1815 · Diasporayear only
The peasants keep what they took and everyone else gives it back
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When the monarchy was restored in France in 1815, the gains made during the Revolution were reversed for almost everybody. The peasantry was the exception. What the countryside had seized or bought stayed in its hands, which is why some historians describe the French Revolution as the first successful peasant revolution of modern times. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie pushes the reading further. Peasants in the last years of the old regime were attacking the enclosers, the drainers and the improvers, so their revolt was aimed at capitalism rather than at feudalism, and where no improving landlord had appeared, as in Brittany, the peasants stayed quiet. Volker Hunecke makes a parallel case for the towns, where the end of controlled bread prices produced a defensive fury against free trade. A revolution described for a century as the arrival of a new economic order had its most durable effect in slowing that order down.