Word of the Day

: October 18, 2016

jacquerie

noun zhah-kuh-REE

What It Means

: (often capitalized Jacquerie) a peasants' revolt

jacquerie in Context

"There were no bloodthirsty sansculottes preparing to erect guillotines; nor were farmers, however angry about government excise taxes and other matters—as Shays's Rebellion suggested—ready to burn down the manorial estates of their feudal overlords in some version of an American jacquerie." — Steve Fraser, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, 2008

"The thicker the masonry, the more likely the fortress would withstand the anticipated Jacquerie." — Michael Knox Beran, National Review, 7 Sept. 2009

Did You Know?

The first jacquerie was an insurrection of peasants against the nobility in northeastern France in 1358, so-named from the nobles' habit of referring contemptuously to any peasant as "Jacques," or "Jacques Bonhomme" (in French bonhomme means "fellow"). It took some time—150 years—for the name of the first jacquerie to become a generalized term for other revolts. The term is also occasionally used to refer to the peasant class, as when Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities tells her husband to "consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour."