Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce review — the slow death of Europe’s earth-toilers

It doesn’t feel like the end of Europe’s peasantry. I am writing this as a member of the 10,000-strong French Confédération Paysanne. And at a time when farmers are en colère, furiously blocking motorways with tractors, staging nude demos in supermarkets and besieging Paris in protest against low prices and reductions in diesel subsidies. My regional paper, Sud Ouest — sobriety itself — calls the protest “a battle”. The enemy is the usual one: the masters. Once they were kings, but today they are technocrats in Brussels, the politicians and officials in Paris, Berlin or the Hague.

Patrick Joyce, an emeritus professor of history at Manchester University, will doubtless appreciate the irony of his heart-writ valediction to Europe’s peasants appearing at such a moment,