Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

 The historical role played by debt in the exploitation of peasants

For over five millennia, peasants’ debt has been an instrument of exploitation and dispossession that has repeatedly resulted in uprisings in the countryside and affected cities.

The process of exploitation and dispossession through debt is simple: creditors demand that debtors pledge what they own. It can be the land they till or tools or cattle. Repayment occurs either in kind or in cash. As the interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher…

The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. are high, debtors have to transfer a large part of what they produce to their creditors and thus get poorer and poorer. If they default, the creditors keep whatever was pledged. In some societies it can also result in debt slavery, whereby debtors or members of their families lose their freedom.

For the last 5000 years private debt has played a key part in social relationships. The struggle between rich and poor, between exploiters and exploited, has often also been a struggle between creditors and debtors. As emphasized by David Graeber, with remarkable regularity popular uprisings have begun in the same way, namely through the ritual destruction of debt records (whether on tablets, papyrus, parchment, account books, tax registers or other supports). [1] In several cases, the struggle for debt cancellation led to revolutionary situations.

Before turning to the late Middle Ages and the context of the German Peasants’ War, we should remember that debt cancellation has a long history. We cannot understand the force that moved German peasants if we do not take into account the tradition of debt cancellation in the original Christian view of the world. Thomas Müntzer, like many radical preachers of his time and the leaders of peasant struggles, called upon the Gospels and considered that debt cancellation had to be carried out as part of a divine dispensation.

But where did this tradition originate?

 The origin of debt cancellation

In Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age, rulers regularly cancelled debts, thus restoring social peace as they put an end to abusive indebtedness that often resulted in enslavement for debt and complete dispossession. [2] There were some thirty general cancellations of private debt in Mesopotamia from 2400 to 1400 BC. They mainly benefited peasants. One of the cancellation decrees specified that official creditors and tax collectors who had expropriated peasants should compensate them and return their property.

There were also debt cancellations by Assyrian emperors in the first millennium BC and by pharaohs in Egypt. In the 8^th century BC, for instance, Pharaoh Bocchoris (717-711 BC) proclaimed both debt cancellation and the liberation of debt slaves.

Though abandoned in practice, this tradition had been a foundational principle of early Judaism and, later, early Christianity. The tradition of general debt cancellation is found in both Hebrew and Christian texts in the books of Deuteronomy, which states the obligation to cancel debt every seven years, and Leviticus, where debt cancellation must occur every Jubilee year, i.e. every 50 years. [3] The prohibition of interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. on loans was also among the founding principles of Christianity, of Judaism, and later of Islam.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’ best-known prayer, instead of saying “Lord, forgive us our trespasses as we also forgive those who trespass against us,” the Greek text of Matthew’s version (6: 12) could be translated as: “Lord, forgive / cancel our debts as we also forgive our debtors.”. In German, Dutch and Swedish the same word (Schuld) is used for sin and debt. The term Alleluia, which expresses joy and is used in the Jewish and Christian religions, comes from the language spoken in Babylon in the 2^nd millennium BC when it meant the liberation of debt slaves. [4]

We should point out that the tradition of cancelling debt every seven years or on Jubilee years, every 50 years, was never respected because it ran against the interests of the ruling classes and of successive modes of production from the second half of the first millennium BC. Debt cancellations only occurred after large popular mobilizations or when there were major crises within the ruling classes.

In Greek and Roman Antiquity, peasants’ debt reached huge proportions resulting in debt enslavement, which led to repeated uprisings. In Athens, Solon’s reform in the 6^th century BC included debt cancellation and the prohibition of debt slavery. [5]

In early feudal times in Western Europe, a great many freeholders were reduced to serfdom since as indebted peasants, they could not repay their debt. This was the case under Charlemagne at the end of the 8^th and early 9^th centuries. [6]

From the 14^th century onward, a succession of powerful protest movements among peasants would shake Western and Central Europe, notably in Flanders, France, England, Bohemia and Germany in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

 Successive peasant uprisings in Western and Central Europe in the 14^th and 15^th centuries

The 1524-1525 Peasants’ War in Germany is part of a movement that had started two centuries earlier with large peasant mobilizations that marked the 14^th century: in Italy, in Piedmont, under the leadership of Fra Dolcino (1300-1307), [7] in Flanders (1323–1328), [8] in France (Révolte des Pastoureaux in 1320, la Grande Jacquerie in a significant area North of Paris in 1358, [9] Révolte des Tuschins in the Languedoc in 1381-1384), in England (an uprising led by Wat Tyler and John Ball in 1381). The German Peasants’ War was also to some extent a continuation of the great Hussite movement and of the Taborites, which had shaken Bohemia in the 15^th century. [10] In Spain the Remensas’ War (1462-1485) actually resulted in the cancellation of peasants’ debt granted by the King in a bid to take back control of Catalonia. [11]

