The Peasant’s War in context 225 years of facts and representations

Abstract:This essay takes the representation
of the so-called ‘Peasants’ War’ in
the popular documentary series
Het Verhaal van Vlaanderen (2023)
as a starting point to place the
sequence of events in the Southern
Netherlands during the 1798 war in
a nuanced historical perspective. The
main findings of a recent academic
colloquium on the Peasants’ War serve
as our guideline (‘De Boerenkrijg in
context’, 7/10/2023, Sint-Niklaas).
A political-historical perspective on
the 1798 rebellion against the French
occupation should consider both the
foreign policy of the regime of the
Directory and the local difficulties
that the French regime faced in
implementing its socio-economic,
military, and anti-clerical policies.
From a socio-historical perspective,
the Peasants’ War was far from an
isolated phenomenon in Europe.
To unravel the complex interplay
of factors that caused the rebellion,
we must compare the so-called
“Belgian Vendée” with other rural
uprisings, from both a long-term
and an international perspective. The
modern political and cultural use
of the memory of the Peasants’ Waralong the linguistic and philosophical
fault lines in Belgium is a rich field
of study for historians and modern
ethnologists alike. For a long period
of time, the Peasants’ War provided in
Flanders a site of collective memory
transmitted through songs, stories,
monuments and other forms of (im)
movable and immaterial heritage. 225
years after the events, in current-day
Flanders, however, the 1798 rebellion
offers inspiration for folklorist and
celebratory practices in only a handful
of places.

Publication year:2024

Keywords:peasants, French Revolution, Flanders, commemoration

Accessibility:Open

Review status:Not peer-reviewed