Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

The crusades acted in the same way on the condition of the peasantry in France, as they did in Germany, Flanders, etc.

Successively, kings began to regulate and alleviate the condition of the serfs on their domains, gradually interposing to limit the power of the nobles over their serfs. A chronicler of that time (twelfth century), says: "Cetera censuum exactiones quæ servis infligi solent (nobles) omnimodis vacent." The French legists of the thirteenth century, inspired by Ulpian and Roman law, the study of which was again revived by a decree of Louis IX., declared that every man on the soil of France is or ought to be free, by right as well as by the law of nature. Subsequently this axiom was considered applicable even to Saracens, Mahomedans, Africans, and all races, creeds, and nationalities. Louis IX. was the friend of the oppressed and the redresser of the wrongs of the peasantry. He abolished the more oppressive servitudes in the domains, and tried to humanize the nobles.

The great principle of liberty asserted by the legists of the thirteenth century, was in the fourteenth embodied in a law or edict of Louis X., which decreed that the serfs might pay off their personal and rural obligation to the nobles and become free tenants. This law was very generally carried out in the royal domains, but did not find much favor among the nobles or in the feudalized church. At that time, moreover, many serfs and peasants, from poverty, mental degradation, and shiftlessness, and others from distrust of the law and the nobles, refused the freedom offered to them. In several provinces, disorders even resulted from their resistance, especially in those places where the conditions dictated by the seneschals (royal overseers), nobles, and priests, were so oppressive as to make free tenantry no better than bondage; and for this reason, also, serfs who had obtained their liberty often returned to servitude. In defence of American chattelhood, it is asserted that many chattels spurn the idea of emancipation; that many of them, when emancipated, return, of their own choice, into slavery, and that they are too degraded to appreciate freedom, and too shiftless to achieve its rewards. These very reasons, based on facts similar to those now set forth, were urged by the French feudal masters against the efforts of the government to liberate the oppressed whites.

The consequences of a bodily as of a social disorder are frequently of protracted duration. The oppression of centuries so destroys the mind and manhood of the oppressed that they consider slavery their normal condition, even as physical monstrosities have sometimes been regarded by their possessors as the symbols of beauty and health. Such incurables may even be found among the now free descendants of social, political, national, and legal bondmen—among the descendants of those who in former times were covered with contempt, and who suffered unutterable social degradation. Such are the Irish, en masse, and some others who escape oppression in Europe only to support slavery in America.

Personal serfdom and vassalage began to be gradually modified; but on the estates of the clergy and nobility it lasted till near the eighteenth century, still preserving several of its worst features. Nowhere in Europe was the peasant so long and so grievously oppressed as in France; nowhere did he take such terrible but just revenge. Insurrections of the peasantry in various parts of France form an almost uninterrupted historic series, of which the great revolution was the fitting climax.

The repeated bagaudies of the Gallic peasantry have been already mentioned: the next revolt was in the tenth century, when the serfs and peasants of Neustræ (Normandy) rose against the Northmen, who had just established themselves, and who tried to transform them into chattels; and another rising took place about the same time in Brittany. Beside many partial uprisings against particular strongholds or districts, the most general and most celebrated were those of the pastouraux, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—one of which was directed principally against the feudalized clergy—and the repeated jacqueries. Indeed, during the fourteenth century, the whole of Europe might be said to be divided into two great hostile camps: the nobles with their exactions and oppressions forming one, and the laborers, peasants and serfs, resisting their oppressors with battle-axe and fire, forming the other. And thus the oppressed everywhere hewed out their path to freedom and civilization.

The fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their various revolts, sometimes evoked by governmental measures and maladministration, but far oftener stirred up by the reckless and cruel treatment of the laborer by the nobles—against whom both the law and royal authority were too often inefficient and powerless.

Then came the epoch of atonement and of justice—1789-1793. Then germinated the seeds which had been sown for centuries in the social soil by the oppressors, and then, too, was gathered the bloody harvest.

The present rural population or peasantry of France, the descendants of serfs and chattels, now possess the same civil and political rights as any other class in the nation—rights more ample than are enjoyed by any other peasantry in Europe. They have, of course, still to suffer various evils arising from the common imperfection of all social structures; but no special degradation is attached to their birth or their condition.