Those various medieval mobilizations share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. a number of common points, namely peasants’ opposition to the privileges of the nobility (feudal lords) and of the high clergy, who were exempted from paying taxes; their rejection of the corvées and abusive taxes that hit peasant families very hard; the desire to defend communal land against private appropriation by the nobility and the high clergy, to gain or maintain free access to forests and the right to collect dead wood, access to streams, rivers and ponds with the right to fish in them; their opposition to abusive debt and to loans with usurious interest rates; their demand for far-reaching changes in how justice was done; and the abolition of serfdom wherever it was still present. In some cases, we also find a demand for the goods belonging to the Roman Catholic Church to be expropriated. The 1524-1525 peasants’ revolt also demanded that priests be elected by parishioners, that they might be revoked and that their sermons should conform with the Gospels. [12]

 Towards the great peasants’ uprising in Germany in 1524-1525

An anonymous text that began to be circulated in Germany in 1521 includes the following dialogue between a peasant and a wealthy burgher which well describes how indebtedness is used to dispossess toilers of their tools or land:

Peasant: What brings me to you? Why, I would like to see how you spend your time.

Burgher: How should I spend my time? I sit here counting my money, can’t you see?

Peasant: Tell me, burgher, who gave you so much money that you spend all your time counting it?

Burgher: You want to know who gave me my money? I shall tell you. A peasant comes knocking at my door and asks me to lend him ten or twenty gulden. I inquire of him whether he owns a plot of good pasture land or a nice field for plowing. He says: ‘Yes, burgher, I have a good meadow and a fine field, worth a hundred gulden the two of them.’ I reply: ‘Excellent! Pledge your meadow and your field as collateral Collateral Transferable assets or a guarantee serving as security against the repayment of a loan, should the borrower default. , and if you will undertake to pay one gulden a year as interest, you can have your loan of twenty gulden.’ Happy to hear the good news, the peasant replies: ‘I gladly give you my pledge.’ ‘But I must tell you,’ I rejoin, ‘that if ever you fail to pay your interest on time, I will take possession of your land and make it my property.’ And this does not worry the peasant; he proceeds to assign his pasture and field to me as his pledge. I lend him the money and he pays interest punctually for one year or two; then comes a bad harvest and soon he is behind in his payment. I confiscate his land, evict him, and meadow and field are mine. And I do this not only with peasants but with artisans as well. [13]

From 1470 to 1525 a multitude of peasants’ uprisings were largely related to rejection of debt repayment that was demanded of peasants and of exploited city dwellers; they broke out in Alsace, Austria, most regions in Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary (in 1514) and Croatia. Hundreds of thousands of peasants took up arms, destroyed hundreds of castles, dozens of monasteries and convents. They also repeatedly burnt seigneurial archives to remove debt records and property titles wrongly acquired by the lords. The repression killed over 100,000 peasants. [14] During one of those uprisings, in 1493, peasants demanded the introduction of a Jubilee year to cancel all debts. [15] Thomas Müntzer, one of the leaders of peasants’ uprisings, who was beheaded on 27 May 1525, called upon a radical application of the Gospels including debt cancellation. In this he was opposed to Martin Luther, who, from 1524 onward, after denouncing usury and the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church in 1519-1520, had started defending interest on loans and demanding that peasants and indeed all indebted people repay their debts.

In opposition to the peasant uprisings, Luther called for

a strict, hard temporal government that will compel and constrain the wicked (…) to return what they borrow… Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the ruler must be red and bloody; for the world will and must be evil, and the sword is God’s rod and vengeance upon it. [16]

In the conflict between peasants and other components of the popular classes (in particular untitled city dwellers and the most destitute strata including vagrants, beggars and prostitutes) on one side and the local ruling classes on the other, Luther had chosen his camp, claiming that the laws of the Old Testament, including the Jubilee year, were no longer applicable. According to Luther, the Gospel simply describes ideal behaviour. In real life, he maintained, debts must always be repaid. Müntzer, on the contrary, claimed that a system based on the Gospels had to be introduced on Earth, which involved the cancellation of debt and equal distribution of wealth.

The class nature of the 1524-1525 uprising is obvious when you consider that Protestant and Catholic princes united in spite of their religious differences in order to crush the popular movement. Another piece of evidence is that the main German banking family, the Fuggers based in Augsburg, financed a mercenary army to help put down the uprising.

