Other Interpretations

Tocqueville is one of the scholars who have made an essential contribution to an understanding of the relationship between the central state and local communities under the Old Regime. He postulated what is still the generally held opinion that centralization undermined local autonomy, although today few sympathize with his fear that in France more democracy would mean more domination of society by the centralizing state. Tocqueville argued that the village assemblies, once the arbiters of local government, became in the eighteenth century "an empty show of freedom; [they] had no real power." After reading the records of village meetings in the district surrounding Tours, he remarked:

It will be noted that this parish assembly was a mere administrative inquiry, in the same form and as costly as judicial inquiries; that it never led to a vote or other clear expression of the will of the parish; that it was merely an expression of individual opinions, and constituted no check upon government. Many other documents indicate that the only object of parish assemblies was to afford information to the intendant, and not to influence his decision even in cases where no other interest but that of the parish was concerned. . . . The government preponderates, acts, controls, undertakes everything, provides for everything, knows far more about the subject's business than he does himself.

Tocqueville was persuaded that centralization was equivalent tosterilization.

Tocqueville was concerned that in the transition from an aristocratic to a democratic society, local autonomy would be sacrificed. "How could it be otherwise? Noblemen take no concern for anything; the bourgeois live in towns; and the community is represented by a rude peasant." Centralization, because it removed the nobility from the countryside, left the peasants defenseless against the bureaucratic tyranny of the state. "Since most of the wealthier or more cultivated residents had migrated to the city, . . . the [country] population was little more than a

horde of ignorant, uneducated peasants, quite incapable of administering local affairs." Tocqueville concluded that the tradition of local government, dating back to the Middle Ages, was lost in the eighteenth century.^[4]

In interpreting the Revolution, historians since Tocqueville have continued to concentrate on the peasantry's relationship to the state under the Old Regime, but they have added a further consideration—capitalism. More concerned than Tocqueville with the economically determined structure of society, many of them have argued that peasants acted in the Revolution to protect their precapitalist culture and the village organization from the capitalism foisted upon them by the centralizing state. France's foremost historian of the Revolution, Georges Lefebvre, was the first to advance that proposition. He argued that during the Revolution, which marked the coming to power of the bourgeoisie, there was an autonomous peasant revolution that was anticapitalist and traditionalist, aimed at preserving an "economic and social world that was precapitalist." The peasants, Lefebvre argued, were opposed to the capitalism for which the French Revolution had cleared the way, and they responded defensively to the triumph of the bourgeoisie. They acted to prevent capitalism from destroying traditional communal institutions. During that revolution, the peasants "opposed with all their force the capitalist transformation of agriculture. In their spirit there was much more conservatism and routine than zeal for change. It was with elements from their past that they wanted to construct their social ideal." The peasants had a keen sense of social rights and social justice. In contrast to the bourgeois assertion of the inviolability of private property, they claimed that "superior to the rights of property are the just needs of the community in which all the inhabitants have a right to live."

The precapitalist organization of the village was not socialist,

[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1954), pp. 45–51, 252, 255. The Burgundian evidence reveals that, just as Tocqueville had suspected, royal officials encouraged village democracy as a means to increase their control over local politics. Although he accurately predicted how democratic forms of government might facilitate greater bureaucratic supervision, Tocqueville underestimated the vitality of peasant politics during the Old Regime. Making village government more bureaucratic had unexpected results. The problem of villagers' participation in governance is discussed at length in Chapter 3.

Lefebvre insisted, because the peasants did not constitute a class; they possessed divergent economic interests. In addition, the peasantry was more concerned with the distribution of wealth than with organizing a system of production. "They dreamed of enclosing themselves in their time-honored routines and stopping the progress of capitalism. It was the division not the production of wealth that interested them." Rather than socializing the means of production, such as tools, livestock, or land, the peasants "wanted only enough land, in property or lease, to provide for their families." Lefebvre nevertheless asserted that modern socialism owes much to the peasants' commitment to social justice. The notion that socialism can be traced to these rural communities has been unquestioned since Lefebvre. His claim that the institutions of the precapitalist village were morally superior to those of modern capitalism has also gone largely unchallenged.^[5]

Albert Soboul, Lefebvre's successor as France's foremost historian of the French Revolution, carried the latter's interpretation one step further and posited the existence of a direct connection between peasant culture and socialism. He integrated the history of the French peasantry directly into a larger debate concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism. However, his interpretation differed from that of Lefebvre in one important way. Soboul perceived the community as a "natural" premarket economy that feudalism could accommodate, whereas it could not accommodate capitalism. Capitalism required cheap proletarian labor, which in turn required the elimination of the communal practices that sustained the peasant small holding. Soboul claimed that a fundamental antagonism existed between capitalism and the community. The traditional community had to be suppressed so that an essential distinction could be made between labor and capital in order for the transition from feudalism to capitalism to occur.^[6]

[5] Georges Lefebvre, "La Revolution française et les paysans," in his Etudes sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1963), pp. 338–68. This article is the most complete statement of Lefebvre's philosophy. In it he implies that by bringing their communal tradition to the cities, peasant immigrants contributed to the growth of socialism in nineteenth-century France (p. 349).

[6] Albert Soboul, "The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Past and Present 10 (Nov. 1956):78–96.

