And the peasants rejoiced. Or revolted. Or whatever.

[mrissa]

One of the many nice things about peasant uprisings, as plot points go, is that the peasants are everywhere. You don't have to do a particular lot of maneuvering to get your protagonist near potentially-uprisable peasants. They're around. There's a reason they call them commoners. Your characters walk into a bar. Peasants! They buy some fruit. Peasants! They go to have their shoes re-soled. Peasants! They want to hire a fishing boat. Peasants!

Unless you're in that one period of Hungarian history, of course, in which case Aristocrats! but other than that.

That being the case, why don't more authors write peasant uprisings for me? They make me so happy, and they're easy. It's not like you have to sit around for very long thinking really hard about what on earth the peasants might find to get angry over; there's plenty. You don't have to draw the long family trees with the million crossed branches, because they're peasants; no one cares if they're actually their own fifth cousin twice removed, especially not them. In fact, there's a lot of stupid stuff you don't have to bother with in a peasant uprising. And blood is compulsory. Rhetoric may even be compulsory, too. So by then you have your choice about whether you want to bother with love and whether you want them consecutive or concurrent, but the point is, you already have blood and rhetoric, so you're good to go.

I'm not saying it has to be every book. I'm just saying, for your plot development needs, please consider the peasant uprising. It's fun! It's fresh! It's versatile! It's got barricades! Haven't you always wanted barricades?

I thought so.

Comments

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

The problem with pheasant uprisings is they tend to be messy, what with feathers dropping everywhere, and depending on their angle of flight it can be hard to get a shot off, and...

What?

Oh, peasant.

Never mind.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The problem with pheasant uprisings is they tend to be messy, what with feathers dropping everywhere, and depending on their angle of flight it can be hard to get a shot off

My family moved house because of a pheasant uprising once.

No, seriously. My parents had decided that self-sufficiency was a good thing, and that the urban environment was not the best for us, so we moved from Dublin to half-way up a mountain in the wilds of North Cork. The first year they planted a sizable garden and neighbouring cattle ambled in and ate everything. So my father put up a hefty fence, and the second year rabbits tunneled in and ate everything. So the following year he buried chicken wire to a depth of a couple of feet all around the garden, and somebody released an enormous flock of pheasants for the hunting virtually next door, and they ate everything. At which point my parents said "sod this for a lark" and moved somewhere more civilised, though not alas back to Dublin. I suggested putting a canopy over the garden but nobody paid me any attention; to be fair, I was eight.

The peasants are always revolting!

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely. I am also interested why there aren't more self-interested peasants betraying people. But I think the point here is that peasants aren't so much characters as plot devices.

This is all reminding me of Westmark, which is one of my all time favorite treatments of civil war. (Maybe because it was one of the first.)

Re: The peasants are always revolting!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This book is not just homage to that entire series.

No.

Not only that.

Re: The peasants are always revolting!

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Ooooo...I heart Westmark so much.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Plus Cynthia Voight's Jackaroo, which is one of the most overlooked fantasy cycles for young people, along with Joan Aiken's Go Saddle the Sea and Bridle the Wind, both of which feature lots of peasant characters. (As I recall. It's been a while.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I never read the later books after Jackaroo -- they were coming out just as I was finding an entire new genre, so I ended up ignoring them. I should go back and find them maybe?

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Ooo! I have Jackaroo, bought it at a school book sale in 7th or 8th grade. I had no idea there were more! *Adds to wish list on Amazon*.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Brandon Sanderson (http://mistborn.livejournal.com/), one of last year's Campbell class, has a peasant uprising combined with the heist genre in his second book, Mistborn. I enjoyed it immensely but there was a lack of barricades. Maybe next book. :)

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Hm. Kind of. I'm halfway through Book 2. It's veryveryVERY good so far. I'm finding that Sanderson is not getting as much buzz as other newer authors are and it makes me sad, because I think he's simply fantastic. The end of Mistborn gave me chills--I went from "No, he can't possibly be going there," to "Oh my God, he IS going there, I hope he can pull it off," to "That was the most brilliant thing I've read this month, where is the next book?"

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Hypothesis; perhaps the thing about peasant uprisings that disinclines people to do them is that something to do with focus more on mobs than on individual characters.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Those people should read more Simon Schama, then.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I'm sold. There will definitely be a peasant uprising in my next book.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I like peasant uprisings too, but they tend not to lead to qualitative changes in the underlying social system, which is most fun of all.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Our comments overlapped! I dispute! Or rather, perhaps you have summarized my problem as "I wanted my peasant uprising to result in major power shifts," see below, 1848 Europe, and that's hard.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Funny, I love a good peasant uprising but I always think they're too complicated to write. When I was reading a lot about 1848 I wrote many chapters of a peasant-uprising novel, only I had this character to start with who was not peasanty enough so then I had to figure out how she would have learned to read and everything and then I wanted to work out the entire political structure and the new concept of meritocracy, sort of a NCO/commissioned officer deal and I got so busy nailing down the details that I stopped writing.

I guess you would say that I should just have forgotten about my NCO and had five hundred farmers with pitchforks. I might revisit that, actualy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I want more 1848. Any particular books standing out in your memory?