As in most peasants’ movements that shook Europe from the 14^th to the 16^th century, repression by the nobility and the kings was appallingly violent. It was not limited to executing leaders; it was extended to a huge proportion of insurgents. For example, repression against the 1358 Jacquerie killed 20 000 peasants in less than ten days (Dommanget, 1958, p. 95), 60,000 Hungarian peasants were killed in 1514 (Engels, 1850, p. 51), 100,000 in 1525 (Graeber, 2013, p. 391). On the other hand, the number of casualties on the side of the nobility and high clergy was minimal. Peasants’ victories were few and short-lived.

The barbaric methods used by the Spanish conquistadores to suppress native people’s resistance in what Europeans called the New World in the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries were directly inspired by the horrible treatment applied to put down peasants’ revolts in Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

After the violent and massive repression in May 1525, the movement never completely died out. Supporters of Thomas Müntzer were still active and tried to rekindle the flame of revolt but without success. Still, we should underline the significance of the Anabaptist religious movement that had a deep influence in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland during the 16^th century, with some of its leaders upholding Müntzer’s ideas, and was subjected to violent repression (Bloch, 1921, p. 116-121).

The way peasant uprisings were quashed in Germany in the 16^th century had lasting consequences in that of part of Europe. According to Friedrich Engels, there was no similar mobilization in Germany for about three centuries though outbreaks of peasant rebellions occurred, as in Brandenburg in 1645, 1646, 1648, 1650 and 1656 (Anderson, 1974). We had to wait for the large popular and peasant uprisings that occurred in Germany as well as in several other European countries in 1848 to witness a renewal of peasant struggles in the Germanic world (Engels, 1850).

In France, England, Bohemia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, on the other hand, powerful peasant mobilizations took place from the 16^th to the 18^th century.

 Peasant movements from the 16^th to 18^th centuries in England, France, Bohemia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia

In England there were a number of movements of peasants against the enclosure of lands and in defence of the commons. In 1549, in Norfolk, a movement of up to 16,000 peasants decided to destroy the fences around the fields and expressed their opposition to the law against vagabondage, which dealt harshly with peasants who had been dispossessed of their land or their employment. They succeeded in occupying Norwich, then England’s second-largest city (Federici, 2004, p. 142-144). The king and the landlords were forced to put together an army of 12,000 men, including foreign mercenaries, to put down the rebellion, [17] killing at least 3,000 rebels in the process. After the English Civil War (1642–1651), movements like that of the Diggers in 1649 and 1651 demanded agrarian reform and the cancellation of peasants’ debts, opposing enclosure and demanding an end to feudal privileges. In her book Caliban and the Witch Silvia Federici shows the importance of women’s participation in the struggles against enclosure in England (Federici, 2014, p. 144-147). She also stresses the scope of the repression of women in the form of the witch hunts, which reached their peak between 1580 and 1630 and claimed hundreds of thousands of victims (Federici, 2014, p. 299 ff.).

In France: There was a succession of peasant uprisings (in the Southwest in 1593–1595 and also in Burgundy, in the region of Cahors in 1624, in Guyenne and in the Périgord in 1636–1637, in Normandy in 1639, in 1643 in the Rouergue, and in 1707 at Cahors). Each of these uprisings had its specificities, but they had in common opposition to increases in taxation, which very often resulted in increased debt.

In Bohemia, in 1680, a revolt of the peasantry against the landlords required intervention by the Austrian army to put it down (Anderson, 1974).

In Eastern Europe, from the 16^th century onward, serfdom became generalized, whereas it had begun to disappear in the western part of the continent. Peasant slavery also continued to exist in several regions of Russia. At the end of the 16^th century, slaves were still farming 9 to 15% of Russian land.

Increasingly harsh living conditions for the peasantry and the generalization of serfdom led to large peasant movements. Peasants had two means of resistance: to engage in organized revolt or to flee and settle on uncultivated land. This was possible since the density of population and land occupation in the East was much lower than in Western and Central Europe. A census taken on order of Tsar Peter the Great in 1718–1719 counted 200,000 fugitive serfs on Russian territory (Anderson, 1974). That figure gives an idea of the scope of the phenomenon.