Soboul's principal concern was the relationship of feudalism to capitalism. That the state assaulted the communal traditions of the village to facilitate that transition is a notion that has been discussed most explicitly by American sociologists. Charles Tilly in particular has explored the state's collaboration with the capitalists during the eighteenth century to bring about the demise of communities.^[7] To establish the primacy of capitalist relations of production, the crown "generally acted to promote [the land's] transformation into disposable property, to strengthen the rights of owners, to discourage multiple-use rights on the same land. Customary hunting became poaching. Customary gleaning and gathering became trespassing. Customary scratching out a corner of the wasteland became squatting." Thus, "for France's ordinary people, the eighteenth century fused the costs of statemaking with the burdens of capitalism." Tilly found support for this view in royal edicts that "favor the shipment of local supplies wherever merchants could get the highest price, a strenuous effort to break monopolies of workers over local employment, an encouragement of bourgeois property in land—all features of government action that forwarded the interests of capitalism." The most articulate government spokesman for the emerging capitalist order was Turgot, since "he self-consciously advocated the accumulation of capital, the elimination of small farmers, and the spread of wage labor in agriculture and industry." In the process, "all French governments of the later eighteenth century trampled the interests of ordinary people." The state played the capitalist game, Tilly reminds us, for fiscal reasons—"to maintain the crown's sources of credit and to generate new taxable income." In this zero-sum game, what was of benefit to the capitalists was harmful to everyone else.

Charles Tilly's emphasis on the growth of markets and on the impact of state formation has opened new areas for scholars to research and has produced new theories to be tested in future studies. For Tilly, even more than for Lefebvre, rural protest was

[7] For an alternative view of France by a scholar of historical sociology, see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979). Skocpol argues that the state can be autonomous of the dominant class. It can be a partner or a competitor but always acts to perpetuate itself. Thus, in her model, states are actors who are as important as classes.

a defense against capitalism. Social revolutions commonly follow the introduction of capitalism. The peasants protested when noncapitalist property relations were threatened. They clung to communal traditions and resisted capitalism because it would lead to the loss of communal property, to expropriation, and to proletarianization. "Holders of small capital fought off their manipulation by holders of large capital, workers struggled with capitalists, and—most of all—people whose lives depended on communal or other noncapitalist property relationships battled others who tried to extend capitalist property into their domains." As the state's commitment to the capitalist program increased, so did the opposition. Alliances between capitalists and state officials aroused the opposition of the common people, who wanted "food at a feasible price, equitable and moderate taxation, checks on speculators, and guarantees of employment." Nevertheless, economic expansion continued by undermining communal rights and the consumer-oriented economic regulation upon which these people depended for their survival. "France's government did not cause these evils on their own; the capitalists were the real offenders. By collaborating with those capitalists and authorizing their profit-taking, the French monarchy took on the stigmas of their misdeeds. King Louis and his agents paid the price."^[8]

Barrington Moore has also argued that in 1789, the precapitalist peasantry wanted to prevent France's transition to a modern capitalist democracy. Like the other scholars discussed here, Moore believed that in the eighteenth century "the modernization of French society took place through [efforts of] the crown." Those efforts to modernize were hindered, however, by the emphasis on peasant property rights, which was a carry-over from earlier state policies. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the kings of France had attempted to consolidate their political authority by protecting peasant property rights. The crown reinforced those

[8] Charles Tilly, "Statemaking, Capitalism, and Revolution in Five Provinces of Eighteenth-Century France," Center for Research on Social Organization Working Paper no. 281, pp. 14, 15, 15, 15, 8, 18, 52; now collected in The Contentious French (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). See also Tilly's introduction to The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1975).

rights to establish a counterweight to seigneurial authority. Later, with its property rights firmly established, the peasantry wielded enough power to determine how far the Revolutionary government would go in the direction of capitalism. Moore argued, as Lefebvre and Tilly had, that the peasants opposed the Revolution because "as a pre-capitalist group, peasants frequently display anticapitalist tendencies."^[9]

To summarize, there is a convergence of opinion between French Marxists and American sociologists on the subject of the role of the peasantry during the French Revolution. The ideas of Lefebvre, Soboul, and Tilly overlap. All three asserted that the peasants wanted to protect traditional values from the disruptive influences of capitalism. Tilly made explicit the implication of Soboul and Lefebvre that the state was an agent of class exploitation. Lefebvre's interpretation was a point of departure for Barrington Moore, but Moore's principal concern was the kind of political regime that results when agrarian societies become modern industrial ones. Tocqueville concentrated on the politically determined structure of society under the Old Regime. That the royal administration destroyed aristocratic institutions was his greatest regret. Tocqueville linked the excesses of the Revolution, and of France's movement toward democracy in general, to abolition of the nobility's role as intermediary between the king and the nation.

What is common to all these interpretations of long-term political change is the belief that the state was the winner and communities were the losers: The progressive, modernizing

[9] Barrington Moore, Jr., "Evolution and Revolution in France," in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966), pp. 40–108. Moore's analysis of the relationship of the Old Regime state to the peasantry differs from the one presented in this book. He emphasizes that the monarchy built its political base in alliance with individual peasant proprietors. The point made here is that the state did not have the administrative capacity to work with individual peasants. That is why it dealt with the community instead. Robert Brenner, in his study of the agrarian class structure of the French state ("Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present 70 [Feb. 1976]:30–75), also emphasizes an alliance between the crown and the peasants as individual producers. In this study I argue that it was not the strength of peasant proprietors but the strength of village communities that hindered agricultural development in France.

state gained authority by eliminating the traditional communal institutions. In this book I provide an alternative view of the impact of state formation on village organization during the Old Regime.