Europe: A History (119 page)

SZLACHTA

A
CCORDING
to an inventory of 1739, Stanislaw Lubomirski (1719–83) had inherited latifundium of 1,071 landed estates. They stretched right across the nine southern palatinates of Poland, from the family seat at Wisnicz near Cracow to Tetiev near Kiev in Ukraine, and were worked by close to a million serfs. Grand Marshal of the Crown from 1766, Lubomirski could have laid claim to be Europe’s largest private landowner. Allied by marriage and politics to the related clans of the Czartoryski, Poniatowski, and Zamoyski, he certainly belonged to the most powerful circle of magnates in the land. Each of them possessed vast estates, a private army, and an income larger than the king’s. They stood at the pinnacle of a social system whose noble estate—the
szlachta
—was the most numerous in Europe.

The magnates, however, were highly untypical of the nobility as a whole. By the mid-eighteenth century an absolute majority of Polish nobles had become landless. They survived by renting properties, by serving the magnates, or even by working the land like peasants. Yet no amount of economic degradation could deprive them of what they prized most—their noble blood, their
herb
or ‘coat of arms’, their legal status, and their right to bequeath it to their children,
[
CRUX
]

Poland’s
drobna szlachta
or ‘petty nobility’ was absolutely inimitable. In certain provinces, such as Mazovia, they made up a quarter of the population. In some districts, where they built walled villages to separate themselves from the peasantry, the
zaścianki
or ‘nobles-behind-the-wall’ constituted the whole population. They preserved their way of life with fierce determination, addressing each other as
Pan
or
Pani
, ‘Lord and Lady’, and the peasants as
Ty
, ‘Thou’. They regarded all nobles as brothers, and everyone else as inferiors. They reserved the severest penalties for anyone falsely masquerading as a noble, and jealously guarded the procedures of ennoblement. They engaged in no trade, except for soldiering and land management. They always rode into town, if only on a nag; and they wore carmine capes and weapons, if only symbolic wooden swords. Their houses may have been hovels; but they had to have a porch on which to display the family shield. Above all, they insisted that Prince Lubomirski and his like were their equals.

The most prominent feature of the
szlachta
, therefore, was the tremendous contrast between their economic stratification and their legal, cultural, and political solidarity. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, they admitted no native titles. There were no Polish barons, marquises, or counts. The most they would do was to confirm the personal titles which some of their number had gained in Lithuania before the union of 1569 or which, like the Lubomirskis, had been granted by pope or emperor.

In legal terms, Poland’s noble estate came to an end when the laws governing its status were abolished by the Partitions. Some, like the Lubomirskis, managed to confirm their nobility in Austria or in Prussia. A few did so in Russia, though 80 per cent of them there lost their status, forming a déclassé reservoir of anti-Russian discontent that raged throughout the nineteenth century. In 1921, when the Polish Republic was restored, a democratic Polish Sejm formally confirmed the abolition of noble privilege.Yet the
szlachta’s
consciousness of their special identity survived all manner of catastrophes. As late as the 1950s, sociologists found collective farmers in Mazovia who shunned their ‘peasant’ neighbours, dressed differently, spoke differently, and observed complex betrothal customs to prevent intermarriage. In 1990, when Poland’s Communist regime collapsed, there were still young Poles who would wear a signet ring with a coat of arms, just to show who they were. By then, everyone in Poland addressed each other as
Pan
and
Pani
. The ‘noble culture’ had become a major ingredient of the culture of the whole nation.

Nobility played a central part in social and political life all over early modern Europe. But the only place where the Polish model was matched, even in part, was in Spain, where the grandees and
hidalgos
of the West resembled the magnates and petty gentry of the East.
¹

PUGACHEV

S
INCE
peasants formed by far the largest social class in modern Europe and the Russian empire by far the largest state, it is not surprising to find that the greatest peasant revolts took place in the heartland of Russia. There were four—those of Bolotnikov, 1606–7, of Sten’ka Razin, 1670–1, of Bulavin, 1707–8, and of Pugachev, 1773–4. Equally, the civil war in Soviet Russia, 1917–21
¹
contained a major element of peasant unrest.

Emelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (1726–75) was a small Cossack landowner and veteran officer. He had spent years wandering among the monasteries of the Old Believers, storing up his sense of resentment. In 1773 he raised the standard of revolt at Yaitsk on the Ural River, on the very frontier of Europe, declaring himself to be the Emperor Peter III and promising the emancipation of the serfs. Hundreds of thousands joined his cause throughout the Volga provinces. He was acclaimed by peasants, by Cossacks, even by the nomadic Bashkirs and Kazakhs. Lacking coordination his supporters deteriorated into rampaging bands.

At first the Empress made light of ‘L’affaire du Marquis de Pugachev’, setting a modest price of 500 roubles on his head. But the price soon rose to 28,000. At one point, all the Volga forts were in his hands. Pugachev reduced Kazan to ashes, slaughtering all resisters. He maintained a satirical court, mimicking the entourage of Catherine’s murdered husband. The end came after two years of mayhem, when Pugachev’s main force was cornered at Tsaritsyn. Pugachev was brought to Moscow, and quartered.
²

At any time until the mid-twentieth century the numerical preponderance of the peasantry was not reflected in historiography. Peasants only found their way into textbooks when their periodic revolts disturbed the political scene. Events such as England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 or Germany’s Peasants’ War in 1524–5, were favoured by Marxist history-writing because they were taken to demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the masses.
³
In fact, no peasant rising ever succeeded. Peasants have been shown the most conservative of social forces, deeply attached to religion, to the land, to the family, and to an immemorial way of life. Their periodic
fureurs
were outbursts of desperation. Their revolving cycle of fortune and misfortune was far more important to them than any thought of social revolution.
⁴

Peasant studies is one of several flourishing new academic fields. It offers great opportunity to examine the interrelations of social, economic, anthropological, and cultural themes. It was specially suited to comparative analysis—both between European regions and between continents.
A Journal of Peasant Studies
(1973– ) grew out of a seminar centred at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Its editorial statement stressed the sheer size of the world’s peasantry and their problems:

Of the underprivileged majority of mankind, [the peasants] are the most underprivileged … No social class has a longer history of struggle against such conditions … Hitherto, scholarly periodicals have treated peasants in a peripheral way. We offer this journal as one where the peasantry will be central…
⁶

France, like Russia, has drawn historians to the study of its very substantial peasantry. A multivolume
Economic and Social History of France
was to inspire the second generation of the
Annales
team. The key volume was written by Le Roi Ladurie, whose analysis combines the thematic factors of territory, demography, and economy with chronological peri-odization over four centuries. The ‘Rural Renaissance’ of the late fifteenth century followed the earlier ‘Destruction of the Full World’ and preceded the ‘Trauma of Civil Wars’ and the ‘Drift, Reconstruction and Crisis’ of a seventeenth-century Ecosystem which would survive the Revolution.
⁶

Numerous studies have been made of revolts in the French countryside—the ‘tithe strikes’ of the sixteenth century, the revolt of the
Pitauts
against the salt-tax in Guyenne (1548), the
Croquants
and
Nouveaux Croquants
in the Limousin-Perigord (1594, 1636–7),
⁷
the
Gautiers and Nu-pieds
in Normandy (1594,1639), the ‘Enigma of the Rural Fronde’ (1648–9), and the repeated insurrections in Provence (1596–1715). Attempts have been made to link the rhythms of peasant unrest in France to those in Russia, and even China.
⁸

The historian of insurrections in Provence demonstrates that peasant revolts were interlaced with other forms of social unrest. He proposes a typology of five categories of revolt:

1. factional struggles within the nobility or bourgeoisie,

2. struggles between the
menu peuple
and the well-to-do,

3. popular action by the peasants against one of the political factions,

4. struggles between different peasant action groups,

5. united struggle of the whole community against outside agencies.
⁹

Anthropological studies are specially fruitful. They reveal the universal, immemorial qualities of peasant life. Sicilian reapers sing as peasants sang for centuries from Galway to Galicia:

Fly, fly sharp sickle
The countryside is all full,
All full with goods
For the joy of the landlords
[bis]
How sweet is the good life!
Tutrutrü, Tutrutrü
,
The pig was four scudi
[bis]
Rich and poor, we are all cuckolds.
¹⁰