WHAT DO THE PEASANTS WANT NOW? REALISTS AND

 FUNDAMENTALISTS IN SWISS AND SOUTH GERMAN RURAL POLITICS, 1650-1750

(A restored, corrected and briefly amended version of the article by the same title in Central European History 34:3(2001), 313-356)

©2002

Hermann Rebel

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, ‘crossing the Rubicon.’  So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It’s like a baroque emblem.(G. Deleuze)^[1]

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities’ own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed ‘an unbroken progressive line’ between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others. . . More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations. . . and made their peace with the early modern state.(T. Brady)^[2]

The first epigraph suggests a line to take on that revival of a historical ontology, examined here, by which peasants and other subaltern “actors” become “historical” only when they engage in allegedly “threshold-crossing” events. The second gives us a historically precise opening figure for the critical questioning to which this essay subjects such limitations on social history. Tom Brady thus ends his pivotal study of the mid-sixteenth century abandonment by Central Europe’s urban elites of the double-edged ideal of “turning Swiss,” of becoming one’s own lord. He implicitly poses a tantalizing question about how the early modern peasantries, destined now to remain the mere subjects of corporations and to make up what he calls the  “subsoil of the absolutist state,” could have made their peace, and this particularly in those regions of the German-Swiss borderlands where structurally (i.e., financially and militarily) but not intellectually defeated communal-democratic utopias long continued to make post-mortem appearances.

Two recent studies by Andreas Suter and David Martin Luebke^[3] concerning significant peasant wars in, respectively, mid-seventeenth century north-central Switzerland and the early eighteenth century Black Forest region of southern Germany, offer thought-provoking presentations of archival materials and open up additional perspectives on Brady’s perception of the “deep shadows of ambiguity and tension” residing in this region’s constructions of civic and civil modernity. Both authors provide us with much information about how these peasantries sought to invent and negotiate viable economic, social and political niches for themselves in a dynastic-corporative order of violently enforced protection and tribute contracts that required from everyone organizational solutions for finding shelter under one or another territorial, urban or Imperial lordship. Our interest in these issues is to discover the political means by which peasant householders sought to solve the difficult puzzle of how to secure themselves in a tribute order that effectively located them below the thresholds of civil standing, below those corporate memberships that could own property and exercise “sovereign” power at the territorial-diplomatic level.^[4]  Luebke makes a conscious effort to connect to Brady’s argument while Suter, absorbed by a problematic of “threshold-crossing” events, unwittingly provides a great deal of evidence to make Brady’s point but, intent on assigning the very failure of the Swiss peasant war of 1653 an ironically positive place in what he sees as the finally happy outcome of Swiss liberal democracy, shows no interest in Brady’s story line at all. This is a particular pity, since his materials suggest that the occasion and motivations for this Swiss attempt at a peasant revolution (a term Suter concedes unwillingly, apologetically)^[5] illuminate well the tragic weaknesses of all the peasantries’ efforts to construct local systems of politics that could have given them a chance to connect more independently and profitably with the larger European and world economies.

I

Similar conceptual predispositions inform both studies. Suter’s book about the outbreak, suppression, aftermath and possible meaning of the Swiss Peasant War of 1653 is a particularly self-conscious demonstration of a currently popular approach combining “symbolic-actionist” and performative anthropology, drawn by him primarily from Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas and others, with what he calls, in his repetitious and insecure subtitle, “political social history,” a term he coins in connection with the work of Reinhard Koselleck, among others.^[6]  It is something of a misnomer because no social objects other than vaguely “structural” and specifically unanalyzed and therefore not particularly “social” phantom entities (such as the alleged general demographic-economic crisis of the seventeenth century, ostensible long-term and post-war price/debt conjunctures, alleged land fragmentation, etc.) appear in his analysis and because, having somehow reduced the social to the “structural”, he rejects the latter, after some awkward shadow-boxing with Ladurie and Braudel, in favor of what he calls a “return to the event in social history.”^[7] His is a historical vision that, in a move that, incidentally, echoes the dominant world view of the early modern corporative order itself, places the occurrences of everyday social life below historicity and grants only symbolically charged political “events”^[8] that cross “horizon-of-expectations” thresholds actual historical status. His stated intention is to counter any threatening structuralist hegemony in the profession by redirecting historians toward recognizable “events” with a renewed sensitivity toward the impact of these (and of presumably consequent and related corrective “learning” by the “actors”) on structures. By the latter he means not structures of law or contract but merely institutionally or otherwise scripted allegorical political performances remembered in historical myths and analogies and periodically re-scripted and acted out, revitalized symbolically, by performances in “real events.” By contrast, I find Georges Duby’s less metaphysical connections between scripts and actions more satisfying when he observes that “An event explodes. It sends shockwaves into the depths of society, and in the resultant echo we can look for signs of phenomena normally hidden. . .”^[9]

While one can only applaud any intention to retain some communicable and comparative sense of hermeneutical convertibility  between ostensible events and structures, the particular boundaries and relationships between the two that Suter’s approach draws can only invite interminable scholastic squabbles about what qualifies as an “event,” about what crosses (“surprisingly”) the thresholds of whose “expectations” (formulated how and where and under what pressures? and who is surprised?). The implicit questions about where the public begins and the private ends, about what the designated properties and places of our presumably separable individual or collective experiences are, etc. all remain completely suppressed.^[10] Moreover, throughout he reduces, irritatingly, the peasants to historical “actors,”^[11] i.e., mere role players, consciously deploying “symbols” in highly charged and theatricalized, ritualized “events” occurring in unavoidably “real time” and constituting, in the case of the peasant war in question, nothing more than a predictable, presumably somehow collectively scripted, five-act drama of escalating political crisis, revolution and open military conflict ending in peasant defeat and the reassertion of an improved normal order. This altogether distracts from the complexity of the actual historical processes he has to narrate according to the evidence, where the intertwined individual and collective experiences and expressions and the seriousness of the phenomena discernible through even his tendentious narrative disarticulations simply overwhelm the aesthetics of a perceived dramatic devolution. Not only the obviously “public”  but also many of the “private” actions preceding and following what he sees as the “crisis” of the Peasant War of 1653 were all (by his own evidence) historical events that took place in legally accountable and in memorably experienced time, and held moral and mortal, unconscious as well as conscious existential risks and consequences for those living (and not just “acting”) in locations that were both public and private, “real” and “symbolic” at the same time. Suter’s event and horizon-of-expectation conceptualizations aspire to a having-and-eating-of-the-cake as he appears to speak at several points sympathetically from the peasants’ point of view, claiming to “rethink” what he perceives as their “risk calculi” (with no stated conceptualization of risk), while at the same time and in ways we will explore below, absolutely devaluing these latter as “delusional.” He actually represses key dimensions of the peasants’ calculations that point toward far more complex and disturbing conclusions than the all’s-well-that-ends-well comedic emplotment he puts forward in this “detailed” and weighty and yet also superficial and disappointing tome.

Reading both Suter and Luebke requires a constant awareness and clarification of one’s sense of the figural implications^[12] of horizon-of-expectations and symbolic-actionist approaches to history.  I was reminded of being invited, some years ago, to join a panel of Turnerian anthropologists discussing “the liminal” at a national convention. My paper was not entirely off the topic and concerned an early nineteenth century rural Austrian innkeeper’s daughter who had been assigned the status of a laborer in her father’s house and who was drawn by various parental pressures into committing a “threshold-crossing” infanticide to gain a finally illusory readmission to the inheriting family circle.^[13] In the session’s discussion period, however, nothing was said about my pointing to the family’s and community’s covert complicities in the daily denial of the pregnancy and the consequently “necessary” infanticide and nothing about my sense of the broader significance of this small, simultaneously public and private but in every sense historical (i.e., remembered, recorded and retold) “event,” during which the participants casually, tensely, oscillated into and out of ritual performances in the “normal” processes of “everyday” social life. Instead, my presentation was perceived by my symbolic-actionist colleagues as concerned mainly with linens. I had indeed, in my discussion of the case files, mentioned linens in their multiple appearances as dowry treasure, infant swaddling and death shroud and one of my points had in fact been that the shifting symbology of linen permitted metonymic, i.e., displacing, references to the infanticide bargain between the patriarch and his daughter, allowing this contract to remain unspoken, unspeakable, simultaneously forgotten and remembered in the historical social unconscious both of the family and village where it had happened, and of the subsequent judicial proceedings and historical remembrances where it also “happened.”^[14] My point had not been to riff on the identity-ascriptive resonances of linen symbology as such, as my colleagues proceeded to do, but to appreciate the duplexities of such murderous, power-serving linguistics as they authorized or even compelled fatal patterns of hidden threshold-crossings within the private and then public performances of historical “actors” in ways that public discourses on these matters, both then and now, consequently did not have to acknowledge or even bring into consciousness.

My anthropological colleagues’ immediate turn to symbolic actionist agendas was in effect a collaboration with the social linguistics, the metonymic strategies, of the several participants in an “original” perpetration of a social-culturally significant murder that archival research had brought back into current historical memory. The anthropologists were in effect deploying a linen-symbology discourse of their own devising to avoid discussing the central objects of an analysis focused not only on the extortion of a murder as an “order-restoring” threshold-crossing act but also on the intertwinings of hierarchy and agency implicated in this crime and in its subsequent historical moments. In Suter’s and Luebke’s Collingwoodian efforts to rethink their historical subjects’ “rationality” there frequently comes to the fore a similarly one-dimensional and forced symbolist erudition whose historical, explanatory and connective powers appear actually to be engaged in fencing out and occasionally counteracting and repressing alternative historical readings.^[15]

II

David Martin Luebke’s study of rural factions and of their local politics and civil war during the 1730s and 40s in Habsburg-controlled Outer Austria (Vorderösterreich)^[16] is aware, without taking a serious comparative look, of Suter’s earlier monograph on Basel peasant disturbances going on just across the Empire’s border at roughly the same time.^[17]  He rejects Suter’s allegedly “mechanistic” argument about  peasants uniting in rebellion to preserve communal self rule against intrusions by outsiders, even as he has to acknowledge that Suter has a sense of the divided and coerced nature of this unity.^[18] Unlike Suter, Luebke does not dwell at length on conceptual matters but introduces them somewhat casually, and without much exposition, as his argument seems to require.  He focuses on what appear to be two fundamentally opposed forms of political rationality operating in specific German village communes under Habsburg absolutism and he pays specific attention to the conflicts between two ideological-pragmatic positions that could both bridge internal social differences among the rural subjects and still also divide politically what historians had once thought of as more or less culturally unified peasant “communities.” While his book makes numerous significant contributions in these factual-descriptive areas, it also on occasion moves into the kinds of symbolic and performative analyses one finds in Suter. Even more than the latter, Luebke explains divergent peasant motives in rebellious acts as the products, in the final analysis, of divergent political acculturation patterns among the peasants themselves, recalling and reinventing two different, long-term historical traditions of political responses to be deployed against the authorities’ actions and during ostensible crises.^[19]

