The countryside

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe was a continent of peasants. Even in areas that were, by the standards of the day, heavily urbanized and industrialized, such as the Düsseldorf District of the Prussian Rhine Province, or the Austrian province of Bohemia, farmers made up 40 and 55 percent of the regions' respective labor forces. The French census of 1851 counted some 64 percent of the gainfully employed as active in agriculture. Moving east and south, towards the poorer, economically less developed parts of the continent, the presence of the peasantry increased: 85 percent of the labor force in the Austrian province of Galicia, on the Habsburg monarchy's border with Russia; 89 percent of the inhabitants of the province of Basilicata in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at the far southern end of the Italian peninsula. “The people” of 1840s Europe were the peasants – a point that would surprise not a few contemporaries in 1848, when “the people” went from being the objects of political rhetoric to the subjects of political action.

Peasant life varied enormously across Europe, and it would take several books to describe the differences in peasants' standards of living, agricultural tenures, farm products, customs, religion or folklore. For our purposes, we can note two broad groups of differences: in the kind of agriculture practiced and in the relations of production.