Popular revolts

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	Popular revolts

Explaining rebellion.

During the seventeenth century, both urban and rural revolts erupted in many parts of Europe. Modern historians have adopted various theories to explain these:

I. Marxist - Class struggle is central to historical development. The bourgeoisie struggle to overcome the feudal elite and profit from the introduction of capitalism. Then the proletariat revolts against capitalist oppression and their revolution ushers in communism and the classless society - a sunny utopia without war, corporations, or state. The peasant rebellions, urban revolts, and gentry uprisings of the seventeenth century are all to be seen as the working out of this inevitable historical dialectic.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones....."

(The Communist Manifesto)

II. Annaliste - A society's history is dominated by underlying structures: geography, material culture, and mentalité (social consciousness). These deep impersonal currents are far more important than "mere events" like rebellions, which - however eye-catching - are just froth on the surface. Only from the distant perspective of la longue durée (the long term) can historical events be explained: Individuals are simply deceived in thinking that they are making free choices and controlling outcomes.

"When I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long term always wins in the end"
(Braudel)

III. Conservative (empiricist) - To understand seventeenth-century revolts, we should study the surviving evidence about the actions, ideas, and beliefs of the rebels. People act for reasons. Grand theory is of little use in explaining rebellions that were produced by complex conditions. The rebels' attempts to protect local independence, religious traditions, and the customary rights of their orders and estates were a response to the world as they saw it and in reaction to government policies and socio-economic conditions.

Russian rebellions

The Time of Troubles has often been seen as a social revolution of the poor against the rich, but it is better characterized as Civil War. The false Dmitriis attracted support from all social classes including boyars.
The peasants involved in the revolt did not demand social change, but that the true Tsar should rule them and curb the unreasonable exactions of the nobility.
The Time of Troubles was ended by Russians of all orders uniting against Swedish and Polish intervention - the defense of Orthodox Christianity and of Mother Russia attracted the support of both peasants and gentry.

Stepan (Stenka) Razin was a Cossack who briefly established himself as an independent ruler. He attracted the support of many peasants and his rebellion was aimed in part at easing the burdens on Russia's serfs. He also attracted the support of clergy who objected to Patriarch Nikon's reforms. Stenka Razin did issue propaganda calling for the establishment of a Cossack social system, run by deliberative assemblies of free and equal men, but he also insisted that he was fighting for the Tsar and the Virgin Mary.
After Razin's defeat in 1670, the Tsarist government hanged thousands of peasants and portrayed the uprising as socially anarchic. However, local resentment against central government (especially in Chuvashia) and religious feelings were key to the revolt as well. Cossack desire for plunder and profit also played an important role.

Tommaso Aniello, "Masaniello"

The revolt of Naples

Sicily and Naples were both controlled by Spain. Sicily normally exported grain, but in May 1647 the harvest had failed and bread prices soared. Food riots broke out in Palermo - Sicily's largest city with a population of 130,000. Popular discontent focused on the local aristocratic elite, and an educated adherent of civic republicanism, Giuseppe d'Alesio, briefly became a popular leader.
The Spanish viceroy initially lacked the forces to suppress the rebellion and bowed to d'Alesio's elevation as the city's ruler. However, the rebels soon quarreled amongst themselves and killed d'Alesio, while the propertied classes rallied to support the viceroy as the only guarantor of order. Messina - Sicily's other major city and a long time rival of Palermo - remained loyal to Spain. In September 1647, the Palermo revolt was suppressed.

A far more serious revolt broke out in Naples in July 1647. As in Palermo, it began with riots against high food prices caused in part by the excessive taxes that the almost-bankrupt Spanish government was exacting. The rebels sacked the houses of tax collectors and demanded lower taxes and local self-government.

The revolt's first popular leader was Tommaso Aniello (known as "Masaniello"), a fish seller. He became a popular dictator or "captain-general" for ten days before being murdered and his body dismembered by a large crowd. (Another mob decided the next day that he was a martyr and buried the reassembled bits of his corpse, praying to him as a saint).