Luebke begins his ”chronicle” of what took place in the “county” of Hauenstein^[20] by outlining four parties to the political struggle: two factions of peasants (the Millers and the Salpeters), the abbatical landlords at St. Blasien and the Emperor, represented by chancellory, forest and treasury authorities. His focus is on the two peasant parties’ early eighteenth century conflicts “over the most effective defense against St. Blasien’s campaign to expand its age-old [?] powers of domination in the county” and he contextualizes their (both civil and external) war as merely another episodic event, “the latest in a long chain of anti-seigneurial conflicts that spanned several centuries and were carried out by various means, some violent, others not.”^[21] The conceptual ground for this narrative of a “long chain” of events is in the Blickle school’s perception of a quasi-democratic, communalist integration of the German peasantry into the early modern Empire, evident for Luebke most particularly in W. Schulze’s notion of a “juridification” of peasant social relations after 1525. Luebke twists this construction toward an even more conservative and ironical reading of the peasants’ experience in the following 200 years of purportedly juridified negotiations when he asserts — in a move that echoes the royal authorities’ reasons for finally curtailing the Hauensteiners’ democracy in 1746^[22] —  that the events he describes are the result of a “crisis of too many choices” which the German peasants could not handle. The peasant “community” split vertically into opposing factions of village oligarchs, heading similarly stratified parties made up of peasants, artisans and laborers, who  aligned themselves with (and were manipulated by) different parties of authorities. The outcome of this latest set of political and rebellious actions was a pyrrhic victory for the conservative, “realist” Miller (müllerisch) faction who acceded to the loss of electoral democracy for the Hauenstein peasantry as a whole.^[23]

The parties of peasant oligarchs (holding elected office as so-called Octovirs, representing the eight “cantons” of Hauenstein) emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century and embodied two different solutions to the problem of how to fit into the post-1648 corporatist-absolutist order. Both factions, perceived by Luebke as distinct communities of “acculturation,” claimed to represent the interests of “the whole county” and each accused the other of betraying those interests by making secret deals with the abbey of St. Blasien or, alternatively, with royal or “foreign” authorities. The pragmatic-realist position of the Miller faction emerged around 1700 when its leaders sent a delegation directly to the emperor in Vienna in an attempt to intervene in a long negotiation between the latter and St. Blasien concerning the abbey’s campaign to obtain a “lease”^[24] in perpetuity over some particular tenancies that owed homage to the royal house. When the emperor granted the lease in 1705 on terms unfavorable to the peasantry, this faction not only looked ineffectual but also could be represented, because of its apparent acceptance of ambiguous language about the contractual subject (Eigenschaft) status of the leaseholders, as selling out the freedoms of Hauenstein. The other faction, the Salpeters, had seen the negotiations as an opportunity to start getting rid of “servile” status (Leibeigenschaft) and, beginning in 1719, waged a successful campaign in which the Millers’ “failure to present themselves as lacking self-interest in their dealings with dominant powers outside the polity. . .”(p.64) cost the latter the election of 1725, which saw the rise of the veteran Octovir Salpeter Hans to a third term in office, where he died (imprisoned for illegal political acts) in 1727.

The Salpeters’ followed up their own failed missions to Vienna —  rejected by Imperial authorities and, significantly, passed on to the royal/regional administrative government in Freiburg — with disruptive and effective takeovers of all but one of the eight counties. Their organization of an armed, in the end non-violent, stand-off in 1728 against Imperial troops that had come to force St. Blasien’s subjects to swear an oath to the new abbot caused the royal government not only to engage in some exemplary punishments but also to side with the Miller faction against both the abbot and the Salpeters.  The Millers negotiated a restoration of electoral rights in 1730 and a “manumission” of the offensive Leibeigenschaft rights of St. Blasien in 1737-38.  Dissatisfaction with significant provisions of this deal sparked salpeterisch resistance (significantly, a “paradoxical” and puzzling act for Luebke) and a new round of electoral success for this party. A standoff developed between the two factions when the royal Forest Steward refused to swear in the new Octovirs who then, in turn, organized what amounted to a tax revolt against payment of the manumission fees, and followed this up, in the spring of 1739, with a violent military campaign against the Millers. Austrian troops suppressed the rebellion, carried out punitive executions and returned Hauenstein to the status quo ante 1738. Reinstalled in leadership, the Millers found that they now were identified with smoothing the imposition of the enormous tax burden mandated by the War of the Austrian Succession. Moreover, the Salpeters, returned to power as war-tax resisters in some areas by the elections of 1744, could, at a time when French-Bavarian forces briefly occupied Outer Austria, represent themselves as a party of patriots, claiming to be a royally sanctioned partisan resistance against the invaders and, more importantly, against the latter’s alleged müllerisch allies. The Millers’ purported betrayal (by satisfying French war requisitions) exposed them to a wave of very extensive and violently conducted expropriations by armed salpeterisch gangs. The denouement of the whole affair in December of 1745 saw a reassertion of power by the Austrian authorities, reinforced with 800 müllerisch troops, against the Salpeters, followed by a wave of retaliatory, violent expropriations of the latter and by a restoration of the Millers to provincial leadership. Their own leadership imprisoned or deported to the Banat, the Salpeters were pacified in a new political contract imposed by the Habsburgs, who retained the office of Octovirs but eliminated elections and placed the pragmatic realists, the Millers, into permanent power as paid state officials while also recognizing and consulting with the ideological fundamentalists, the Salpeters, as a more or less permanent political opposition.

There is a specious quality to Luebke’s questions-and-answers approach about who won and who lost this peasant war.^[25] To come up with a good answer one would have to know what was at stake in these conflicts beyond the kinds of inconclusive and even evasive pieces of information and readings of intentions and outcomes that he provides. Nowhere does he ever make it clear, for example, what the precise terms of the obviously pivotal “manumission” treaty of 1738 were. Nor, for that matter, are we ever certain that the return to the status quo ante 1738 did not also mean an abrogation (followed by possible renegotiations?) of the treaty.^[26] The reason such matters are important is that much of Luebke’s argument hinges on presenting the “fundamentalist” Salpeters’ understanding of and reactions to the treaty and to other political moments as less-than-rational, paranoically conspiratorial (“the serfdom plot”), and historically (i.e. mnemonically) delusional —  and therefore effective for political mobilization but not for governing. His fudging on the play of  “facts” inside the “events” diminishes our ability to judge the rational qualities of, among others, the Salpeters and rather encourages us to see them as ineffectual and self-contradicting and as historical contributors only in the unconscious ironies of their misunderstandings and self-neutralizing actions. After outlining Suter’s narrative, we will take a critical look at the characterizations of the “realities” of action and the ascriptions of motive and meaning in both Luebke’s and Suter’s analyses to determine if there is more to these peasant experiences than their being merely duels of historical dramaturgies, ending always with the least-worst victories of the “realists” and worth talking about now only for our post-historic aesthetic edification.

III

One of the most curious moves by both authors is their simultaneous disclosure and marginalization, indeed their reference to and immediate narrative silencing of the events that were the, in their view, “triggering” moments for these peasant wars. They do not entertain the notion that these events-before-the-“event” were arguably already the actual collapse into disorder that then required (unavoidably divided and contested) responses from the peasants which in turn produced various kinds and degrees of disruptive acts. It is these latter, however, that are characterized in both cases as “the collapse” into disorder that in turn leads to the “learning” that allegedly restores order. It is difficult to see how we can arrive at a credible assessment of the rationality of the various “actors’” political positions, if the nature and qualities and, above all, the appearances to them of the “exogenous shock” that merely “triggered” what are represented here as particular subsequent  “collapses” into rebellion, are not present for discussion.  For Suter, such simply generic shocks need not be explained but only recorded and their passage tracked through the “endogenously given transmission mechanisms”^[27] that are the purported focus of his study. This is a too-clever-by-half way not only of blocking important contextual dimensions from a specific historical narrative but also of suppressing, in a larger cultural-analytical sense, the contents and meanings of whatever phenomena appear to fulfill the shock-function, reduced now to acting merely as trigger-mechanisms for discernible (and presumably scientifically predictable — otherwise why do the investigation?) devolutions-in-crisis of any given historical populations’ cultural repertoires, including those in the post-1989 world that Suter in particular refers to repeatedly.^[28]  In the context of global banking in the 1990s, where such world-system shocks as insider-trading currency manipulations, debt restructurings, cartellist rearticulations, ethnic-cleansings-for-real-estate-development, etc. remain largely invisible behind the “political events” reported by global news networks, and where the effectual containment of genocides inside national-cultural boundaries is a barely speakable desideratum,^[29] such studies can certainly do their part in the creation of “scientifically” ethical and legal languages for the requisite hegemonic-cultural projections and negotiations accompanying allegedly “necessary” and therefore “tragic” financial and other restructurings in the “global” economy.

That this last contextual linkage is not altogether far-fetched becomes evident when we look at Suter’s “exogenous shock.” Not unexpectedly, the “event”dissolves into events, specifically, secretly prepared and therefore insider-known devaluations of the currency (the Batzen) by 30-50 per cent, running through Bern, Solothurn, Friburg and Lucern in December, 1652, and ending with an official devaluation decree for the Swiss Confederacy as a whole on January 18, 1653. The initial wave of devaluations meant the effectual destruction of a substantial part of the wealth of the largely unprepared rural subject population. The peasants were caught with devalued stock to pay their debts while the Patriciates of the leading cities had had, with foreknowledge, the opportunity and time to adjust their credit and commercial portfolios to take maximum advantage. In the analytical Part II of his study, Suter strongly implies but does not dare to risk making a fully exonerative claim that the devaluations were a necessity, driven by a world-system crisis.

Even more than in Luebke’s case, the conceptual dimensions of Suter’s work are closely wound into details of narrative and this requires any critical reader to reconstruct his stories at  some length and in detail. Moreover, his several narratives present reading and summarizing problems not found in Luebke. His accounts in Part I and again in an Appendix summary (and in another in English) of the peasants’ multiple and far-ranging responses to the devaluations are fragmentary, incomplete and constantly interrupted by lengthy pontifications about various subjects. Facts, persons, events etc. are arguably “present” but not where we should expect to find them. Having shuffled the “triggering” events off-stage early, he proceeds, throughout the various versions, to leave out key and possibly fractious narrative moments. These often surface in displacing contexts in the analytical portions of the book where they are immediately enveloped in Suter’s not particularly revealing readings of successive, dramatic devolutions of specific symbolic acts leading toward what he sees as the peasants’ “adjustments” that allegedly demonstrate their political “learning.” As we will see, some significant displaced narrative moments appear as part of his discounting, as irrational, the subjects’ leaders’ invocations of historical and/or ”mythical” documents and chartering agents. Such contextual manipulations greatly diminish the seriousness of the peasants’ legal and political actions and in effect align this work with the latter’s suppression by absolutist acts of obvious bad faith and force. The book ends with a sense that this peasant war was nothing more than pre-history for a Modernization of the Swiss Confederacy that begins finally when the peasantries “learned” not only to submit to force but also to trust patricians’ “paternal” benevolence — as displayed in an Appendix that purports to show, without commenting on the relative political and other significance of what was and was not agreed to, how high a percentage of peasant claims were “granted” during and after the war.^[30]

The drama’s first Act, tracing a descent “From Political Everydayness to Unrest,” begins with the special meeting of the 40 jurors (Geschworene) of the Entlebuch district’s peasantry on December 28, 1652, ten days after their overlord, the incorporated Patriciate of Lucern, had, in its jurisdiction, devalued the Batzen by 50%. Suter’s choice of “everydayness” to suggest a normalcy prior to this specific meeting alerts the reader to his narrative duplicity by which not the authorities’ destructive, insider-advantaging devaluation but the peasants’ reaction make up the breach of normalcy, the first “threshold-crossing.”  An Entlebucher embassy, January 8-10, 1653, failed to achieve a meeting with the Lucern city council and this was followed immediately by a highly visible and violent scourging of one of the city’s debt collectors by some “youths” whose actions were then officially disavowed by the peasant jurors. January, 1653, ended with the Lucern council threatening retaliations against Entlebuch, the Bern city council taking steps to strengthen its military and with some of the Lucern peasants organizing to make spiked war clubs and parading these symbols about in efforts to draw attention to the life and death importance of their resistance against what they perceived as the patricians’ economically and socially destructive absolutism.  A comet, visible since December 1652 throughout the Confederacy, was recorded by Merian as a portend of conflict about to erupt.

