In this second extract from Revolution in Carcassonne, Elaine Graham-Leigh discusses the debates around class struggle and medieval revolts

Read the first extract here.

The Carcassonne revolt of 1303 comes at the beginning of what would be a turbulent century for the ruling class over much of Europe. The later years of the fourteenth century stand out for a number of major revolts, such as the 1381 English Rising and the 1378 Ciompi Revolt in Florence. These great revolts can appear to us as the beginning of a revolutionary tradition which would last through the early modern period to the modern era. It does not after all appear a very great leap from John Ball of the English Rising’s ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman’ to Colonel Rainsborough’s famous statement at the Putney Debates in 1649: ‘For really I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.’ 

In medieval revolts, however, we are dealing with the uprising of elements of ‘the people’ – ‘those excluded from real political power, economic wealth or social status’  – in general, rather than with a nascent proletariat. The rebels would not therefore have the kind of class consciousness familiar to us from nineteenth and twentieth-century struggles and in consequence, even the great late fourteenth-century revolts were not aiming at a wholesale social transformation with the abolition of property.

Many historians would also object to seeing too clear connections between medieval revolts and modern revolution. Modern interest in medieval revolts, it is argued, ebbs and flows according to contemporary events. Left-wing historians fired up by the protests they are seeing around them are inspired to look for similar protests in the past, but this means that the resultant history is then written ‘in more or less conscious reaction to the political upheavals of their own day.’ The result, the objection goes, is that in seeing medieval revolts as practice runs for the English, French or Russian revolutions, we fail to appreciate them in their own terms.

This means that we also can’t assume that any specific revolt was ‘for liberty’ in general or specific terms. Historian Justine Firnhaber-Baker considers for example that medieval revolts could just as easily be undertaken ‘by people who were not so much opposed to the state as critical of its weaknesses or hungry for a piece of the action.’ Some historians also argue that focusing on revolts as specific interruptions in the status quo is to fail to understand the extent to which they were part of normal political life; so much so that there is a call to stop talking about revolts entirely in favour of using the term ‘contentious politics’.

It is clearly correct to point out that medieval revolts were not interruptions in otherwise peaceful and non-contentious relations between the rulers and ruled, the exploiters and the exploited. Class struggle is after all always ongoing, although the forms in which it is expressed differ depending on the specific social groups involved and the particular economic and political conditions. The effect of these arguments can be however to position medieval revolts as a method of communication between the people and their rulers, not ever rising to, or intending to rise to a real threat to ruling-class power.  Although recent historiography stresses the organisation, planning and rationality of late medieval revolts in particular, it also posits that medieval revolt was a specifically medieval phenomenon, not something that can be seen as at all related to class struggles in other periods. The effect is to refuse any continuities with class struggles across different societies and different modes of production.

These lines of thinking underestimate the extent to which the major revolts of the fourteenth century were significant events. They were part of a continuum of class struggle, but they were also breaks in the business-as-usual which were widely remembered, and which terrified the elites. It is true that one difficulty for historians assessing these revolts is in remembering that the rebels were not acting in an existing revolutionary tradition. As Firnhaber-Baker comments in relation to the 1358 Jacquerie rebellion in northern France, ‘neither the Jacques themselves nor their immediate ancestors had ever really done this before. What it meant was open to interpretation.’  One legacy of the fourteenth-century years of revolt though was that for many of western Europe’s people, that was no longer true.

While they were not attempts to abolish class rule as such, fourteenth-century revolts could nevertheless be revolutionary in their aims, in the sense that they were significant attacks on feudal power, in which those on the lower rungs of the social scale rose up against feudal overlords and town elites. The English Rising stands out here both for the evidence we have of considerable preparation and organisation on the part of the rebels and for the extent to which the rebels were trying to imagine a different sort of society, free from feudal hierarchies.  These are however also in evidence, albeit on a more limited scale, in the Carcassonne revolt.

As the revolt progressed, the rebels of Carcassonne can be seen to have been reaching for a new form of social organisation. It would be claiming too much to argue that this was a worked-out plan. If the rebels had a social programme even as explicit as that of the rebels of the English Rising, it has not survived. It is more likely that they didn’t; that they really were making it up as they went along. However, that right at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the rebels of Carcassonne were able to conclude that what they needed was a transformation of society and to try to start to work towards it, remains impressive. It is a testament both to the tradition of struggle of the preceding generations and the potential for resistance to authority in medieval society.

The Carcassonne revolt ended, as medieval revolts tended to do, in repression and mass executions. It then had an unpleasant coda which illustrates the deleterious effects of sustained persecution on the networks of solidarity in any society. While it lasted, however, it was a significant challenge to feudal authority which surely must have contributed to the revolutionary tradition developing across much of medieval Europe. It went much further than a little local difficulty.

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