),Supplement 1, pp. 178–203.

16 Homage is paid to Lefebvre by E. Labrousse, Annales ESC XV (1960), pp. 1–8 and

R. Cobb, Past and Present 18 (1960), pp. 52–67.


4/13


undifferentiated class.17 His theories regarding the peasantry and the agrarian

history of France and the Revolution were then expanded and developed in a

series of articles and shorter monographs published between 1924 and 1957.

At the centre of Lefebvre’s œuvre is his discovery of an independent peasant

revolution, which he believed had an autonomous nature ‘in terms of its origins,

its proceedings, its crises, and its tendencies’.18 This peasant revolution, which

existed alongside the bourgeois revolution, was aimed specically at the

destruction of the seigneurial regime. The peasant and bourgeois revolutions

agree on this point of the abolition of feudalism, but according to Lefebvre

once this goal was achieved, the peasantry retreated from revolutionary action,

because the majority of peasants were anti-capitalist in outlook and hence, in

conict with the liberal-minded bourgeois revolutionaries. However, within his

conception of the peasantry Lefebvre differentiated between wealthy tenant

farmers and laboureurs, whom he considered to be the ‘rural bourgeoisie’ and proto-capitalist, and the rest of the more ‘proletarian’ or petite peasantry.19

Lefebvre’s contention that this second collectivist peasantry was essentially

anti-capitalist is the foundation of his interpretation that while the peasantry

abolished feudalism during the Revolution, it also consolidated the agrarian

structure of France.20 Because the destruction of the seigneurial regime was

not then followed by the development of capitalism in the agricultural realm,

France was, throughout the nineteenth century, locked into an agrarian structure

dominated by small peasant proprietors mainly concerned with subsistence-

based production.According to Lefebvre, the peasantry was anti-capitalist for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, French peasants were deeply attached to their collective rights –

these usage rights, such as grazing, gleaning and cutting wood, applied to both

private and common land; they also ensured the survival of many poor peasants

and more broadly, the proper functioning of the rural economy.21 Lefebvre stressed

that the peasants were:

profoundly attached to their collective rights and to the regulation of pre-capitalist

economic and social systems, not only by routine but also because the capitalisttransformation of agriculture worsened their conditions of existence.22

17 G. Lefebvre, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1924),

reprinted without notes (Bari, 1959).18 G. Lefebvre, ‘La Révolution française et les paysans’ in Etudes sur la Révolution

française (Paris, 1963), p. 343.19

Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 125.20 Lefebvre, ‘La Révolution française et les paysans’, p. 353.21 Ibid., p. 348.22 Ibid., p. 344.


5/13


Related to these collective usage rights was the peasantry’s customary

conception of property, which would suppress private ownership rights after the hay

harvest, usually after the rst cutting, thus transforming the eld into ‘communal

property’ on which collective rights could then be carried out.23 Underlying these

collective practices is the idea of le droit social , which was deeply rooted in

peasant mentalité. Lefebvre maintains that the peasantry operated under the belief

that they had a social right to life and survival which private property could not

supersede. Rather, it was believed that property must be arranged in such a way as

to meet the needs of all members of the collectivity.24

This brings us around to another of Lefebvre’s contentions regarding the

peasantry and capitalism; it is essentially that peasants were not very interested in

freehold property. For the peasantry, access to land, in the form of common lands

and rights, was much more important than a freehold private plot.

All the thoughts of the poor peasant were to limit individual property rights

and to defend collective usage rights, which permitted him to live and which he

regarded as a property as scared as others.25

In short, poorer peasants were completely opposed to any capitalist

transformation of agriculture.26 Moreover, because peasants were not proto-

capitalists, they were much less concerned with producing for the market than

for their own subsistence.27 The theoretical dilemma this interpretation implied,

in that an autonomous (anti-capitalist) peasant revolution did not t within theMarxist explanation of the French Revolution, did not seem to trouble Lefebvre;

he was not dogmatic in his Marxism and simply accepted the variation which he

had discovered. It did, however, prove to be more problematic for other Marxist

historians working in the eld, namely Albert Soboul and Anatoli Ado, and it is on

this point of the peasantry’s relation to agrarian capitalism that the challenges to

the master’s work begin.