Act Two, the “Transition from Unrest to Revolt,” opens with the peasants’ continuation of a kind of dual strategy during February, 1653, by which, on one hand, their jurors sought to engage the Lucern council in political conferences that had, for reasons of mutual mistrust, a hard time coming together, while, on the other hand, popular demonstrations reviving symbols of violent resistance and leading to performances of historically resonant ritual oaths to form “free” incorporations provided the political energy for the jurors’ various diplomatic efforts and for their collaborating with more radical “representatives of the common man” to move toward acts of open revolt. On February 10, the subjects of Entlebuch swore a collective oath of membership as an independent territorial commune (Landgemeinde) and elected three military leaders in case of sudden military action by Lucern.^[31] It is worth noting that Suter here, and throughout, claims to find (in a phrase that echoes language heard under the Nazis) what he calls ritual formations of “collectively fated communities of necessity.”^[32] On the basis of its illegal incorporation, a socially and politically defined Entlebuch peasantry, however unsuccessful its initial attempts at uniting all ten of the magisterial townships of Lucern, sought to bring its position before the city council. The latter initiated, on February 14-15, a threshold-crossing learning experience of its own by sending to the peasantry an unprecedented delegation. This mission failed as well after the Lucern ambassadors had to endure the peasants’ insults and rude hosting. Suter does not consider that the peasants’ behaviors were reactive, not escalating actions, and that, given that the ambassadors were not empowered to negotiate or sign any agreement, their mission was in fact, however cloaked in signals of benign paternalism, a provocation by the intransigent patricians. It was, if anything, a threshold-crossing in its own right, one that was syntactically connected with the authorities’ initial threshold-crossing into the abyss of communitas (if we must use Victor Turner’s language)^[33] in the form of the currency devaluation, gone from Suter’s narrative even though it remains prominent in the peasants’ negotiation points. The powerless Lucern embassy was an assertion, a communication of the legal barrier by which subjects were not fit to negotiate as equals but could only expect to address their authorities within established rules of “submissive petitioning” (untertänige Bitte) in the city itself. The lines were drawn when the ambassadors closed the discussion by stating that they would not “create an opening for others to slip through” and the Entlebucher replied that that had to be their intent.^[34]

Suter’s central Act Three follows these mutual escalations from “Revolt to Revolutionary Situation,” from Lucern’s decision, as early as February 15, to crush the uprising with military power to the first meeting, on April 23, of a peasant union claiming to represent all of the Confederation’s subjects but consisting mostly of the subjects of Lucern, Bern, Solothurn and Basel.  Lucern tried, on February 22, to enlist other Catholic towns in its cause but these rejected the request and offered to mediate instead. All ten of the Lucern peasantry’s townships on the next day, the 23rd, rejected the city’s order to swear new oaths of loyalty. There is a noticeable fluster in Suter’s story when none of the book’s three (long, short and “Summary in English”) versions of these events gives any clue why suddenly all of the city’s rural townships, divided thus far between Entlebuch and one ally on one side and eight neutrals on the other, united against Lucern at this point and subsequently, on the 26^th, swore an oath of union in the church at Wolhusen.  Suter hastens the reader through these “events” in a very short space without once mentioning a pivotal narrative ingredient, itself an event; viz., that the Entlebuch peasantry had finally obtained, precisely on February 22, against the assiduous resistance of the authorities, documentary evidence on which to stake a claim that Lucern’s lordship was entirely invalid. In Suter’s construction, this legal discovery only surfaces very briefly over two hundred and fifty pages later in Part II, outside of the narrative context altogether, where it is then immediately discounted and effectively suppressed as part of the “cultural analysis.”^[35] There are similar narrative moves throughout and they make this already physically unwieldy and visually unpleasant book an even worse chore to read because the reader, unable to trust the story at any given point, has constantly to search forwards and backwards in the text, only to find that the conclusions drawn at one point are undermined by facts found elsewhere. Indeed, not only is Suter’s presentation of the very complicated interweaving of “events” that constitute “the Event” very hard to follow through his forward and backward jumps in time and his constant interruptions of the story with corny ruminations on, among other things, a “decision calculus” of the peasants, ritual oath-taking and the “free rider” problem, and the various meanings of “revolution,” but we also continually run the danger, depending on whether we happen to be reading the long or short version, of missing pivotal moments necessary for an understanding of what is going on .

The events of March, 1653, provide a case in point. The Catholic towns began their mediation between Lucern and the peasants on February 28 and the subject districts of Bern, particularly in the Emmental, called together their assemblies (some with the authorities’ permission) in the first weeks of March to formulate and present grievances, following all due procedures of “submissive petition,” on March 16. Two days later, a Confederate assembly (Tagsatzung) met, according to the short version, for four days in Baden to produce printed orders forbidding rebellious acts, to threaten military action and to begin to lay secret plans for such action. At the appropriate conjuncture in the long version, which is presumably how the reader first encounters this story, this absolutely crucial meeting is completely absent and it is only mentioned a few pages later, without explanation, in the context of the mediators’ offer of a settlement, and then only to record the Lucern representative’s branding of the peasants’ acti the city of the arbitration results.^[36]

In the context of Bern’s alleged decision, on March 20, to declare war on their subjects, there is a footnote^[37] telling us to go to Part II, Chapter 4.2, where we actually find yet another account of these events, one that undermines the “spin” of Suter’s official narrative versions about peasants’ “threshold-crossings.” Here the Lucern authorities’ request for military assistance of March 14 triggered a flurry of mobilization orders by the Bernese on the 15^th and 16^th. The decision to gather forces was accompanied by an authoritative report, on the 16^th, that, with a political alliance between the Entlebuch and Emmental peasants imminent, any concessions by the Catholic arbitrators would encourage similar demands by the Emmentaler.^[38] In other words, it was the threshold-crossing military mobilizations of the authorities, even as the peasants were still following procedures and engaged in arbitration, that was behind the hard line subsequently taken by the Confederate Tagsatzung. When the arbitrators came in on the 19^th with significant economic concessions, it was the Bernese patricians that were prepared to declare war and did so immediately. While Suter’s short and long narratives make it appear that peasants were the escalating force, it is evident that they were in fact lagging behind the preparations and willingness of the authorities to be the first to plunge into military operations. Indeed, a majority of the subjects continued on a, from their perspective normal, political path. In an action that in effect broke the union of February 15, the eight moderate Lucern townships — at a time when the city was divided by civil war and when the peasants’ resistances were successful against a Basel intervention — voted to accept, on April 3, the arbitrators’ terms, even without concessions to the peasants’ demand for a more democratic state to govern urban-rural market and other relations.

There is one more narrative dispersal of these events by Suter that we need to pull together before we return to what happened next. Suter is careful throughout to separate and downplay the economic relative to the political motivations of the subject peasantry. However, we learn from the Bernese report of March 16, mentioned above, that significant goals of the Entlebuch and Emmental peasantries’ political acts were tax, trade and market related. Moreover, displaced into the “analytical“ Part II of the book is an episode in the opening sparring of what would become the First Villemergen war between Lucern and Bern in 1656, in which the Bern authorities refused a Lucern request in October of 1653 to lift transit trade barriers. This interruption of a trade network by which the Central Catholic and the Northern Protestant peasantries had cooperated in exporting their cattle and dairy products blocked the most vital growth sector in the rural economy. The authorities’ revealing argument was that it was precisely their economic success that sustained the peasants’ political alliances and that to shut the market down was the means to defeat them.^[39] We will return to this episode below when we consider Suter’s insistent characterization of the authorities as “paternalistic.” For now we note that this imposition of an internal embargo, demonstrating a willingness by the authorities to forego the growth and tax benefits of export trade because these would make specific communities of producers and traders politically powerful, is an ongoing strand of the story that is also syntactically linked to the triggering currency devaluation and is narratively displaced by Suter even as it is, arguably, “covered.”

Worn out by endless cross-referencing only to discover unresolved or even unacknowledged narrative disjunctures, the reader finds himself increasingly at an impasse at producing a summary account of this peasant war. To do so would mean, given Suter’s disaggregating versions of the story, doing the work of narrative reintegration for him and that exceeds any reader’s obligation as well as the physical limits of an essay. Trusting that this set of critical points has been made in preparation for the discussion below, we can finish with a sketch ” of the rest of the “drama, if not of the“action.”

The remainder of Act III (from revolt to “revolutionary situation”): a Protestant arbitration commission for Bern, organized under the leadership of Zürich, met between March 23 and 26 but was not in time to halt a military confrontation that began, significantly, when some peasants objected to seeing their drafted sons among the troops mobilizing against them. On March 29, a sizeable gathering of Bernese, Basel and Solothurn subjects forced units of the Basel militia to retreat. The first half of April saw, with the collapse of the Lucern rural townships’ union as already noted, the temporary return of clear political divisions among the peasants.  While the Entlebuch/Emmental radicals continued to move toward political union with other townships, the moderate majority accepted the Catholic and Protestant authorities’ mediation terms and even swore new oaths of subjection. However, a decisive moment occurred on April 10, when the Emmental peasants, at an assembly including representatives from Entlebuch, the Aargau and elsewhere, overturned, for reasons that are not clear, their own negotiators’ earlier acceptance of the terms of mediation. The radicals’ subsequent campaign caused the moderate townships, falling like dominoes, to do the same, ending with the eight moderate Lucern townships’ rejoining the radicals on April 16. This was followed by a meeting at Sumiswald in the Emmental of about 2000 subject representatives on the 23^rd to form a war council and a peasant union on the Wolhus model to represent the entire territorial peasantry of the Confederation. It is a shame that a book of this size could not reproduce (beyond a few sound bites out of context) the debates of any of these processes. Four articles of union appear only sketchily in the long narrative: 1. mutual aid in overturning illegal innovations, 2. collective consideration of and agreement to arbitrate specific subjects’ grievances, 3. mutual military assistance and 4. no separate agreements.^[40]  For the peasants, these terms were their understanding of the logic of Swiss territorial-corporate traditions while it was the authorities who perceived them, as early as April 19, as constituting a “revolution.”^[41] Whose horizon of expectations are we talking about? Whose thresholds? What is “the event?”

