”WE SHOULD DO OUR UTMOST TO CUT OFF THE HEADS OF RICH MEN”: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Had anything like that ever happened before? Did earlier periods witness revolutionary action that resulted in substantial leveling of income or wealth inequality? We will see that the twentieth century was—once again—anomalous in this regard. Although premodern societies certainly did not suffer from a shortage of popular uprisings in city and countryside, they did not normally appear to have altered the distribution of material resources. In much the same way as mass mobilization warfare, revolution as a leveling device had few antecedents in the preindustrial age.
Among earlier challenges to traditional authority, the French Revolution holds pride of place in the popular imagination and would seem a particularly promising candidate among potentially equalizing conflicts. France near the end of the ancien régime was characterized by high levels of wealth and income disparities. The best estimate we have puts the country’s income Gini coefficient at around 0.59, close to England’s at the time, although the margin of error (from 0.55 to 0.66) is wide. Gross inequities in the tax system helped shaped the disposable income distribution. The nobility owned a quarter of the land but was exempt from the main direct tax, the taille, and successfully resisted payment of newer taxes such as the capitation tax of 1695 and the vingtième of 1749. Much the same was true of the clergy, which held another tenth of the land and also received the dime, no longer a tithe but variable and generally substantial. Direct taxes were thus in effect almost entirely borne by the urban bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Moreover, inasmuch as richer bourgeois were able to escape taxation by purchasing titles and offices, the actual burden fell largely on smaller farmers and workers. Among indirect taxes, the salt tax (gabelle) was one of the most onerous, levied by imposing compulsory purchases of salt on individual households, which again hit the poorer harder than the rich. The overall fiscal extraction system was therefore highly regressive.
In addition, peasants owed seigneurial contributions to nobles and clergy, such as corvée labor and other obligations in time and money. Only a minority of farmers held enough land to get by—although even those arrangements technically counted merely as tenancies—whereas the majority of the rural population worked as sharecroppers and landless laborers. In the decades leading up to the Revolution, conditions worsened further owing to population pressure and the creeping reintroduction of feudal rights as well as the curtailment of pasture on common lands that excluded poor farmers who owned only a few animals and struggled to support them. This led to pauperization in the countryside and the growth of an urban proletariat. Land rents doubled between 1730 and 1780, and the price of agricultural goods rose faster than agricultural wages; urban workers were also adversely affected.1
The dismantling of the ancien régime and its institutions, which unfolded in stages between 1789 and 1795, entailed several measures that benefited the poor over the rich. In August 1789 the National Constituent Assembly declared “personal” feudal rights abolished, even though formal implementation dragged on into the following year. Although rents were still due, tenants increasingly resisted payment, and riots spread in late 1789 and early 1790. Peasants raided seigneurial chateaux and burned records. This unrest was accompanied by widespread violent agitation against (indirect) taxes, causing tax collection to stall. In June 1790, all personal feudal dues (such as corvée) were finally abolished without compensation, and common lands were ordered to be distributed among local residents. Consecutive Parisian assemblies repeatedly responded to rural unrest by abolishing the most unpopular levies, the onerous dime among them. However, the addition of new taxes to replace them did not generally reduce the burden on the peasantry and caused renewed resentment. Although “real” feudal rights (such as annual dues) nominally remained in force unless peasants bought them out by indemnifying landlords at twenty to twenty-five times the annual rate, this compromise arrangement was rejected by peasants, who withheld payments or rebelled. In 1792, a major flare-up of rural violence resulted in antifeudal attacks in large parts of the country that became known as the “guerre aux châteaux.”
After Parisians stormed the Tuileries in August 1792, the Legislative Assembly felt empowered to address rural violence with more sweeping reform: all landholders now became proprietors unless landlords were able to produce actual title deeds, which were rare in arrangements governed by customary rights. Even this final provision was done away with by the Jacobins in July 1793. At least on paper, this amounted to a major redistribution of wealth, for the millions of peasants who had paid fixed rents had technically been tenants even if they de facto operated as smallholders. By this reckoning, as much as 40 percent of all land in France—land that had already been held but not legally owned by peasants—was formally privatized in 1792. What mattered more in terms of income was the abolition of any feudal dues linked to these lands. It is important to note that from the very beginning, the antifeudal measures of August 1789, rural reform had been driven by the assemblies’ concerns about the “threat from below”—that is, crowd action. Peasant activism, which became increasingly violent, and metropolitan reform legislation were intertwined in “a dialectic process that led, not to compromise, but to a mutual radicalization.”2
The confiscation and redistribution of land more forcefully promoted leveling. In November 1789, the National Assembly expropriated all Church property in France for use by the nation, primarily to address budget shortfalls without having to institute new taxes. These lands, known as biens nationaux, were sold off in large tracts of land, a practice that benefited the urban bourgeoisie and wealthier farmers. Even so, the peasantry is estimated to have acquired some 30 percent of these properties. Starting in August 1792, the land of nobles who had emigrated was likewise seized and sold, this time in smaller lots and expressly to benefit the poor, a move that reflected the more egalitarian aspirations of the Legislative Assembly. Peasants consequently ended up with some 40 percent of those lands as well. That confiscated land could be purchased by paying in installments spread out over twelve years helped those of more modest means but ultimately worked to the advantage of all buyers once rapid inflation greatly eroded interest on the installments. Overall, however, redistribution was quite limited in scale: merely 3 percent of all farmland in France was acquired by peasants in this way, and even nobles and émigrés were able secretly to participate in purchases via middlemen. The leveling effects of land confiscation, though real, should thus not be overrated.3
Inflation was fueled by assignats, paper money issued in ever larger quantities from 1790 onward. Initially backed by confiscated Church assets, assignats came to be churned out in such huge quantities that five years later they had lost more than 99 percent of their value. The effect on inequality was mixed. Inflation imposed an indiscriminate tax on the population that was effectively regressive, for the rich would hold proportionately less of their wealth in cash than others. At the same time, it also benefited the less wealthy in several ways. As already mentioned, it reduced the real price of farmland and livestock paid for in installments. Fixed money rents, which increasingly replaced sharecropping, worked to the advantage of tenants. Inflation also wiped out rural debt, favoring the poor. At the other end of the spectrum, creditors of the ancien régime were partly repaid in devalued assignats, unless debts were voided outright. Those who had bought offices lost out by being recompensed in depreciated currency, a practice that strongly disfavored the elite. Top offices, which were usually purchased by nobles, represented most of the capital tied up in and lost in the venality business.4
