Peasantry+and+Urban+Workers+in+French+and+Russian+Revolutions

Masha Kremliovsky


 * Prompt:** Compare and contrast the roles of the peasantry and of urban workers in the French Revolution to those of the peasantry and of urban workers in the Russian Revolutions of 1917.


 * Thesis:** Peasants and urban workers, both essentially important to society and its movement of change, of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 showed similarities including dissatisfaction with the ruling government, protests against the rise in price for basic food staples like bread, and the ownership of lands throughout each nation, and differences like the latter happening in the era of industrialization and being led by the proletariat, unlike the French Revolution, which had a patriotic response to foreign threats.

__French Revolution__ __Russian Revolutions__
 * Outline:**
 * Estates - peasants were of the third estate, 97% of total population
 * Aristocrats - mostly local aristocrats owned the land on which peasants worked
 * Tithes - most peasants owed tithes, often one-third of their crops
 * Dark bread - basic staple - nourishing, high in vitamins, minerals, proteins; price rose
 * Land - even free peasants owned little or no land
 * Early satisfaction of major demands, then essentially opposed to further revolution
 * Local villages - center of peasants' social lives; villages maintained public order
 * Rural and Urban uprisings - the Fall of the Bastille
 * Committee of Public Safety - decreed universal mobilization of the nation
 * Patriotic response to foreign threats
 * Government distrusted own people, people's dislike with tsarist regime (Rasputin)
 * "Peace and Bread" - March 8th protest against price of bread (a basic staple)
 * Peasants seizing lands - made promise of Provisional Government to confiscate and redistribute royal and monastic lands meaningless
 * John Reed's //Ten Days That Shook the World// - Lenin's speeches captured the inner spirit of men and adoration of the common people, stirring up desires for change
 * Lenin's first law - declared the land nationalized and turned it over to local rural soviets - ratified the peasants' seizure of the land and assured the Bolsheviks of peasant support
 * Demands of urban workers met - Lenin turned over control of the factories to committees of workers
 * Policy "war communism" - included forcible requisition of grain from peasants
 * "April Theses" - stated that soviets of soldiers, workers, and peasants were ready-made instruments of power
 * Slogan "Worker Control of Production"
 * Mobilization for further revolution
 * Led by working class (proletariat) and based on wide ideology

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