In Act IV, “From Revolutionary Situation to Peasant War,” we see the appearance of unity achieved at Sumiswald fall apart and the subjects’ surprisingly substantial forces not yet engaged with but on the brink of battle against a better organized and wealthier (but, as it turns out, not more “modern”) united Patriciate, hiding in its fortified places. The political dominoes began to fall the other way for a short time once the authorities began, between April 28 to May 9, to woo the moderates away from the revolutionaries. Suter makes much of the fact that it was the cities’ so-called “diversion” tactics consisting of visitations to rural townships to hear grievances, make promises and renew loyalty oaths, that defeated the peasants long before they were defeated militarily.^[42] He has to admit, however, that by and large the “diversions” failed and that the “hard” and “mild” peasant parties that emerged fluctuated in size and coherence according to the ups and downs of negotiations, to the visible re-configurations of power and to the proximity of specific, direct threats of reprisals and violence.^[43] The central and northern peasant alliances were solid but failed to grow and failed to penetrate the united front of patricians and “citizens” who were, under peasant pressure, apparently cooperating to democratize their cities’ internal constitutions.^[44] Conversely, the Patriciates were united in their refusal to extend membership in Confederate-territorial sovereignty to inhabitants outside their corporations. After negotiations broke down on the 17^th and 18^th and when the Confederation, commanding three regional armies of about 20,000 troops altogether, declared war on the peasants on May 20, the peasants, in turn desperately mobilizing and arming a credible force of the Landsturm, were able to respond in kind with comparable numbers. Suter closes Act IV with peasant troops investing Bern and Lucern on May 21 and 23 respectively.

 The dramaturgy falters when we find ourselves in Act V, “From Peasant War to Tyrannicide,” with the crisis still unresolved. The transit from high to low point for the peasant protagonists is only reached by the middle of the last Act before the resolution, the revelation of what this was all about, begins to unfold in a final devolution. The failure of the sieges and the overall successive collapses of the peasant forces, with scarcely a shot being fired, occupy so much of the reader’s attention in this final Act that it all but obscures the denouement, consisting of the peasants’ humiliating and brutal subjugation and a last desperate acting out of the Tell legend by three radical leaders. The final whimpers of this “war” receive the perfunctory and thoughtless treatment of one eager to normalize and refigure the absolutistic Confederacy’s reactionary bad faith at the moment of pacification as a harbinger of a benign, future-oriented paternalism.^[45]

The extensive and artillery-resistant fortifications of Bern^[46] and the skills of the Confederate armies’ experienced leadership in fortifying open terrain overcame the peasant armies’ resolve for action outside Bern on May 28 and in the Aargau on June 3 and the “war” ended swiftly with the peasants agreeing to peace terms invoking the earlier arbitration agreements. Why this sudden collapse into the moderate, “mild” position remains unclear. Suter speculates that the peasants did not have artillery and yet he also shows they could have gotten some.^[47] No doubt the financial means and full-time soldiers for multiple sieges were lacking and the crop and dairy cycles called, but we miss the texts that could tell us how the peasants recognized, while they were pushing things as far as they could reasonably push them, their outclassed, “bypassed” position. In any case, the dominoes fell yet again the other way, as the peasant leaderships made separate peace agreements with their authorities between June 4 and 6, foregoing all political demands and trusting in their lords’ promises, if not of amnesty then of limited punishments. While peace agreements were being concluded between the Lucern patricians and subjects (the Stans Peace), the Bernese authorities already repudiated their agreements on the 7^th and set the course for the others by arresting suspects far in excess of the numbers the peace terms had stipulated, interrogating some with torture and punishing those convicted of rebellion with fines, confiscations, galley slavery and death. It astonishes when Suter characterizes this period as a return to “political everydayness” (der politische Alltag).^[48]

With search and arrest units occupying villages and combing the countryside for fleeing rebels by mid-June, public executions under way by early July and the reversal of Lucern’s urban constitutional democratization on the 11^th, widespread accusations of “tyranny” and breaches of contract came together in one final radicalization of the peasant resistance. On September 29, three of the outlawed Entlebuch leaders, in the by then common guise of the Three Tells, killed a leading Lucern official after the latter had refused to grant amnesty on a ritual occasion for renewing loyalty oaths. In early October, the Three Tells were betrayed, two killed in flight and the third betrayed again and killed when he returned in June of 1654. The rebellion’s end is best marked perhaps by the Lucern authorities’ building of a police fortress at the center of one of the most rebellious Entlebuch towns during October, just in time for the beginning of hostilities with Bern. The residue of broken agreements, of brutality and force against reasonable political actions, and all to preserve a narrowly patrician-corporatist monopoly on state and fiscal sovereignty, is quickly forgotten in Suter’s concluding focus on the peasants’ tyrannicidal “threshold-crossing” into “treachery and brutality.”^[49] His projective, reductionist reading of the Three Tells’ performance as an “unambiguous symbolic act” (is such a thing possible?) to recall the Christian community to its conscience, misses the crucial difference in timing with the “original” Tell’s action standing at the beginning of the Swiss turn to “liberty” whereas here it is obviously perceived by the majority, even as many support it, as a suicidal last hurrah, a pathos at the moment of capitulation to superior, absolutistic force.

Significantly, not only did the “triggering” currency devaluation (whose effects are purportedly here being traced through cultural learning machineries that seek equilibrium) completely disappear long before the end of this story, but, even prior to that, the larger “triggering” context, the achievement of sovereignty by the Swiss Confederation in 1648, a context that much of what the peasants’ legal struggle sought to address, plays no role in the narrative whatsoever. In the second part of this essay, we will examine how Luebke’s treatment of the triggering event similarly keeps it completely off-stage. We will consider in greater detail how Suter and Luebke, in their haste to construct modernist symbolic action narratives, seeking to diminish the rational qualities of “fundamentalists” and to approve of the pragmatism of “realists,” had to repress a great deal about the many-layered and articulating worlds in which their subaltern “actors” lived, about the multiple rational qualities, beyond the “realism” of merely giving in to power, that were required of the latter. However the Swiss peasants may have been “outclassed,” the reasoning inside their capitulation remains obscure and untold; if anything, Suter has at least to admit that they did not cave in to a more rational, “modernized” military force.^[50] It is the refusal to address a fuller range of “historical actors’” experiences and, above all, their rational qualities that renders both of these narrative analyses less valuable than they could have been.

IV

Even though the scale and narrative complexity of the peasant wars Luebke and Suter examine differ greatly, both stories share not only adjacent temporal and geographic frames but also a historical commensurability, in that both authors reveal aspects of “what it was like” to challenge politically, economically and “from below,”the absolutist-corporatist order of German Central Europe in the century after 1648. Neither of them rises to the occasion because the analyses remain trapped in a behaviorist phenomenology, seeking to boil historical experiences down to essential (i.e., finally predictable) distillates of “actions” and “ choices” associated, in this case, with “peasant war” or, Luebke, “rural revolt.” But is “peasant war” what we need to talk about to gain a significantly sharper focus on the central questions affecting everyone, perhaps especially peasants, concerned with negotiating and battling for position in a re-polarizing, dynastic-corporatist world system experiencing an expanding “web of market relations” (Brady) that was brought “home” to the local worlds of peasants in the form of the lords’ searching for trans-regional financial opportunities and/or profitable defaults? Does the designation “peasant war” itself already impose a limitation on our perception of how deeply and extensively woven into larger designs such an “event” could possibly be? By not giving us a satisfying sense of the ”actors’” articulations with their respective world systems (perceivable differently both then and now), of how their actual social and economic and other relationships worked in terms of simultaneously local and trans-regional power, these authors give us no basis for judging the very things they had set out to illuminate; namely, the qualities of their “actors’” economic, political and social rationalities and the capacities of both emerging peasant parties for combining and effectively mobilizing pragmatic “realism” as well as ”fundamental” legal and democratic principles.

For both Suter and Luebke, the narrative device of an external “shock” to trigger a collapse, only then to disappear from the subsequent “event,” represses not only the content-specific, continually ongoing and actively displaced presence of these shocks in the respective events they “triggered” but also points away from an even deeper layer of  triggers within triggers. Hovering in the background but never part of the effective story, these last are, in both cases, nothing less than the far-reaching restructurings of the legal-constitutional environments in which peasants had to operate. In Suter’s story, this was the Swiss Confederacy’s assumption of international sovereignty according to the terms of the peace of Westphalia. Luebke’s peasants experienced the deeper “shock” of the Habsburgs’ unilateral exclusion, in the early eighteenth century, of some regions from Imperial status and protection. These constitutional rearrangements were accompanied, in turn, by both hegemonic and subaltern corporations’ testing of their new systems’ limits and capacities for redistributing individual and collective costs and advantages. Neither “system revolution” plays a narrative role in these monographs whose failure lies in the failure to recognize that, to a significant extent, this is what these “peasant wars” were about and what we have to judge the “rationality” of the various “actors” by.

It argues against Suter and Luebke to note that it was the aristocratic corporations who initiated the process of threshold-crossing escalations by asserting themselves unilaterally in their refigured economic-political arenas with aggressive demonstrations of sovereign power aimed at exploiting in the market the subaltern’s political and military weakenesses. Luebke’s Black Forest peasants saw themselves increasingly subject to deals from which they had been excluded without recourse and by which the negotiating authorities broke the existing social contract, as the peasants understood it. The ominous granting, in 1705, of a renewal “in perpetuity” of St. Blasien’s lien administration of the Habsburgs’ earnings from Hauenstein, by which the subjects were in effect “privatized” and expelled from royal treasury protection without being consulted, set up the re-gathering of rebellious peasant forces in 1719 in response to a failed legal challenge of this contract in which the Miller leadership, so the Salpeter accusation, had not taken the matter to the Imperial courts as they were entitled. Whether or not this latter was the case is not at all clarified by Luebke, but the Millers’ “realistic” recognition of the de facto state of affairs was confirmed the next year with the Habsburgs’ Court Chancellory Ordinance which terminated the Hauensteiner’s legal appeals chain at the royal administrative courts of Innsbruck and excluded them from the Imperial processes in Vienna.^[51]  Although completely absent from the narrative account, this is surely the key change for this peasantry at that specific moment at the level of Imperial-dynastic law. It is what is being tested in 1719/20 behind the several political-legal confrontations that were the opening actions for the larger, internally conflicted confrontation. As had Suter’s Entlebucher before them in response to an absolutist currency devaluation which had translated into an internal power play the Swiss Patriciate’s exclusive claims to external Confederate sovereignty, the Hauensteiner too mobilized because they were being legally “provincialized,” their legal position in the corporatively organized regional market eroded out from under them. Without this premise of the peasants’ obvious (albeit divided and differentially “rational”) understanding of the changes in the politics and rules that governed their markets, Suter and Luebke’s artificial separations of economic from political-cultural motives constitute an analytical blockage.

A case in point is Luebke’s discussion of Leibeigenschaft, an issue over which the Hauensteiner parties were divided for reasons Luebke admits he can not grasp. For him this term translates into “servile subjection”^[52] and he is trapped completely in the political-historical rhetorics surrounding that figure. By overplaying the “servility,” “serfdom” and “slavery” associations that persist as the historiographical conventions surrounding this term, he misses completely the intertwined legal-constitutional and economic, i.e., the actual “systemic” layers of meaning which made it the central issue it was in its own time — and demonstrating thereby, incidentally, how the relentless, endless laboring of the obvious “content” that we find with symbolic actionist approaches blinds us (with power-serving, metonymic moves of taking the figure always only at its face value) to what the subaltern are actually doing. Thus, although Luebke cites Hannah Rabe’s reassessment of the Leibeigenschaft problem,^[53] he completely ignores her central argument; viz., that it was the communalist  parties of peasants who opposed Leibeigenschaft because, rather than “servitude ” it actually offered those who agreed to this arrangement freedom from communal supervisions, restrictions, taxations, and obligations and it was, even worse, a freedom that empowered women because it made this, under certain conditions desirable status, inheritable through the mother.