The established wealth elite was hit hard, not merely by the abolition of feudal obligations they used to be owed but also, and especially, by the nationalization of Church property and the subsequent confiscation of the estates of émigrés and political opponents. Mass mobilization for war in 1793 prompted extraordinary levies: in Paris and various departments, forced loans were imposed on the rich in order to raise the necessary funds. Local revolutionary committees drew up lists of suitable payers, and dues were payable within a month. Additional locally created taxes were employed as an illegal yet effective way of soaking the rich. During the “Terror,” thousands were imprisoned under suspicion of hoarding or violating price controls. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone handed down 181 death sentences for such transgressions. That the assets of the condemned fell to the state provided a powerful incentive for singling out rich targets. The quote in the section heading is taken from a speech by the delegate Joseph Le Bon, who urged that “among those charged with crimes against the Republic we should do our utmost to cut off the heads of rich men who are generally known to be guilty.”5
Nobles left France in growing numbers. In the end, 16,000 of them, more than one in ten, had departed for safer shores. Outright persecution commenced in 1792. The following year, the government ordered the public burning of patents of nobility and of feudal entitlement documents. Only a relatively small number of nobles lost their lives: 1,158 of the 16,594 individuals sentenced to death by extraordinary courts belonged to the nobility, representing less than 1 percent of that order. However, their share in the condemned went up over time, culminating in the “Great Terror.” Of the 1,300 decapitated corpses buried over the course of just six weeks in June and July 1794 in two pits in a former monastic garden, the Garden of Picpus, off Paris’s eastern gate, more than a third were the remains of nobles, including princes, princesses, dukes and assorted ministers, generals, and high officials, whereas many of the others had been commoners in noble employ.6
Those who stayed in France and survived counted not only their blessings but also their losses. In Count Dufourt de Cheverny’s account,
I had lost in the first three years of the Revolution, twenty-three thousand livres of income in seigneurial dues . . . my pension from the royal treasury granted by Louis XV, and several other items . . . . I had had to suffer incursions by national guards, enormous taxes imposed by the Jacobins, all sorts of requisitions, seizure, under the name of patriotic donation, of what was left of my silverware . . . . My four months imprisonment had involved excessive expenditure . . . . My best trees were taken for the navy, and not a week went by when I did not have to take my requisitioned grain to military stores in Blois . . . . I make no mention of . . . the burning of all feudal title-deeds . . .7
Insofar as the Revolution hurt the rich and benefited the poor, some leveling can be expected to have occurred. But although the overall direction of this trend is clear, its scale is difficult to determine. Regarding the income distribution, the abolition of feudal encumbrances ought to have had a positive effect on workers and a negative one on landlords. Mass mobilization in warfare also tended to raise real wages. By one measure, real wages of adult male rural laborers rose by a third between 1789 and 1795. In one western French department, the share of harvesters in the crops increased from a sixth to a fifth. There are also indications of rising real incomes of urban workers: between the 1780s and the 1800s, wages rose more quickly than grain prices did.8
Table 8.1 Income shares in France, 1780–1866
Income share |
1780 |
1831 |
1866 |
Top 10 percent |
51–53 |
45 |
49 |
Bottom 40 percent |
10–11 |
18 |
16 |
Regarding the distribution of wealth, changes in the distribution of landholding likewise point to an attenuation of inequality. In one new department where clergy and nobles had held 42 percent of the land in 1788, their share dropped to 12 percent by 1802 even as the share of peasants grew from 30 percent to 42 percent—yet this also suggests that intermediate groups benefited the most. In a sample from the southwest of France, the share of farmers whose holdings were insufficient to support them without recourse to outside employment or charity fell from 46 percent to 38 percent, and that of those who had sustainable holdings increased from 20 percent to 32 percent. In the longer term, these transfers consolidated small farms and smallholdings and ensured their survival despite enduring conditions of poverty. Reform fell far short of a radical redistribution of landed wealth. In many departments, the greatest landowners under Napoleon belonged to the same families as before the Revolution, and between a fifth and a quarter of land lost to confiscations was eventually repurchased by family members. Only a tenth of all land of the nobility was permanently lost to that group.9
Christian Morrisson and Wayne Snyder’s somewhat heroic attempt to estimate changes in the French income distribution points to a decrease at the top and growth at the bottom of the income distribution (Table 8.1).10
One problem is that this comparison is limited to income distribution within the French labor force and thus excludes the shares of elite rentiers. Moreover, and perhaps more important, these estimates do not allow us to distinguish between the distributive consequences of the revolutionary period (1789–1799) and the subsequent Napoleonic monarchy and Bourbon restoration periods. This makes it impossible to ascertain whether or to what extent initial leveling—in the period of intense reform activity in the first half of the 1790s—had been more pronounced than these figures suggest. For example, followers of Napoleon bought up land that might otherwise have been available to the poor, and under the Bourbons 25,000 families, many of them nobles, were indemnified for revolutionary expropriations. It is very well possible that the income distribution had temporarily become more compressed in the 1790s than it was a generation later.11
That said, there is no indication that the French Revolution resulted in anything even remotely comparable to the leveling brought about by the major twentieth-century revolutions. Changes in landownership, wealth concentration, and income distribution occurred at the margins. This was by no means trivial to those affected: if correct, a 70 percent relative increase in the income share of the bottom 40 percent was bound to represent a significant improvement for the poorest elements of French society. But this process was far from transformative overall. This finding meshes well with the comparatively moderate degree of violence directed against the propertied classes: however much it may have scandalized conservative contemporary observers, a revolution that by later standards turned out to be quite restrained in its means and ambitions yielded correspondingly less leveling.
