Revolting peasants

Duncan Bowie on the German Peasants’ War

The Time of the Harvest Has Come by Martin Empson published by Bookmarks

This is a useful study of the rebellions of 1624-5, which spread across Germany and the Tyrol, the subject of previous Marxist studies by Frederick Engels, Karl Kautsky and the British theorist and historian Ernest Belfort Bax, who was a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation. There have been few recent studies, although the Peasants’ War became something of a symbolic event for Marxist historians in the pre-1990  East German Democratic Republic, and there is more material published in German.

Empson, who styles himself as a “longstanding socialist and environmental activist” and has previously published on peasant revolts in England, presents a solid narrative of complex historical events, largely free of the polemics which are common in some Bookmarks‘ publications. Empson rightly focuses on the economic backgrounds to the peasants‘ uprisings, which were mainly against the oppression by local landlords.  While some of the landlords and local princes were also clerics and the uprisings coincided with the preachings of religious reformers such as Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt and Philip Melanchthon, the revolts were economic rather than religious. Treating them as a component of religious reformation, as some historians have done, is misleading. In fact, Luther opposed both the peasants‘ action as well as condemning more religious radicals such as Thomas Müntzer and the later Anabaptist leaders.

Empson makes much use of the works of the earlier Marxist historians as well as more recent work by German historians and the British academic Thomas Scott. An interesting chapter covers the revolt in the Tyrol led by Michael Gaismair. While some historians consider Müntzer a proto-communist, there is a stronger case that Gaismair adopted the practice of communal sharing of goods in his theory and political practice, and can be seen as seeking to construct a new governance structure rather than just destroy the old.
The latter sections of Empson’s study are the weakest as he tries to reconcile the claims of Engels and other Marxists that the peasants‘ revolt was the first European bourgeois revolution and a precedent for the revolutions of 1688, 1789 and 1848, which is clearly nonsense as the revolts were peasant-led and against feudalism. There was no bourgeoisie in early 17^th century Germany and Austria. Despite this unhelpful diversion seeking to impose a Marxist framework on historical fact, Empson’s book is well worth reading and a readable introduction to an important but complex period.