French Rebellion Dbq

More than thirty years wars, destruction of the rural fields by the troops and compulsory conscription, created high anti-military attitudes among the peasantry. For instance, Davila pointed out that the brigandage was the reason for the Gautiers’ uprisings, or Moreau had the same idea about the uprising of the hamlets of Cornouaille. The Bonnet Rouges also took up the arms when their fields destroyed by the increase of the military depredations. The military duty was still a seigneurial duty, hence, the military activities of the seigniors besides their fiscal demands caused significant anti-nobility tendency among the peasantry. According to Thou, the Gautiers had the anti-nobility element and nobles of Normandy, saw them as their main enemies

or the peasants of Cornouaille, as Moreau indicated it, were determined to destroy the nobility entirely. In Brittany, we see for the first time that the peasants massacred the nobles in the large scale. The Bonnet Rouges were less anti-nobility because they were well-to-do peasants who pursued more to gain their complete freedom once the noble houses were on the verge of dying out.
Anticlericalism was not part of the peasant revolts in northern France because the religious affiliation were still important and peasants could not go beyond it to achieve more solidarity which later happened among them in the Croquants movement.

The Gautiers had good connection to the local priests and the Breton peasants even went more than it and claimed to exterminate all the enemy of the Church. The Bonnet Rouges also did not show any enmity against the clergy. Besides their attitude toward the clergies, the peasants showed different religious approaches. First of all, the Calvinism failed to find the support of bulk of population in Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Champagne and Picardy. The Norman and the Briton peasants inspired by their catholic zeal with their struggle against the seigneurs and the gens de guerre, for instance the Gautiers rejected to obey the king just because of his Calvinistic background, but unlike them, the Burgundian peasants turned to the king in order to defend themselves against the catholic fanatics in the towns and the tyranny of the league. In Brittany, the isolation and peculiar aspects of the peasantry pushed them to a kind of religious conservatism and

ultra-Catholicism.
One time, Tate called the peasant revolts of the end of the century as the animosity between the walled-towns and the countryside. About the peasant revolts of northern France, this idea is not completely applicable. Perhaps the revolts of these regions were not like the revolts of Vivarais and Dauphiné as the union of the towns and the countryside, but it is also recognizable that the even the commoners, at least lower classes, in the towns showed sympathy to the peasantry. However, the peasants of Brittany detested both the towns and the nobility or the Bonnets Rouges were against the catholic bourgeoisie of the great towns rather than nobility.
Politically, the peasantry of Normandy and Brittany were the pro-League and Burgundian peasants were against the League.

In the western provinces, the fiscal policy of the Royalists, perhaps besides their religious affiliations caused the peasantry to adhere to the League, in eastern provinces the same happened as a consequence of the behavior of the league nobility. The radicalization of the peasant revolts in Normandy is tangible, from the Gautiers who adhered to the League and Catholicism to the Franc-museaux of Senlis, and the Lipans who did not accept the authority of any political parties, however; apart from the sheer peasant revolts such as Franc-museaux, the Chateau-Verts, the Gautiers and the Lipans were conducted under the leadership of the gentry. The peasants in Brittany achieved to a better class solidarity due to their particular conditions such as their language, isolation, and religious enthusiasm. Their aim also went further than the Gautiers goals, and formed in a utopian vision for making the better society, at least in the very local scale. The collapsing of the League authority and destruction of the countryside in Burgundy led to the formation of one of the well-organized peasant revolts of the 1580s. Generally, the demands of the peasants altogether are classified into three parts as follow: those related to the taxes and illegal impositions, those related to military issues, such as conscription, supplying the garrison and brigandage and those

related to social life of the rural communities, such as having a syndic or a representatives.
The peasant revolts could be a kind of class antagonism in a society casted based on social and economic hierarchy. Perhaps it is impossible to divide these revolts into struggle between very specific classes, because among the peasantry there were petty-bourgeois or even local gentry and among the nobility there were the haut-bourgeois. But it is also traceable to see how the nobility tried to maintain their privileges or the peasantry tried to preserve the minimum facilities or right or to regain them. In the next chapter, we would see the peak of these efforts.