The Jacquerie - Jacques Bonhomme Sticks It To The Man
Paris was on fire in 1358, and not in a good way. France was in the middle of the largest popular revolt in its history, the Jacquerie, and Jacques Bonhomme was to blame.
Jacques Bonhomme means something like “Jackie Goodfellow” in French, and it was what rich people called poor working schmoes. Think Joe Six-Pack, but even more pejorative. The Jacquerie was a rebellion among the social classes, and everybody was fed up.
To set the stage, things were pretty bad in February 1358. It was less than ten years after The Great Plague killed off half the population. France was losing the Hundred Years War to the English, and losing hard. The war cost money, and that meant taxes. That there were only half the people left alive to do the work didn’t help at all.
Back in 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers, King John II of France was captured by the English, which discredited the French monarchy. After that there was a truce in the fighting, which meant that the mercenaries hired by the English were free to roam the French countryside and steal whatever they wanted while they waited for the fighting to start again. The nobles could not and would not protect the peasants. The ancient social contract of the feudal system was broken.
There were sorta two different but related civil wars going on:
1) In Paris, the rich merchants led by the provost of Paris, Etienne Marcel tried to take control and edge out the prince, giving the assembly of the Estates-General a chance to run things.
2) In the countryside, the peasants rebelled against the nobles, the ones who demanded taxes in exchange for protection, but could no longer protect anyone.
The fighting was less pitched battles and more bloody massacres. Rebels destroyed over a hundred castles and manors owned by the nobles. One legend tells of unruly peasants who roasted a knight on a spit, then fed him to his family. That’s probably an embellishment, but it should give you an idea of how much hatred there was of the nobles.
Who would win this civil war: the nobles, the rich, or the poor? There’s a hint that the Jacquerie happened in 1358, more than 400 years before the French Revolution. Yeah, that’s right; the peasants lost big time. And it was roughest for those at the bottom of the chain. Eventually, the nobles remembered that they had swords and armor while the peasants had pitchforks and rags. They restored the normal order, then slaughtered the peasants in brutal reprisals.
Etienne Marcel was executed. By late summer the French prince, the Dauphin, marched into his city. He didn’t prosecute all the wealthy merchants of Paris; pardons were handed out to keep the peace and make everything go back to the way it was before. The people of France rose up for freedom, but it ended in failure and vengeance.
Too often, employment relationships are reduced to management and labor. But that’s way too oversimplified. There are strata within both of those categories, and employees get treated differently depending on where they are in the chain. Just like it was with the peasants in France.
For an example, imagine a giant tech company that employs thousands of high-paid software developers to work in its offices and thousands of low-wage workers to work in its warehouses. Then imagine an illness sweeps through the country, shutting down normal operations. The software developers all work from home, but the warehouse workers are deemed essential and have to trudge into the warehouse.
Then imagine a magical vaccine is invented, which makes the illness much less scary. The bosses call the software developers back to the office, but the developers revolt against this RTO mandate. Management threatens to fire them if they don’t show up 1-2 days a week, but it’s an empty threat, because it is so hard to replace them. Management and labor both grumble, but the business trundles along.
Meanwhile, the company has invented a new gadget that pokes the warehouse workers in the eye to make them work faster. This improves productivity by 1%, which sends the company stock up 10%, which makes management very happy. How do the warehouse workers feel about getting poked in the eye? Who cares! Fire them if they complain.
JFK famously said, “Life is not fair.” 60+ years later, that’s still true. Maybe it’s helpful to know that it was even less fair 600+ years ago. What to do about it? Well, that probably depends on if you’re the one getting poked in the eye or the one doing the poking or the one complaining about your once-a-week commute.
