Of the four-fifths of the population who were peasants the problems were even less understood. Among all the reforming writers of the eighteenth century the peasants possessed no authentic spokesman, and nothing in the experience or education of the Revolutionary leaders could fill the gap. The idealism of the Revolution helped the peasants, removing their feudal burdens, granting them land on instalment payments, promising them education, taking steps to relieve their poverty, endowing them with rights of citizenship which they were not prepared to exercise. After these initial reforms the
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