Agrarian Constitution

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The agricultural constitution is the legal, economic and social order of a peasant society, above all property relations, forms of settlement, land use, labor constitution and social structure . The cooperative and the lordship principle had a shaping effect on the agricultural constitution. The cooperative principle , which is based on the fundamental equality of equals, was expressed in the Middle Ages in the form of the village community and the common and market cooperative . The lordship principle has existed since the early Middle Ages until the peasant liberation of the 18th and 19th centuries. Century through the basic rule or Gutsherrschaft marked.

history

The establishment of manorial rule came about in the Frankish times, when large parts of the country were in the hands of the king, the nobility and the clergy and the increasing population density forced those in need of land to acquire land from them on condition that they were included in the manorial system To borrow. Decisive for the further development of the agrarian constitution were the gradual consolidation of property rights, which restricted the landlord's free power of disposal over the land, as well as the precise setting of peasant taxes.

Overall, a general improvement in the situation of the peasant class can be ascertained up to the late Middle Ages , which was not least due to the German settlement in the east : the more favorable property rights granted to the colonists as an incentive also forced concessions from the landlords to prevent the peasants from migrating.

From the early modern period to the 18th century, the development of the modern princely state ran parallel to the development of a sovereign agricultural policy , which was essentially determined by two objectives: on the one hand, to protect the peasantry against the landlords and, on the other, to protect the numerous forms of the To unify the agrarian constitution, in that the sovereign sought to subordinate and influence the cooperative and manorial provisions under his control. The design of the agrarian constitution - as far as the sovereign side was concerned - was increasingly no longer determined by a dispute between landlords and peasants, but the law-making was passed on to the sovereign as an authority above both parties.

The geographical division of the agricultural constitution in Germany was also characteristic of the early modern era : while the manorial principle remained in the south and west, in the east of Germany manorial rule developed into manorial rule. With the exception of religious country Prussia (see. Prussian agrarian ), in which the basis for the formation of Gutsherrschaft already in the colonization period had been laid, widened in East Germany, the landlord own economies in 15-16. Century through reversal or confiscation of desolate places; after the Thirty Years' War , the emphasis shifted in favor of the landlords with the onset of a systematic peasant laying . However, the mere enlargement of the property did not establish the estate. Rather, it came about through the transfer of political rights to the landlords on the part of the sovereigns, who were forced to make more and more concessions due to their financial need, so that the former landlord became the rulers of the peasants. The enlargement of the estates also led to a tightening of the binding of clods , so that the peasants, who once had special rights as colonists and were only bound by the landlord, were given real serfdom (these included, for example, compulsory service, flocking, prohibition of the sale of real estate, ban on emigration and landlord's right to punishment ) to be designated dependency got ( inheritance subordination ).

The reforms in connection with the liberation of the peasants in principle dissolved the entire old agricultural constitution, both in its cooperative and, in particular, in its manorial characteristics.

The twofold structure of the agricultural constitution in Germany continued until 1945: While the landlords in the south and west were mainly compensated financially by the peasants and so the agricultural structure remained largely unchanged, in the east the compensation by land was common, so that again shifted the weight from peasant land to manor land. The inheritance laws and inheritance rights were also different : In the east the inheritance law applied , in the south and west the real division prevailed .

After 1945 there was another upheaval in the agricultural constitution in Germany: while new settlement land was created for the peasants displaced in the east in the western occupation zones , land reforms took place in the Soviet occupation zone , with large landowners expropriated and their land distributed to new farmers . which from 1952 were forcibly merged to form agricultural production cooperatives ( LPG ); From a purely legal point of view, if the land remained the property of the individual, the rights of use were transferred to the LPG collective . In the unification treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR (1990), the expropriations carried out between 1946 and 1949 were not reversed; however, those affected receive compensation.

literature

  • Günter Dessmann: History of the Silesian agricultural constitution . Trübner, Strasbourg 1904.
  • Paul Hesse: Basic problems of the agricultural constitution, illustrated using the example of the types of communes and production zones of Württemberg, Hohenzollern and Baden . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1949.
  • Oskar Howald , Hans Brugger : Basic features of the Swiss agricultural constitution . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1936.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Heinrich von Lang : Hammelburger Reisen. Third trip. Munich 1818, p. 51.