What is a peasant? A humble person, one of low rank; the lowest class. Uneducated and unchanging. Crude, coarse, boorish, ignorant. In need of progress. Those notions have stuck to it, but it’s worth returning to the word’s original meaning. The English word (borrowed from French) began to harness associations of rustic poverty in the early fifteenth century, but the Old French païsant means, simply, a country person. Pays (“countryside”) is from the Latin, pagus, which refers to a country district, a locality and its community. In its origins, the word simply meant person who lived on, and by, the land.

Throughout history, peasants have been humanity’s silent majority, the eternal underclass, “the meek.” Where they have not been ignored, they have been despised. Yet there are still over a billion worldwide. And in Europe, the peasant world was eradicated in the blink of an eye historically speaking, over the past seventy-five years. Food production still employed about half the working population in countries from Spain to Poland until the mid-century. Since 1950, that number has fallen to figures like five percent in Spain, three percent in France, one percent in Germany. Their replacement was the current model of large-scale agribusiness that followed the so-called “Green Revolution”: new technologies, large-scale fertilizer and pesticide use, and an ever-shrinking number of landowners. For about seventy years, this system has served its purpose: vastly greater yields feeding (and permitting) a burgeoning global population. It is also heavily subsidised, economically unjust, and ecologically disastrous, in a climate-threatened economy of shortages, destabilized supply chains, growing economic protectionism, and degradation of soils all over the world.

Peasant communities around the world have vanished or are vanishing. Driven by agricultural transformation and the centralization, privatization, and urbanisation so essential to capitalist modernity, this is, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, “the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of the [twentieth] century, and one that cuts us off forever from the world of the past.”footnote But the word peasant doesn’t merit much interest today. The annihilation of European peasantry over the course of the last few centuries, and the acceleration of it, globally, in the past seventy years is only dimly conceived, its significance underestimated. Yet peasant experience makes up most of human history since the dawn of agriculture around eight thousand years ago and the (supposedly city-defined) “civilizations” this made possible. Anyone alive today is, more likely than not, a descendant of peasants.

Camille Pissarro, Les Sarcleurs, 1882.

In his new personal-historical study Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, Patrick Joyce aims at and succeeds in revealing how profoundly this loss belongs to all of us. Joyce’s previous work focused on the march toward the modern self over the course of the nineteenth century, centering on Victorian Britain. In Remembering Peasants he ranges over individual lives and experiences in many countries, from his own forebears in 1930s Connemara to Polish Galicia, Sicily, and Andalucian Spain.

These lives and their ways are various, dependent primarily on the land they subsist on and defined by the particularities of place as much as by Christianity or the onrushing of history. Yet the unifying project of the book is an outline of what Joyce terms “the church of the peasants”: remarkably consistent (though locally various) “structures of peasant belief that, if always rooted in local circumstance, show striking similarities across great regions of time and space, encompassing all of Europe.”footnote Peasant societies were defined by ties more than by rights; by duties, obligations, and responsibilities that were deep, old, and communal: village and land, family and ancestors. This is an “old order of time,” Joyce writes, and we have left it behind.

There are still plenty of peasants left in Europe, if by a peasant we mean that primal definition I began with: a country person, a person of the land, by work or by dwelling. But there is no more peasantry in Europe, if by that we mean the class, which is another way of saying a society, which is another of saying a world.

“Peasants do not generally speak, they are spoken to,” Joyce observes.footnote To allow them to speak as much as possible for themselves, he assembles an impressive host of historical, autobiographical, anthropological, and cultural material into dialogue to argue that should we unthinkingly accept the logic of modernity leading to the natural death of the peasantry, we may be doing so at the peril of everything that makes us meaningfully human.

