SMALL FARMS: FEROCIOUS REPRESSIONS AND "ART DE VIVRE"

"EUROPE MENACED FRANCE, AND FRANCE MENACED PARIS"

-- Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three and

Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution, 1962, influenced this page.

When the Revolution seemed on the verge of defeat its leaders took the extraordinary step of selling in small lots lands confiscated from the Church and émigré nobles so that peasants could buy them. They'd never give them up, making counter-revolution impossible.

Those farms saved the French Revolution — and stalled France's Industrial Revolution

1940

• Industrialization requires low salaries: That, in turn, requires cheap food, mechanized agriculture and large estates. In France, the family tenures due to the Revolution delayed such change until the 1960's.

• Such land transfers did not appear everywhere, farmers fell into debt and holdings could become too small as heirs divided them, but they transformed France in a way that took place nowhere else. 

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The mutation explains fully or in part...

• The volunteers who flocked to the revolutionary armies:

         The battle of Jemappes, November 6, 1792 by Raymond Desvarreux-Larpenteur, 1913 / zoom

Confiscating and selling lands of the Church and émigrés has nothing to do with "barefoot workers stopping a peddler's wheelbarrow offering shoes for sale, clubbing together and buying fifteen pairs of shoes for our soldiers." But it is one reason for the multitude of volunteers who without uniforms, experience or strategy simply rushed forward to win this decisive victory. Austrian conscripts who had been enrolled by force and who were controlled by fighting in line, turned and ran. 

-- Barefoot workers: Victor Hugo, Ninety-three.

  French and Austrian armies, Eric Hobsbawm

• The end of famines and peasant revolts.

• The rarity of emigration.

• Urban insurrections and barbaric repressions, tragedies specific to France: Because industrialists' relatively limited profits made yielding to workers harder?

Barricade, rue de la Mortellerie, June 1848, by Ernest Meissonnier after a sketch made on the spot / zoom

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Those farms meant small-scale manufacturing, which explains... 

• The luxury production that continued the quality the royal court initiated:

    By RBW, illustrator for American Vogue in the 1930's -1950's / courtesy of the Countess Fabienne Bouêt-Willaumez

René Bouët-Willaumez (1900-1979), a French count, observes parvenus with a touch of irony.  

• Respect for intellectuals:

• Cafés where one could stay all day for the price of a cup of coffee:

    A Saint-Germain café in the 1950's by Foujita, Musée Carnavalet

• Traditional values, outstanding cuisine, long déjeuners and a life that for the middle classes was usually pleasant and calm:

 French Impressionist school, 1890's, anonymous / antiquarian sale on the web 

The rural exodus of the 1960's* and globalization
erased those farms,

and only traces of the society they engendered remain.

*Peasants made up 35% of the French population in 1946 and are less then 2% today (The Revolt of the Tractors, editorial, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2024). 

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Next,

Rebels and their demand for social justice