Rural Life : January 2025

16 January 2025

Minutes of discussion on rural society and politics, online, 16 January 2025

Present: Joanna Innes, Mark Philp; Bartłomiej Blesznowski, Sofia Carlfjord, Klaas van Gelder, Niels Grüne,  Maartje Janse, Hent Kalmo, Piotr Kuligowski, Anne Engelst Nørgaard, Milan Řepa, Yannis Skalli-Housseini, Jesper Lundsby Skov, Thomas Stockinger, Kai Struve, George Vasçik,

Apologies: Trond Bjerkas, Diederik Smit

Discussion of panel 1:

Joanna emphasised that the point of the discussion was to identify lines of thinking that might cut across papers, and help participants engage with each other’s work, in the hope of improving the quality of interaction among panellists at the conference.

She noted that in the conference proposal, she had observed that paper givers used a variety of sources, and that they would be encouraged to reflect on the extent to which their sources reflected something about the political culture of the time and place, and the extent to which they shaped, perhaps narrowed perceptions of a time and place. Would it have been possible in principle to use other sources, perhaps sources akin to those used by other panellists? How might changing the source change the view? The patterning of the sources in time might be seen as reflecting something about the ‘modernisation’ of politics. But might that be something we brought to the material, missing other kinds of continuity or change?

Yannis noted that his (joint) presentation would focus on litigation, but litigation had often been preceded by many years of petitioning on the same issue.

George said that petitions as such were not part of the political repertoire of the people he was looking at, but at rallies those attending might be asked to write their name and perhaps occupation on sheets of paper – so that attendance could be vaunted.

Bartłomiej said that he relied on autobiographies to give him access to a peasant view point.

Thomas agreed that petitions were a relatively long-lived political form. And of interest because eg women who might not be able to take public political positions in other ways could sign them.

Niels agreed that they were about the only source which not only supported long-term comparisons but allowed one to get somewhere towards the authentic voice of the people.

Maartje said that her previous work had been on petitions at a national level. She had never seen anything there relating to rural grievances. To find those, one had to look at petitions addressed to local officials. She also noted a historiographical challenge: these more local forms of politics were carefully studied by local historians, who published on them in non-academic journals. It was a challenge to get different traditions of historical study interacting.

Mark asked if petitions did reveal the authentic voice of the people. Might they not be mediated, by eg notaries or professional petition-writers, who had their own ideas about what they should say?

Maartje agreed that petitions were always strategic and had to be interpreted in relation to their intentions. She herself preferred more aleatory evidence when it could be found: reported remarks, notes found on doorsteps.

Klaas said that judicial records could also give you what were apparently protagonists’ own words, but similarly these underwent a polishing process.

Joanna said she thought there was no such thing as an authentic source. There were only different genres of source, each with their own features. An advantage of combining different kinds of source was that one at least might get different perspectives, shaped by different generic features, on the same thing.

Mark started a new strand of conversation, focussing on difference by place. Did things like local agrarian social and economic structures affect political cultures?

Yannis said that when they had studied the geography of revolts for the Amsterdam workshop, they had found bigger revolts in areas characterised by proto-industry. This may have had something to do with problems being experienced in proto-industrial districts specifically, but it was hard to tell.

Maartje said in her study of rural revolts, religion seemed to be crucial. It was in Catholic regions that one found anti-Orangeism. Borderlands could also be different, being exposed to politics across the border.

Sofia said that she was studying just one local case, alongside other historians who were studying other local cases. So she couldn’t talk about difference on the basis of her own work. But her area was itself a mixed area, featuring both agriculture and industry. And people couldn’t necessarily be categorised as operating in one sector or the other: industrialists might own land, and those involved in agriculture also engage in industrial activity.

Thomas said that his work had involved a comparison between regions in Lower Austria and France, each large enough to have some diversity within itself. In this context, he had engaged extensively with French historiography. French historians had put much time and effort looking for correlations between socio-economic features and politics. He had concluded that these didn’t exist in any simple way. Of course, features of the environment – eg how dependent a region was on wider markets – helped to shape its politics. But it was wrong to expect correlation.   He also noted that contemporaries were sensitive to the importance of the socio-economic context for politics, sometimes saying, for example, that electoral districts should be relatively homogeneous: they thought it was unhelpful to have different kinds of district sharing a representative.

Anne said that there were socio-economic contrasts across Danish rural regions, but it was difficult to establish their influence on politics. Broadly, in the west (Jutland) there were more smaller owners – less hierarchy; settlement was more dispersed. In the east, more big landowners and hierarchy, ‘kind of feudal’. But also closer to Copenhagen; more concentrated settlement patterns facilitated polilticisation.

Mark said that in principle one might expect it to make a difference where somewhere stood on the gradient between self-managing and directed from above.

Niels said that exploration of the implications of different socio-economic patterns was crucial to his work.

Joanna said that she had been struck by a difference between the accounts of Trond (who wasn’t there) and Kai – who were both on the next panel, but still, this linked to the theme currently under discussion. Kai stressed the importance of peasants discovering a sense of common interest in order to find a place in politics; Trond stressed the development of more clarity about differences in interest and outlook within rural society, such that party divisions could be reflected there. She wondered how others thought that themes of unity and division featured in the political cultures that they studied.