Obviously, it is important not to romanticize. “The bitch” of poverty, as one French peasant puts it, is always “ready to pounce.”footnote The simple fact of subjection – of being not so much the lowest rung on the social ladder as the dirt in which the ladder stands – renders the peasant the accursed “servant of servants.” They are vulnerable: to taxes, the hungry jaws of war, the whims of landowners. This sense of fragility, of being surrounded, by omnipresent hazard and chaos, human and natural, makes the famous conservatism, caution, and closedness of the peasant world understandable. These people, as Joyce points out more than once, are “the class of survivors.”footnote

The imagined innocence and noble simplicity of the “rustic” and “bucolic” – the “pastoral” – is a well-worn trope born of the guilty consciences of Europe’s literate classes. It has its roots in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Virgil’s Eclogues: both summon up in extremely fine-grained detail the agricultural cycles with which they were familiar as land-owning farmers, living more comfortably than the peasants with whom, nevertheless, they would have had close contact. Yet the rebirth of the pastoral in the Renaissance (think flute-playing shepherds and merry milkmaids) is the one we have unconsciously inherited and come to consider as natural as nature. It still influences our perception of the countryside as a place to get calm, to “get away from it all” before rushing back into the rat race of the city.

Yet this image was conceived through the aristocratic window of a landed country estate. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) and Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene (1590) are two seminal works in this vein and were both written when the expropriation of England’s peasantry, so crucial to the development of capitalism, had begun in earnest. As Raymond Williams writes, the growing dominance of the urban in early modern societies eventually transfigured the countryside to become “a myth functioning as a memory.”footnote The real memory was buried in the furrows of the land: class warfare, commons enclosed, ties to land and place uprooted, time-and-wage-bound structures and communal ways of life made impossible. All this memory of historical rupture had to be sublimated to create the “modern” countryside: a standing reserve for the extractive and distractive benefit of city-dwellers. The deprivation and poverty, the emptied communities and drug addiction, the loneliness and sense of abandonment (and the subsequent rise in support for the far right) across so much of rural Europe has its genesis in this early modern bargain, which began in England.

But it was with the arrival of Romanticism that the view that the “common people” were in essence closer to truth, to reality, took hold on the imagination: what was needed for a new, true literature was the “real language really used by men,” as William Wordsworth put it in the preface to his 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Obsessed with rediscovering the influences and “impulses” (a favorite word) of nature himself, Wordsworth staged a great deal of the Ballads in the world of the naturally “innocent” rural poor of his native Lake District, with roving rural beggars cast almost like ghosts of the displaced peasant world. But Wordsworth had trouble connecting the “romantic” destitution and nobility of this “ruined” peasantry to systemic materialist causes. His more intellectually curious friend and collaborator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the flush of idealistic youth, planned with fellow poet Robert Southey to found a utopian socialist commune in America – “Pantisocracy” – in which all property was to be held in common and all work shared. The scheme failed: all three poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, would become Tories later in life.

It would fall to later “peasant poets” such as John Clare, George Crabbe, William Barnes, and Robert Burns to issue powerful correctives to the poetic misappropriation of the countryside throughout the nineteenth century, when the poverty of England’s rural laborers was becoming too plain to ignore and was documented by campaigners such as the radical MP William Cobbett in his 1830 Rural Rides. Idealization of the already-vanished peasant societies of England was common among early socialists. In fact, it was in direct and scornful response to the small-scale, peasant-inflected commune economies dreamt up by utopians such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier that Karl Marx proposed his revolution via “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In Marx’s adopted England, this proletariat was composed of relatively recent descendants of dispossessed peasants, a dispossession enabled by the enclosure of the commons (the privatization of publicly accessible farmland by wealthy landowners). It is now a commonly accepted credo of Marx’s that the “rural idiocy” of the peasantry could never be the foundation for revolution across Europe. But as later studies (notably by sociologist Teodor Shanin in his 1983 volume Late Marx and the Russian Road) have pointed out, Marx was reconsidering this with great energy toward the end of his life.

The peasant’s greatest intellectual advocate in the twentieth century was the English art critic, essayist, and novelist John Berger. In Into Their Labours, his trilogy of novels about the peasants of the alpine village near Geneva where he lived and worked from the mid-1970s until near the end of his life, one of the things Berger sought to find was a new mode of what he continually referred to as “storytelling,” as opposed to “fiction writing” or “literary fiction.” Such storytelling often arose from the aging, shrinking population of his adopted community, and was always defined by a concern to preserve what was being lost. What was being lost, Berger thought, was an entire way of being human. But Berger stressed that this had “nothing to do with nostalgia. In a very curious way, it is a sense of loss which is directed towards the future.”

