By approaching the peasants of the Middle Ages no longer as victims or rebels, but as agents of their own destiny, Mathieu Arnoux disrupts historiographical patterns. A study that goes well beyond medieval history.
“ Everywhere in the Europe of the Xe–XIIe centuries, mills were the work and tool of laboratories. There is no reason to do so a posteriori what they were not then: the tyrannical and progressive instrument of seigniorial power » (p. 336). This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the fruitfulness of the approach proposed by Mathieu Arnoux: peasants are no longer approached as victims of a society which crushes them, even if it means that these victims become rebels, but as the agents of their own destiny, which is enabled by corpus narrative in which the characters occupy a central place. Agents capable, when they revolt, of appropriating the discourse of the Church: it is significant that the most revolutionary phrase of these centuries is a reference to the Bible, an Augustinian vision well received in the countryside: “ When Adam was digging and Eve was spinning / Who was then a gentleman ? » This is partly why these peasants, who were then the essential part of the continent’s population, Mathieu Arnoux refused to define them in a negative way, as non-clerics, non-nobles, non-urbanites. And its study, critical of ancient approaches supported by revisited sources, allows us to finally perceive what the activities and life of the majority of the population of Western Europe were in the centuries following the year 1000.
Write history
This book is first of all a history of work in the Middle Ages, sometimes presented as a period of transition, between the time of slavery and that of the proletariat, between the ancient economy and the capitalist economy. The author starts from the enigma represented by the growth of the population of the West between the beginning of the XIe century and that of XIVeconsiderable before being interrupted by a series of catastrophes: hunger, plague, war. He questions the factors of this demographic dynamic, which plays a fundamental role in the history of the world over the following centuries, and returns to previous analyses, which explains the importance in this book of a bibliography without constantly revisited.
The work is made up of two parts. The first, stories rather than the story of the plowman, studies the question of growth, but this question, he tells us, is not resolved. Then, after an approach to the debates about the three orders, he examines the dynamics which make “ from servitude to order » (p. 59) and highlights the slow disappearance of slavery, the slave trade being, he writes, “ the problem of the year 1000 » (p. 66). Two points must be highlighted, among which the interest in philosophical reflection, especially that – but could it be otherwise ? — of Augustine of Hippo whose influence should not be underestimated as his analyzes were able to be disseminated, particularly by priests. Let us also underline the significant role of peasant uprisings, particularly in Normandy – an area on which previous work by Mathieu Arnoux focused – and in England where the revolt of 1381 left sources of great wealth.
The second part examines three institutions, very distinct but whose place is essential in the construction ofordo laboratorum, the tithe, a levy taken from the harvests by the clergy, the market, with precise temporalities, and the water mill. All these subjects have already been studied, and the author questions the interpretations, going back to the sources to understand the divergences. In the case of tax, these are the positions of the Church, which “ when it comes to the tithe is (…) at the same time maximalist, indecisive and anti-historical, which explains the rather conflicting character of the historiography devoted to it » (p. 225).
A study over a long period of time and which does not neglect the use of terminology is not crucial in social history. By focusing on laboratorians, the plowmen of the Western Middle Ages, a time of exceptional growth, Mathieu Arnoux provides a singular contribution to the history of the world of work, to the history of humanity. Etymology often doesn’t explain much other than the origin of a word. How many times have we heard or read that work is an abomination because the word that names it comes from a Latin term, tripalium, who designated, among other things, an instrument of torture ? This would only be the case for French speakers, because neither German (Arbeit) nor English (plowing And work, with distinct nuances) do not have such a connotation.
Reread the classics
The work of epistemology must be noticed, and will clearly prove to be a model, if only by putting a work and the work of a researcher into perspective. The Duby of The rural economy and rural life in the medieval West (1962) is not that of Warriors and peasants. VIIe–XIIe centuries, first boom of the European economy (1973), a fortiori that of The Knight, the Woman and the Priest (1981). Thirty-five years later, Mathieu Arnoux returns to another book by Georges Duby, The Three Orders and the Imaginary of Feudalism (1978), which “ remains today a singular object in medieval historiography, without precedent or true heir » (p. 37), and it is by situating it within the framework of his writing that he brings out all the contributions. He also rereads Marc Bloch, two articles from Annals in which he criticized in 1936 the overly deterministic approach to the history of water mills. Mathieu Arnoux emphasizes that in many European countries, economic development and even what we call the Industrial Revolution took place “ in a landscape largely determined by hydraulic energy » (p. 293). This allows it to go back to Roman Antiquity with the singular Barbegal flour mill, powered by an aqueduct, described in the 1930s but whose dating has recently been modified and overturns previous interpretations.
The author also takes up the work of a lesser-known medievalist, a legal historian whose commitment to the trade union movement allowed the establishment in Strasbourg of the first Labor Institute, Marcel David. In two articles from 1959, the question was raised of the identity of this singular social group designated in Latin by the term laboratorians, neither of which translations, “ plowman ” And “ naughty ”, is not really satisfactory.
Work over the long term
Would it be a monograph, a history book helps us understand many other societies. By working over a long period of time, he highlights dynamics, constants which seem to go beyond his sole subject. One of the questions of social policies is that of their scale, national in France since the reforms of the 1940s but for a long time remaining municipal. For “ learn the lessons of the summer of 1789 “, it is by looking at the debates of the Constituent Assembly, by reading the (little known) interventions of Mirabeau and Sieyès during the session of August 11, 1789, by returning to an older text by Turgot, that the author places within the rural economy the policy of assistance and training, far from being negligible, and which was financed by the tithe, a tax of which the peasants did not demand the abolition in their notebooks of grievances. He emphasizes that, although their archives have not reached us, the remains of the thousands of leprosariums and hospitals created in XIIe And XIIIe centuries bear witness to the prevalence of assistance whose networks, in Normandy for example, were close to those of commerce. The history of medieval markets is also that of assistance and extends over a period of time up to the present day, with Mathieu Arnoux explicitly situating his approach upstream of Robert Castel’s analysis of Metamorphoses of the social question. A chronicle of wage labor (1995).
Deconstruct the categories
The first categories that the author breaks down are those of the academic discipline: if his work ignores the periodization of historians, he also manages, through an economic analysis, to disrupt political approaches that are still well established. Among the bibliography of this book, the works of Dumézil, notably The tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans (1958), are examined again and allow Mathieu Arnoux, after Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff, to question the relevance of what turns out to be a nomenclature that must be placed in a precise time: “ The consensus of men who pray, who fight and who work in the service of monarchical power lasts a short time and fades over the course of the XIIIe century, for the benefit of the more sophisticated constructions demanded by the University and urban society. » (p. 342). Researchers who study work in contemporary times, particularly in XXe century, could profitably draw inspiration from this deconstruction. All in all, the commonly used nomenclatures, whether Colin Clark’s three sectors or the successive versions of the socio-professional categories of theINSEEthen those which are currently being developed and attempt to impose a more liberal vision of society and the workforce, even if they may have been relevant in the perspective of their conception, are all dated, registered in societies characterized by economic and social dynamics, and restrict the thinking of researchers. Mathieu Arnoux shows us how to overcome them.
The contributions of this research are numerous. This extremely dense book, as the reader will have understood, presents interests which are not restricted to the history of the Middle Ages and renews the perception of a subject which, for several decades, we have struggled to understand in terms of renewed problems. Far from being limited to showing us what work was like at a time and place in the history of humanity, it allows a renewed look at a number of subjects.