Lecture

Tuesday, February 11, 2020 10:00 AM

• What was the role of the peasantry in early modern revolts? (You may focus on only one rev
• How did state-building affect revolts?
• Was carnival a safety-valve?

Context
• Taxation
• Lack of food
• Warfare: solders in area; thirty years war; religious wars;
• Economic: famine; disease; deflation
• Climate: ice age==>flu;
• Central government: Warfare===>Bureaucracy===>collect taxes; fund for the war;

Causes
• Fear for change
• Plunder of the soldiers on the food
• Removal of the grain from the area
• Speculation that it would violate the community
• Soldiers to live in the community
• Tax collectors (most)
Change to french taxation system:
Tallie: more direct collection
Pay d'éats: local provincial estates decide who pays (Burgundy; Languedoc; Prov
Pay d'élection: royal agents, élus, decide who pays, and collect Tallie themselves

• More indirect taxation tax on consumption

e.g. gabelle: tax on salt

Agency?
T1: Porchnev-class struggle===>agency of the peasants

T2: Mousnier-corporatism ===>agency away from the peasants

• 'class' in doubt in a cooperate society
• Across social grouping
• Revolts will not be organized with peasants alone
• Order
volt if you wish.)

vence; Dauphiné;)
s
 T2: Mousnier-corporatism ===>agency away from the peasants
• 'class' in doubt in a cooperate society
• Across social grouping
• Revolts will not be organized with peasants alone
• Order
• Honor

T3: Bercé-community
• Causes are seen as evasion of communal values
• From top to the bottom: Local nobility agrees on communal values
• Local nobility to negotiate with the government
• Community vs. outsiders
• Carnival can be like revolts; carnival can produce revolts; Revolts can be carnivals;

Popular culture
Popular culture:
Not mass culture; the world view and action of people who are lower down society;
• Keys: Community honor; Community regulation by themselves

1. Honor
• Individual Reputation
Women: sexual honor
Men: control of women; virtues
• Geographical idea
Solidarity and dignity: community has its own rights

2. Festivals
• Orality
• Ritual nature and symbolic content
Carnivals: world turned upside down
Powerful===>weak; weak===>powerful;
Ridiculing and criticizing social order

Not necessarily dangerous?

People are thinking about order
Affirming the order
• Local Politics represented in festivals
• Authority: 16th worried about the subversive nature of the carnivals; carry emotions; p

• E.g. Charivari:
Community should work in a particular way
People exert the justice to show disapprovement
Communal honor and communal justice

3. Personal honor (Beik)

• Revolts of personal honor
potential to revolts;
 Community should work in a particular way
People exert the justice to show disapprovement
Communal honor and communal justice

3. Personal honor (Beik)

• Revolts of personal honor
• Fight in public to defend
• Duels
• Strong sense of personal dignity that can expand into honor of a community

4. Not corporation: exclusion (Beik)

Culture of retribution

5. Religion

Motive
1. T1: conservative actors (Mousnier; Bercé; Pillorget;)
• Demand for order and justice
• Not welcome change and want to push it back
e.g. taxation;
e.g. increase with state building
e.g. people looking back at the past: in some periods there would be a king that would be ju
• If the king does know, he would fix it: not blaming the king yet until the change in 18th

2. T2: everybody has the same idea for community (Berce; Pillorget)
3. T3: noncommunal; class should be regarded (Beik)
• Focus In town
• People not share the same communal value
e.g. local leaders not necessarily see tax collectors as intrusion to the local society
• Claim that they mistakenly take Factional conflict for solidarity of local order
take side to fight own battles?
• Not local v.s. central, but more going on in locality
e.g. lyon
Magistrates choose the tax to hurt consumers rather than merchants

Questions
• Nature of group identity?
• Different types of power relations
• Suggests Contemporary Reaction and long-standing cultural practices (e.g. honor)
• Role of honor
Belongs to what group? What honor to protect?
• Who has the agency?
Doubt for Blindly following leaders (e.g. negotiation)
ust
h century
• Role of honor
Belongs to what group? What honor to protect?
• Who has the agency?
Doubt for Blindly following leaders (e.g. negotiation)