”GIVE ALL THINGS TO GOD FOR ALL TO USE IN COMMON”: THE TAIPING REBELLION
In the context of this survey, one particular nineteenth-century revolutionary movement merits special attention for two reasons: its ostensibly communitarian aspirations and the immensity of violence it generated. From 1850 to 1864, large parts of eastern and southern China were engulfed by the Taiping Rebellion. The bloodiest conflict in history up to that point, it is thought to have claimed some 20 million lives. An uprising against the Qing state, it was fueled by millenarian expectations of a “Heavenly Kingdom.” Launched by the failed aspiring bureaucrat Hong Xiuquan, whose visions and program combined Chinese traditions of popular protest with Christian elements, it drew on a wide range of popular resentments from resistance to Manchu rule and hatred of state officials to ethnic tensions. Starting out in southwest China in 1850 and 1851 as an uprising mostly of peasants but also of charcoal-burners and miners, it quickly snowballed into a massive armed insurrection of 500,000 by 1852 and perhaps as many as 2 million the next year. What has been called a “vast army of the poor” wended its way through the economic heartland of China and soon seized Nanjing, which was chosen as the new capital of the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. Establishing control over tens of millions of people, the Taiping leadership promoted the worship of God and, more mundanely, the liberation of the Han from foreign domination. This was joined by a social agenda: Because only God was considered to be capable of owning anything at all, the notion of private property was at least notionally rejected. Celebration of universal brotherhood was meant to gather all as if into a single family. These lofty sentiments found their purest expression in a document first published in early 1854, “The Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty.” It was based on the premise that
all people on this earth are as the family of the Lord their God on High, and when people of this earth keep nothing for their private use but give all things to God for all to use in common, then in the whole land every place shall have equal shares, and everyone be clothed and fed. This was why the Lord God expressly sent the Taiping Heavenly Lord to come down and save the world.12
Ideally, all land was to be divided into equal shares for all adult men and women and half shares for children and was to be “cultivated in common.” Land was to be graded according to its productivity and shared out evenly so as to achieve perfect equality. If there was not enough land for all to receive standardized shares, people were to be moved to locations where it was available. Each family was expected to rear five chickens and two sows. Every twenty-five families would set up a central treasury to pool and store their surpluses beyond subsistence. This earthly paradise of strict egalitarianism had distant historical roots in earlier notions of “equal-fields” systems but, oddly, failed to provide for periodic redistribution to preserve equality over time.
Yet this oversight, if so it was, scarcely mattered—for the simple reason that there is no sign that this program was ever implemented or indeed even widely known at the time. Although some homes and estates of the wealthy were raided in the early stages of the Taiping advance and some of the loot shared with local villagers, most of it went to the rebel organization. These activities never developed into a broader redistributive scheme, let alone systematic land reform or real-life agrarian communism. Faced with stiffening Qing resistance and eventual counterattacks, the Taiping were primarily concerned with maintaining revenue flows to fund their own operations. As a result, traditional landlord–tenant relations remained largely intact. At most, some change occurred at the margins. In Jiangnan, where numerous Qing land and tax records had been destroyed and many landlords had either fled or were no longer able to collect rents, the new regime briefly experimented with having peasants pay taxes directly to state agents. This arrangement proved short-lived. Taxes might have been lower than before, and it had become easier for tenants to resist demands for high rents. In both gross and net terms, some income deconcentration is likely to have occurred as the Taiping withheld Qing-style privileges from the wealthy. Faced with stiffened tenant resistance, and for once expected to pay their full share of taxes topped up by special levies, landlords saw their incomes come under downward pressure.
But all this fell far short of any systematic leveling as envisioned in the utopian schemes that were never put into practice—or may not even have been intended to be. The latter might be signaled by the fact that on top of generally maintaining traditional land tenure arrangements, the Taiping leadership eagerly embraced hierarchical stratification by claiming a lavish lifestyle replete with harems and palaces. The Qing’s violent destruction of the Taiping in the 1860s, which cost millions of lives from combat and famine, did not suppress an egalitarian experiment, for there was none. Neither communitarian doctrine nor extensive military mobilization of the peasantry appear to have produced significant leveling, nor could it have been sustained had it indeed been attempted. Prior to 1917, the gap between ideological goals and preindustrial realities was too wide to be bridged by force.13
”FOR THE RUSTICS SOUGHT TO BETTER THEMSELVES BY FORCE”: RURAL REVOLT
Much the same is true of most popular uprisings in history. Most people for most of recorded history were agriculturalists, and the distribution of wealth and income in any given premodern society was in large part determined by the configuration of landownership and control over agricultural products. Any survey of leveling by revolutionary means must thus pay particular attention to the effects of rural revolts. Such events were generally very common: apparent variation across space and time may well have more to do with the nature of the evidence than with actual conditions. Yet despite their frequency, it is rare to encounter rural revolts that turned into genuine revolutionary movements that then achieved a noticeable degree of leveling.14
The most promising cases are, once again, of relatively recent origin. Land reform in Mexico in the wake of the revolution of 1910 is one of them. Mexico had always experienced a great deal of resource inequality, going back to the Aztec period. In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors received huge grants of land and forced labor. The war of independence from 1810 to 1821 merely replaced rich peninsulares with Creole and Mestizo elites, and concentration of landownership kept growing in the later stages of the nineteenth century. The wealthy colluded with the state to acquire more land and profited from increasing commercialization. Disparities on the eve of the revolution were thus quite extreme. Altogether, 6,000 estates, controlled by 1,000 families and corporations, comprised more than half of all land in a country of 16 million, two-thirds of whom worked in the agricultural sector. Most rural residents were almost or completely landless, half of them smallholders who had precarious rights to land and the other half employed on large estates where they owed heavy rents and labor services. Debt tied peons to the land. In the central state of Mexico, only 0.5 percent of household heads owned property, only 856 people owned land, and sixty-four hacendados among them held more than half of all private land. Both economic wealth and political power were concentrated within a tiny ruling class.15
The revolution, which began as a struggle among competing elite factions and did not originally feature plans for land reform, prompted the mobilization of rural forces that pursued their own redistributive agenda. Armed groups took over haciendas. Most notably, in the south, the peasant armies led by Emilio Zapata occupied large estates and redistributed land. Violent rural revolt created conditions on the ground that had to be addressed by central authorities whose influence had waned. In acknowledging the supremacy of public over private interests, the new constitution of 1917 legitimized expropriations. These were officially accepted only when peasant armies needed to be pacified: local violence rather than top-down legislation was the key driver of redistribution. Even so, formal allocations of land to the poor proceeded only slowly in the 1920s, and landlords obtained concessions such as caps on expropriation claims. Most of the land redistributed between 1915 and 1933 was of poor quality. Up to 1933, less than 1 percent of all land was reallocated per year, and less than a quarter of that land was actual cropland. Landlords were able to seek injunctions, and fear of foreign intervention prevented more sweeping seizure of large estates.