Kai said that in Galicia there were certainly social differences in peasant society, but these weren’t expressed in politics. That was perhaps because  the poorest segments of village society hadn’t the means to become active in politics anyway. Politics was dominated by peasants with larger or mid-sized holdings.

Mark wanted to add the question, What is ‘politics’ anyway? Reading through the abstracts, it seemed to him that different panellists understood ‘politics’ in different ways. It seemed helpful to bring those differences to the surface and think about their implications.

Joanna noted again, as she had in her introductory remarks, that one might take the papers to tell in sequence a story about the modernisation of politics. But maybe the trend of development was overdetermined by what panellists chose to focus on. Historians of the early modern period often used litigation as a source of insight into daily life and conflicts; modern historians much less so, partly because they had so many other sources. But litigation continued to be one way of pursuing conflict. If modern historians made more use of such sources, how might that change the picture?

Anne also noted a lingering stereotype of peasants being ‘traditional’.

Mark said that that had struck him too. They were seen as acting in their own interest, and in doing that being not truly political.

Joanna suggested that what you thought you were doing mattered: you needed to be able to frame what you were doing in terms of some larger story about society and its government for your action to count as political. Otherwise all life is politics – a position that can be argued, but that has its problems.

Thomas agreed that there were problems about casting peasants as traditional and representing them as at some point entering into politics. This had been a common French historiographical framing: politicization. He sided with those who criticised this approach. Peasants were always engaged with politics in some sense. What changed were the ideas they brought to it and their repertoires of behaviour. They never started from nothing. They engaged with changing forms of politics with their existing knowledge of how to do things, which shaped their responses, though those responses nonetheless changed.

Niels said that he agreed that peasants were neither conservative nor apolitical. But others who sought to engage them in politics did so on the basis of certain assumptions about what would interest them, eg abolishing feudal dues. He preferred to talk about them as becoming increasingly trans-local in their outlook and activity.

Joanna queried the idea that non-elite rural residents were ever entirely local. There were always some issues that people perceived to relate to the kingdom as a whole that impinged on them: taxation, war, changes of dynasty. She thought that it was better to think of particular issues gaining a trans-local dimension.

Maartje agreed with Niels that in the early nineteenth century rural people came to see more of their local grievances as reflecting systemic injustices. For example, Catholic villagers might long have had a sense of grievance about how the church of their forefathers had been taken over by Protestants, but opportunities to address this as part of a larger problem grew.

Joanna argued however that religion should be added to her list of themes that had for many centuries at least sometimes had a trans-local dimension. Thus during the Reformation.

Niels argued that, despite these qualifications, it was nonetheless a trend.

Mark thought that there was change but not necessarily linear change.

Kai said that an important source of change in politics was institutional change, which might change options for political action and argument. The creation of representative institutions gave peasants the formal right to participate in politics on regional and state level. It required trans-local organisation to articulate and represent their interests  in new ways.

Sofia said that she thought it might be interesting to think about continuities within change. Her research focussed on people who continued to operate according to old, consensus-oriented ideas even within new structures which promoted decision by vote-tallying.

Discussion of panel 2:

Niels, opening discussion, suggested that the kinds of source material panellists were using might once again provide a useful focus.

Piotr said that in his paper he would be talking about the activities democratic propagandists in Russian Poland, as documented in police reports. He found it interesting that though democrats were referred to by name in these sources, peasants were always anonymous. Democrats were active in disseminating books

Niels asked if there was evidence that these democrats were labelled such by members of the rural population. Piotr said no: that was what the police called them.

Kai said his key source was newspapers. These were party papers, aimed specifically at the rural population. They sometimes included reports from villages.

Joanna said that she thought the question of how elite or urban activists, what language they thought appropriate for doing that, was interesting, as well as reception. In the project, they had run across plenty of examples of activists who talked about ‘democracy’ among themselves preferring to talk to wider populations in terms of eg ‘liberty’. But there was an alternative strategy, represented in Britain by the Chartists, a popular political organisation of the late 1830s-1840s. They talked about democracy quite a lot, and didn’t just use the word but wanted to give it a history, talk about the Greeks etc. In this case educating the population by the kinds of discussions one exposed them to was very much the name of the game.

Anne said that she had used petitions a lot. She thought they were a political medium that peasant farmers found especially useful. One could read out a petition without having to be a confident public speaker. Contemporaries sometimes suggested that peasants signed petitions without understanding what they were doing, but it was normal to pay to sign (one paid to reward the petition writer and those who carried them around for their trouble and expense) so that didn’t seem so likely. She had also used newspapers, which originated outside rural society, but might carry letters from rural readers.

Niels asked if they talked specifically about democracy. Anne affirmed that they did, though the word didn’t become fairly common until 1848, when it was in wide circulation.

Niels suggested that it was worth thinking about how communication media adapted to a mass market, and what that did to political discourse.

