[HN Gopher] A Vanishing World: On Europe's Disappearing Peasantry
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A Vanishing World: On Europe's Disappearing Peasantry
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-03-05 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I highly recommend the movie "Etre et avoir", which doesn't
| necessarily touch this exact subject but is a wonderful look into
| the world of rural France as it existed 20 years ago.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Reads a little too romantic.
|
| Being a peasant sucks. It sucked then and it sucks now. Trapped,
| in an infernal machine designed to keep you anchored within 7
| kilometers of the room in which you were born.
|
| You live in the same crumbling leaking house that half your
| extended family has lived in for over a century, marry who you
| are told to marry, learn only what the local preacher tells you
| to learn-- and nothing else.
|
| My mother's side of the family was peasants of the dying 50s-60s
| variety who escaped in the last wave of abandonments. The kind
| whose ancient family estates are now AirBnBs in the Empty
| Diagonal of France where tourists can cosplay as grape stompers
| or characters in a French New Wave film where some tortured
| artist flees to the countryside and ends up seducing and roughly
| stealing the virginity of his cousin by reading her poetry on a
| blanket in the middle of a field before an art thief swindler
| shoots him on the veranda for double-crossing him in a
| counterfeiting job gone wrong.
|
| They lived long enough to tell me what it was really like.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> French New Wave film where some tortured artist flees to the
| countryside and ends up seducing and roughly stealing the
| virginity of his cousin by reading her poetry on a blanket in
| the middle of a field before an art thief swindler shoots him
| on the veranda for double-crossing him in a counterfeiting job
| gone wrong.
|
| Plug that into Stable Diffusion 3.0 and you will be up for a
| Palme d'or.
|
| (Edit: Wrong award. The Pomme d'or is totally different than
| the palme d'or.)
| throwanem wrote:
| You might have been right the first time. Using AI to produce
| a work of art that attacks the fetish of wealth for
| romanticizing poverty? That seems like it could make for a
| pretty sizable _pomme d 'or_ - I look forward to the
| premiere!
| benterix wrote:
| > It sucked then and it sucks now.
|
| Yes and no. It did suck in many ways, the ones you describe
| plus many others, including lack of anonymity and little
| privacy as everybody in the village knows everything about you,
| your family, your neighbors. Worse access to doctors (even
| worse in the mountains in the winter). Occasional crazy person
| could wreak havoc. The list could go on.
|
| However, you had space. Your own space, a lot of it. Internal
| and external. No walls everywhere - fields and meadows instead.
| And, depending on your situation, you might have quite a lot of
| time (and at times very little).
|
| For me the ideal is in between these two worlds.
| pcrh wrote:
| It's poverty that sucks. The rural exodus to the cities
| occurred later in France and Ireland than, for example,
| Britain, so the memories of "true" peasant life were able to be
| more easily documented. You perhaps know the TV series "Jean
| Chalosse" which describes modernity arriving for a shepherd in
| the Landes region of France [0].
|
| The other side to this, is that most who left the countryside
| for the cities did not see a marked improvement in living
| standards, they simply swapped poverty in the countryside for
| poverty in the city.
|
| [0] https://madelen.ina.fr/serie/jean-chalosse-2720
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I always remember this sort of article which frames things
| differently about who we should pity.
|
| https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-
| vacation-m...
|
| We have more stuff now but it seems we have way less time and
| maybe even less happiness? I don't know, I'm biased I love
| working outside.
| anthk wrote:
| Rural Spain was like that but with Franco's regime. Most people
| fleed away into cities in the 60's and 70's and they got back
| just in Holidays with the kids in Summer.
| Nicook wrote:
| Has its plusses and minuses, my grandfather still proudly
| proclaims that he's a peasant. Has farmed in rural loire valley
| france all his life, from his childhood during ww2. Seems to
| generally have enjoyed his life, definitely worked way harder
| than my parents or myself. My mother grew up with them as well,
| left for the city for work as an adult though. granddad was
| using a horse for farming into the 70s. Mother didn't think it
| sucked that much either. Their house wasnt luxe, but it
| absolutely wasn't crumbling.
|
| Definitely a lot of British tourists and retirees in their area
| now.
|
| I don't disagree that most people over romanticize farming, but
| don't have to go to the opposite extreme.
| pcrh wrote:
| This reminds me of John Berger's work describing the modern world
| invading the life of peasants in France, such as Pig Earth,
| reviewed here:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/05/books/love-among-the-peas...
| HillRat wrote:
| Likewise, a classic, compelling nonfiction history of the
| transformation of European peasantry into rural citizenry is
| Weber's "Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural
| France, 1870-1914" (Stanford University Press, 1976)
| fuzztester wrote:
| For a more modern take, and only French in that it's in Quebec,
| but one that I've watched the series of, and liked:
|
| Watch "Les Fermiers saison 1 condensee" on YouTube
|
| https://youtu.be/pm-XlB_-UK0?si=iOjed40aHfZqKL8Y
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Fortier
|
| I had watched the Les Fermiers series earlier (in French, with
| subtitles in English, IIRC), couldn't find it on a quick search
| now, but found the above condensed version.
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