Word of the Day

: August 30, 2009

jacquerie

noun zhah-kuh-REE

What It Means

: a peasants' revolt

jacquerie in Context

"In light of inadequate social safety nets and the probability of further economic turndowns, the regime's fear of an anti-government jacquerie is not far-fetched." (David Aikman, The American Spectator, March 2000)

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." 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 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."