200 Years Before the French Revolution, German Peasants Tried to Overthrow The Holy Roman Empire

The German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 was the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants—roughly 2% of the male population—were slain in a mere two months. While the peasant forces would ultimately prove no match for the lords, for a period of several months they managed to take control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany in pursuit of a more egalitarian order. The rebels pushed against the structures of lordship and embraced the radical and ecological potential of the Reformation in which Earth’s natural resources were gifts from God to all of humanity.

Today’s guest is Lyndal Roper, author of “Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War.” We see that neither the Reformation nor the Peasants’ War can be fully understood in isolation from one another, and that the rebels’ fight for freedom was a direct response to the period of reform.

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