A Peasant Revolt & A Vision for the Commons with Peter Sahlins

Wednesday October 30th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ariège department in the French Pyrenees: young male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women’s clothes, were gathering in the forests at night to chase away state forest guards and employees of ironworks. This was the raucous “War of the Demoiselles” (the Maiden’s War), a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827 that restricted peasants’ use of the forests.

In this talk, historian Peter Sahlins will reflect on this long-forgotten episode and its relevance to today’s challenges of climate breakdown, social justice and access to the Commons.

As Peter describes in his book “Forest Rites” (1994), The Maiden’s War was not simply an archaic, primitive outburst of a vanishing peasant community, but a sophisticated response to capitalism, state-building, and environmental degradation in the nineteenth century.

Drawing on theories of popular protest developed by Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Davis about others, Peter will place the Maidens War within an animist peasant cosmology that structured local approaches to forest management, while reframing the story of carnival in relation to popular sovereignty.

In the discussion following his talk, he will invite reflections on the relevance of history to our current struggle to find equitable social responses to environmental degradation.

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is currently completing a book, Neanderthals Among Us: A Cultural History, about our century and a half long obsession with the Paleolithic hominid.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Talk starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter. Food complimentary.

Before requesting a discounted ticket, please consider sincerely: Are you struggling to meet your basic needs? Would you have to make a genuine sacrifice to buy a full priced ticket? Do you have reduced earnings through a lifestyle choice or because you’re dedicating your time to unpaid work relating to the climate and nature crises?