ABSTRACT
Neither the monarchy nor the peasants were very effective in their resistance. The efforts of the monarchy were vitiated by fiscal preoccupations: the declarations of 1677 and 1702 authorise those who have seized common land to keep it, at least for the time being, provided they 'restore' (to the king, of course) the profits received over the past thirty years. The peasants were all too often content with fruitless 'popular demonstrations'. At this period the break-up of common lands for the benefit of the nobility and the wealthy was a European phenomenon. The operating causes were everywhere the same: the trend towards the reintegration of large estates; the increasing emphasis on production as a private undertaking, with an eye always on the market; and the crisis among the rural proletariat, painfully adjusting itself to an economic system based on money and exchange. The communities were no match for these forces; what is more, they were far from possessing that perfect inner coherence with which they are sometimes credited.
