The War of the Poor
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The fight for equality begins in the streets.
The history of inequality is a long and terrible one. And it’s not over yet. Short, sharp and devastating, The War of the Poor tells the story of a brutal episode from history, not as well known as tales of other popular uprisings, but one that deserves to be told.
Sixteenth-century Europe: the Protestant Reformation takes on the powerful and the privileged. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth?
There follows a violent struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer: a complex and controversial figure, who sided with neither Martin Luther, nor the Roman Catholic Church. Müntzer addressed the poor directly, encouraging them to ask why a God who apparently loved the poor seemed to be on the side of the rich.
Éric Vuillard tells the story of one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in which he lived – a moment when Europe was in flux. As in his blistering look at the build-up to World War II, The Order of the Day, Vuillard here once again takes us behind the scenes at a moment when history was being written.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prix Goncourt winner Vuillard (The Order of the Day) revisits the 16th-century German Peasants' War in this pithy portrait of radical reformist preacher Thomas M ntzer (c. 1489 1525). Vuillard's dramatic rendition, nimbly translated by Polizzotti, begins shortly after M ntzer's father was executed by a count for reasons now unknown, and tracks his rise from "street urchin of the Harz Mountains" to self-declared "destroyer of the faithless," whose literal readings of scripture and calls for "a world without privilege, property, or government" spurred German peasants to revolt against nobles and burghers in 1524. Vuillard quotes from extant letters and sermons to convey M ntzer's sharp-tongued revolutionary charisma ("you miserable, wretched sack of maggots," he once called a noble who had banned German-language Masses; he also called Martin Luther, who sided with the princes against the peasants, "the easy-living flesh of Wittenberg"), and cinematically recreates the Battle of Frankenhausen, when M ntzer and his "band of vagabonds" were routed by "several thousand well-armed, battle-hardened men." (Vuillard disputes accounts that M ntzer fled the battle and hid before he was captured, tortured, and beheaded.) This unique and provocative account brings the chaos of the Reformation to vibrant life, reminding readers that "quarrels about the Beyond have to do with the world here-below."
