French Peasant Revolution Essay

The main question of this thesis is that how the socio-economic changes caused the French peasant revolts during the French wars of religion?

To understand why the peasant revolts happened in this way, we need to look at the economic and social conditions of the French peasantry in the late sixteenth century. In order to fulfill it, I will look at the peasant revolts through two macro and micro perspectives in the framework of the comparative economic history. The 16th and 17th century Europe was an agrarian society with the peasant economy. In peasant economy, the labor and agricultural output were the capital, for this reason, there were extreme anti-military spirit in all three peasant revolt waves. Understanding the peasant economy is

For macro-approach, I use the Immanuel Wallerstein famous theory of the Modern world system. His idea offers a good framework for better understanding of the historical changes and making of the capitalist economy. Basically, Modern world system is the synthesis of Marxist and Braudelien economic history based on the “longue durée” processes. With an emphasis on the Marxist idea of accumulation and labor process, this theory provides a decent context for the conceptualizing the peasant revolts both on the local and national scales. At the end, I take into account the basis of this transition as the main ground of all changes. The smallest unit in this process is related to the economic life of peasants.

The peasant economy has some characteristics which describe this mode of rural production. The common economic characteristics of peasant household agricultural production is about the ways by which the peasant families make use of the resources at their disposal, for production, for

He has an ambivalent attitude to the peasantry. In his famous book “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Karl Marx formulates the peasant economy as a mode of production among the peasants which instead of bringing them together, isolated them from one another and it happens through the lack of good means of communication and poverty. For Marx, each peasant family is almost self-sufficient because they directly produce their needs for consumption and saving in an exchange with nature than in dealing with society. The economy of a village has the same features because the combination of peasant families makes a village. He sees the lack of division of labor in the cultivation of the field, the small holding, lack of applicable science and absence of proper social relationship as the backwardness of the peasant economy. He adds that the peasant economic conditions of existence separate their mode of life, their interest, and their culture from the other classes. The interconnection among them just comes from their attempt to maintain themselves. Their interest begets no community, no national and no political organization bond. They do not form a class for this reason for their political life, they need to be represented. The peasants shape an economic class than the social and political class. For Marx and Engels, the peasants were a fossil representative of an old and reactionary social