In works such as the photographic book Another Way of Telling or the extended poem-essay And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Berger sought precious seeds for a spiritual and soulful replanting of something that might come (if anything was to come) after “the totalitarian global order of financial speculative capitalism under which we are currently living.”footnote He did not bypass Marx, but sought something Marxism alone could not address. This was a track down which many of Berger’s most ardent admirers (leftist intellectuals, aesthetes, city-dwellers) could not follow. British journalist Joshua Craze typifies the disappointment of many when he writes that Berger’s late work (such as Into Their Labors) “reads like a salvage anthropology, with Berger diving down into the sinking ship of the peasantry to save what baubles of wisdom he can before the waters of capital cover us all.”footnote

Craze’s critique betrays a telling lack of curiosity as to what, exactly, Berger might have been looking for among peasant societies. It is this same reductionist tendency to reduce peasant worldviews to “baubles” of folksy homespun wisdom that Joyce declares his book to be against.

Both Berger and Joyce’s projects might make more sense to the historical-materially inclined once we remember that the deliberate extinction of peasantry was the necessary condition for capitalism’s emergence. As the late historian Ellen Meiksins Wood argues,

Capitalism was born at the very core of human life, in the interaction with nature on which life itself depends, and the transformation of that interaction by agrarian capitalism revealed the inherently destructive impulses of a system in which the very fundamentals of existence are subjected to the requirements of profit. In other words, the origin of capitalism revealed the essential secret of capitalism.footnote

If so, the world of the peasantry – or the wreck of the peasantry – seems a natural place to begin looking for an other-than-capitalist future, since it was that same world that capitalism had to extinguish for its eventual, and total, dominion. The social, economic, and spiritual conditions imposed by capitalism are not natural or innately human; rather, they were gradually imposed and embedded at certain times and places. This is the reasoning behind Wood’s critique of previous accounts of capitalism’s origin that assume “the very thing that needs to be explained”: the (supposedly) innate human tendency to exist as a rationally self-interested homo economicus in an alienated marketplace, an inevitable condition if only “the historical fetters” are lifted.footnote

The Polish writer Władysław Reymont originally published his novel The Peasants in installments between 1904 and 1909. In 1924, it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. When it came to writing Remembering Peasants, Joyce only had access to a century-old translation, “which I found so dated as to be unreadable.” footnote He adds, however, that there is now a much better modern translation.

Anna Zaranko’s remarkable new translation of The Peasants (Penguin Classics, 2022) has received little attention. This is a real shame. As I discovered, The Peasants is among the greatest achievements of the European novel. It is also the most comprehensive artistic depiction of peasant life I am aware of, and therefore perhaps the single most useful entry point for anyone wishing to reimagine the world of peasants.

Reymont was born in 1867, in the village of Kobiele Wielkie, in a Russian-ruled corner of rural Poland. He himself was not a peasant. His father was the church organist, a destiny for which Władysław was also bound, though he showed little inclination for imposed studies. Drifting to Warsaw to be apprenticed to a tailor, he fell into theater instead. He was a bad actor, though, and after returning home for a job on the railroad, he started to write in earnest. After his first stories were published, he moved back to Warsaw. Acclaim arrived in 1895 when his Pilgrimage to the Mountain of Light, about a spring journey to the Madonna miracle site of Częstochowa, was published. He later traveled through England, France, Italy, and Germany. Much like another famed chronicler of rooted peasant existences, the Icelandic novelist and fellow Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, Reymont himself was a restless soul.

Camille Pissarro, Paysans dans les champs, Éragny, 1890. 

