"I shall not talk platitudes after such a flattering speech as that,"
said the abbe, smiling."What is going on in this valley is spreading more or less throughout France; it is the outcome of the hopes which the upheaval of 1789 caused to infiltrate, if I may use that expression, the minds of the peasantry, the sons of the soil.The Revolution affected certain localities more than others.This side of Burgundy, nearest to Paris, is one of those places where the revolutionary ideas spread like the overrunning of the Franks by the Gauls.Historically, the peasants are still on the morrow of the Jacquerie; that defeat is burnt in upon their brain.They have long forgotten the facts which have now passed into the condition of an instinctive idea.That idea is bred in the peasant blood, just as the idea of superiority was once bred in noble blood.The revolution of 1789 was the retaliation of the vanquished.The peasants then set foot in possession of the soil which the feudal law had denied them for over twelve hundred years.Hence their desire for land, which they now cut up among themselves until actually they divide a furrow into two parts; which, by the bye, often hinders or prevents the collection of taxes, for the value of such fractions of property is not sufficient to pay the legal costs of recovering them."
"Very true, for the obstinacy of the small owners--their aggressiveness, if you choose--on this point is so great that in at least one thousand cantons of the three thousand of French territory, it is impossible for a rich man to buy an inch of land from a peasant," said Blondet, interrupting the abbe."The peasants who are willing to divide up their scraps of land among themselves would not sell a fraction on any condition or at any price to the middle classes.The more money the rich man offers, the more the vague uneasiness of the peasant increases.Legal dispossession alone is able to bring the landed property of the peasant into the market.Many persons have noticed this fact without being able to find a reason for it."