A Response to Hilton Root, ‘The Case Against Georges Lefebvre's Peasant Revolution’

The death of Georges Lefebvre in 1959 removed from the scene an historian whose researches touched upon virtually every aspect of the French Revolution. Generations of students have been raised on his textbook surveys of the period, but scholars know him primarily as the great social and agrarian historian of the Revolution: the man who put the French peasantry on the map. He it was who uncovered a separate 'peasant revolution' incubated during the final decades of the ancien regime, active in 1789-92, and intermittently at loggerheads with the liberal-minded leaders of the Revolution thereafter. This discovery posed problems for those who were accustomed to viewing the Revolution as a strictly bilateral struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, but it was documented with such precision that it passed without serious challenge for over forty years. Few orthodoxies outlive their progenitors unscathed, however. When interest in peasant studies revived in the 1970s, Georges Lefebvre's legacy came under close scrutiny.' Two aspects of his work attracted particular concern, namely his system of social classification and his conviction that the mass of poor peasants was opposed to agrarian capitalism. Until recently, though, no one has challenged the central precept of an autonomous peasant revolution. Maybe the bulk of French peasants was not as doggedly loyal to communitarian agricultural practices as Lefebvre supposed, but, for all that, they intervened massively and decisively in 1789. Hilton Root's article takes the revisionist debate a stage further and in the process it crosses an important watershed. While paying lip service to Lefebvre's contribution in the field of rural history, the author questions its very foundations. According to Hilton Root, there existed no fundamental antagonism between the peasant masses and nascent agrarian capitalism, nor was there a distinctive peasant explosion in 1789. The specificity of the peasant revolution is thereby lost. My own reaction to Lefebvre's legacy is more measured. Unlike the present author, I regard the 'autonomous peasant revolution' hypothesis as proven beyond reasonable doubt. However, I do share with Hilton Root some misgivings over Lefebvre's depiction of the poor peasantry as more interested in use-rights than in freehold-rights, and I could volunteer some other criticisms of the orthodox thesis as well. Where I part company with Hilton Root is in the matter of how we should view the peasantry at the end of the old regime and judge their behaviour at the start of the new. His

Archaeology · Linguistics · Peasant · Root (linguistics · Sociology · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · French Urban and Social Studies · History · Philosophy