In 1648–1651, in Ukraine, which was then a part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a major peasant rebellion broke out, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, [18] leader of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. These Cossacks were former fugitives from Russia or Ruthenia who had settled in a vast border area extending between Poland, Russia and Crimea (populated by Tatars) and were supported by the Ukrainian peasantry. The peasants lived an equestrian, semi-nomadic life, like the Tatars, and were formidable warriors. According to Perry Anderson, “Peasant mobility had thus given birth in the Pontic grasslands to a sociological phenomenon virtually unknown in the West at the time –commoner rural masses capable of fielding organized armies against a feudal aristocracy.” (Anderson, 1974). In 1648, the rebellion against the Polish nobles, which was led by Khmelnytsky at the head of a relatively prosperous warrior elite, set off a vast uprising of serfs in Ukraine, who fought alongside the poor Cossack peasantry. Even if the cancellation of peasant debt was not explicitly mentioned as a central goal, the uprising was deeply rooted in the economic and social injustices suffered by Ukrainian peasants under Polish–Lithuanian domination. The rebels faced the Polish–Lithuanian army and the private troops of the great landowners, or magnates. After initial victories (1648–1649), the insurgents were defeated in 1651. The Cossack leaders changed sides and allied with the Russian tsar, who thereby extended the territory under his control. [19] The peasant base escaped the domination of the Polish nobility only to find itself under another form of exploitation.

In Poland, peasant struggles developed in the Podhale region (near Krakow) between 1650 and 1651, against oppression by the nobility and taxation in the broader context of the social and political tensions in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their manifesto, now lost, called for the liberation of peasants from serfdom and for social equality

In Russia, a series of peasant revolts broke out in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

-In 1606-1607 an uprising of free peasants, serfs and Cossacks from the Dniepr region, under the leadership of the former slave Bolotnikov, [20] at its height controlled more than 70 cities in southern and south-western Russia and the middle and lower Volga basin. In October-December 1606, they laid siege to Moscow, but were vanquished and retreated. Bolotnikov was executed. Abolition of serfdom was among the movement’s demands.

-In 1670, a revolt began in the Volga region headed by Stenka Razin, [21] a charismatic Cossack leader. It spread quickly, attracting thousands of peasants, serfs and Cossacks. The rebels took several cities, from Astrakhan to Simbirsk, in an area covering nearly all of south-eastern Russia, and mounted attacks on nobles’ estates. The rebels denounced the abuses of the nobles and civil servants, demanding fairer distribution of wealth and of the land. Peasants and serfs were often indebted, and one of their main demands was a reduction or cancellation of their debts. The Cossacks, in particular, were fighting to preserve their lifestyle and their autonomy in the face of the growing influence of the State. The tsarist government reacted with great brutality, mobilizing troops to crush the revolt. Stenka Razin was captured in 1671 and publicly tortured and executed at Moscow to serve as warning against further rebellion. Even though the revolt was crushed, Stenka Razin has remained an emblematic figure of popular resistance in Russia. His name is often associated with the struggle against oppression and for social justice.

-In 1707–1708, a major uprising of the Don Cossacks against Tsar Peter the Great took place under the Cossack Bulavin. The Don Cossacks traditionally gave refuge to people fleeing serfdom in central Russia. Peter the Great was seeking to use them for his own ends, which caused tensions with the Cossacks, who valued their autonomy. They were also unhappy about heavy taxes and unpaid forced labour. At the height of the uprising, Bulavin had assembled a force of nearly 100,000 men, including Cossacks, peasants and workers from the Ural region. In July 1708, government forces crushed the rebellion near Azov. Bulavin was killed, and the revolt collapsed.

-In 1773-1775 the largest peasant revolt in the history of the Russian Empire took place. Led by the Cossack Pugachev, [22] the insurrection mobilized serfs and exploited populations (in particular Christians and Muslims) from the foothills of the Urals and the deserts of Bashkiria to the shores of the Caspian Sea. According to Perry Anderson, it “mingled mountain and steppe Cossacks, empressed factory workers, peasants of the plains, and pastoral tribes in a series of risings that necessitated the full-scale deployment of the Russian imperial armies to be defeated.” (Anderson, 1974). During the struggle Pugachev published decrees promising the abolition of serfdom, redistribution of land, and an end to unjust taxation and religious freedom. After the revolt was put down, Tsarina Catherine the Great intensified serfdom, consolidated central control, and wiped out all traces of the rebellion (the names of cities were changed and the use of the name “Pugachev” was prohibited).

