Excerpt: ... with plenty of cider, formed the daily fare in prosperous farm-houses. Footnote: This description of the condition of the peasants is taken chiefly from Babeau, La vie rurale. The peasants were not cut off from all social and political activity. Every rural parish formed a separate little community, very restricted in its rights and functions, yet not without valuable corporate powers. Footnote: The parish and the community were generally coterminous, but were not always so. Ibid., Le Village, 97. It could hold ...
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Excerpt: ... with plenty of cider, formed the daily fare in prosperous farm-houses. Footnote: This description of the condition of the peasants is taken chiefly from Babeau, La vie rurale. The peasants were not cut off from all social and political activity. Every rural parish formed a separate little community, very restricted in its rights and functions, yet not without valuable corporate powers. Footnote: The parish and the community were generally coterminous, but were not always so. Ibid., Le Village, 97. It could hold property, both real and personal; it could sue and be sued; it could elect its own officers and manage its own affairs. In the eighteenth century it became the fashion in France, as in many other countries, to divide the common lands, but many parishes still held large tracts in the reign of Louis XVI. The sale of their woods, the letting of their pastures, of fishing rights, or of the office of wine-taster in grape-growing districts, formed the revenues of the rural community. Its expenses were many and various. It repaired the nave of the church, the choir being kept in order at the cost of the priest. The parsonage and the wall round the churchyard were maintained by the parish. The drawing for the militia was at the expense of the community. So were some of the roads. It paid the schoolmaster and the syndic. Then there were incidental expenses, such as the annual mass, the carriage of letters, the keeping in order of the church clock. Sometimes the accounts of a community show a charge for a present to some influential person, capable of helping in a lawsuit, or of effecting a reduction of the taxes assessed on the parish. It was a notable feature of the communal expenses, that the lord of the village shared them with his poorer neighbors. Into these rural matters privilege did not extend.Footnote: But this was not always the case. See the cahier of the Artignose in Provence, Archives parlementaires, vi. 249. "Clochers et autres...
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Add this copy of The Eve of the French Revolution to cart. $35.80, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2003 by IndyPublish.