The fallout of the Great Depression—unemployment and declining incomes—finally ramped up the pressure, and the rate of redistribution increased under the more radical government of Lázaro Cárdenas, who also nationalized the oil industry in 1938. Forty percent of arable land was expropriated between 1934 and 1940, and peons now also qualified for assignments. Land was handed over to tenants, workers, and land-poor peasants, organized in collectives (ejidos), but was farmed in parcels. Once again peasant mobilization on the ground provided the necessary impetus for these measures. As a result, by 1940, half of all land had been covered by land reform, and half of the rural poor had benefited. Ten years later, the share of landowners had increased to more than half of the population, up from 3 percent in 1910, and by 1968, two-thirds of all farmland had been transferred. This drawn-out process illustrates the obstacles to large-scale redistribution and leveling in an electoral democracy and the importance of shocks—rural violence and later also the Great Depression—in jump-starting or accelerating redistributive action. Although Mexico did not undergo anything like the radical restructuring that was typical of communist revolutions or takeovers, peasant mobilization created and sustained momentum for redistribution in the face of establishment resistance. Even Cárdenas’s more activist government critically relied on this input.16
Similar developments can be observed in 1950s Bolivia. A revolution in 1951 and 1952 was directed against oligarchic power that had severely oppressed both the indigenous peasantry and Spanish speakers. Most Indians worked as serfs on large estates or lived in communities that had forfeited their best arable land to estates. In the course of the uprising, organized peasants occupied large estates and burned hacienda buildings, prompting absentee owners to abandon their holdings. Subsequent agrarian reform in 1953 that provided for the expropriation of poorly managed large estates and the scaling back of others was de facto often just a recognition of processes that were already well under way. Large estates that had covered more than half of all farmland were taken over by tenants and nearby peasants, and more than half of the poor consequently enjoyed improved access to land. But violent resistance does not always succeed. The communist-led Salvadoran peasant uprising in January 1932 failed in a matter of days and provoked the army into massacring large numbers of peasants, an event known as the matanza or “slaughter,” and subsequent palliative reform measures remained feeble at best. In fact, successful peasantry-based revolutions have been rare even in the recent past. I discuss the critical role played by violence, or the threat of violence, in encouraging land reform and the failure of most peaceful attempts in chapter 12.17
Moving back from the recent history of developing countries into the premodern period, we find that Chinese history has been particularly rich in recorded peasant revolts. Kent Gang Deng has surveyed no fewer than 269 instances of what he defines as major peasant rebellions that occurred over 2,106 years of Chinese history, from the fall of the Qin to the end of the Qing dynasties. “Equality” was repeatedly promoted as a goal, especially concerning land ownership, and the redistribution of wealth and land featured among the measures taken by rebel groups. Even if most rebellions were unsuccessful, they could serve as a catalyst for change by encouraging tax reform or land redistribution. In those cases when they managed to overthrow an established regime, they acted as what Deng calls “the terminator of the corrupt state apparatus” and a redistributor of wealth. I return to this issue in the next chapter in the context of state collapse and its leveling effects.18
At the same time, it merits attention that even though leveling agenda were explicitly advanced by rebels, concrete change could be minimal or absent even in cases of success. The movement led by Li Zicheng is a good example. A rebel leader supposedly of shepherd origin, he came to command large armies drawn largely from the peasantry and helped bring down the Ming dynasty. He briefly held Beijing as a self-styled emperor in 1644 before being destroyed by the advancing Manchus. Although he was said to disdain wealth and planned to seize and redistribute the fortunes of the wealthy and even equalize landownership, nothing came of this. As we have seen, much the same was true of the more massive and longer-lasting Taiping rebellion two centuries later.19
China stands out for the unique time-depth of its historical record of rural revolt. Evidence from other ancient societies is much sparser. Perhaps not by accident, in the slave-owning societies of ancient Greece and Rome, slave uprisings and cognate events rather than peasant revolts appear in the sources. In principle, the freeing of slaves on a large scale would have served as a very potent leveling mechanism: in slave-rich environments, slaves embodied a large amount of the capital owned by the elite, and the sudden loss of that capital would have flattened the overall distribution of wealth. Equalization in the Old South in the wake of the American Civil War, described in chapter 6, offers powerful testimony to this effect. Yet this did not normally happen. The reported escape of more than 20,000 Athenian slaves after a Spartan invasion in 413 BCE certainly resulted in substantial losses for the wealthy but was an opportunistic response to interstate warfare and not a revolt in a narrow sense. Some leveling must have occurred when the Messenian helots—communal slaves held in serflike conditions by the Spartan warrior-citizen class—were set free in 370 BCE by foreign intervention: yet once again, this was not the result of autonomous helot action. In fact, a previous helot uprising in 462 BCE had failed. Two large uprisings of slaves in Roman Sicily (about 136–132 and 104–101 BCE) had some potential for leveling as the attempted creation of independent slave “kingdoms” would have deprived large owners of their estates and incomes. But neither of them succeeded, nor did the famous Spartacus rebellion in Italy in 73 to 71 BCE.
