Quiz: The Peasant Question in France and Germany

10 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. 1. Why does Engels say promising the big and middle peasants permanent farms would border on treachery?

   They own too little land They will always vote for the Junkers and the Conservative party anyway They cannot exist without wage-workers, whom the party must defend They are all anti-Semites
2. 2. Which two regions of Western Europe does Engels name as exceptions where the peasant has been displaced?

   Ireland and Bavaria Andalusia and Sicily Belgium and the Prussian Rhine Province Great Britain and Prussia east of the Elbe
3. 3. What does Engels say the party will do about small peasants when it holds state power?

   Expropriate them, but with full compensation paid by the state Leave them subject to the usurer Not expropriate them by force Expropriate them without compensation
4. 4. What predominates in western Germany, as in France and Belgium?

   Cultivation by smallholding peasants, mostly owners Large estates worked by day labourers Middle peasants with farm servants Cottage industry without land
5. 5. What ruinous competition does Engels say faces European landowners?

   Cheap wool from Australia Cheap grain from the Americas and India English fertiliser and machinery Russian sugar beet
6. 6. What did Marx often tell Engels about the big landowners?

   That compensation to them is always and everywhere inadmissible That they should keep their estates That they would join the socialists once the crisis came That buying out the whole gang might be cheapest
7. 7. According to Engels, what did the French peasants create out of the legend of Napoleon?

   The Second Empire The Paris Commune The February Revolution The Third Republic
8. 8. If socialists freed the peasant’s property from debt and rent, what would they have achieved?

   Only a respite, not his freedom A new class of big peasants and employers His permanent emancipation from the usurer and the landlord A socialist agriculture in every village
9. 9. Why, according to Engels, did the French party extend its programme at Nantes?

   Engels himself had urged it to promise the peasants their holdings Success among the peasants made it adapt further to their taste The anarchists forced it to compete for the support of the peasants Its deputies had lost their rural seats and needed to win them back
10. 10. 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 shields them when they exploit day labourers It calls them proletarians, like the day labourers It excludes them from the programme altogether as capitalists