The War of the Poor
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
International Booker Prize Finalist
The Spectator (UK): Best Book of the Year
From the award-winning author of The Order of the Day, a powerful account of the German Peasants’ War (1524–25) that shows striking parallels to class conflicts of our time.
In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question why they shouldn’t have equality here and now on earth.
There ensued a furious struggle between the powerful—the comfortable Protestants—and the others, the wretched. They were led by a number of theologians, one of whom has left his mark on history through his determination and sheer energy. His name was Thomas Müntzer, and he set Germany on fire. The War of the Poor recounts his story—that of an insurrection through the Word.
In his characteristically bold, cinematic style, Éric Vuillard draws insights from this revolt from nearly five hundred years ago, which remains shockingly relevant to the dire inequalities we face today.
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."
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