Francesco Torrato was the next who attempted to lead the Neapolitan rebels, but he too was ousted from power - in his case because of his willingness to compromise with Spain.

His successor, a blacksmith/gunsmith named Gennaro Annese, proclaimed Naples a republic whose head was to be the Duke of Guise. The rebels hoped for French protection, and the French navy did (unsuccessfully) attack Spanish ships blockading Neapolitan ports. However, the French government was not backing the Duke of Guise, just capitalizing on Spain troubles as it had done in the case of the Catalan revolt. (Annese was executed for treason in 1648 for resuming his contacts with France).

Another important actor in the Neapolitan revolt was Giulio Genoino, an aging radical who wanted the people of Naples to have more say in the state's government. He tried to hold the rebellion together but it began to dissolve in disorder - some supporting French sovereignty, others independence, and others a return of Spanish rule.

In April 1648, Spain appointed a new viceroy and sent troops. These were admitted without resistance on promising to remove the taxes on food and to grant amnesty to all the rebels.

In 1674, Messina rebelled against Spain, but this was not a popular uprising. Rather, certain discontented oligarchs, Malvizzi, appealed to France in order to gain help in suppressing the popular party, Merli, who were encouraged by Spain to undermine local patrician control. France initially sent help, but withdrew it abruptly in 1678, leaving the Messina rebels to severe Spanish reprisals.

French provincial rebellions

1. 1632 Revolt of Languedoc

In 1628, Cardinal Richelieu attempted to increase the direct taxation paid by various provinces of France, including Languedoc. His proposals prompted a tax strike, indeed the local courts seized the tax revenues and used them to pay their own wages.

Languedoc

In 1632, the Governor of Languedoc, Henri de Montmorency, supported by the provincial Estates, joined the rebellion of Gaston d'Orléans. The revolt was suppressed and Montmorency executed. Although led by the gentry and nobility, the revolt did attract popular support in Languedoc where provincial loyalties were to the family of Montmorency and provincial privileges seen as under threat from central encroachment.

2. 1636-37 Revolt of the Croquants

In 1636, the Spanish had occupied Corbie and the French government pushed taxation and military recruitment to unprecedented levels. These demands produced the Croquants revolts. (Perhaps named for the town of Crocq in South Central France which had earlier revolted or perhaps from croc - the hooks that the peasants used as weapons - "croquants" became a pejorative term for peasants and now is a sort of French cookie).

"They protest that they are good Frenchmen who would rather die than continue under the tyranny of the Parisians and the financiers (Parisiens ou partisans), who have reduced them to the despair and extreme poverty under which their province labours presently as a result of new and heavy taxes invented during the course of this reign."

From a contemporary account of the rebellion.

The primary aim of the rebellions was a reduction in taxation, particularly the gabelle and the taille. The rebels insisted on their loyalty to the king and were not socially revolutionary. Nonetheless, the revolts that spread widely in the South and West of France (Saintonge, Angoumois and Poitou) undermined royal authority.

3. 1639 Nu-Pieds of Normandy

High taxation and the billeting of troops on a population impoverished by plague played a part in provoking the rebellion in Normandy in 1639. Provincial loyalty was also important.

The Nu-pieds (bare-feet) from whom the revolt took its name were the bare-footed workmen who manufactured salt by evaporating sea-water. The government's decision to extend the gabelle tax to their activities produced an outburst of anger. Five thousand insurgents began attacking tax-collectors. A few local gentry joined the peasants and workers, others stood passively by.

	The movement was led in theory by the mythical "Jean Nu-Pieds", and in practice by Jean Morel, a local priest. He expressed the popular sense that Normandy should free itself from the tyranny of the alien tax-collectors sent from Paris.
	The government sent 4,000 of its best troops to suppress the rebellion. Many rebel leaders were hanged.
	The Nu-pieds were Norman patriots motivated primarily by a hatred of taxation; they had no program of social revolution.

"… the French agrarian rebellions of the time were not class conflicts with class aims but one social response among others in a disturbed society to the growth of absolutism and the state's exactions"
(Zagorin).