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

[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.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I dispute that 1848 is best categorized as a bunch of peasant uprisings. Those were bourgeois-democratic revolutions which used peasants as muscle.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Okay, strictly speaking yes, I was starting to think about that as I wrote my comment but was carried away by enthusiasm. I also suspect that it might be definitional, because of the theoretical weight of what "changes in the underlying social structure" means, which requires some kind of education. Maybe you could do it with a religious figure. Hmm.

I think you can have all the advantages of the peasant revolt as discussed in this entry, though, even with your rising-middle-class instigators or opportunists or whatever.