Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
Mirages of revolution
It’s easy enough to see hints of future upheavals—good, bad and both—in the chaos of the plague years.
The Jacquerie and bourgeois uprising mirror the early chapters of the French Revolution, at times uncannily—down to the crown’s wrangling with the Estates General over budgets, the facilitating role of the Paris mob and the stark kill-every-aristocrat rhetoric of some participants.
The flagellants clearly anticipated the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on personal piety, rejection of priestly intermediaries, denunciation of ecclesiastical corruption—even its German epicenter.
Persecuting Jews was nothing new. But blaming them for a vast, inexplicable calamity—and imaging that a shadowy transnational cabal had been formed to carry it out—was a sinister and lasting innovation. Adjust the specifics, and the language of the Savoy well-poisoning trials would look perfectly at home in a Dreyfus-era pamphlet, a Hitler speech, or a Youtube comment.
Setting aside the pogroms, which reached a monstrous scale, why didn’t these incipient upheavals come to fruition? Why didn’t the French Revolution or the Protestant Reformation happen in the 1340s, when the lower castes—at least in France and Germany—were clearly aggrieved and apparently ready to force change?
Perhaps the issue is the teleological framing: with apologies to Marx, nothing about societal change is preordained. Perhaps there’s a world in which the Revolution and Reformation still haven’t happened—in which they never do, or the social upheaval that does happen takes a wildly different form.
Perhaps we’ve got it upside-down. We shouldn’t see a precursor of Luther in the flagellants or a precursor of Robespierre in Marcel: we should treat the Bastille and the 95 Theses not as stark leaps into modernity, but essentially premodern events with plenty of medieval precedent—it’s just that later, as the aftermath of these events unfolded, society veered into new territory.
But let’s indulge the question: why didn’t the 1340s turn into the 1520s or the 1790s?
First, things are easier to pull off when there’s a precedent. However much raw material there is in centuries of brutal caste oppression or staggering hypocrisy on the part of the apostles’ heirs, it’s easier to press the kill-all-aristocrats or shun-the-priests case when you’re not the first to say it. Much better if there’s a lost cause—extra points if brutally suppressed—a stirring epic of righteous struggle by our ancestors, who if they could see us now, well what would they say?
There’s also a subtler and harder-earned prerequisite: the habit of imagining society changed. Most people in most times and places have fundamentally imagined that history is a wheel, that things were always thus (or that we’re in steady, predetermined decline from illustrious ancestors to whimpering doom).
They’ve been able to conceive of killing, robbing and raping the elites. But eliminating them all permanently? Reshaping the world? Ushering in a new epoch of history through human agency? If you say so.
That may well be the Black Death’s contribution—for better or worse—to the modern mind. The people of the 14th century hadn’t thought through the implications of dismantling feudalism and replacing it with Enlightened bourgeois—scratch that, socialist proletarian—democracy. They hadn’t thought through the creation of a spontaneous, text-based, belief-oriented, egalitarian Christianity. (At its best.)
They hadn’t invented those ideas any more than they’d invented laser pointers or the saxophone.
But they may have invented something. They saw the world end, as they’d all been taught to expect—but then somehow, it didn’t end all the way. A third of the world died and the rest went mad. But then the remnant wasn’t judged, it was just left there to negotiate the madness. And then things got better, sort of, but stayed awful.
Perhaps it became clear that the world can change, society can change, and the signs and wonders don’t necessarily herald anything. They’re just events, and the world keeps on going—changed.
Once people came to believe that, Luther and Robespierre became possible.
More likely, though, the reason the 1340s didn’t reach their potential—as we might define it in hindsight—was none of that heady stuff. It was simple: the weak were too weak and the strong were too strong. The knights of the 14th century saw a peasant as a churlish degenerate (the word “villain” is literally just the medieval French-English word [archived] for peasant).
A rebellious peasant, the knights saw as game.
When the commoners of the 14th century rose up, whatever they could or couldn’t imagine would be the result, they were slaughtered by men on horses wearing steel armor: the equivalent, to the unmounted and barely-armed, of tanks.
The more things change.
Next time, The Black kingdoms of America (part 1): upon a peak in Darien—the textbooks talk about "European contact" after 1492. But for centuries, large areas of the non-native New World were African—and free.