Why Is There No Jacquerie in "Pride & Prejudice"?

One would think that the situation of Mr. Bennet, Mr. Darcy, & Lizzie Bennet in "Pride & Prejudice" would end with them like their French counterparts half a generation before—them fleeing the...

One would think that the situation of Mr. Bennet, Mr. Darcy, & Lizzie Bennet in Pride & Prejudice would end with them like their French counterparts half a generation before—them fleeing the merciless agents of some Committee on Public Safety with their clothes on their back & whatever silver eating implements they can stuff in their undergarments, hoping for some Scarlet Pimpernel-like figure to come to their rescue. But no!…

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While stuck in traffic on the Octavia Street offramp in San Francisco, we were talking about how it possibly could have been that Mr. Bennet, father of heroine Lizzie Bennet in Jane Austen’s Novel Pride and Prejudice, could be so wealthy and maintain his wealth. 

Mr. Bennet, of course, is the early-1800s proprietor of Longbourne, an estate (they don’t seem to call it a manor) near Meryton, in southern England. I have always thought of Longbourne and Meryton as being located somewhere in or near Hertfordshire—say, in the quadrangle running from St. Albans to Bishop’s Stortford to Biggleswade to Leighton Buzzard.

He is a rich man.

Consider four monetary amounts £2,000,  £20, £13, and £5:

• Mr. Bennet: £2,000/year

• Agricultural worker: £20/year

• Allen & al. family “respectability” basket: £13/year

• Allen & al. family “subsistence” basket: £5/year

£2,000 is the annual income that Mr, Bennet derives from his estate of Longbourne back in 1810.

£20 is the annual income that a not-rich agricultural worker takes home to his family, including in-king income.

£13 is the reckoning Robert Allen make of the annual cost of the “respectability basket” of consumption commodities—people who are not at the edge of starvation, but whose living standard is still modest.

And £5 is the estimate of the annual cost of the “subsistence basket” of consumption commodities—that at which people are at the edge of being very hungry, wet, and cold much of the time.

There is a peculiar fact here: Mr. Bennet is in a very weird position, relative to either his feudal predecessors of six-hundred years before or his semi-feudal predecessors of three-hundred years ago, or relative to his successors of today.

His predecessors as proprietors of the Longbourne estate three centuries before would have been, personally:

• warriors,

• judges, and

• police officers.

They were knights, along with their sergeants, squires, and men-at-arms—or possibly bureaucrats and fixers who could call on said knights, etc. To the ideological legitimation that the Lord of the Manor was born in a higher caste, and that he risked his life in battle to protect the community, was added the fact that he was armed and trained to deal out death and destruction whenever necessary. They thus can claim to deserve their wealth by virtue of their  contribution to the community (as those who fight), and they personally can evoke fear in those who might think of taking their stuff.

His successors as proprietors of the Longbourne estate today are either:

• owners and controllers (at some remove) of valuable capital goods embodying technological knowledge that greatly amplify labor productivity, or

• skilled professionals with valuable knowledge and expertise that the market will pay for, or

• more likely both.

They thus can claim to deserve their wealth by virtue of their contribution to the community (as those who invested in valuable capital, took substantial risks that came good, or have useful skills), and they can draw on powerful armed assistance from security forces, and that threat institutionally should evoke fear in those who might think of taking their stuff.

But Mr. Bennet?

Mr. Bennet did not make the land. Mr. Bennet has no marketable valuable skills. Mr. Bennet can barely manage to dispatch a fly buzzing around his desk. And as for local police—there was a part-time parish constable, nearly Meryton probably had a night watchman or two, and there was the recently raised yeomanry composed of people of Mr. Bennet’s social class but more energy, and their friends, with their hunting weapons.

So why, then, do 300 families pay Mr. Bennet ⅓ of their production and income, directly and indirectly, in rent?

Well, they almost did not.

Look across the English Channel at what been in the mid-1700s the more strongly aristocratic and autocratic Kingdom of France. On the night of August 4, 1789, three weeks after the storming of the fortress-prison of the Bastille, the National Constituent Assembly into which the États Généraux had transformed themselves voted to abolish and renounce all feudal rights, privileges, and dues held by and owed to the nobility and clergy of France. The estates that were the French parallels to Longbourne thereby ceased to be. France became a country of individual peasant farmsteads, each owning their own.

Why did they do this? Well, let us quote from Georges Lefebvre’s The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France:

In the Dauphine… a host of local peasants gather[ed]… at Bourgoin on 27 July… decided that since they were all gathered together they might as well make the most of it and attack their oppressors…. At six o'clock in the morning on the 28th, they went off to burn the chateau of the President de Vaulx to the west of the town, then split up and gradually aroused all the local villages. On the 28th and 29th, all along the Bourbe and to the west of it, chateau after chateau went up in flames. Militia came out from Lyons to intervene and managed to stop further damage, but the peasants went as far as the Rhone and burnt other chateaux on its south bank, the finest being the home of the Baron d’Anthon….

The revolt also travelled down to the South-West: on the 31st, the chateau of the President d'Ornacieux was burnt in its turn; the mob moved into the neighbourhood of Peage-de-Roussillon where they made an unsuccessful attack on the Chateau de Terre-Basse on the 3rd; they had been more successful earlier on the night of 31 July-i August, for the Chateau de la Saone was destroyed. In the South-East, the Grenoble militia had managed to stop the peasants' advance at Virieu, but on 1 August, the militia retired and the disturbances spread all around the town…. 

The Great Fear… caused the downfall of the seigneurial regime and added a new jacquerie to those which had gone before. In the drama of peasant life, it is written in letters of fire….

The Great Fear…  by gathering the peasants together, it allowed them to achieve a full realization of their strength…reinforced the attack already launched against the seigneurial regime…. It played its part in the preparations for the night of 4 August and on these grounds alone must count as one of the most important episodes in the history of the French nation…

The Great Fear is what we call the wave of social and political unrest that spread across rural France during the summer of 1789. What was it a fear of? That there was an aristocratic conspiracy at work. Rural economic and harvest conditions were not good. And rumors abounded: rumors that nobles and landlords were planning to suppress the nascent Revolution, and then turn to further exploiting the peasantry. In response, peasants armed themselves, formed militias, attacked and burned chateaux and estates, and—most of all—burned feudal documents that recorded their obligations to landlords. 

This insurrection and the response were a pivotal moment in the French Revolution: the cause of the “Night of August 4, 1789”. The National Assembly majority believed that if they got ahead of the popular movement they could control it. Hence the sudden and radical turn to dismantle feudal privileges in hopes of addressing peasant grievances and restoring order,

Nothing like this happened in England. But it could have. Edmund Burke in 1790 was terrified that it might. That in England as in France there might be revolution. That out of:

neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility… the medicine of the state [might be] corrupted into its poison….

The French rebel[ed] against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession, their revolt was from protection, their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities. 

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence…

And so, in Burke’s words, with the end of a landed gentry-nobility that could neither justify nor defend itself, in France: “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

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References:

• Allen, Robert C: 2001. "The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War." Explorations in Economic History 38 (4): 411–447. <https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:38:y:2001:i:4:p:411-447>.

• Austen, Jane: 1813. Pride & Prejudice. London: T. Egerton. <https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342>.

• Burke, Edmund: 2009 [1790]. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/reflectionsonrev0000burk_j0w9>

• Lefebvre, Georges: 1973. The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France. New York: Pantheon Books. <https://archive.org/details/greatfearof17890000unse>.