Violent action by certain groups in the later Roman empire have sometimes been read as signs of rural unrest or revolt with equalizing aspirations. However, modern identifications of the circumcelliones of Roman North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE as some sort of “Jacquerie” lack an empirical basis beyond hostile contemporary rhetoric that cast them as a menace to society—claims that “rural rebels are roused up against their landowners” and “notes of credit were extorted from creditors and given back to the debtors” represent the two principal surviving allegations of class warfare. All we can be sure of is that this group consisted of violent itinerant harvesters who were embroiled in Christian sectarian conflict at the time of St. Augustine. The Bagaudae (or Bacaudae) of Roman Gaul are only a marginally more promising case: they first appear as rebels in sources of the third century CE and reemerge in the fifth, clearly associated with crisis and the weakening of Roman rule. They may simply have sought to fill power vacuums by asserting or trying to assert local control: there is not much to support notions of peasant revolt or class conflict, even if the scant sources have at times been made to look that way.20
In Europe, reports of peasant uprisings begin to flow freely in the late Middle Ages. Complemented by numerous urban revolts, they continued well into the early modern period. One study counts no fewer than around sixty peasant rebellions and some 200 urban risings in late medieval Germany alone, and a broader survey of medieval Italy, Flanders, and France gathers a much larger number of instances. The Flemish peasant revolt of 1323 to 1328 was the biggest rural movement prior to the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 and stands out for the unusual scale of its initial success. Peasant armies, at first allied to urban constituencies, drove off nobles and knights; they also exiled aristocrats and officials. By the time the rebellious citizen of Bruges captured the Flemish ruler, Count Louis, in 1323 and had him locked up for five months, the rebels were in control of much of Flanders. Conflicting interests of the urban and rural elements of the movement and the threat of French military intervention subsequently led to a peace in 1326 that would have severely limited peasant autonomy and imposed fines and payment of arrears. Because peasant leaders, chosen by popular assemblies, were excluded from the negotiations, these terms were immediately rejected by rural rebels, who proceeded to re-establish authority over most of the country until they were defeated in battle by the French in 1328. Just how much leveling occurred under peasant control remains an open question. They seized and redistributed some of the land of the exiles and set up their own governance with taxation and courts.
And the commoners rebelled against the councilors, aldermen, and lords . . . . They elected captains for their fortresses and against the law formed squadrons. They marched out and captured all the councilors, aldermen, lords, and tax collectors. Once the lords had fled, they destroyed their homes. . . . All who rebelled were commoners and rustics. . . . They burnt all the mansions of the nobility . . . and plundered all their possessions in Western Flanders.21
Later compensation claims did document the orderly expropriation of movable goods and crops that belonged to wealthy landowners. What is less clear is whether allegations of extremism and violence were hostile propaganda or based in fact: occasional references to atrocities that involved killings of the rich are of dubious quality. By contrast, the savagery of reprisal upon the rebels’ defeat at Cassel, which cost more than 3,000 peasants’ lives, is well documented. The victorious French cavalry immediately started massacring civilians, and rebel leaders were apprehended and executed:
After the victory the glorious monarch of France did not look on these matters favorably; rather because of God’s omnipotence by which kings rule . . . he burnt villages and massacred the rebels’ wives and children to leave a lasting memory of his vengeance against their crimes and rebellions.
Rapid pacification followed, accompanied by crushing demands for arrears and indemnities. In a sense the rebellion had failed due to its own success: a badly shaken elite organized an international crusade with papal blessing to crush this movement before it could entice peasants in other regions to follow the Flemish example. This offers an early but powerful example of the forces of repression mobilized by armed resistance of primary producers. Under these circumstances, sustainable leveling was not a viable outcome.22
The same was true of the “Jacquerie” of 1358 in northern France. It differed greatly from the Flemish uprising in its short duration of just two weeks and ostensible lack of organizational structure. Peasants attacked and destroyed castles and big houses of the nobility until they were put down by mounted knights in the battle of Mello. Elite sources revel in the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the rural mob, topped by Jean de Bel’s notorious account of how a knight was roasted on a spit in front of his wife and children.
Going forth with their arms and standards, they overran the countryside. They killed, slaughtered, and massacred without mercy all the nobles whom they could find, even their own lords. . . . They levelled the houses and fortresses of the nobles to the ground and . . . they delivered the noble ladies and their little children upon whom they came to an atrocious death.
Yet although we cannot be sure how the peasants actually comported themselves, there are no doubts about the response of the ruling class:
For the knights and nobles recovered their strength and, eager to avenge themselves, united in force. Overrunning many country villages, they set most of them on fire and slew miserably all the peasants, not merely those whom they believed to have done them harm, but all they found.23
However violent they may have been in practice, local risings of this sort stood no chance of addressing entrenched inequalities. Even partial exceptions were relatively few in number. The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for instance, was ostensibly a failure. Triggered by the imposition of new taxes to fund the war in France, at a more fundamental level it was driven by the people’s desire to protect gains from the rising cost of labor triggered by the Black Death—gains the elite sought to contain with the help of labor statutes and feudal constrictions. The movement was quickly put down, although not before rebels had taken the Tower of London, ransacked palaces and mansions in the capital, personally confronted King Richard II, and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice, among other luminaries—and not before risings had occurred across much of the country, though mostly in the east. Whether or not the rebels really
planned much more radical and merciless evils: they determined not to give way until all the nobles and magnates of the realm had been completely destroyed,