The Russian historian Anatoli Ado has put forth, in his impressive Paysans

en Révolution, the major critical alternative to the Lefebvrian perspective.28

Ado’s premise is that another interpretation of the peasantry’s relationship tothe Revolution is possible. At the heart of his thesis is the reversal of Lefebvre’s

characterization of the peasant revolution as anti-capitalist; for Ado, the peasants

23 G. Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Bari, 1959),

p. 90.24 Lefebvre, ‘La Révolution française et les paysans’, p. 349.25 Ibid., p. 348.26 Ibid., p. 348.27

G. Lefebvre, Questions agraires au temps de la terreur (La Roche-Sur-Yon, 1954), p. 129.

28 A. Ado, Paysans en Révolution: Terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794 (Paris,

1996).


6/13


were above all small-scale agrarian capitalists. By focusing on the egalitarian nature

of the peasantry’s desire for land, Ado developed an interpretation that stresses the

capitalist nature of peasant demands during the Revolution. The peasantry’s desire

for small plots of land signals to Ado that perhaps poorer peasants were really

more interested in agrarian individualism and small-scale capitalism than Lefebvre

realized.29 His interpretation suggests that the peasantry took a different route to

capitalism than the ‘standard’ one, which is usually based on the English model

where the peasantry rapidly lost their land and became workers for landlords.

In Ado’s model, the French peasantry followed a unique route to rural capitalist

development, which is called la voie paysanne. Using theories of Lenin regarding

the diverse ways in which agrarian capitalism could evolve, Ado claims that small

peasant proprietorship does not necessary inhibit capitalist development, but instead

would produce a larger base for the development of market production.30 In other

words, if the peasantry had acquired small plots of land during the Revolution, theywould have eventually adopted new agricultural techniques and then would have

abandoned their old collective use rights and practices.31 The problem according to

Ado is not what the peasantry imposed on the bourgeois revolutionaries, but what

they failed to gain from them, i.e. the destruction of large property owners, their

rentier mentality and old systems of fermage and métayage.32 Thus, Ado resolves

the dilemma of Lefebvre’s interpretation by suggesting that the bourgeois and

peasant revolutions may not have been out of step at all, for they were both aimed

at agrarian capitalist development, but failed to produce the conditions conducive

to its fruition.Anatoli Ado’s reformulation of the relationship between the peasantry and

agrarian capitalism was well received in France by the Marxist historians at

the Sorbonne, specically Albert Soboul and his students. Florence Gauthier, a

student in Soboul’s doctoral seminar at the time, has used Ado’s theory of peasant-

led agrarian capitalism to examine the region of Picardy.33 She found that the

peasant movement during the Revolution was the bearer of a revolutionary route

to the development of capitalism and that the egalitarianism which characterized

the peasantry’s desire to acquire national and communal land represented the

highest stage of the democratic revolution.34

In essence, Gauthier argues for a

29 A. Ado, ‘Le mouvement paysan et le problème de l’égalité (1789–1794)’ in

A. Soboul (ed.), Contributions à l’histoire paysanne de la Révolution française (Paris,

1977), p. 126.30 Ado, Paysans en Révolution, p. 430.31 Ado, ‘Le mouvement paysan’, pp. 136–7.32 Ado, Paysans en Révolution, p. 453 and A. Soboul, ‘A propos d’une thèse récente

sur la mouvement paysan dans la Révolution française’, Ann. his. Rév. fran. 45 (1973),

p. 101.33 F. Gauthier, La voie paysanne dans la Révolution française: l’exemple picard

(Paris, 1977).34 Ibid., p. 205.


7/13


re-conceptualization of the Revolution; she insists that the conict between the

bourgeoisie and the mass of the peasantry was not over capitalism, but rather it was

over the differing ways that the two groups wanted to move towards capitalism.

