ABSTRACT
This chapter provides further clarification of the personnel and problems of the ‘fourth estate’ of poverty. It introduces subsistence farmers, sharecroppers and farm labourers; protoindustrial and industrial workers, journeymen, apprentices, migrant workers and street vendors; domestic servants, beggars, prostitutes and African slaves. The peasant-weavers of Picardy were the foot soldiers of rural capitalism, whose lives and work transformed the character of the French countryside from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Journeymen’s organisations collected fees to insure their members against unemployment and sickness and to assist families after the death of their members. Under the ancien regime, popular protest was frequently couched in biblical and millenarian language. Popular religious movements gave women a voice that was totally denied to them in almost every ecclesiastic, governmental and professional organisation. The Regent decided to bring detachments of the regular army into the suburbs, and the Gardes françaises out onto the streets of the capital.
