Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

LANDland; the creation of a rural class of entrepreneurs, that the most hardheartedand hard-headed exploited him instead of, or in addition to,the old lords. Altogether the introduction of liberalism on the land waslike some sort of silent bombardment which shattered the social structurehe had always inhabited and left nothing in its place but the rich:a solitude called freedom.Nothing was more natural than that the peasant poor or the entirerural population should resist as best it could, and nothing was morenatural than that it should resist in the name of the age-old customaryideal of a stable and just society, i.e. in the name of church and legitimateking. If we except the peasant revolution of France (and eventhis was in 1789 neither generally anti-clerical nor anti-monarchical)virtually all important peasant movements in our period which werenot directed against the foreign king or church, were ostensibly made forpriest and ruler. The South Italian peasantry joined with the urbansub-proletariat to make a social counter-revolution against the NeapolitanJacobins and the French in 1799 in the name of the HolyFaith and the Bourbons; and these also were the slogans of the Calabrianand Apulian brigand-guerrillas against the French occupation, as lateragainst Italian unity. Priests and brigand-heroes led the Spanishpeasantry in their guerrilla war against Napoleon. Church, king and atraditionalism so extreme as to be odd even in the early nineteenthcentury, inspired the Carlist guerrillas of the Basque country, Navarre,Castile, Leon and Aragon in their implacable warfare against theSpanish Liberals in the 1830s and 1840s. The Virgin of Guadalupe ledthe Mexican peasants in 1810. Church and Emperor fought theBavarians and French under the lead of the publican Andreas Hofer inTyrol in 1809. The Tsar and Holy Orthodoxy were what the Russiansfought for in 1812-13. The Polish revolutionaries in Galicia knew thattheir only chance of raising the Ukrainian peasantry was through theGreek-Orthodox or Uniate priests; they failed, for the peasants preferredEmperor to gentleman. Outside France, where Republicanismor Bonapartism captured an important section of the peasantry between1791 and 1815, and where the Church had in many regions witheredaway even before the Revolution, there were few areas—perhaps mostobviously those in which the Church was a foreign and long-resentedruler, as in the Papal Romagna and Emilia—of what we would todaycall left wing peasant agitation. And even in France Brittany and theVendue remained fortresses of popular Bourbonism. The failure of theEuropean peasantries to rise with Jacobin or Liberal, that is to say withlawyer, shopkeeper, estate administrator, official and landlord, doomedthe revolutions of 1848 in those countries in which the French Revolu-159