Reymont returned to his native Poland and the burgeoning industrial city of Łódź “to study conditions in heavy industry.”footnote This would result in his 1899 novel, The Promised Land. Preceding Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle by five years, The Promised Land sought to conjure the devastation of industrialized “progress” on owners and workers alike. After a train accident in 1902 left him permanently in shaky health (he would die at age fifty-seven in 1925), Reymont returned to the countryside of his youth. There he began rewriting The Peasants from scratch, (after burning an early draft started in 1897) in 1904, completing the novel in 1909. It was published in four volumes, reflecting the four seasons, one complete agricultural and liturgical cycle in the life of the village of Lipce.

The action, set during some unspecified year in the late nineteenth century, gradually acculturates the reader into the rhythms of a timeless world – timeless because time-bound. It is bound, of course, in a natural sense. The novel includes extensive and detailed description of the seasons and the human rituals accompanying their transformations. Descriptions of light, for example, in its changes throughout the day, are closely noted by the narrator’s unerring eye. Birds, insects, sounds, weather, wind, trees: the world of these peasants is intensely animate, mutual, participatory. Alongside the agricultural cycle is the liturgical cycle, the feasts of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and many in-between acts of collective celebration, thanksgiving, and renewal. Then there are the familial and personal milestones: birth, coming of age, marriage, procreation, death.

There is no single plot to the book; with over a hundred named characters from dozens of families, we move from family drama to community struggle, inner meditation to bustling gossip, in one continual flow. The central family is that of Maciej Boryna, “first in the village.” Boryna owns the most land and is its most respected figure, a kind of descendant of the tribal headman, but an undeclared leader. And Maciej is complex. Reserved and already twice widowed, he decides in part 1 (Autumn) to marry Jagna, the most beautiful (and wild and strange and resented) girl in the village. Jagna doesn’t need to marry the aging Boryna, having a fortune of her own from her deceased father – but she does. And yet she desires only Antek, Boryna’s fiery son. Antek, who happens to have a wife and children already, reciprocates. Chaos ensues.

This central story is interrupted, or intersected, as the year wears on, with many others, both within the village and without – the winds of history, mostly hostile, blow toward, around, and through Lipce. From our historical remove, we can see their eventual destructiveness as Reymont never could. Polish nationalism and rural antisemitism (which is shockingly but complexly presented); the rising motivations of capitalism and individualism; and immigration, the constant possibility of escape to the New World, all place us firmly in a time whispering, but only faintly, of a beginning of some sort of end.

How much existential danger Reymont believed the world he was chronicling to be in is difficult to know, but the novel – from its title to its composition – has the absolute air of a self-conscious attempt at definitiveness. Not that this hurts it. It has the expanse of an epic. But unlike the individual quest of Dante or the royal, martial drama of Homer, it’s an epic sown by a collective (“a hive,” as Reymont more than once refers to the village) over four seasons, through the quotidian accumulation of detail, tension and release, scandal and gossip, brutality and tenderness, greatness and meanness, selfishness and solidarity – the whole surprising, intensely transient thrum of life. In a real sense, nothing happens. That is, at the novel’s end, a great deal has happened, but the characters, the people to whom it happened, have ended up at no definitive place, neither comic nor tragic. And they are going nowhere. Things, utterly changed, will continue to utterly change and to stay utterly the same.

Like other epic writers before him, Reymont decided to unify his readership through his language. He combined many dialects of rural Poland to allow the book and characters to speak in a kind of pan-peasant “rural Polish.” The narrator adopts these tones, too, but also cycles through more detached modes, derived from the naturalism of Émile Zola, which was ascendant during Reymont’s youth. In its concern for realistic verisimilitude and presentation of environmental and social determination, the novel could certainly be described as naturalist. Reymont first conceived it as a rebuke to the insultingly crude and coarse portrayal of rural life he found in Zola’s La Terre. But then, one would also have to describe it as realist, symbolist, impressionist – ultimately, modernist.

Reymont was writing before there was such a thing, but the novel’s refusal to be confined in mode or perspective or moral earns it that label. It is a unique modernism, but a modernism nonetheless: the shadowy and neglected opposing current of modernism that springs from and describes not the cosmopolitan world of the cities supposedly inseparable from modernity but its rapidly receding sacrifice zone: the rural.