The key to getting a mutual benefit in a leibeigen ( “personal bondage”) contract was, for both lord and subject, the geographic separation between them and its effect on the competition between communal-local and central-distant sources of authority.^[54] It gave lords the means to have loyal leibeigen agents who were relatively independent of local politics in “distant” villages, while it gave the subjects who took on this status not only greater (!) mobility and agency than the normal, communalized, subject population had but also provided a bargaining tool for tenant-landlord transactions. In the Hauenstein case this necessary geographic distance was disappearing: the 1719 claim by St. Blasien to this form of landlordship over all Hauenstein tenants (now without appeal to Imperial arbitration) as well as the 1738 “manumission” arranged by the Miller party by which the territorial government would become “Leibherr” were both localizations, provincializations, that negated the bargaining advantage to the subjects and increased the controlling power of the local landlords, be they St. Blasien or the County government. Leibeigenschaft’s lower-court provisions would, for example, greatly augment the local landlords’ capacities for enforcing debt payments, a particular benefit to St. Blasien, the biggest lender in the area, already deriving t from debt servicing.^[55] The reason that Luebke advances for the peasants’ opposition to this “personal” contractual form is the taxation burden that allegedly accompanied it^[56] but, in the specific case of the death taxes that he cites, it is clear that these were already key to an old, fifteenth and sixteenth century battle the Austro-German peasantries had largely lost by 1600 and that it applied to subject populations’ tenure contracts generally.^[57]

Moreover, if we follow Rabe’s argument, we have to recognize that the peasants’ internal conflict about Leibeigenschaft concerned the differential impacts this contractual form had on peasant property rights^[58] and, consequently, on the land market and on their management options and choices. To go with the “servility” discourse alone is to share Luebke’s puzzlement about why the Salpeters would oppose the 1738 “manumission” deal and it is also to miss an opportunity to grasp a moment of party differentiation that makes this latter more than simply two kinds of political habitus but actually sees it containing conflicted visions of how best to conduct family business and communal politics in the corporatist-absolutist future. From the perspective of those who saw in Leibeigenschaft’s post-1525 regulated constructions an opportunity to engage in a more complex set of “world system” relations for individual peasant family firms, a regression to a localized version was the worst of both worlds and had, for some, to end in a call for the abolition of Eigenschaft, of any kind of subject status, altogether. The Miller party’s move to eliminate the possible intrusion of a “foreign” Leibherr into the community by, in effect, acquiring that right for themselves represented a conservative, corporatist and, for peasants, a self-encapsulating path of economic and political development.^[59] The Salpeters’ alternative vision of a centrally adjudicated “state-subject” status (and hence their not so irrational-appearing efforts to find some way to continue to connect to the Viennese court by delegations or by negotiating alignments with the Imperial Marian cult) was, to a limited degree, forward looking since it anticipated precisely the kind of “revolutionary” changes  that would come to be associated with Joseph II’s alleged abolition of “serfdom” later in the century. Evidently, once we understand what Leibeigenschaft was about as an issue, the respective positions dividing the parties were both “rational” and “realistic” parts of political programs that sought different solutions to the problem drawn from Tom Brady at the outset. It is, at the same time, not surprising that both Luebke and Suter perceive the pyrrhic victories of the conservative, corporatist-communalist parties as the triumph of a reasonable, realistic turn toward future progress and away from allegedly debilitating conflicts with what were, from their limited “political science” perspective, divisive fundamentalist utopians.

Luebke’s underestimation of even the simplest complexion of issues surrounding Leibeigenschaft is an indicator, one that also applies to Suter, of the incapacity of a symbolic actionist approach to pay adequate analytical attention to the rational qualities demanded by the subaltern’s economic and social position in their world systems — or, for that matter, by their “symbolic systems.” Luebke, for instance, understands that the issues surrounding the terms of tenure, household debt, the right of “withdrawal” (one of the means available to families to adjust inheritance), etc. were related to a broad battle going on over the terms of the land market where, indeed, St. Blasien was trying to gain control. He is, however, not aware of the substantive economic-rational dimensions of this market struggle where the issue was not just who “controlled” the market, as he puts it, but where conflicts about the shared degrees of civil market rights, the freedom of the market itself and the legislation advanced by absolutist-corporatist representations actually to reduce the existing freedom of the market for peasants^[60] were issues that challenged the rational calculations of the managerial and other interests of peasant family firms and could reasonably divide peasant factions into two opposing parties advocating either accommodation with or resistance to these recognizably regressive moves. As it is, neither Luebke’s nor Suter’s  grasp of these issues can determine for us who is “rational” in this conflict and what the substantive qualities of the opposing arguments are.

A key case in point for both studies concerns the partibility of inheritance, a desideratum for which peasantries in the Austrian empire had gone to war since at least the early sixteenth century and which, for reasons of militarily enforced tribute-state formation, had largely been decided in favor of impartibility (and of the downward distribution of the latter’s social costs) by 1650.^[61] Nevertheless, in mid-seventeenth century Switzerland and in early eighteenth century Hauenstein peasants were still managing to subdivide property and distribute it differentially among their heirs, a practice that the authorities opposed mainly, as Luebke at least admits, because it interfered with keeping together farms as tribute-producing and accounting entities. It is a curious fact that neither Suter nor Luebke can think his way past the tribute-authorities’ standard argument on this issue which was that by the logic of partibility properties would become subdivided to the point where they could not sustain a farm family.^[62] This argument, however, can only prevail in a logic flawed by unrealistic, de-contextualized premises, operating where no land market is allowed to develop so that countervailing cycles of property division and reconstitution (precisely the kind of activities the Hauenstein and Swiss and indeed many other peasantries of German-speaking central Europe were seeking to engage in) could overcome the perceived “limits of partibility,” a concept of such hegemonic force in its time that historians in ours are still fully under its spell.  The anti-partibility parties were simply helping to put into place the ideological components for those articulating systems of rural estate, urban and trans-regional tribute cartels, organized under variously sovereign dynastic-corporate, state and Imperial powers that were destined to be the dominant economic actors in Central Europe for three centuries after 1648.^[63]

That there were those, like some in the Miller party, who were willing to accept whatever rewards the unbusinesslike and power-serving rigidity of impartible peasant tenure could provide, does not make their position more “reasonable” or “realistic,” as the authors imply, but signifies rather that a fraudulent “reality claim” of economic necessity was and still is being advanced (by both some of the historical “actors” and their present historians) that in effect shields us from recognizing that a complex of interconnecting political choices about the relative freedom of markets and the distribution of surpluses and powers within the families and communities of the primary producers were being made  — and that the radical parties were not the deluded voices in these transactions while the “realists” were those content simply to accept less. The latter were making economic, political,  social and even moral choices that the former rejected, choices that required incumbent heads of houses to involute, to extort more out of their house-families, to dispossess children more absolutely, to de-securitize the inheritance portions of women, to abandon small trust funds to the “paternalistic” (and, by any standard, “criminal”) predations of patricians’ and courtiers’ banking corporations and so on. For historians to make this self-exploitive, income-sheltering “rationality” the ground for measuring any rural population’s advance toward modernist realism is to be fully complicit with and to share in the pathos of the stifling, arch-conservative provincialism that distinguishes these processes to this day.^[64]

One other significant example of how both authors consistently misrecognize the political-economic aspects of peasant rationality concerns their representations of peasant debt.  Both indicate, without laying out any specific chain of connections, that excessive indebtedness was part of the causal nexus of the peasant wars.^[65] Suter in particular again accepts as innately “rational” the implementation by the ruling corporations of limits on the subjects’ ability to hold debt, as when he indicates that it was the peasants’ post-1648 taking on of more debt (while demanding amnesty on old debt) purportedly to convert their family firms’ economies from war to peace that forced the authorities to intervene with debt limits.^[66] When we examine his very limited evidence for these alleged over-extensions, however, such characterizations appear unsound. Based on only eight of the twenty-one household inventories of convicted peasant rebels that he examines in Appendix 4, he shows an average debt of 54% of all assets. For the persons in question, this is not particularly high, especially in light of the fact that in an Austrian case from about this same period similar peasant rebels’ debt-to-assets ratio was closer to 100% while the average debt for an inventory population of over 800 rural people from all social strata was about 48% of assets.^[67] At the same time, his data on mortgage debt for the other thirteen peasant rebels, averaging 55% of land value (which, again, is nothing remarkable) reveals that what he calls “new debt” — and he’s stretching it by including all mortgage debt taken on between 1640-53 — was merely 13% of total mortgage debt, all of which actually contradicts his argument that it was post-war conversion debts that were causing the peasants problems. Moreover, there is no information about the  content of these debts. What were they for? In peasant-subjects’ family firm arrangements such debts often involved family relations of inheritance, trust fund obligation, dowry and other commitments and the authorities’ imposition of limits on debt (notably in sync with their other “triggering” acts) could indeed reach deeply, catastrophically, into the capacities of peasant family firms to manage their assets not only for business but also social advantages during what were, without doubt, interesting times for them.

Finally, Suter’s assertion that peasants were in a liquidity crisis because too big a percentage of their income went into debt servicing founders when we realize that not only does his figure (66.5% of income) have very limited representational power but that, in any case, it dates from 1690, long after the defeat of the peasantry. His source in fact reveals this defeat’s most significant economic effect; viz., the effect following the assertion of absolutist public-financial and exploitive regulatory power in the market. Contrary to his intentions, he is showing us how miserably the peasants were doing in the new “paternal” order!^[68] Not only does Suter give us nothing to perceive how the peasants could react “rationally” to the narratively long forgotten shock of the currency devaluation, in an environment where their foreign trade connections were being severed by the authorities as part of a strategy of deliberate provincialization and subordination, but he uses data in circular fashion to show the long-term, and evidently dire, effects of this entire process on the family firms’ economies as evidence to justify the authorities’ measures to put a low ceiling on peasant debt fifty years earlier.

Moreover, by making peasant “indebtedness” the problem, Suter erases a whole spectrum of other problems — illustrated by the authorities’ imposition of debt ceilings to favor public and private tribute extractions over private debt servicing — arising from the new market order of controls, localization and urban-corporate exploitation. At no point do we encounter information or texts that could indicate what the substantive economic and social management problems of peasant households were or that could  justify judgments about the possible rationalities that were demanded from peasants who were confronted, beginning in the early 1650s, by imminent imprisonment in powerless, self-exploitive, quasi-colonized and slow-growth regional economies where their family and communal finances were at the mercy of the various Patriciates’ or other sovereign authorities’ secretive, insider-trading, courtier and absolutist finance corporations.