In France, the revolution of 1789–1793 brought an end to the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, including the unpaid forced labour imposed by the aristocracy and the various taxes demanded by the clergy, and did away with the monarchy. But the Revolution mainly benefited the bourgeoisie, who ended up purchasing en masse the properties that had been confiscated from the Church, the nobility and those who fled revolutionary France. Peasants were excluded from the sale of these confiscated properties and the commons were not re-established (Guérin, 1946, vol. 1, chapter VII). Certain cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) drafted by the peasants explicitly called for the cancellation or restructuring of peasant debt, in particular debts contracted with private creditors. But their debts were not cancelled. And yet poor harvests, excessive taxes and difficult economic conditions often forced peasants to contract debts to private creditors (notaries, bourgeois, or even other peasants who were more prosperous).

In the 19^th century, a wave of revolution spread through Germany. In 1848 peasants rose up against their local masters in several regions, notably in Baden Württemberg, Bavaria and Prussia. Seigneurial archives containing property deeds and debt records were burned, symbolizing the peasants’ rejection of the feudal system. In several German states provisional governments promised to abolish feudal rights and cancel peasant debts. In Prussia, for example, the government passed laws to abolish corvée and seigneurial dues, but these reforms were often incomplete and the lords could claim compensations from the peasants. The poorer peasants were often excluded from the benefits of these reforms, as they could not pay the compensations.

The revolutionary uprisings of 1848 were eventually suppressed, and many of the promised reforms were partly reversed or weakened by the conservative reaction that followed.

 The cancellation of peasant debts after the Russian revolution of 1917

Before the 1917 revolution, the majority of the Russian population were peasants crushed by debts to landowners, banks or the state. These debts were the result of persisting feudal exploitation, indebtedness for the purchase of land after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the rapid development of capitalism in Russia (Lenin, 1899).

In the summer of 1917, after the first revolution had overthrown the Tsar in February and a bourgeois provisional government had been installed, the peasants took massive action, seizing the land of the lords, the clergy and the big bourgeois landowners, without waiting for the agrarian reform promised but constantly delayed by the provisional government (Leon Trotsky, 1930, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 1, chapter 20, The Peasantry, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch20.htm). The Russian peasantry was in fact reviving its long tradition of vast uprisings which had already marked the national past, such as the great revolts of Stenka Razine in the 17^th century or Pugachev in the 18^th century at the time of Catherine the Great.

After the victory of the October 1917 revolution, the Soviet government, made up of Bolsheviks and left-wing revolutionary socialists, adopted a number of decrees aimed at fundamentally improving the living conditions and rights of peasants: the Land Decree (1917) nationalized all land and cancelled the debts associated with its acquisition.

Extracts from the Decree on Land - Article 1: “All land: State land, land of the domains, of the crown, of the monasteries, of the Church, of estates, of freeholds, of private, social and peasant properties, etc., is alienated without compensation, it becomes national property and is ceded to the use of those who work it”. Article 5: “The land of ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks shall not be confiscated”.

Debts owed to landowners and banks were cancelled - the banks were nationalized.

Measures were taken to organize agricultural cooperatives and provide financial support for the poor.

To this must be added the total repudiation in February 1918 of the tsarist debt and that contracted by Kerensky’s provisional government between February and October 1917, including foreign loans, considered illegitimate because they had been contracted to finance wars and oppression, not the country’s development (Toussaint, 2024).

 Some other peasant debts cancelled in Europe in the 20^th century

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the poor peasantry was heavily indebted to the large landowners. In Republican areas with a strong anarchist or POUM influence, peasant debts were cancelled as a measure of social justice, but these measures were short-lived, as the victory of the reactionary putschists under Franco re-established the old structures of property and debt.

After the Second World War, Eastern European countries under Soviet influence underwent radical land reforms. Peasants’ debts were often cancelled as part of the collectivization of land and the nationalization of agriculture. These reforms enabled some peasants to free themselves from their debts.

Outside of Europe in the 20^th century other peasant debts were cancelled. This was notably the case after the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, an event that would merit its own full article.

 Conclusion

During the mobilizations of the rural population in Europe in 2024, it became clear that the prevailing production model is generating increasing debt for farming families. Debt is still a tool for exploiting and dispossessing peasants, even if debt cancellation is not among the demands. This article shows that the issue of peasant debt has played a major historical role in peasant revolts.
In some cases, these struggles have actually led to debt cancellation and other measures such as land distribution. This was particularly the case during the Russian revolution of 1917.

The author would like to thank Omar Aziki, Claude Quémar and Maxime Perriot for their proofreading. He would also like to thank Snake Arbusto, Vicki Briault-Manus, Fernanda Gadea, Mike and Yvette Krolikowski, Christine Pagnoulle, Claude Quémar and Sushovan Dhar, for their documentary research.

Translated by Snake Arbusto, Vicki Briault-Manus, Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle.

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