The Condition of the European Peasantry on the Eve of Emancipation

Abstract

In 1770 about two-thirds of the population of Europe, or about 100 million people, lived in lands in which custom and law had organized society into a hierarchical structure of orders. Custom and law had also established a hierarchy of rights and obligations for each order. Vertical mobility was possible but was an exceptional and unimportant perturbation of the rigid social structure. These 100 or so million people lived in France, Savoy, certain cantons of Switzerland, the many states that made up Germany, Denmark, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Poland, Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia, and Russia. Between 70 and 95 percent of them, depending upon the country, lived on the land. They belonged to the lowest order of society, the peasantry. Through the accident of their birth into this order, the society in which they lived denied them certain freedoms and privileges enjoyed by those who belonged to higher orders, and compelled them to be dependent upon and subservient to persons of the higher estates. The degree of their subservience and the extent of their dependence formed a spectrum that ranged from light but often bitterly resented restrictions and impositions in western European lands to a serfdom that was scarcely distinguishable from slavery in some of the lands of eastern Europe. But whether light or heavy, servility-submissiveness of the great majority of the population to a few-characterized the societies of these lands, and so I will call them collectively the servile lands. -The first break in the old order came in 1771 when the duke of Savoy ordered the emancipation of the peasants of that small duchy. Baden was next in 1783, then Denmark in 1787, France in 1789, Switzerland in 1798, and then back and forth across central and eastern Europe until in 1864 the peasants of Romania, the last unfree people in Europe, were given their freedom. In less than 100