For the peasantry, they wanted a more democratic transition with each peasant

receiving a freehold plot; in contrast, the liberal bourgeoisie, who began the

Revolution, held on to the notion of capitalism developing from large modernizing

landowners.35

Guy-Robert Ikni, another of Soboul’s students, presents a similar argument

in his article, ‘Recherches sur la propriété foncière’.36 Like Ado, Ikni recalls

Lenin’s ideas on the diverse paths which the transformation from feudalism to

capitalism could take. For France at the time of the Revolution, Ikni identies

two distinct possible voies; the rst corresponds to the pays de petite culture,

where the peasantry would take the economic initiative; while in the second

route, large property owners in the pays de grande culture, who had been imbuedwith physiocratic and agronomic ideas of agricultural improvement, would lead

the way towards capitalist development.37 Ikni argues that these two seemingly

contradictory situations could be rectied if the large property owners served as

guardians for the smaller ones, but the problem was that the gros were put off by

the petits egalitarian demands for land reform.38

Peter McPhee’s work and particularly his study of the Corbières region in

Languedoc-Roussillon also conform to Ado’s voie paysanne thesis.39 McPhee

traces the extensive land clearance in this region, which began in Languedoc

under the agronomist inspired edict of 1770, but really reached its peak between1790 and 1800. Not only does McPhee examine the signicant ecological changes

brought on by the massive clearance of the garrigues, but he also investigates the

transformation of the local economy in the aftermath of these défrichements. What

he discovered was a shift in the agricultural production on the newly cleared plots

of the poorer peasantry. These recently-fashioned micro-propriétaires concentrated

their energy on commercial wine production for an ever-expanding market. This

evidence certainly corroborates Ado’s theory, as it was the small landowning

peasants who were becoming petit entrepreneurs, at the forefront of a shift towards

market-oriented viticulture. Thus, for McPhee, the French Revolution marks thetransition from an ancient subsistence economy underpinned by pastoralism to

a mixed economy in which viticulture was forming increasingly important links

with the world outside the Corbières region.40

35 Ibid., pp. 212–13.36 G.-R. Ikni, ‘Recherches sur la propriété foncière, Problèmes théoriques et de

méthode (n XVIIIe-début XIXe siècle)’ Ann. his. Rév. fran. 52 (1980), pp. 390–424.37 Ibid., p. 421.38

Ibid., p. 422.39 P. McPhee, ‘The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism’, American Historical

Review 94 (5) (1989), pp. 1265–80 and Revolution and Environment.40 McPhee, Revolution and Environment , p. 199.


8/13


Although Ado’s voie paysanne thesis has been strongly supported in mainly

Marxist academic circles, there are a number of non-Marxist historians both

French and Anglophone who have been critical of this new approach. Peter Jones

has warned that Ado’s theory is based on too many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, and that it

tends to make all small and middling peasants into budding agrarian capitalists,

which was simply not the case.41 Jones maintains that Lefebvre was more exible

in regard to possible differentiations within the peasantry, while Ado seems to

be more dogmatic. He also raises the crucial issue of the regional diversity in

France and claims that no typology could ever do it justice.42 Nadine Vivier in

her extensive study of common land in France has also focused on this potential

limitation in Ado’s theory. Vivier maintains that Ado’s voie paysanne only works

in the vast cereal plains in Picardy, where modernization was well on its way and

the peasantry was more progressive.43 However, McPhee’s study of the small wine

growers in the Corbières demonstrates that it was not only in grain-dominatedregions where petit peasants could lead the way in the commercialization of

agriculture.

All of the issues discussed above have direct bearing on one of the most

contentious aspects of French agrarian life during the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries: village common land. Village common land has existed in France

since at least the Roman Occupation and in popular consciousness since time

‘immemorial’. These lands have always played an important role in rural life.

Peasant polyculture, the dominant form of agriculture in the pre-industrial world,

was dependent upon the exploitation of common wastes and pastures. Commonland also reinforced, and at the same time exemplied, the collective nature of

rural existence. French agrarian historians have long acknowledged the role that

collectively exploited land played in giving shape to communal life. Essentially,

these lands are areas in and around villages which were owned and exploited

collectively.44 In the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, common land is

dened as ‘the property of the commune belonging to the entire community, by

which each inhabitant can not dispose of or set out their individual right within

that property’.45 This denition of common land includes the actual property held

in common and its produce as well as the idea of collective usage ( jouissancedes habitants). The notion that both the ownership and the use of this land were

41 Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 127 and P.M. Jones, ‘Georges

Lefebvre and the Peasant Revolution fty years on’ reprinted in P. Jones (ed.), The French

Revolution in Social and Political Perspective (London, 1996), p. 68.42 Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 126.43 N. Vivier, Propriété collective et identité communale: les biens communaux en

France 1750–1914 (Paris, 1998), p. 176. 44

See M. Bourjol, Les biens communaux, voyage au centre de la propriété collective(Paris, 1989).

