The Issues and the Adversaries 391
of the most far- reaching and immediate effects of the Revolution, as Georges
Lefebvre pointed out, to divide the French peasantry, to break up the old com-
munal and village life, to make the rural population more differentiated or hetero-
geneous, turning some into landowners of a modern kind with an interest in
“bourgeois” institutions, and others into rural laborers, dependent on a daily wage
and on the vestiges of communal practices such as gleanage and pasture rights.
The latter soon lost interest in the Revolution; the former were slow to take any
initiative or make any sacrifices in its behalf. Both resented interference by city
people, whether these acted in the name of the Revolution, national emergency,
the war effort, or reason. As for the unskilled working class of the towns in France,
they played a political role from 1792 to 1795, but even during these radical years
they followed the lead of their own small employers or neighborhood shopkeep-
ers, the next classes above them, who brought them into action in political mobs or
demonstrations.
In other European countries the wage- earning and farming populations were
less active. Their apathy must not be exaggerated. It seems evident, from recent
research, that the peasants, or rather the serfs, of Bohemia and Hungary knew and
talked a good deal more of the French Revolution than historians have generally
supposed. They had their own grievances, and their own frustrations when the re-
forms of Joseph II were blocked by the serf- owning landlords. Elsewhere the
weight of the peasantry, on balance, turned against the Revolution. Sometimes, as
in Belgium, the Catholicism of the farm population was outraged. Sometimes, as
in southern Italy, what seemed to be a religious movement, an outburst of rural
fanaticism or superstition, carried with it a well- grounded and accurate social pro-
test, in the belief that the revolutionary intellectuals of the south- Italian cities nei-
ther knew nor cared about the real needs of the rural masses. In any case, sympathy
for the new order everywhere varied in direct proportion to communications, to
the contact between town and country, the state of the roads, the reading of news-
papers, the frequency of inns and of travelers, the habit of small farmers selling
their own produce in a market. Rural communities that had the least contact with
the outside world were least interested in a new legal or political order.
The most depressed workers in the cities could usually be counted on for sup-
port by the existing governments and established upper classes. Among the Dutch,
the populace was more uncritically loyal to the House of Orange than the middle
classes. In England, the most dependent workers, those below the level of the
skilled trades or self- employment, could be rallied by the squires and gentry in
defense of church and king. They could become as nervous over Unitarianism as
over Catholicism. They produced the mass following in the wholesale Birmingham
riots of 1791, in which Joseph Priestley’s home and scientific instruments were
destroyed.
It was among persons of intermediate status, or whose status was indeterminate
or changing within the categories of the older society, that most Revolutionary
leaders or sympathizers with the Revolution were to be found. Lawyers were di-
vided, largely according to the nature of their clients and habitual practice. Law-
yers whose cases came mainly from church bodies or great landowners were con-
servative. So were those schooled in the intricacies of “feudal” law, or those in