Question

. What was the role of the poorer classes, especially the peasants, in the democratic revolutions
of the different countries discussed?​

Answer 1

Answer:

A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants may hold title to land either in fee simple or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.In a colloquial sense, "peasant" often has a pejorative meaning that is therefore seen as insulting and controversial in some circles, even when referring to farm laborers in the developing world.As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" also could imply "rustic", or "robber", as the English term In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" may include the pejorative sense of "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person".The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as the "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones".The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world.[citation needed] Via Campesina, an organization claiming to represent the rights of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement" as of 2019.The United Nations and its Human Rights Council prominently uses the term "peasant" in a non-pejorative sense, as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas adopted in 2018. In general English-language literature, the use of the word "peasant" has steadily declined since about 1970. More precise terms that describe current farm-laborers without land ownership include farmworker or campesino, tenant farmer, and sharecropper. Those owning and farming land may be called farmers - or, in the context of specialization, dairy farmers, sheep farmers, pig farmers, etc.