Luebke’s evidence to support a similar claim that peasants were going into excessive debt is that more loans were being made by parish-guild treasuries.^[69] He provides us with an interesting example of a double misrecognition, encompassing not only the peasants’ economic but also what he calls their “symbolic rationality.”^[70]  While he is right to connect this kind of indebtedness to an economic upswing during the first half of the eighteenth century, he does not appreciate the role such credit formation played in the community and parish institutional innovations that were assisted by the market’s secular movement. This period of (actually quite limited) growth in rural wealth coincided with a religious revival that saw more personal moneys going into the “pious” parish and community projects that we associate now with the religious, domestic and artistic-architectural “peasant baroque” of Austria and southern Germany, beginning in the late seventeenth and ending with the assertion of ecclesiastical and foundational property-confiscating “enlightened” absolutism by the mid-eighteenth century. By reading peasants’ increasing use of parish guild and other confraternal treasuries in a political-economic frame we can make an alternative argument and say that Luebke’s evidence is not a sign of “debt trouble” but fits better into a rationality construction that combines religious pious revival with developing more independent parish and village-corporate financial institutions that not only provided communal benevolent and welfare initiatives but could also shelter peasant family wealth against aristocratic or state tribute-taking and other predations, thereby forming the rudiments of an anti-monopolistic and more diverse financial market at the village level. That this alternative could then in turn be abused by “insider” debtors who did not pay their interest is a significant drawback of the un- or “self”-regulated provincialization of such institutions (in effect, the Miller position) and is another matter, but the market-liberating and competitive potential of nascent parish, craft guild, welfare and benevolent fraternal associations and other such local fund-managing and credit institutions in the period between 1650 and 1750 is a significant context that both Luebke’s and Suter’s stories lack completely. They are not alone in this. It is a dimension that is generally lost in the current (post-1989) historical celebration of religious symbolisms and popular piety in Central European history where the focus is, as it is here, above all on the politically mobilizing effectiveness^[71] of such symbolic actions and not on their substantive social, economic and discursive applications, i.e., on the full range of options they make available to peasants’ variously “rational” actions.

 Luebke’s description of the Salpeters’ organization and performance of Marian pilgrimages in conjunction with their diplomatic delegations to seek audiences with the emperor in Vienna hints at the parish fund raising activities accompanying these symbol-deploying acts but the latter play no role in what he does with this material, which is to contribute to a growing literature on “naive monarchism.”  He dwells at length on the practical failure of what he sees, on the basis of no evidence in particular, as attempts by the radical peasantry to evade, by vainly reaching out to royal authority directly, the purportedly costly and slow legal innovations and processes that the Millers were apparently realistic enough simply to accept. This is where some narrative flaws catch up with him. Claiming, as he does, that the peasant leadership’s pursuit of a limited rationality that aimed at purely local prestige payoffs is not only not commensurable with the high risk of failure and extreme punishments that he also reports but it also trivializes and writes out of the story what was evidently at stake for the radicals, which was in fact the very opposite of acquiescing in the provincializing aspects of absolutist rule as measured by constrictions of the market. Luebke’s sense of “symbolic rationality” in effect suppresses the triggering events that began in 1705 with the conversion of royal lien property into private property (cutting off the appeals rights of subjects to the former lien lord) and that ended with the imperial restructuring following 1719/20 by which the Imperial authorities in effect abandoned the Hauenstein peasants to local and provincial lordship and created conditions that threatened the kinds of market restructuring-from-below implicit in the renascent proliferation and expansion of parish and guild financial associations.^[72]  In that context, peasant efforts — however unsuccessful (and therefore naive?) they might appear to us now — at sustaining an Imperial connection to try to keep alive avenues of appeal and to resist absolutist invasions by local power, make sense.  It makes it possible to credit at least some among the peasants of being capable of moving beyond the kind of hegemonic realism that Luebke, following James Scott, suggests was operating in the pilgrimages and diplomatic delegations by which even the most radical subaltern, when they approached the “strange theaters” of power (Foucault), appeared only to engage in the habitual performances of deference required by what James Scott calls the “official transcripts,” according to which protest, even in a violent mode, is always a negotiation to stay within the precincts of hegemonic participation.^[73]

Negotiations to stay within and “realistic” capitulations to hegemony are not necessarily the same thing and both were certainly present, indicating that these differences might have been the grounding principles dividing the parties. The process also contained, from the Salpeters’ side (and the same goes for the radical Swiss leaderships), historically unacknowledged elements of what I would call “hegemonic intelligence”^[74] by which I understand the subaltern’s variable ability to intuit, without necessarily fully understanding, the discourses and texts by which existing world systems’ hegemonic bloc participants negotiate from moment to moment and at all levels of articulation their perpetually unstable relationships, and the further ability to invent languages and acts that cut into, resist, interfere with, avert and possibly change those negotiations in whatever actionable world system locations present themselves to or are achieved by the subaltern. This perception seeks to go beyond Suter’s and Luebke’s understanding of “realism” whose one-dimensionality constitutes a blind fundamentalism in its own right and  attributes a pre-discursive, essential quality to Power and gives license to those who claim it to resort to unresponsive silence and extreme, overwhelming violence, against which it is only “realistic” to capitulate.^[75] 

Suter’s and Luebke’s one-dimensional closures on peasant rationality forestall and repress an exploration of the dialogic, figural elements in hegemonic processes whose recognition alone can move us beyond the symbolic actionists’ unsatisfying laborings over perceived off-the-shelf “uses” of symbols that subaltern actors merely take from the hegemons and that therefore appear to offer protestors the duplexity of a resistance that can also always claim shelter in the existing order. Luebke is aware that the symbolic choices peasants made contained nuanced differences that sought to make political and factional statements, to retain controllable versions of, in this case, Marian shrines and pilgrimages, perceived as “forms of cultural appropriation that ran at cross-purposes to its [the “state cult of Maria Immaculata”] original intent.”^[76] Leaving aside a perpetual problem with “original intent,” we can see that my previous argument about the peasants’ fight against economic and legal provincialization finds support in his evidence about Marian symbolic actions which evidently sought to connect with Marian cultists at the court in Vienna and also, by visiting shrines across the border in Bavaria and elsewhere, sought allies and connections in the wider region. 

Moreover, one of the curious absences in Luebke’s monograph is Lionel Rothkrug’s sustained, political-economic argument about the parish guild and other confraternal production of pilgrimages and shrines whose organization in turn was part of a strong upsurge of alternatives to aristocratic monopolies in competing, potentially “liberating” communal corporate formations.^[77] Rothkrug’s complex geography of the distribution not only of shrines dedicated to Christ and the Saints but also to two kinds of Mary, the Imperial immaculata and the dissident parishes’ mater dolorosa, offers analysts a far better appreciation of the political-dialogic possibilities residing in the peasants’ itinerant stagings and productions of, (not just “choices in”) political Mariology. The linkage Luebke seeks to create between Marian symbolism and Leibeigenschaft by focusing on the organized parades of “virgins” (Jungfrauen) fails to do justice to these complexities. His already simplistic reading of the political divisions arising in Hauenstein over leibeigen contracts is not improved by an addition of speculations about uterine and womb significations, purportedly referencing the maternal transmission of Leibeigenschaft, that he elides into Marian symbology. Without credible evidence for making such a linkage, he ties what he perceives as the most significant symbolic aspect of Marian processions, the purported sexual purity of the young women, to the salpeterisch accusation that the Millers’ treachery had made impure a formerly pure community.^[78] Not only is this a clever way to present the Salpeters in their scripted role as irrational fundamentalists given to self-serving factional infighting, but it also blocks more plausible readings that connect to issues broader than, but r Leibeigenschaft or “virginity.”

From Rothkrug and others,^[79] we learn that early modern Mariological discourses referenced several concerns in the subaltern’s experience, including: 1. clemency for transgressors (a theme Luebke could actually have applied to his hegemonic realism perception) 2. mourning for lost sons to sustain pacifist dialogues for negotiating, with Imperial and other authorities, the peasants’ future support for wars against the Turks, or, more significantly, for the drafting of peasant sons for mercenary armies^[80] and 3. Marian protection for the unmarried and the young. This last brings us to see Marian veneration as an indicator for 4. the increasing admission of women to parish corporate life, as well as for 5. the social presence of the hundreds of (literally drafted) Jungfrauen. While Luebke reads the latter as narrowly as possible, as “virgins” construed in the sense of simultaneously biological and moral “purity,” it is just as plausible, and indeed makes better sense in terms of the other issues of peasant politics raised so far, to read their quantitatively significant presence in terms of their being simply unmarried, possibly unmarriageable women, however virginal and pure. We can thereby move away from Luebke’s forced, projective associations between virginal purity and the allaged impurity brought into the community by treacherous Millers — where is the evidence for such a connection? — and recognize instead a multi-dimensional celibacy figure that was a metonymic sign of something wrong in the unfolding of families, that the combined compulsions of impartibility, of localized Leibeigenschaft contracts and of a closed land market designed to encapsulate peasants in rigidly fixed, tribute-dominated and forever middling family firms forced to operate under the exclusive (absolutist) rules of local public and private financial corporations, all the stuff of the peasantries’ politics, were not allowing the necessarily flexible management of family resources (represented also by parish and confraternal trustee relations) that could ease the pressure on families and communities of the presence of young people without provision. Without acknowledging these undeniably present and by any measure rational challenges to the repressive innovations of the authorities, without a sense of these broader linkages of peasant political-economic and symbolic actions, Luebke appears to have little capacity to make judgments about the rational qualities of the peasants’ “symbolic ” actions let alone to devalue them and their attendant, multi-faceted and representationally flexible social-narrative figurations as “naive.”

It is thus often the analyst’s own naively functionalist and personally projective readings^[81] of the subaltern’s mental and rational processes that are reimposed, in endlessly circular fashion, on the latter by the analyst’s own crude (though however ‘learned’) figural realism which perceives any and all pious or other symbolic acts as only representing “themselves” in ways chosen by an analyst who is seeking to make historical-anthropological ascriptions about peasants’ less-than-rational, or self-destructively rational, meanings. This imputed stigma of subaltern naivete and rational inadequacy is concretized further by a perception of some subaltern’s finally “realistic” retreat before the authorities’ violent refusal to negotiate further into what James Scott has called the performance of “hidden transcripts.” He means those resistances “below the line” and beyond “safety-valve” releases that take back through every-day pilfering, poaching, collective shirking etc., little shares from what the “elites” have “extracted”.^[82] Scott concedes as “perfectly true” the criticism that such “practical resistance . . . amounts to nothing more than trivial coping mechanisms that cannot affect . . . domination” but in the same breath claims that such critique is “irrelevant, since our point is that these are the forms that political struggle takes when frontal assaults are precluded by the realities of power.”^[83] 

To invoke “the realities of power” as a closure, a final, decisive moment, is to exclude categorically any consideration of counter-hegemony, i.e., of any possible, whether successful or not, subaltern, textual-performative destabilization and movement past an intolerable, humanly destructive hegemonic bloc which is at work not just “from above” but also reaches into and is reproduce by subaltern social relations. For Scott,^[84] and for Suter and Luebke as well, there remains, as the only “realistic and prudent” subaltern position, the Romantic’s expectation of defeat as a prior condition for becoming, only during a proper time of threshold-crossing crisis, an “actor,” for temporarily leaving “the offstage world of subordination” to register a resistance and then returning, blessedly defeated, to the anonymity of everyday life presumed to be outside of and below hegemony.^[85]  Not only is this latter presumption of a saving sphere of subaltern experience “below” a “line” (or, Suter: a threshold) a precise replication-continuation of the early modern absolutists’ vision of society^[86] but it also makes an a priori Reality claim for Power and thereby dehistoricizes it as a non- or pre-dialogical “real” presence to which those who don’t “have” it but are condemned to experience it must subordinate all their expectations and considerations. Does anyone ever know where these thresholds and lines of Power are from historical moment to moment? Of course, there are barriers to memberships in significant corporations or “clubs” or to access to successful investment funds, but to translate these into a metaphysically discernible separation (for which no sustainable categories exist) between History and Everyday Life is to participate in the ongoing concealment of the perpetual dis- and re-articulations among shifting parties and alliances of hegemons and subalterns, both roles operating inside all levels of any social hierarchy and manipulating hidden as well as official transcripts, even as these latter occasionally reverse places.