Kai said he rarely found references to democracy in his sources. More common terms were rights, constitution, voting and nation. The main push was to be represented by someone other than landowners. As in Poland, democrat became the term for the political (liberal) left since the 1830s , but they had their basis mostly among urban elites and some landowners.

George said, in relation to material circulating in rural settings, that in Prussia school policy became controversial after 1918. The man he was interested in, Tantzen, was very interested in changing history books to reflect a republican ethos. There were also arguments about whether education should be secular (which democrats tended to favour) or religious.

Mark said one might want to think not just about words but also about practices – for example, practices connoting equality (such as forms of address).

Anne noted that different places had different institutional experiences. In Denmark and Danish Norway, absolutism prevailed until the 1830s, when estate assemblies were convened for the first time in a century and a half.  Niels agreed that change in the institutional context was often crucial in prompting new behaviour.

Joanna however argued that there could be other drivers of change. In Britain there were major changes in petitioning practice in the later eighteenth century in the context of a continuously operating Parliament which continued to deal with petitions in largely accustomed way. But they soared in number; became more ambitious in content, and started to be signed by much greater numbers of people. She thought that a variety of changes contributed to this, including changing ideas about how to use petitions [partly inspired by American example]; a growth in petitioning on local issues, which spread know-how about the petitioning process; and a changing attitude to endorsement of petitions, which placed a premium on numbers of signatures collected. So that whereas in the mid eighteenth century a petition from workers in an industry might be signed by the chairman of a meeting, by the early nineteenth century there were complaints that one Lancashire cotton weavers’ petition was being carried from house to house and women and children encouraged to sign. Changes in tactics can be endogenous: be generated within the culture.

Maartje agreed that she thought there were changes that stemmed from new ways of imagining the people. In the Netherlands, changes in petitioning practice were partly inspired by new rules, which said one couldn’t sign on behalf of other people – reflecting animus against intermediary bodies. But that didn’t account for everything that went on. In the 1820s and 30s, bringing masses into politics emerged as an aspiration.

Joanna asked about festivals and the messages they might communicate. She thought that Niels might have something to say about these in a SW German context.

Niels said that indeed, a liberal festival culture developed in SW Germany in the 1820s and 30s. This might involve giving honorary gifts to liberal representatives, who might be hailed as Volksfreunde.

Joanna asked if people found ways of acting out values in practice.  Niels said that some symbols were employed. The whole village was expected to participate: there was an emphasis on inclusiveness. Speeches were given when gifts were presented, in which particular policy achievements by liberals were celebrated.

Joanna asked if there were similar festivals elsewhere. Kai said that he thought the nation was a key concept. Polish peasants in Galicia had been excluded from a traditional understanding nation, but now they were recognised as part of it. In Polish, the ideas of nation and citizen were tightly linked: nobles traditionally addressed each other as citizen. Ukrainian peasants, by contrast, developed the idea that they were part of a different nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were celebrations including reenactments of great national events.

Bartłomiej said that esp. after 1905 this concept of the nation was sometimes replaced in Polish lands with the idea of the republic. This idea was born in the “Zaranie” (The Dawn) movement in the first years after 1905 peaking in the 30s when Polish left-wing agrarian ideology gained strength – especially in the Union of the Rural Youths’ “Wici” ideology, favouring a “People’s Republic of Poland” (the republican ideal was later appropriated by the communist regime).

Anne said that there were festivals in Denmark and there had been some work on them, but this wasn’t something she had studied.

Thomas said that in Austria in 1848 the most common form of public festival involved the national guard. A national guard existed only very briefly, in 1848, but these events were long remembered, even decades later. Guardsmen wore uniforms. They would also visit each other’s festivals. He thought these events helped those involved to see themselves as a part of the nation. They also entailed a masculinisation of politics.

Mark asked how inclusive such guard companies were: how about those who couldn’t afford uniforms? Thomas said that sometimes there were attempts to collect funds to allow the poorer to take part.

Joanna said that the habit of representing the community through processions involving a series of organised groups seemed to get a boost in England during the revolutionary period. Armed ‘volunteers’ might play a part here, but also members of mutual aid societies, or children who attended the parish Sunday School. In a sense, such activity celebrated sub-group belonging, but this was also a way of representing the community to itself in terms of a series of virtuous collective endeavours. From reading she had done about the central and northern region, she thought that gymnasts, members of Turnvereine or the like sometimes similarly took part in festivities as groups. Or volunteer firemen might also do this.

George said that shooting clubs were also important.

Kai added reading clubs. These might start as meetings where material was read aloud to illiterate villagers. In his area, gymnastic groups, Sokol, were a development more of the early twentieth century.

Maartje noted an interesting article by Mary Ryan, ‘The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order’ in The New Cultural History, 2019, Vol.6, p.131-153. Ryan suggests that originally these parades displayed society as a hierarchy; then they were taken over by voluntary associations. Then there was a shift in emphasis towards the representation of ethnic groups (eg Irish American, Italian American).

Mark noted that time had run out.

He and Joanna thanked all participants.