45 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire rasonné des sciences, des

arts et des métiers (Paris, 1753) vol. 3, p. 725.


9/13


collective is tied to its origins. The commons were formed out of two parts of

the ancient agrarian trilogy of Ager , Saltus, Silva. They came from the union of

the Saltus (uncultivated pasture) and Silva (forests or woods), which had always

been conceived of as wild, untameable places and as such could not lawfully

be appropriated by any individual.46 Thus, both the land itself and its usage had

always been regarded as collective and communal.

Although most common land had its ofcial recognition during the Roman

Empire, when many rural communes were formed and consolidated, in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their origins became the focus of a judicial

debate with heavy political overtones. Two distinct lines of argument developed.47

First, juriconsultes argued that the commons were the heritage of antiquity and

that communities rarely possessed titles for them because these lands had always

been in their possession since time ‘immemorial’. They maintained that during

the Middle Ages, seigneurs seized these lands and granted usage rights in orderto persuade inhabitants to settle on their seigneuries. In contrast, the feudistes

believed that when the Franks invaded Gaul, they divided up the land that they

had conquered conceding the commons to the villages, so that initially they were

possessions of the seigneurs. During the ancien régime, the conception of the

commons as a seigneurial concession prevailed with legislation passed in 1669.

The Water and Forest Code restored the ancestral right of triage, which allowed

seigneurs to secure ownership of a third of a village’s common land provided

that the remaining two-thirds were sufcient to meet the needs of the community.

This right was widely used throughout the eighteenth century as land hungryseigneurs annexed portions of common land regardless of the consequences for

village communities.48 Yet royal edicts did allow for the clearance and cultivation

of common land by members of the third estate. During the 1760s the monarchy

passed various edicts encouraging the ‘improvement’ of common land; on 5 July

1770, Louis XV granted a fteen year tax concession for all land that was cleared

and cultivated in the province of Languedoc.49

The tide turned however in 1789 when the juriconsultant view of the commons

belonging to the village community prevailed as the Revolutionaries wished

to undermine all sources of seigneurial power. However, this conception of

46 Y. Rinaudo, ‘Des prés et des bois. Repères pour une étude des biens communaux

dans la France méditerranéenne’, Annales du Midi 95 (1983), p. 483 and M. Bloch, French

Rural History: an Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley, 1966), p. 182.47 For a fuller discussion of these two judicial theories, see Vivier, Propriété collective,

pp. 42–4 and ‘The management and use of the commons in France during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries’ in M. De Moor, L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde (eds), The Management

of Common Land in North West Europe, c.1500–1850 (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 143–70.48

Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 137.49 For a recent analysis of this edict see, N. Plack, ‘Agrarian Reform and Ecological

Change during the Ancien Régime: Land Clearance, Peasants and Viticulture in the Province

of Languedoc’, French History 19:2 (2005), pp. 189–210.


10/13


communally held property seemed to contradict the idea of a nation founded upon

individual rights and private property. As a result, successive legislative bodies

throughout the Revolution attempted to deal with this ‘problem’ of communally

held land (and also with collective practices). In fact, it was during the French

Revolution that legislative attention paid to the commons reached its peak. Three

key laws sought to change the tenure of common land during the Revolution:

14 August 1792, which ordered the partition of all common land; 28 August

1792, which abolished the seigneurial right of triage and permitted communes

to re-integrate any commons seized by the seigneur as well as any waste lands;

10 June 1793, which specied the mode de partage for the law of 14 August 1792

and made partition optional while also allowing communities to recover usurped

lands. In sum, these laws represent the summit of Revolutionary activity regarding

the commons and all subsequent legislation, even into the nineteenth century, was

a reaction to them.The backlash began on 21 Prairial IV (9 June 1796) when a law was passed

suspending any action pertaining to common land, including partition, authorized

by the law of 10 June 1793. During the Consulate, Napoleon, seeking to restore

order and calm in the countryside, consolidated and legally recognized existing

partitions which had adhered to the 10 June 1793 legislation, but outlawed any

further divisions with the law of 9 Ventôse XII (29 February 1804). Then in 1813,

because he desperately needed money to nance his failing military campaign,

Napoleon ordered the sale of all common land which was being leased out through

the municipalities with the law of 20 March 1813. This law was repealed by LouisXVIII in 1816, but the troublesome issue of the common lands was not resolved

under the Bourbon Restoration. On 23 June 1819 a Royal Ordinance was passed

which attempted to penalize usurpers who had taken possession of common land

since 1793; they were ordered to declare their holdings and to either purchase

the land for 4/5th of its value or to pay an annual rent equivalent to 1/20 th of the

land’s worth. These laws, then, form the core legislation regarding common land

from 1789–1819, and each decree along with its socio-economic impact will be

examined in the following pages.