Perceived as living without hope of ever discovering, let alone successfully articulating, the discursive keys to break into (or, alternatively, down) the eternal hegemonic dialogue, the subaltern are, by this understanding, in all cases condemned to the limited satisfactions of self-referential symbolic actions — to which analysts can then, conversely, reduce every subaltern utterance, no matter how well it may actually be grounded in a “reality” form, in legal documents and official discourses for which the subaltern can reasonably claim general relevance and consideration. Nowhere are the inadequacies of Luebke’s and Suter’s moves to “rethink” peasants’ political-economic and symbolic rationalities more evident than, finally, in their treatments of the peasants’ historical-legal representations.

Scott’s paradigm of escalating practices of “domination and resistance” identifies the invocation of mythic historical figures and events as an intrinsic element of ideological resistance in what he calls the “infrapolitics” of sub-threshold actions.^[87] Both Luebke and especially Suter depict political deployments of such apparently mythical histories to illustrate the naive and less-than-rational but effectively mobilizing character of peasant politics. Ostensibly being somehow passed along in the sub-threshold world of everyday life — Suter believes, by means of official memorializations turned to resistant purposes — are iconic names and events often associated with “historical,” i.e., once-held but now stolen or lost freedoms or practices of freedom that are not founded in substantively grounded and understood historical or legal knowledge but are part of a kind of folk-remembering of moments of resistance that resurface in and are reinvented (in purportedly creative ways to incorporate “new learning”) for any present crisis. Where Luebke makes this point in passing, Suter builds it into his central (and in its execution unbearably patronizing) theme of “collective learning.” His ambition is to avoid “dismiss[ing] with categories of historical error” the subaltern’s finally unsuccessful memory politics but to show rather that “collective memory, delivering the experiences of the past only vaguely and in fragments . . . became a very dangerous counselor.”^[88] His devaluation of the peasants’ rationality goes beyond any individual’s or group’s historical-analytical failing. Peasantries’ weakness as historians is perceived rather as rooted in the inadequacies of subaltern historical culture itself, dependent as it is, in his estimation, on the frailties of living memory and inherent forgetfulness, on oral transmission and, beyond that, on wishful thinking.

He contradicts his own good intentions about avoiding accusations of “error” when he singles out one of only two referenced performances of peasant remembering in 1653 as presenting a “false interpretation” (falsche Deutung) — an accusatory “falsch” occurs here, with Ciceronian reverberations, four times in less than half a page.^[89] That aside, one does have to take issue with his reductive judging of the peasants’ “historical memory” by standards of (untestable) tactical effectiveness and also with his accusation that their false historicizing somehow (without any innate mechanism or relevant utterance in evidence) led peasants to have fatally delusional expectations of success.  Even as he rhapsodizes about the peasants’ inventive genius as historical bricoleurs putting together what he calls an “intellectual patchwork,”^[90] it is actually, and throughout, the radical peasants whom he brands as historical fundamentalists whose “false” histories and consequently false expectations created the, by his measure of rationality, unwinnable and therefore unreasonable peasant war and ensured its failure as well. His is a double-entendre message that undermines this work’s claim to “understanding the peasants” throughout. There are, in addition, a number of sleights-of-hand in Suter’s presentation of the battle for “history” that we have to point to, especially since his moves place under erasure the “hidden transcripts” being deployed by the patricians, who were only, “rightfully” (zu Recht) in Suter’s estimation,^[91] defending their exclusive corporate claim to representing Swiss Confederate sovereignty.

During my reconstruction above of Suter’s versions of the 1653 war, I noted a narrative lapse where there was no motivation to explain what suddenly expanded the peasant alliances and toughened their resolve to repudiate Lucern’s authority in late February of 1653.^[92] Only in the “analytical” part of the book did we find (and Suter does not then draw a narrative inference) a coincidence in timing in the obviously important discovery of a 1358 document known as the Vidimus in an archival chest at Schüpfheim. This notarized exemplification of an agreement by Duke Rudolf of Habsburg to release Entlebuch from all future lien (Pfand) contracts purportedly invalidated Lucern’s lordship as well as a 1405 lien contract whose terms had, in any case, presumably long run out.^[93] This last was a point that the peasants had been having a hard time proving, however, since the copy of the lien contract that Lucern finally gave them in 1653 omitted the, by then paltry, 3000fl amount of the original loan whose repayment would have, and probably already had a long time ago, been redeemed to terminate the agreement.  The Bernese peasants had also had some success in grounding their protest in two copies of the Kappel letter of 1531, already in play during their 1641 uprising, by which the city had granted them specific freedoms. Suter reports but effectually ignores, in both his narrative and his analysis, the intense fight the peasants had against the patricians’ occupation of a speciously legal (but certainly not “rational”) high ground by declaring such contracts to be arcana, secrets of state, and then mounting under that cover their own aggressive “hidden transcripts” campaign of foot-dragging delays in producing contractual documents, of denying documents’ existence, falsifying and destroying documents and, perhaps most indicative, confiscating of peasant archives wholesale.^[94]

In yet one more collaborative “hidden transcript” move, this time by the historian, the peasant radicals’ efforts to achieve some standing in court with processes of legal discovery not only founder against the authorities’ absolutist quashing of their struggle to assert the necessarily mutual accessibility and enforcements that make contracts binding in a functioning market, but they founder as well against Suter’s repressive conversion of the authorities’ systematic and destructively aggressive “oralization” of the peasants’ legal-historical capacities into his own fuzzy discourse about “artifacts of remembering” (Erinnerungsstücke) and “places of memory”^[95] which then evolves into a victim-blaming turn toward lengthy, diffuse accounts of the “fairy tales” the peasants told themselves, of the “fictionalized” histories that they became victims of. This switch to a “memorialization,” to an ostensibly fanciful peasant satisfaction with emblems of “memory,” that then becomes a mythologization of the peasants’ unsuccessful efforts to gain legal recognition may be illustrated by what happens to the Vidimus in Suter’s account. Only at the end of the book, as a kind of afterthought, does he tell us that the authorities confiscated the entire Entlebuch archival chest, Vidimus included, in June of 1653, and then released the document back to the peasants, requiring them on December 1, 1653, to take a collective oath attesting that this document did not in any way challenge Lucern’s sovereignty.^[96] This comes long after Suter closed his discussion of the document with the observation that the peasants “fastened on to,” among other things, “songs and myths, signs and rituals as, for instance, the Vidimus” to express their resistance. He left it as a document that posed no serious challenge; it was just another cultural artifact, a curious legal antiquity perhaps, available for peasants to construct their delusional, historically distorted failure.^[97] It is, however, inadequate to the history of an “event” to deny a narrative place for a document that  evidently could not be legally tested and had to be overcome  by force. Here it is the historian’s misrecognition (precisely in Bourdieu’s sense of a violence that is not recognized as such) that short-circuits the peasants’ lost battle to gain and retain archives and documents for a significant effort to engage history in the processes of legal discovery, as a naive, merely ideologically functional search for “memory,” for places of memory, in the currently modish cant. Luebke’s and Suter’s presentations, from this perspective, are both typical of symbolic actionist approaches’ unfailing retroactive collaborations with (or better: compulsively repetitious figural fulfilments of) displaced historical repression.^[98]

V

At one point Suter  claims that “the [peasant] actors . . . cobbled together (bastelten) a new, original, coherent design for a better political future for themselves and sorted out an original tactical way to proceed to realize this design.”^[99] This is curious praise since his evidence for and readings of the peasants’ political-economic and symbolic programs and actions expressly demonstrate the exact opposite. He celebrates the “New Tell Song” of 1653 as one of the most revealing innovations of peasant war learning and yet almost immediately buries the several recognizably new narrative figurations of Tell in his distracted, questionable and, frankly, maundering talk about the Khyffhäuser legend, a savior figure and a “spiritual,” regenerative faith in an originary “upright, patriotic and old Confederate belief.”^[100] But the actual 1653 version of the “myth” is at best an ambiguous revitalization figure. Why are there now “Three Tells” and why do they appear at the end, when defeat is certain, in an almost elegaic-suicidal act that closes rather than begins a rebellion against a perceived “tyranny?” Suter’s diversionary mythification further deepens his contextual exclusion of the moment of historical-constitutional “realization,” after 1648, of the long (and however “mythicized”) process initiated by a medieval Tell’s refusal to bow to a hat on a pole. He fails to credit this last as the Swiss peasantries’ “originary” claim, even if without “real” historical foundations, for having their claim to have played a creative role in the centuries-spanning struggle against foreign domination recognized with political inclusion at this decisive juncture in the history of the Confederacy.^[101] The 1653 innovation that is the political inward turn of the Tell story, the characterization by these last desperate resistors’ of the Patriciates’ absolutist pretensions as unacceptably “aristocratic” and tyrannical, is noted by Suter but submerged immediately in allegedly primary peasant concerns for doing it “just like Tell” — which is obviously not adequate to what the Three Tells were about. Rather than being part of an ongoing Swiss pathos of resistance, with the 1653 errors perpetuated in even later versions,^[102] the Tell figurations of that year were variable references to an ongoing process of modernizing the terms of resistance that was intertwined with (in Elias’ civilizational process sense) and capable of recognizing and contesting, however fatalistically, the simultaneous modernization and absolutization of urban, patrician-corporate tribute forms becoming, in turn, a model for Austro-German absolutism.^[103]

 Suter’s repeated claim that the peasants’ defeat halted a drift toward absolutism and initiated instead a “paternalistic” evolution of government requires careful consideration since it is the ground for his further claim that modern Swiss liberalism emerged from specifically Swiss paternalism (figured as a kind of absolutism that has learned its lesson) as it “modernized” in the decades before 1848, rather than from prior anti-tyrannical and Enlightenment traditions.^[104]  We can, for a start, go beyond his seeing the peasants as seeking to “revolutionize” and the patricians as seeking to “preserve” the “corporate order.”^[105]  Not only is a juxtaposition of “revolutionizing” and “preserving” a misdirection, since the latter often, both now and historically, employs the former, but it is far more instructive to see both Suter and Luebke’s reports as possible histories of a confrontation between competing modernities.

