Quiz: The Peasant Question in France and Germany

All 31 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. 1. What contradiction does Engels find in the Nantes preamble?

   It asks socialism to maintain small holdings it calls doomed It calls for a republic and a monarchy It demands both free trade in grain and protective tariffs It rejects co-operatives in one clause and demands them in the next
2. 2. What does Engels find most objectionable in the paragraph on tenants and share-croppers?

   It demands that they pay higher rents to the landowners It excludes them from the programme altogether as capitalists It shields them when they exploit day labourers It calls them proletarians, like the day labourers
3. 3. How were the rural workers’ old-age and invalidity pensions to be financed under the Marseilles programme?

   By the communes’ land rents By an income tax over 3,000 francs By contributions deducted from the workers’ wages By a special tax on big landed property
4. 4. On what does the power of the Junkers rest, according to Engels?

   Their control of a secure majority in the Reichstag elected by universal suffrage Landed property and local industry in the old Prussian provinces Foreign loans from Russia and the favour of the Tsar at the Prussian court Ownership of the Ruhr coal mines and the great iron works of the Rhineland
5. 5. According to Engels, what is one of the chief advantages of large-scale farming?

   The saving of labour Lower taxes Exemption from mortgage debt Higher prices for produce
6. 6. What did the bourgeois parties teach the peasant to see in the socialist workers?

   Allies against the usurer Agents of the Paris bankers and the stock exchange Partageux, “dividers” of his property Defenders of the Church
7. 7. Why does Engels say promising the big and middle peasants permanent farms would border on treachery?

   They are all anti-Semites They will always vote for the Junkers and the Conservative party anyway They cannot exist without wage-workers, whom the party must defend They own too little land
8. 8. What predominates in western Germany, as in France and Belgium?

   Cultivation by smallholding peasants, mostly owners Cottage industry without land Large estates worked by day labourers Middle peasants with farm servants
9. 9. What does Engels say the party will do about small peasants when it holds state power?

   Not expropriate them by force Expropriate them without compensation Expropriate them, but with full compensation paid by the state Leave them subject to the usurer
10. 10. According to Engels, what did the French peasants create out of the legend of Napoleon?

    The February Revolution The Third Republic The Paris Commune The Second Empire
11. 11. Whom does Engels regard as the most important rural group for the party to win?

    The tenants of northern France The small peasants of western Germany The middle peasants of southern Germany The rural proletarians east of the Elbe
12. 12. According to Engels, which loss outweighs the peasant’s gain from the abolition of feudal dues?

    The loss of the right to vote The loss of the uses of the common mark The loss of protective tariffs on imported grain The loss of his domestic servants
13. 13. Why, according to Engels, did the French party extend its programme at Nantes?

    Engels himself had urged it to promise the peasants their holdings The anarchists forced it to compete for the support of the peasants Success among the peasants made it adapt further to their taste Its deputies had lost their rural seats and needed to win them back
14. 14. What did Marx often tell Engels about the big landowners?

    That they should keep their estates That compensation to them is always and everywhere inadmissible That buying out the whole gang might be cheapest That they would join the socialists once the crisis came
15. 15. Where does Engels say peasants who expect the party to perpetuate their holdings belong?

    With the anti-Semites With the anarchists With the Catholic Centre With the National Liberals
16. 16. On what point are the French comrades “absolutely right”?

    The anarchists are natural allies in the struggle for the land The small peasants must be expropriated by force Small peasant property can be saved by the socialist state No lasting revolution is possible in France against the small peasant
17. 17. Engels uses which country’s budget to show the impracticability of a single income tax?

    Germany’s France’s Belgium’s England’s
18. 18. How does Engels sum up the small peasant’s prospects?

    He will be the backbone of socialism as a property owner He will be protected by tariffs He is a future capitalist He is a future proletarian
19. 19. Which German figure does Engels imagine asking for socialist protection on behalf of the big landowners?

    Count Kanitz Herr von Stumm Herr von Caprivi Count Bismarck
20. 20. Where had Lafargue’s Nantes report been published in German?

    In the Münchener Post In the Berlin Sozialdemokrat In Vorwärts In Die Neue Zeit
21. 21. Which socialists had drawn up plans for village co-operative farms almost twenty years earlier?

    The Narodniks The Dutch socialists The English Owenites The Danish socialists
22. 22. When did the French party adopt its first agrarian programme?

    At the Frankfurt congress of 1894 At the Havre congress of 1880 At the Marseilles congress of 1892 At the Nantes congress of 1894
23. 23. What must the socialist party do in order to conquer political power?

    Concentrate its forces on the capital cities first Become a power in the countryside Ally with the big landowners against free trade Abandon parliamentary elections for strikes
24. 24. How does Engels define the small peasant’s holding?

    Any land he holds on lease from a big landowner or the state Any land worked with at least one hired labourer all year round Land his family can till, and enough to feed it Any holding under five hectares, whatever the soil and crop
25. 25. Which country’s model did the tenants’ arbitration courts copy?

    Belgium’s Denmark’s Ireland’s England’s
26. 26. Which two regions of Western Europe does Engels name as exceptions where the peasant has been displaced?

    Belgium and the Prussian Rhine Province Ireland and Bavaria Andalusia and Sicily Great Britain and Prussia east of the Elbe
27. 27. Which special case does Engels think the tenants’ paragraph was really meant to cover?

    Sharecroppers working the estates of the Catholic Church in the west Fishermen on the Breton coast who rent their boats from merchants Vine-growers in the south of France ruined by the phylloxera Peasants leased land on condition of growing beet for a factory
28. 28. What ruinous competition does Engels say faces European landowners?

    English fertiliser and machinery Cheap grain from the Americas and India Russian sugar beet Cheap wool from Australia
29. 29. If socialists freed the peasant’s property from debt and rent, what would they have achieved?

    A socialist agriculture in every village Only a respite, not his freedom His permanent emancipation from the usurer and the landlord A new class of big peasants and employers
30. 30. How does Engels picture capitalist large-scale production overrunning small production?

    As a railway train runs over a wheelbarrow As a wolf devours a sheep As a steamship sinks a rowing boat in its path As a flood sweeps away a dam of earth and stones
31. 31. What does Engels say a lower legal rate of interest would do for the small peasant?

    Raise the price of his land Have no effect at all Free him from the usurer entirely Make credit harder to get when he needs it most