Many of the aforementioned historians have written about the issue of commonland privatization, and especially the renowned 10 June 1793 decree, which

authorized equal partition of the commons between all members of the village

community. For Georges Lefebvre common lands and rights were a central feature

of rural life.

It is a fact that the very existence of most peasants depended on them. Those who

worked only a small plot of land, were able to raise a cow, a pig, or a few sheep

thanks to communal pastures. Once they lost this resource, they had nothing.50

50 G. Lefebvre, ‘The Place of the Revolution in the Agrarian history of France’

reprinted in R. Forster and O. Ranum (eds), Rural Society in France: Selections from the

Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations (Baltimore and London, 1977), p. 36.


11/13


According to Lefebvre the partition of common land was neither desired nor

executed on a large scale in the Nord, because both poor and well-off peasants

beneted more from their collective exploitation of these lands than from a single

freehold plot.51 Once again, Lefebvre’s perspective on the issue of the commons

and the law of 10 June 1793 has become the standard interpretation and has been

subject to constant trial and revision. In his large-scale study of the peasantry, Peter

Jones asserts that while petits may have called for the division of common land, in

the end, very little land was actually divided ‘because it suited nobody’s interests

to do so’.52 The case for small and middling peasants attached to their common

lands and rights is made even more apparent in the southern Massif Central, where

the agro-pastoral economy was inextricably linked to common land pasture.53

There has been, however, much emphasis on the positive tangible results of the

law of 10 June 1793, and the work of Anatoli Ado provides the principal support

for this new interpretation. Ado was one of the rst to focus on the two-fold natureof this law; it had always been known that the commons could be partitioned, but

another part of the law, regarding the restitution of usurped lands, was not widely

recognized. Although he does not cite any primary source material, Ado claims

that this section of the law was widely applied and that ‘numerous villages proted

by increasing their communal properties’.54 Ado does however focus most of his

attention on the success of the many partitions carried out. But regardless of how

much common land was actually divided, for Ado does admit to the difculties of

partition and that many either lapsed or were overturned, the fact that the poorer

peasantry was galvanized by the possibility of equal partition of the commons ismomentous.55 The fact that poorer peasants all across France called for the equal

division of common land into freehold plots is used by Ado as evidence for his

thesis; i.e., these very same peasants would have led the way to agrarian capitalist

development if only they had received a plot of land. G.R. Ikni has also studied

the law of 10 June 1793 and argued that the division of common land under this

legislation was most successful in regions of petite culture. In addition, he contends

that as it expanded the basis of small-scale property, the Jacobin partition decree

accelerated the ‘peasant route’ to capitalist development.56

The law of 10 June 1793 has received its most thorough demystication by Nadine Vivier in her recent survey of common land in France 1750–1914. The

period 1789–1800 represents the only time when the desire to partition common

land was held and pursued by both legislators and the peasantry, and the law of

51 Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord , p. 549.52 Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 148.53 P.M. Jones, Politics and Rural Society: the southern Massif Central c.1750–1880

(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 44–8.54

Ado, Paysans en Révolution, p. 374.55 Ibid., pp. 373–9.56 G.R. Ikni, ‘Sur les biens communaux pendant la Révolution française’, Ann. his

Rév. fran. 54 (1982), pp. 71–94.


