French peasantry
group · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
petty proprietors · the French peasantry · the peasant
in the texts
Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England
The rural population of France described as holding sympathetic memory of the Napoleonic tradition.
But his unrivalled power of analysis did not reveal to Tocqueville the intellectual capacity of Louis Napoleon, at any rate as a conspirator, or the hold which the Napoleonic tradition had on the memory and the sympathy of the French peasantry and of the French army.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The rural cultivating class of France, subject to feudal dues and increasingly hostile to the nobility.
There were other causes, besides the tendency of judicial decision in the King’s Courts, which helped to prevent the growth in this country of that spirit of discontent which exploded among the French peasantry in 1789 and 1790.
But the French peasant, holding by servile tenure, never compared himself with the farmers of the domain land of the nobles, who were a very special class, the metayers, not only hiring their land from the lord, but having it stocked by him.
Many causes, and among them that personal friction which is the despair of all who would make History a science, had produced among the peasantry such intensity of hatred to their lord that they were ready to find allies against him anywhere—before the Revolution, in the despotic King and his usurping agents—after the Revolution, in the Convention, in the Jacobin Club, in the Directory, in the Fir …