On the aristocratic-Imperial side (and this includes the urban Patriciates) there was a modernization of tribute that turned away from feudal incomes, tithes etc. and toward encapsulating militarily defeated and policed “populations” in deliberately closed and limited regional economies where all movements were controlled and the subaltern were unable to prevent the implementation of innovative, more sophisticated, more experimental, i.e., more“modern,” types of tribute skimming in the form of treasury paper and currency manipulations by insider-trading aristocratic corporations, extractions from “private” export cartels subsidized by “public” funds, the unilateral imposition of legal, judicial, entry and transaction fees of all kinds, tributes from “cautionary” deposits, from orphan and other public/private trust fund “management,” from forced loans and forced labor, from forced public military recruitment for private regimental economies and the leasing of mercenaries etc., etc. The “modernist” component of these corporatist-absolutist (and violently enforced) hierarchies of monopolistic combinations of public finance and private banking cartel formations did not lie, as one still finds throughout the dominant historical literature, in their “disciplining-for-modernity” but rather in their exploitive internal-colonial subordination of peasant and urban “subjects” to press out sufficient funds to allow aristocratic corporations to cross insider-participation thresholds in emergent financial markets and to be protected against and to pass on to those outside their sovereign circles the vast losses incurred in this first great era of Europe’s “modern” waves of state-organized pyramid and Ponzi schemes and colonial bubbles. At the same time, some peasants’ political-economic vision (perhaps more “modern” from our vantage point than theirs) was, if nothing else, merely a largely unsuccessful defense of perceived interests and of alternative directions for individual and collective market advantage against this broad frontal assault by Central European tribute formations seeking to “modernize” for articulating with North Atlantic capitalism. Sufficiently strong parties among Central Europe’s peasants obviously wanted a freer market with transregional commodity, labor and capital movements and with more flexible rules to assist toward a family-firm management that was not forced to be in sync with local and community rules. These “fundamentalist” parties lost and peasants settled for a pseudo-communal evolution under “bureaucratic” mandates, sheltering their incomes as best they could and free only to extort more out of their familial and hoarded labor.

It is hard not to perceive as “modernity” the more radical peasants’ goals ss to markets (deliberately denied them, as noted, by authorities that wanted to weaken them politically by isolating them economically) and access to legal appeals processes beyond the local courts of their masters, to intra- and trans-regional networks of independent parish, guild and confraternal corporations for more competitive family firm and communal capital formation, and the independent disposition and management of their families’ labor, real estate and financial assets, etc. etc. In these terms of political desiderata the “Swiss ideal” was evidently not a dead letter but was itself perceived as capable of an evolving, “modernizing” potential, identified in these two accounts with peasant fundamentalists and radicals who in fact sought a continuation of an already ongoing evolution of market forces as well as of legally secured community and family institutions, all of which was actively reversed and repressed by the assertion of absolutist “modernizing” models after 1648 and, then in earnest, after the onset of global colonial and dynastic wars in the early eighteenth century. The peasant “realist” parties were simply those who acceded to aristocratic-corporate and absolutist tribute- extracting modernity; they took over to become those uniquely  German and Austrian clans of village notables, the Honoratioren, occupying permanent local and regional magisterial offices under “state” auspices, functioning as agents for and as brokering manipulators of the sovereign corporations’ and dynasties’ rules in limited, provincial magisterial republics.^[106] Suter and Luebke provide us with graphic moments in the hegemonic victory of aristocratic-corporate modernity in the provinces as we witness the installation of both the Millers and Salpeters as perpetual ins and outs or observe the Swiss “mild” parties, as they signed on to the arbitration agreements and, to seal the bargain, disposed of the Three Tells in an object-relational transition from open support to secret betrayal.

Suter’s ascription of a paternalist, and therefore presumably “not-absolutist,” character to these emergent rural authority relations does more than merely repeat the absolutists’ favorite self-representation as well-meaning, necessarily stern but also lenient fathers to subjects who are re-cast as ”children.” These infantilizing formulas were widespread in the German/Austrian ecumene and do not at all signify a Swiss “third way.” It is, rather, language that points to where the roots of this absolutism lie, to where paternalism was a metonymic concealment of modernizing, absolutizing, tribute formations empowering “housefathers” at every level to enforce their “family” members’ submission to institutions, rules and procedures (including impartibility, family credit, mortgaging and trust fund restrictions and supervision, village draft boards to select households’ “expendables”^[107] for recruiting and sale as mercenary-auxiliaries etc.) that guaranteed the ongoing viability and tribute productivity of the houses and offices that constituted, altogether, the new absolute state.

If there is a moment of hegemonic duplexity  —  in Scott’s sense of the subaltern’s hedging, prior admission of defeat in the very act of rebellion in order to remain inside the hegemonic formation that is threatening and oppressing them — it appears, ironically, at this core where “paternalist” discourses mediated the new tightening of exploitive political-economic articulations among capital markets, tribute lords and subject families. In the peasants’ demands we find several areas where they in effect declared their willingness to bargain for weakening the property rights and other economic and legal positions of women and heirs.  When we look past Suter’s point about what he thinks is the authorities’ “paternalistically” high percentage of concessions to peasant demands, we note that while the patricians categorically denied the challenges to their monopoly over public finances and the admission of peasants to full political-corporate status in the Confederation they also agreed, precisely in these family and communal areas, to allow the advantaging of male heirs, exempting women’s inheritance and dowry funds from securitizing in mortgages, closing avenues of appeal beyond the local magisterial courts for wards in inheritance and trust fund matters and so on.^[108] To answer further the question implied in Brady’s paradigmatic perception, we can say that the peasant “realists” accepted provincialization in return for the more limited economic and political opportunities of familial and communal involution which entailed the perpetual downward mobility of and displacement of social costs among women, children, servants and, increasingly, the old. While one might acknowledge that this hegemonic, “paternalistic” (or, better, absolutist-patriarchal) bargain is indeed the core of Swiss “modernity” it is impossible to perceive it, as Suter does, as a “liberal-democratic” form, especially in light of the finally not surprising facts that Swiss women did not acquire the right to vote in national elections until 1971 and that it took until 1990 (!) for them to have the vote in all cantonal elections.

While Luebke touches on it indirectly by his irritating and labored indexing of “ironies,” Suter places the “modernity” problem at the heart of the history of this region’s peasantries. Much of what he sees as a positive, comedic-ironic evolution contains historical costs that have not simply disappeared with “success”^[109] but continue to surface when some of the forgotten threads holding closed the wounds of Swiss history are torn away, as they were in the recently renewed disclosures of Swiss bankers’ entanglements with “Aryanization” and Nazi genocide.

VI

We do not have the space to look at several themes in both these fact-filled studies that deserve more extended discussion, including peasants’ invocations of old and new law, the interesting ambiguities of “oath-taking,” the militarizing social restructuring of peasant “peripheries” as a function of French, German and Austrian military colonialism, etc. There is, however, one last moment in Suter that warrants notice for the bearing it has on the overall significance of the symbolic-actionist and event-oriented kinds of peasant histories being advocated by both authors. In the closing pages of Suter’s book, the post-historic intellectual finds his way back to reveling in the Bastelei,  in the “intellectual patchwork” of the “actors participating in the conflict.” He salutes their bricolage as a “fundamentally unpredictable, indeterminable, and creative translation and construction achievement that transcended (aufhob)^[110] their own world and the possibilities for action it contained” and, for him, points to “the significant role accident (Zufall) plays in the coming to pass [!] (Zustandekommen)of historical events.”  This greatly undermines, however, what historians can possibly do: “one can not explain further but only ascertain as an accident of history and pass on the story of the extremely complicated combination of exogenous shocks, structural transmission mechanisms and the creative construction achievements of the actors.” This in turn ends in a self-consuming, circular formulation according to which “the accidental combination of external influences and structural preconditions [as if “accidents” had no willed, only colliding, paradigms] could . . . only through the original [and therefore outside of structure?] collective action of the actors achieve that effectiveness that the historical event and its far-reaching consequences made possible.”^[111] This a circularity that says structures become an event through the acts of actors who are made possible by the event that their acts create. This completely de-humanizes, mechanizes, exteriorizes and removes from any historical judgment the actual contents and motivations at work inside the “triggering shocks” in prior historical formations (which certainly do not just “go away” once the action starts) and leaves only the completely “free” and “threshold-crossing” momentary responses of the shocked peasants as the force that holds together and converts “chaos” into event, reducing historians (wearing white lab coats and holding clip boards, no doubt) to standing on the sidelines to take notes and give off gratified, encouraging noises. The payoff is that we all get to celebrate once again a perceived “autonomy of human action” without which “the accidental and complex combination of exterior influences and structural preconditions can not be thought of as an event-creating force: precisely therein consists also our freedom before history.”^[112]

Our freedom before history, i.e., our essential humanity without history, signifies a retreat into a pre-Kantian homo clausus, to use Norbert Elias’ term. However one reads this reductive subordination of historical understanding to a fundamentalist-religious notion of free will that reduces itself to judging what were (and therefore are) the “right”choices between good and evil in threshold-crossing historical events,^[113] one has also to be aware that its proponents actively continue to produce highly tendentious chronicles and projective symbolic readings that occupy the space of history even as they undermine the scientific complexity and potential for change of historical work. For both Suter and Luebke, professional history returns to a high antiquarianism, to a mere observing, recording  and cataloguing of the predictable ironies of the human comedy; we are back to “the event,” to what allegedly “actually happened,” and not, still with Ranke, to remembered experiences (themselves saturated with prior remembrances of experiences), to “what it was actually like.”^[114] In Suter’s view, only peasant amateurs, bless them, would hope to learn something from history to help them put together their “intellectual patchwork” for inevitably misguided action. We do not even need to know what the “intellectual” or factual dimensions of this patchwork were as long as (re-)learned historical symbolisms were being acted out, the signifying war clubs manufactured, the virgins crowned, and all paraded about in public, and we can be edified by observing how out of these historically deluded, failed efforts “the good” ironically emerges after all. If it seems duplicitous of Suter to celebrate what he calls the two most important products of peasant “learning” in the 1653 war, the articles of union and the New Tell Song, without ever producing them as full texts, then we have to remember that this is history under the Romantic assumption of an “always already” present expectation of defeat. In this light, historical significance is not in anything that “actors” actually say or intend but is in the threshold-crossing motion of the action itself. Suter’s upbeat optimism challenges us to think about what this cultural-analytical figuration of inevitable and ironically positive defeats of the subaltern signifies for an ethics of historical practice at this time.

The forced and repeated appearances in Suter of the “surprising event” of 1989 as an equivalent moment to 1653^[115] for displaying a transcendent “free will” in historical action provides an opening for considering such questions. Why would a historian put forward an unequivocal celebration of 1989 in the later 1990s, in full view of what ensued, beginning in 1991, in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Russia when the “intellectual patchwork” of those “restructurings” failed and the “realists” could resort to threshold-crossing “shocks” empowering piratical currency manipulations and treasury lootings, regional pyramid schemes, national bank frauds, mass real estate expropriations, population “relocations” and outright genocide, altogether destroying, presumably necessarily, millions of victims’ lives? Following Suter, we can begin to puzzle out what the widespread renewal in the cultural and social sciences of symbolic actionist approaches (in neo-Kantian, pragmatist-behaviorist, Chicago school, Turnerian etc. guises) can do for the ethical-historical reception of such crimes. Not only can individual victims (of, say, torture) be construed as just “unfortunates” (thus Suter),^[116] caught in a larger cultural collapse but also, more significantly, the increasingly urgent present puzzle of how to re-stabilize populations that were targeted for and have experienced genocidal de-stabilization finds new languages and strategies in researches such as these.^[117] Need we add that such political science functionalism brings together several politically reactionary understandings of human motivation and experience, couched in languages of acculturation, symbolic management, performance theory, group analysis etc., altogether making up a bricolage of world-system ethics that can countenance the targeting of regional populations for destabilizing “shocks” that can, in turn, be expected to devolve into historically predictable and therefore, it is hoped, “containable” genocides. (see note 30) If one sees history, as I do, working not for specious accommodations with “reality” but for recognitions-for-change, then it behooves one to reject the current “post-historic” assignment to furnish theoretically and archivally prejudiced historical representations that “grant agency” in the very act of casting ordinary people as culturally belled and branded cattle to be corralled and herded from event to “event.”

Endnotes