12/13


10 June 1793 marks the culmination of this process.57 Vivier stresses poorer

peasants’ aspiration for a plot of common land, but also recognizes the fact that

middling and larger proprietors also desired land. Therefore during this period, the

crucial question was not whether the commons should be divided, but what the

mode de partage would be. Vivier also acknowledges the intense historiographical

debate that the issue of partitioning the commons has generated. While she

concedes that both Lefebvre’s conservative view of peasants holding onto their

collective lands and rights and Ado’s interpretation of poorer peasants as proto-

agrarian capitalists do have their merits for explanation, Vivier concludes that

essentially the success or failure of common land partition depended upon a whole

host of regional factors which must be taken into consideration for each particular

case. For example, the will to divide the commons was strongest in regions where

there was sufcient land hunger and/or the state of agriculture was advanced

enough to benet partition; but in mountainous regions where every member ofthe collectivity depended on the commons, they remained intact. Still, Vivier does

insist that the total effect of all Revolutionary legislation regarding the commons,

from the abolition of seigneurial rights upon them and the integration of usurped

lands, to the authorization of partition, did have a considerable impact on these

lands – the full extent of which will only be discovered with the completion of

many more regional studies.

This book aims to discover how Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Restoration

legislation in the long term fostered the privatization of common land in one

region of southern France. It also takes into account the peasantry’s agency andactions involved in the privatization process. The village common lands in the

department of the Gard will be the focus of investigation, as they were numerous

and variously in the form of communal marshes, pastures, heathlands and woods.

The departmental archives, located in Nîmes, are full of documentary evidence

regarding the changes to common land tenure during the period and also the socio-

economic transformations brought about by the privatization of these lands. The

two main series used for the implementation of legislation regarding common

land are the L series, which contains documents from the Revolutionary Period

(1791–1800) and the O series, which chronicles the administrative activity of thecommunes from Napoleon until 1940. Evidence for the implementation of the

Napoleonic law of 20 March 1813 is found in the Q series in which the sales of

biens nationaux are also classied. Additional information on the economy and

environment of the Gard was gleaned from the M Series relating to the general

administration of the department. Although the common lands of the Gard have

not been systematically studied until now, the department has been examined

before. In the late nineteenth century, François Rouvière penned a general survey

of the department during the Revolution, which was updated in 1989 with a new

57 Vivier, Propriété collective, see pp. 175–8 for a succinct discussion of her

conclusions.


13/13


examination by Duport and Peronnet.58 In addition, the Gard has also been the

focus of investigation as a centre of Counter-Revolutionary reaction, revolt and

religious unrest.59 This department’s diversity in terms of mountain/ garrigue/ plain

topography, agricultural/pastoral/transhumance practices, commercial and proto-

industrial production, makes it an excellent locale to examine the issue of common

land privatization.

These socio-economic and environmental features will be examined in more

detail in the rst chapter of the book which describes life in the Gard at the end

of the eighteenth century. Then a chronological approach is adopted as Chapters 2

and 3 analyze the legislative changes to common land during the Revolution

and reveal how these laws were applied in the Gard. Chapter 4 bridges the

Revolutionary period and Napoleon’s early years as First Consul. First, during

the Directory attempts were made to modify the 1793 Jacobin decree and second,

Napoleon sought regularize the revolutionary partitions with a law in the yearXII – how these developments impacted the commons of the Gard is of central

importance. Napoleon’s seizure and sale of common land during the late Empire

is the focus of Chapter 5, along with the Restored Bourbons’ attempt to nally

put to rest the Jacobin partition decree of 1793 with the Royal ordinance of 1819.

Chapter 6 attempts to discover the impact that privatizing common land had on

the rural society and economy of the Gard. There is a brief conclusion which sums

up the results of this investigation and grapples with some of the historiographical

questions outlined in this Introduction.

58 F. Rouvière, La Révolution française dans le département du Gard 4 vols. (Nîmes,

1889 reprint Marseilles, 1974) and A. M. Duport and M. Péronnet, La Révolution dans le

Gard, 1789–1799 (Roanne, 1989).59 See J.N. Hood, ‘Protestant-Catholic Relations and the Roots of the First Popular

Counterrevolutionary Movement in France’, Journal of Modern History 43 (1971),

pp. 245–75 and ‘Patterns of Popular Protest in the French Revolution: The Conceptual

Contribution of the Gard’, Journal of Modern History 48 (1976), pp. 259–93; G. Lewis,The Second Vendée: the Continuity of Counter-revolution in the Department of the Gard,

1789–1815 (Oxford, 1978); B. Fitzpatrick, Catholic royalism in the department of the Gard

1814–1852 (Cambridge, 1983).

Common_Land_Wine_and_the_French_Revolution_Intro.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Common_Land_Wine_and_the_French_Revolution_Intro.pdf