as Henry Knighton tendentiously averred, nothing of the sort came to pass. It was all over in a few weeks: rebel leaders were caught and executed, and well more than a thousand malcontents lost their lives. Yet although Wat Tyler’s alleged demand that “all men should be free and of one condition” had been met with lethal force, and although labor statutes were upheld and serfdom was not abolished, actual living conditions of workers nevertheless continued to improve. This had little to do with the fact that the loathed poll taxes had been dropped. A much more potent violent force than rebel arms ensured further leveling: the recurrent waves of plague that raised the value of labor. As we will see in chapters 10 and 11, bacteria combated inequality much more effectively than any human uprising could hope to do. Both peasant violence and elite counterviolence were dwarfed by the lethality of pandemic disease.24
Only rarely did violence directly lead to improvements, however temporary. When more than 200 mountain villages in Florence’s territory rebelled in 1401 to 1404, their determination—according to Pagolo Morelli’s Ricordi, “there was not a peasant who would not have gone happily to Florence to burn it down”—was sufficient to extract material concessions from the ruling city, most notably tax exemptions and debt forgiveness. Nevertheless, no substantial degree of leveling was likely to have been sustained by such provisions. Likewise, little came of the Rebellion of the Remences in Catalonia in 1462 to 1472 that reacted to growing seigneurial pressures motivated by the labor scarcities caused by the Black Death. Other Spanish revolts in 1450 and in 1484 and 1485 also failed. In 1514, peasants rose in Hungary after they had been mobilized by their overlords for a crusade against the Ottomans. Under the leadership of György Dózsa, they attacked manors and killed landlords; yet military defeat exposed them to the usual wave of terror. The largest of all rural uprisings in western Europe, the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525, which engulfed much of southern Germany, sought to preserve income gains achieved in the wake of the plague and resist seigneurial rights and encroachment on common lands, goals that were reinforced by the spread of antiauthoritarian ideas. Although peasant armies stormed castles and secured supplies from monasteries, their aspirations fell far short of generalized leveling. Key demands focused on tax reductions and the restriction or cessation of seigneurial obligations and serfdom. Radical utopian visions remained marginalized, such as Michael Gaismair’s call for the abolition of all status distinctions and the nationalization of estates and mines. Failure was pervasive and bloody: defeated in a series of battles, as many as 100,000 peasants are believed to have lost their lives in the war and the repression that followed. As so often occurred, elite reaction proved vastly more violent than peasant action itself.25
And so it went. In 1278 Bulgaria may have found itself under the short-lived rule of a “peasant emperor,” the erstwhile swineherd Ivajlo, who had mobilized peasants against Tatar incursions and then removed the sitting ruler. But contrary to hopeful Marxist readings of his revolt as a social movement, modern scholarship has found “no sign that he or his followers protested against social injustices or sought any social reforms”—and in any case, he lasted only a single year. In 1670 and 1671, backed by Cossacks, Stepan Razin, the leader of a massive peasant uprising in southern Russia, disseminated subversive declarations, one of which urged the punishment of the titled elite, the abolition of ranks and privileges, and the promotion of Cossack equality. The movement ended in bloody failure. The same was true of, among many others, Kett’s Rebellion in England in 1549, directed against enclosures that constricted peasants’ livelihood; the Russian Cossack rebellion of 1773 to 1775, largely aimed against intensification of serfdom; the Saxon peasants’ revolt of 1790, born of outrage about noble hunting rights that despoiled fields; the Galician peasant uprising of 1846, directed against feudal obligations; and the Malabar rebellion in India in 1921, likewise launched in resistance to the tightening of landlords’ rights.26
Modern attempts to impose a measure of order on often chaotic events have identified specific popular concerns and engines of revolt. In Italy, France, and Flanders in the late Middle Ages, direct confrontations with landlords remained rare, whereas politically flavored revolts were more common, often provoked by fiscal abuse. The dislocations of the Black Death prompted a surge in uprisings in the second half of the fourteenth century. Sixteenth-century revolts responded to the revival of serfdom. In the seventeenth century, peasants sought to resist states’ fiscal expansion via direct taxes that hit the countryside harder than the cities. Finally, in the late eighteenth century, rural revolt owed much to a growing sense that the removal of surviving servitudes had become overdue. Peasant revolts frequently started out as tax revolts, including the peasant revolt in Flanders in 1323 to 1328, the English peasant uprising of 1381, the “Harelle” in Rouen in 1382, the Transylvanian peasant revolt of 1437, the “Poor Conrad” rebellion in Württemberg in 1514, the Slovenian peasant rebellion of 1515, the Swedish Dacke war in 1542 and 1543, the Finnish Club War of 1595 and 1596, the four French Croquant risings between 1594 and 1707, the Swiss peasant war of 1653, the White Lotus rebellion in China from 1794 to 1804, the Palestinian Peasants’ Revolt of 1834, the Imsul peasant revolt in Korea in 1862, the opening stages of the Romanian peasant revolt of 1906 and 1907, and also the Tambov rebellion against the Soviets in 1920 and 1921. It was an element in the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 and the Donghak peasant revolution in Korea in 1894, and the same is true of the major French, Russian, and Chinese risings in the seventeenth century. This list is as incomplete as it is representative.27
Just like their late medieval antecedents, early modern peasant revolts rarely had any discernible effect on the distribution of income and wealth. The German Peasants’ War bought the south German peasantry concessions that proved beneficial in the long run by constraining the spread of what is known as the “second serfdom”—protections that were to set them apart from rural populations to the north and east which had not joined the risings. The Swiss peasant war of 1653 more immediately resulted in lower taxes and debt relief. Although examples such as these suggest that violent resistance could on occasion make a difference, the general picture is nonetheless clear: more significant leveling was beyond the scope of premodern rural revolts. This was a function of both aspirations and capabilities. As Yves-Marie Bercé has observed, “[v]ery few revolts were successful in seizing the totality of power; in truth, they did not even conceive of doing so.” Indeed, the closer they came to this outcome, as the Flemish peasant movement of the 1320s may arguably have done, the stronger the countervailing forces they were bound to unleash.28
”LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE AND DEATH TO THE WOLVES”: REVOLT IN CITIES AND CITY-STATES
What was true of rural revolts applied even more to urban risings. In most historical settings, cities were embedded in vast rural landscapes, their populations greatly outnumbered by the peasantry. Rulers and nobles could draw on soldiers, arms, and resources from surrounding areas to bring rebellious towns to heel. The bloody crushing of the Paris commune in 1871 is merely one relatively recent example. If urban revolts had any prospect of success, it would have been in self-governing city-states whose local elites could not readily fall back on external resources of repression.