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I'm already on board. The LARP I've been writing for *cough cough* a while is heavily dependent upon a peasant uprising.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You are the best careswen we know. You win the official careswen Of The Year for 2007.

We have no plaque yet, but if we ever get one, it'll be chocolate, just like the Hero Of The Revolution medals. Possibly with hazelnuts in, because who doesn't like chocolate with hazelnuts?

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

Help, help I'm being repressed! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

... many delighted in torching the manors

[aet.livejournal.com]

"During the 1905 revolution, poverty-stricken Baltic peasants vented their anger at Czarist police and Baltic German nobility, who owned more than half of all land in Latvia and Estonia. “In the Lithuanian provinces the destruction of estates was rare, but strikes by farm laborers were widespread.” (Smith) In the end almost 600 estates had been destroyed by arson in all three provinces. "It was a violent time in the Baltic states, where many delighted in torching the manors…and other buildings of the ruling classes. It was the start of a savage century,” said British historian Rowlinson Carter. As a result, 700 people in the Latvian and Estonian provinces were shot and over 8,000 deported to Siberia. In the Lithuanian provinces about 2,900 people were arrested. Many escaped to Britain but the majority ended up in the US."

http://depts.washington.edu/baltic/papers/independence.html

Toivo U. Raun "The Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland" is unfortunately not available free, or I would try to mend ignorance on what the Finnish peasants did, not having the German manors to burn ...

Re: ... many delighted in torching the manors

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Hang on, why is your journal showing deleted? Come back, Aet!

[grndexter.livejournal.com]

"Your father needs you."
"Why, are the peasants revolting?"
"The peasants are always revolting. But now they are also rebelling."
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There are several problems with peasants. One of these is defining them. Exactly who ARE the peasants? In a strictly feudal society where you have basically only two classes, that's easy. Whoever is not ruling class is peasant. But if there is a modicum of freedom, a bit of free enterprise that creates a middle class, then the term peasant becomes relative. You could be ruling class, your relatives peasants. You could be a peasant to your king, but a ruler to your tenants and employees.

Then there are the Royal Peasants - people of royal blood (issue from the chambermaid's OTHER duty) who are born to peasants.

So... in the final analysis, peasants are really complicated.

And we must also remember - no rebellion in history has succeeded without sponsorship from some element of the ruling class. So if the revolting peasants are rebelling, we have to have a worm or three in the royal apple, so to speak, and it REALLY gets complicated from there.

So... peasant rebellions end up becoming just the disputes and the competing ambitions of individuals in the ruling classes, the peasants doing their bit by being faceless and bleeding and dying... kinda like now. So who does the story end up being about? Yep. King Whoosis and his disloyal Court. And THAT is why you don't see peasant uprisings.

And uprisings are the inevitable product of people with leisure time - not something peasants have if they want to eat.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

But you don't have to write that story, you know. That's a cool thing about fiction, you don't have to subscribe to the Great Man Theory of History (aka the Les Mis style of revolution). You can write the story of Second Peasant On The Left, it's just a different story.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I have nothing substantial to add, but I want to thank you for this post, it made me giggle. Which is good on day, um, N of N+M, gah, I have lost all track of time, of experimenting on the undergraduates.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

May M be small, then.

This is approved experimenting still, right? You haven't switched from experimenting on the undergrads to just, y'know, experimenting on the undergrads? Because frustration might well incline one that way, N days in.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Actually I was planning a couple for the book I'm writing now. :D One will be on the Washita River in Oklahoma; the second is an undetermined location but probably central Illinois. Most of it will take place off-stage though, but the main characters (in Virginia) will get radio play-by-plays. :)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Duly noted: write more peasant uprisings. Step one: get back to writing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's good to break tasks up into manageable steps some days.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I know I would like to see more peasant uprisings in fiction. I am getting heartily sick of everyone in damn near every novel I read being ruling class of whatever ilk is appropriate for the genre.

[ellarien]

Not much room for peasant uprisings in the milieu of my current novel, alas. (There probably were peasants of some kind on the colony that went quasi-feudal in the Lonely Years, but that was a couple of hundred years back.)

[tewok.livejournal.com]

Last night, I saw the Washington National Opera's production of Leos Janacek's "Jenufa". (Excellent, excellent production, by the way.) This opera sorta featured a peasant uprising, of the barricadeless variety.

The Evil Step-Mother drowned Jenufa's baby. The townspeople -- peasants, in my opinion -- thought Jenufa had drowned the baby, so they ripped open ESM's house in order to tear Jenufa to pieces. ESM confessed to the murder and the peasants took her away. The uprising kinda fell apart after the confession. Sure, they hung about in order to take ESM away. But the whole peasanty bloodlust dissipated when ESM was willing to go without a fight.

This story also had a strange twist in that the ESM loved her step-daughter Jenufa. The only reason ESM drowned Jenufa's baby was that ESM thought Jenufa would have a better life if the baby wasn't around.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I know this comment is very belated; I'm slowly catching up on posts from when I was in London. But I just wanted to say, peasant uprisings are one of the reasons I really want to write what a friend of mine keeps referring to as my epic communist fantasy -- it isn't actually communist (I was just reading On Guerrilla Warfare as research, is all), but it's all about this sort of thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Eeeee!

I have proto-socialists. They are shiny.