Small-holding peasants (Parzellenbauern)
분할지 농민
Marx's concept in The Eighteenth Brumaire for the French small peasants who, freed from feudal burdens during the French Revolution and under Napoleon I, came to own small plots of land (Parzellen). Marx argued that they formed a class like "potatoes in a sack", isolated from one another and unable to represent themselves, and that this was why they chose Louis Bonaparte as their representative.
In depth
A Parzelle is a small, subdivided plot of farmland. According to Marx, the Revolution and Napoleon turned the feudal peasants into small-holding peasants who owned their land. Small-holding property was a bulwark against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy, and as its roots struck deep into French soil feudalism was deprived of all nourishment. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 also required inheritances to be divided equally among all children, so that the land was divided further with each generation.
Marx described the condition of the small-holding peasants thus: each family is almost self-sufficient, obtaining its means of life more through exchange with nature than through intercourse with society, so that nothing connects them. "Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." Insofar as their mode of life and interests separate them from other classes they form a class; insofar as their identity of interests produces no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not. "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." Their representative must therefore appear as their master, an unlimited governmental power that sends them rain and sunshine from above.
For Marx this class carried both the presidential election of 10 December 1848 and the coup of 2 December 1851. "Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants." Yet the Bonaparte dynasty represented not the revolutionary peasant who, in alliance with the towns, wanted to overthrow the old order, but the conservative peasant who wanted to consolidate his holding and be saved by the ghost of the empire. The so-called 45-centime tax by which the Provisional Government sharply raised direct taxes in 1848 also turned the rural landowners against the republic.
Marx nevertheless believed that the age of the small holding was ending. In the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal lord, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, and bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The small holding had become a mere pretext for the capitalist to draw profit, interest and rent from the soil, and the peasants' interests, unlike in Napoleon's day, now stood opposed to capital. Hence, he concluded, the peasants would find their "natural ally and leader" in the urban proletariat, whose task was the overthrow of the bourgeois order.