In chapter 6, ancient Greece served as an early example of military mass mobilization and concurrent egalitarianism. This raises the question whether this environment also produced revolutionary movements that aimed for or even achieved overall leveling. Radical visions certainly emerge in plays and utopian texts. In Aristophanes’s comedy “Ekklesiazusai,” staged in Athens in 392 BCE, the Athenian women abolish private property and the family, decreeing equality for all. Four years later, in his “Ploutos,” undeserved wealth is taken away from its owners. Plato, in the “Republic,” was vexed by the idea that there were “not one, but two states, the one of the poor, and the other of rich men,” and his later “Laws” consequently envisages a maximum ratio of nonlanded wealth of 4 to 1 for the richest and poorest citizens. More radical utopians went farther: Euhemeros, writing in the early third century BCE, imagined the island of Panchaia, whose inhabitants owned no private property beyond houses and gardens and mostly received equal supplies, and Iamboulos, later that century, wrote of an Island of the Sun that was completely bereft of private property or family life and characterized by universal equality—and thus happiness.29
In practice, however, nothing of this kind ever seems to have happened among the ancient Greeks. Just as in later periods of history, significant leveling would have required significant force. The most extreme case on record may be a civil war in the major Peloponnesian polis of Argos in 370 BCE, during which 1,200 wealthy citizens were sentenced to death in mock trials and beaten to death with clubs; their assets were confiscated and given to the masses. Yet such gory scenes, with more than a whiff of Mao’s China, were not the norm. As we will see in chapter 12, the record is dominated by land reforms associated with coups but without the large-scale violence we observe in modern revolutionary settings.30
Genuinely radical urban revolts were generally rare in history. One notable case concerns the “zealots” in Thessalonica from 1342 to 1350: popular elements seized control of the city, killed and expropriated aristocrats, and redistributed their wealth. But although hostile sources paint them as extremists, there is no evidence for a program of systematic confiscation or redistribution. Alongside the ancient Greek polis culture, medieval and early modern Italy, with its clusters of often independent city-states, is another leading candidate for more ambitious urban movements. Urban risings were indeed often recorded in this environment. Yet once again, just as rural revolts infrequently confronted landlords directly, urban violence, even if sometimes motivated by economic concerns, rarely targeted capitalists and employers. Riots in response to corruption or professional exclusion were much more common, as were tax revolts. And much like rural risings, even urban revolts with their relatively modest agenda tended to fail. As good an example as any is provided by the well-known Ciompi revolt in Florence in 1378, which was led by textile workers who found themselves excluded from a guild that shaped the labor market in a highly unequal way. Although they managed to take over the city, their demands were modest: incorporation via newly created guilds and a tax on wealth. Even so, the movement was crushed with reactionary bloodshed.31
”THUS THEY WERE ENTIRELY DESTROYED”: OUTCOMES
This is what the Chronique des quatre premiers Valois had to say about the rebellious peasants of the short-lived Jacquerie of 1358—and what proved to be a common theme throughout history. During the 1932 uprising in El Salvador, communist rebels killed at most three dozen people, whereas the military slaughtered thousands during the repression that followed, including women and children: estimates range from 8,000 to 40,000. This outcome should not have been entirely unexpected: right before the start of the revolt one of the rebel leaders, Alfonso Luna, told war minister Joaquin Valdés that “the peasants will win with their machetes the rights you are denying them,” to which the latter replied, “You have machetes; we have machine guns.” Short of capturing what Yves-Marie Bercé called the “totality of power,” no uprising could hope to flatten income and wealth inequality as such, even had this indeed been a goal—which it rarely was. The means of violent expropriation and control required for the great upheavals witnessed in the twentieth century were simply not available to premodern societies. Nor were there firm ideological commitments to this end. Even the much-maligned Jacobins of the French revolutionary “Terror” shied away from wholesale expropriation and equalization. They had no idea what real terror on a national scale would eventually come to look like.32
Deliberate systematic leveling through violent revolt was therefore beyond preindustrial means. Only in the twentieth century do we encounter revolutionaries who wielded both machine guns and radical programs. It was only then that the conclusion of the Chronique des quatre premiers Valois could finally be applied to other side, to lords and landlords—the original 1 percent. Only then could power be exercised pervasively enough, to transformative enough ends, and for long enough for truly substantial leveling to occur. Although the premodern world was no stranger to violent popular dissent, social evolution required a step-up in the capacity for violence and the scope of its application in order to pursue radically equalizing policies, whatever the cost to ruled and rulers alike. But there is a final twist to this story. Even when society was deeply penetrated by ruthless revolutionaries, enforced equality lasted only as long as these regimes were in power and stayed the course. The moment they fell, as in the Soviet Union and its satellites or in Cambodia, or changed track, as in China or Vietnam, inequality of income and wealth rapidly returned. This principle applied even under dramatically different circumstances, as the experience of Russia and China shows: economic collapse and explosive inequality in the former, massive economic growth and a gradual rise of inequality in the latter.33
The kind of leveling brought about by “modern” and often blood-drenched transformative revolution could be maintained only as long as repression—latently or overtly violent in nature—constrained market forces. As soon as this repression is relaxed or removed, equalization is reversed. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the increase of Russia’s market income Gini coefficient from 0.26–0.27 in the 1980s to 0.51 in 2011 and the Chinese rise from 0.23 in 1984 to 0.55 in 2014. Vietnam’s market income Gini may have reached 0.45 by 2010, although lower values are also being cited, and Cambodia’s was estimated as 0.51 in 2009. Development in Cuba has followed the same pattern: after the market income Gini dropped from 0.55 or 0.57 in 1959, the year of the communist revolution, to 0.22 in 1986, it appears to have risen to 0.41 in 1999 and 0.42 in 2004, although one estimate put it already as high as 0.55 by 1995. In the majority of these cases, nominally communist regimes remain in power, but economic liberalization has rapidly driven up inequality. The same has been true of the postcommunist societies of Central Europe. Whether communism’s sacrifice of a hundred million lives bought anything of value is well beyond the scope of this study to contemplate. But one thing is certain—that whatever it so bloodily bought in terms of greater material equality is now well and truly gone.34
1 Inequality: Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 69–70 and 61–70 on prerevolutionary inequality in general. See also Komlos, Hau, and Bourguinat 2003: 177–178 for French eighteenth-century body height differences according to class. Tax system: Aftalion 1990: 12–15; Tuma 1965: 59–60. Access to land: Hoffman 1996: 36–37; Sutherland 2003: 44–45. Aftalion 1990: 32–33 (peasants, worsening); Marzagalli 2015: 9 (rents and prices).
2 Tuma 1965: 56–57, 60–62; Plack 2015: 347–352; Aftalion 1990: 32, 108. Quote: Plack 2015: 347, from Markoff 1996a. See also Horn 2015: 609.
