Louis XIV - Terms of lives of farmers, our ancestors in France
Francefrom below farmers are ragged
In the seventeenth century, on the twenty million inhabitantsof the France, one in two is an agricultural worker, although no other piece of land a few acres. Far from the large estates of the nobles of France from above.
workers Agriculturalusually live in a house in one piece, sometimes shared with another family. Inside, mats on the dirt floor, a fireplace where the hanging rack, cabinet where he keeps his plate terracotta his shirts hemp, some sheets and blankets. Outside, a cabana with four or five hens, two or three sheep that graze on the children lead the commons; they are raised for wool and reproduction, not cut them down for meat. Attached to the house, a vegetable garden, where they grow a few vegetables (cabbage, beans or chard, lentils, peas or turnips.)
These laborers, as they were then called, have only rare hand tools, a spade and a scythe, or simply a wooden fork and sickle. From May to October, they go on the estates of the nobles, clergy or among laborers, those who own land, a horse and a plow, be rented to help harvest the hay at harvest. Exhausting days where men, women and children, broken in half for hours toiling to saw, cut, bind, cram. At least they can be assured of their hunger. The rest of the year, the laborer serves as a mason earth, thatched roofing, tank timber or coal, while his wife weaves home for a linen merchant.
Meal peasants consists almost exclusively of bread , a mixture of rye and wheat, which are consumed 700 grams per day per person, soaked in a vegetable soup slowly cooked in the clay pot hanging from the rack. Everyone dips pieces of bread, traditionally, the father breaks before meals. Meal only enhanced by a few eggs and, by province, by a galette, a corn porridge or mashed chestnuts. Almost never meat or dairy products, resulting in a deficiency of fat which we have great need, especially in the winter to fight against the cold. For dessert, depending on the season, fruit, berries, some bread rubbed with garlic and soaked in cider. Hunting and fishing are reserved to the lord, but some are likely to reduce poaching a rabbit and some fish.
Almost all arable land is reserved for the cultivation of grain (rye, wheat, barley, oats, millet, corn ). Breeding is rare, except for the horse or mule. No other machine that agricultural plow. Also, with the exception of plowing, all field work remains manual. Or sow by hand is time consuming and often interrupts the rain sowing, we do not always have time to finish before winter, making random crops. Especially since, in the absence of insecticides, seedlings are exposed to rodents and diseases. Is harvested with a sickle; even hiring young children, the family of the farmer is not sufficient to the task, as we used the laborers.
yield (the ratio of the crop seed) is an average of four or five grains harvested for grain sown but on bad land, or during the lean years, it can drop to three to one: if we deduct harvesting the amount of taxes and reserve grain necessary for sowing the following year, there is nothing left to feed a family. then these years, when the humidity prevents grains ripen and the harvest turns out bad, laborers prefer to harvest only with the help of family labor. Unemployment is then added to the surge in grain prices, and the laborer is reduced to first send his children to beg at the doors of convents and cities, then, misery escalating, parents take them- same route and end up small troops pilfering or real brigands, or, for men, to enlist as soldiers of the king.
If the wealthier peasants, laborers, seem to lack Christian charity, c is that since the wars of Richelieu, they are overtaxed, become the main cause of miseryexempt.;
The clergy, thenobility,the holders of the offices are taxes fall entirely on the people, especially the campaigns. The size absorbs on average 20% of the income of farmers. By adding the salt tax, aid, tithes due to the clergy (which varies from 3% to 12%), the manorial rights, etc., about half of the peasant income is siphoned off by taxes. Enough to discourage the most enterprising: what good, in fact, work more, to fatten tax officials
can not believe no more revolts, peasant unrest decreases under Colbert. His term only knows two riots, one in Vivarais in 1670 and the other in Britain, 1675
In the Vivarais, word got around that two new taxes were to be established, one at top and the other on births. After crushing the revolt, the Musketeers hang a few hundred mountaineers Cevennes and send others to the galleys. In Britain, the revolt against the Red Hats stamped paper is just as easily repressed. "Our poor Lower Brittany writes Madame de Sevigne, flock by fields and when they see the soldiers, they throw themselves on their knees and say mea culpa: this is the only word they know French We ... do not let them hang up fourteen on the same tree. They ask to drink and tobacco, and that the dispatch.
"Almostall revenues laborer is spent to meet the food needs. It is therefore not much left to buy clothes, oil for light, and for the holidays a piece of lard. For in this desperately sad existence, at long, the village festival puts a note of gaiety. That day, we eat pancakes or pancakes with bacon and chestnuts. On the place of the church in the midst of beggars, hawkers and their teeth, is fun to watch an acrobat, listening to play the oboe, flute or bagpipes. We dance the minuet, the motion or current, while a blind man playing the violin or singing a lament. But there is always a Capuchin friar or to recall the fear of hell.
Peasants Life
After twenty-five years of relative respite, corresponding roughly to the Department of Colbert, France from below revives misfortune. This is not the plague or rebellion against the tax, as under Richelieu, but scarcity. In 1686, in March, the steward of Poitou note: "The people are forced to eat grass porridge" and the Languedoc: "There is extreme poverty in the Cevennes, because wheat and chestnuts have missed it, and many farmers are now live on acorns and grass. "Worse! The poor harvest of 1692, followed in the fall of heavy rains that destroy the crop and cause in July 1693, a disastrous harvest. "Misery and poverty are beyond what you can imagine, writes Lieutenant General in Normandy. In the Pays de Caux, endless people often starve. It is feared that the people who only eat grass, not cut and ruin all the corn before they ripened. "Speculators corner the grain, so its price is up fivefold.
Each scarcity, marginal, infirm, sick, destitute widows, dispossessed peasants of their land flock to the cities to find assistance. But spurned by the offices of the poor, who book their alms to the locals, they are duly registered and provided a distinctive sign; then they fail in the suburbs of cities. Forgetting his duty of charity, the company is frightened to these unwanted vagrants, loafers, unsocial, troublemakers or carriers of disease.
Also, both to ensure the salvation of souls by police measure, Mazarin promulgatedin 1656 a Edict of great confinement, Colbert confirmed a few years later. All are disadvantaged in Paris, willingly or unwillingly, interned in a general hospital, which has nearly three institutions, the Salpetriere, Bicetre and the Pity, and later the hospice Foundling. The regime of Bicetre, reserved to men, resembles that of a reform: the most violent get the whip or are shackled. At least everyone has enough to eat, a privilege.
Such confinement measures do little shocking at the time. "The poor are so born or being reduced to this condition by the order of Providence, said the Bishop of Grasse, should not think of living or profusely or deliciously. It's not deprive them of the freedom of locking is to deprive them of their debauchery. "Inthe winter of 1693, the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris sees every day starving hundreds of people. Other lack of bed, perish in the street. Reynie, lieutenant general of the police, trying to
Hôtel-Dieu de Paris in 1693
prevent possible riots by building thirty large ovens in the courtyard of the Louvre to cook it every day 100,000 rations of bread sold in two pound. The sale takes place in five locations: the Louvre, the Place des Tuileries, the Bastille, Luxembourg and the Rue d'Enfer. We argue, we fight, we got to buy this bread sold at a loss. Bourgeois who, out of curiosity, went to see the distribution of bread smothered perished.
Next on Part 2
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