Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/126

 112 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The feudal tenures, far from being replaced by the small proprie- tors, gave place in the north and west of France to rents for a fixed term or to the direct management of domains by their lords or by companies of stockholders. \

Where a copyhold tenure had been maintained the lords had diminished the benefits of their country vassals by abolishing profit- less pasture and by reducing the acreage for commons, and by the augmentation of charges and pecuniary payments from their ten- ants. These tendencies were especially active in the years which preceded the Revolution. These tendencies greatly displeased the peasants who considered these augumentations as a crying abuse and thus suggested to them the idea of destroying by fire the rec- ords of the new customs of servitude as far as these were contained in the seignorial archives. Thus was prepared the way for the abolition of the feudal regime in the celebrated session on the night of August 4, 1789.

In the first chapter, entitled "The Possessing and Non-possess- ing Orders — The Directed and Directing Classes," numerous cita- tions are made from the proceedings of agricultural conventions, from the records of rural parishes, from the writings of the physio- crats, and from private correspondence and memoirs of the time.

In a table showing the distribution of the rural population of some communes of the district of Chatillon, 27 per cent, of the inhabitants are reported as simple workmen and as p>ossessing nothing but a thatched cottage; 21^ per cent, were reduced to men- dicity. There were some 390 peasants who possessed in their own name some vineyards ; 181 of these held land on rental.

Having in his first chapter given a detailed discussion of the ownership of lands, both static and historical, he proceeds in a more general way to consider seignorial rights and the economic and social situation of the peasants at the end of the eighteenth century. The division of the seignorial soil between free tenants and serfs tended to disappear gradually as the third estate under- took the exploitation of the soil either in the form of rentals or by direct management, and at the age of the Revolution the soil of France was no longer in the control of laborers and workmen, but it belonged to the nobility of the sword and of the robe, to those newly ennobled from the third estate, to high financiers, and finally to the church and religious congregations. By the sale of the property of the church and religious congregations as well as of