3 Tuma 1965: 62–63; Aftalion 1990: 99–100, 187; Plack 2015: 354–355.
4 Aftalion 1990: 100, 185–186; Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 71–72; Postel-Vinay 1989: 1042; Doyle 2009: 297.
5 Aftalion 1990: 130–131, 159–160.
6 Doyle 2009: 249–310, esp. 287–289, 291–293.
7 Quoted from Doyle 2009: 297–298.
8 Leveling: see esp. Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 70–72 and Aftalion 1990: 185–187. Real wages: Postel-Vinay 1989: 1025–1026, 1030; Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 71.
9 Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 71; Aftalion 1990: 193; Doyle 2009: 294.
10 Table 8.1 from Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 74 table 8. But cf. ibid. 71: “There are no viable indicators that can be used to approximate how the distribution of income changed between 1790 and the 1830s.”
11 Morrisson and Snyder 2000: 69 table 6 put the prerevolutionary top decile income share at 47 percent to 52 percent. Postrevolutionary developments: Tuma 1965: 66; Doyle 2009: 295. For private wealth shares, cf. Piketty 2014: 341.
12 Kuhn 1978: 273–279 (quote: 278); Platt 2012: 18; Bernhardt 1992: 101; Spence 1996: 173 (quote).
13 See Bernhardt 1992: 102 for the lack of evidence of its ever even being mentioned in records from Jiangnan. Relations: Kuhn 1978: 279–280; 293–294; Bernhardt 1992: 103–105, 116.
14 The quote in the section caption is from Thomas Walsingham’s account of the English peasant revolt of 1381, quoted from Dobson 1983: 132.
15 Tuma 1965: 111; Powelson 1988: 218–229; Barraclough 1999: 10–11.
16 Tuma 1965: 121–123; Barraclough 1999: 12; Lipton 2009: 277.
17 Bolivia: Tuma 1965: 118, 120–123, 127–128; Barraclough 1999: 12, 14–16; Lipton 2009: 277. El Salvador: Anderson 1971; and see also at the end of this chapter. On land reform more generally, see herein, chapter 12, pp. 346–359.
18 Deng 1999: 363–376, 247 table 4.4, 251 (quote). Although most recorded rebellions failed, no fewer than forty-eight new regimes were installed by rebels in that period (223–224 table 4.1). Most rebellions were launched by rural unrest.
19 Mousnier 1970: 290.
20 Circumcelliones: Shaw 2011: 630–720 (quotes from Augustine on 695–696), and 828–839 for a dissection of modern historiographical constructs. Bagaudae: e.g., Thompson 1952, rejected by Drinkwater 1992.
21 See Fourquin 1978 on popular rebellion in the Middle Ages; Cohn 2006 on social revolt in the late Middle Ages, with the collection of sources in Cohn 2004; Mollat and Wolff 1973 specifically on the later fourteenth century; Neveux 1997 on the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries; and also Blickle 1988. For the early modern period, see Mousnier 1970 on seventeenth-century France, Russia, and China, and see Bercé 1987 on peasant wars in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. For the Nordic countries in the medieval and early modern periods, see Katajala 2004. Numbers: Blickle 1988: 8, 13 (Germany). Cohn 2006 covers more than a thousand events, about a hundred of which are documented in Cohn 2004. Flanders: TeBrake 1993; see also Cohn 2004: 36–39 for sources. Chronicon comitum Flandrensium, quoted from Cohn 2004: 36–37.
22 TeBrake 1993: 113–119, 123, 132–133; Chronicon comitum Flandrensium, quoted from Cohn 2004: 37.
23 Cohn 2004: 143–200 on the rebellion, and 152 for the roasted knight. Quotes: Chronique of Jean de Venette, in Cohn 2004: 171–172.
24 1381: Hilton 1973; Hilton and Aston, eds. 1984; Dunn 2004. Dobson 1983 collects sources. Quotes: Chronicon Henrici Knighton, in Dobson 1983: 136, and Tyler as paraphrased by the Anonimalle Chronicle, in Dobson 1983: 165.
25 Florence: Cohn 2006: 49–50, with sources in Cohn 2004: 367–370. Spain: Powelson 1988: 87. Germany: Blickle 1988: 30; 1983: 24–25. Gaismair: ibid., 224–225, and cf. 223–236 for other radicals. Failure: 246; 1988: 31.
26 For Bulgaria, see Fine 1987: 195–198 (quote: 196). Cossacks: Mousnier 1970: 226.
27 Middle Ages: Cohn 2006: 27–35, 47. Black Death: esp. Mollat and Wolff 1973, with Cohn 2006: 228–242. Later phases: Bercé 1987: 220.
28 Bercé 1987: 157, 179, 218 (quote).
29 Fuks 1984: 19, 21, 25–26.
30 Argos: Fuks 1984: 30, mostly based on Diodorus 15.57–58.
31 Thessalonica: Barker 2004: 16–21, esp. 19. Italy: Cohn 2006: 53–75. The section heading is taken from Niccola della Turcia’s Cronache di Viterbo, reporting the motto of rebels in Viterbo in 1282 when local nobles were chased out of the city, quoted from Cohn 2004: 48. Causes: Cohn 2006: 74, 97. Ciompi: Cohn 2004: 201–260 for sources.
32 Jacquerie: Anonymous, about 1397–1399, quoted from Cohn 2004: 162. El Salvador: Anderson 1971: 135–136, 92 (quotes). Quote: herein, p. 250. Jacobins: Gross 1997.
33 See Milanovic 2013: 14 fig. 6.
34 Ranis and Kosack 2004: 5; Farber 2011: 86; Henken, Celaya, and Castellanos 2013: 214; but cf. also Bertelsmann Stiftung 2012: 6 for caution and Veltmeyer and Rushton 2012: 304 for a lower Cuban estimate for 2000 (0.38). SWIID registers a decline from 0.44 in 1962 to 0.35 in 1973 and 0.34 in 1978. In view of this, the question whether communism’s effect on social policy in Western nations (see herein, chapter 5, pp. 172–173) has been its most durable contribution to economic equalization is worth considering.