I am glad I read Joyce before Reymont. Every detail of the “church of the peasants” so carefully excavated and anatomized by the former is revived into real and humming life in the latter. But what is the point, the use, in all this? The weak spots of Remembering Peasants are where Joyce attempts to make this very case: “If we are in a sense ultimately the children of peasants, then a kind of redemption may lie in honouring our forebears, for surely children should pay respect to their parents, which is to say, their ancestors.”footnote

This, to me, sounds flimsy, in its imprecise phraseology of “honouring” and “a kind of redemption.” If we, relative to our “ancestors,” are now “children,” how are we to learn to grow up? Joyce’s final section is also his weakest. It amounts to an extended diatribe against the shallowness of Europe’s historical memory of its peasant past, from museums to “historical buildings.” His complaint (no doubt justified) is that our memory and understanding of peasants has been lost in the comforting and museum-influenced construct of national (or nationalistic) “heritage.” And he presses the question further: What has history come to mean today, when the obliviating, relentless nature of our present “engulfs us?”footnote

These are worthwhile questions, but they are the questions of a historian. The book oddly takes on shades of the very historicization it was ostensibly written to counter. The only dispute is how we ought to “remember,” but that “we” is still located outside any sense of shared consciousness or body – remember that the “member” in “re-member” refers to a limb, a part of our own body.

Camille Pissarro, La Récolte des Foins, Éragny, 1887.

In one form or another – whether you blame the cracking of the ecological balance, or capitalism, or the rise of “techno-feudalism” in which we depend to a terrifying extent on a handful of virtual “platforms” owned by a handful of increasingly unhinged billionaires determined to live forever – a sense of hazard, precarity, and essential powerlessness in the face of a world we can’t influence have also become more or less universal aspects of daily experience even for those in the prosperous, post-peasant West or Global North.

We might not like to admit it to ourselves, but just like the peasants before us, our own freedom to choose, (modernity’s signal justification for peasant eradication over the twentieth century) has now become attenuated to such an extent that we seem unable to halt our own self-inflicted annihilation by a changing climate, as the violence wrought upon the earth by the past century’s search for “freedom” comes back to haunt us.

Helpless as the peasants in Berger’s or Reymont’s novels are, in one respect both authors stress that they are free: in the ability to tell their own story. Reymont’s gigantic work is a testament to this one fact, the way in which the village (in Berger’s phrase) can “define itself,” and in a way define the world, by a collective, ongoing act of co-narration. We dwellers in the wraparound world of techno-urban modernity, post-modernity, or whatever it is we’re supposed to be in now, still remain half-spellbound by a fraying narrative of individual freedom and the right to everything under the sun without limit. We no longer collectively tell these big stories or ask these big questions about our lives; they are instead told to us, or they are not told at all.

I am not arguing that we should attempt to play peasants. Rather, I would suggest that many of the downsides of a peasant’s existence are gradually returning to our lives anyway, in new and strange garb. But we have very few of the upsides to counterbalance them: the long-ingrained knowledge, the communal and spiritual resources that made peasants “survivors.”

What imaginable and survivable futures do we foreclose in forgetting our common historical identity, which was defined by orientation to the earth, and what it meant to survive on it? Within those often brutal limits, the peasant societies created wonders of the human spirit, some of which still survive in some places: a curious, flawed, but nevertheless certain kind of freedom, to be no more or less than a human being, with other human beings, on the earth.

Footnotes

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (Abacus, 1995), 289.
2. Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Scribner, 2024), 60.
3. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, 35.
4. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, 187.
5. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, xii.
6. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973), 43.
7. John Berger, Confabulations (Penguin Books Limited, 2016).
8. Joshua Craze, “Learning to Look: Berger’s Lessons,” Critical Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2023): 5–21, at 17.
9. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2022), 194.
10. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 3–4.
11. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, 345.
12. “Władysław Reymont: Biographical,” nobelprize.org.
13. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, xi.
14. Joyce, Remembering Peasants, 270.