Contenu du sommaire : Une collectivité idéale. L'héritage politique de la zadruga dans les Balkans

This paper deals with the linguistic aspect of the term zádruga “large patriarchal family,” focusing on its evolution from an appellative noun (i.e. sc-r. zádruga, a postverbal from zadrúžiti “to come, join together,” itself a denominal from drûg “friend, companion” – as interpreted in etymological dictionaries of Slavic and non-Slavic languages it was loaned into). We additionally support this stand by an exhaustive review of attestations of zádruga in descriptive dictionaries (RJAZU and RSANU) and by hitherto unknown ones from the RSANU materials. Semantic diversity indicates an autochthonous nature of the word. On the timeline (from 1638 till today) six meanings (of various longevity) are identified: “company,” “large family,” “community, society,” “partnership, joint business,” “cooperative, association,” “agricultural cooperative.” Its introduction into ethnology in the 1870s we see as due to linguistic economy – it prevailed in competition with rivaling binary terms used by V. Bogišić.

The term zadruga comes into being under Vuk Karadžić's pen in 1818. However, the presence among the “Serbian nation” of many multiple households who worked a common land was already described in details two generations earlier by administrators from the southeast of the Habsburg Monarchy. Contrary to what a narrowly imagological perspective might suggest, these observations owe little to the curiosity for popular cultures that can be perceived in enlightened circles from the 1770s onwards. Their interest in family structures was primarily impulsed by government experience. In the Banat province, a huge imperial domain, cameral sciences inspired a major land reform which magnified the potentialities of intervention by seigneurial officers. The collective organization of agricultural work in Banat was thus studied and became essential to the understanding and adaptation of legal forms of land ownership, as well as the transformation of agrarian economy. However, these practices are not evaluated without discrimination among peasants. Considered as national characteristics almost from the very beginning, they contributed to increase old prejudices on different peoples settled there, at a time when Banat welcomed many colonists from all over Europe.

The notion of zadruga was introduced in the scientific research literature, as well as in the social and political discourse of the then young Balkan countries in the xixth century to mark the multitude of historical forms under which the “complex family organization” was known among the South-Slavic people in the region. Following broad discussion in the fields of historic demography and anthropology in the past three decades concerning this “Balkan Family Pattern” this paper aims to contribute to their scientific presentation and continue their findings. Therefore, it concentrates on the usage of the term zadruga and its meanings in the context of the nation and institutional building in the newly-forming Bulgarian state at the end of the xix and the beginning of the xx centuries, as well as in the cooperative movement in the agrarian sector of the interwar period. It also analyses the attempts of the new communist leaders to use the traditions of the society in terms of communal living through the imposition cooperative system and the nationalization of the arable land in the first years under the totalitarian system following the Second World War.

Cet article examine le destin politique des communautés paysannes (zadruga) à l'époque de l'État indépendant de Croatie (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska – NDH, 1941-1945). Après avoir rappelé les considérations antérieures d'idéologues clés à ce sujet, l'auteur en mesure l'influence sur les adeptes du mouvement Oustachi. La création de la NDH encouragea la poursuite du débat sur la liquidation de la question paysanne. Divers théoriciens sociaux privilégièrent des formes hybrides d'organisation sociale, de corporatisme et de collectivisme. Les débats publics furent fortement influencés par la domination des régimes totalitaristes alliés à la NDH, à savoir l'Italie fasciste et l'Allemagne national-socialiste. Font l'objet d'un examen particulier Mile Budak, écrivain célèbre et l'un des plus hauts responsables du mouvement oustachi, ainsi que Milan Ivšić, professeur d'université qui en 1944 projeta une loi de protection des foyers paysans nécessiteux. This article examines the treatment of peasant communes (zadruge) in the period of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC, 1941-45). The author first highlighted some earlier views of key ideologues who influenced followers of the Ustasha movement. He also takes into account the reflections of various social theorists who favoured hybrid forms of social organization, corporatism, and collectivism. The establishment of the ISC encouraged the continuation of the debate over the regulation of internal peasant question. The predominance of totalitarian political systems that were allied to the ISC, namely fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, had a strong influence on the public and professional debate. The author focused his analysis on the case of Mile Budak, a famous writer and one of the highest officials of the Ustasha movement, and his stance towards peasants, as well as university professor Milan Ivšić, who in 1944 created a plan of a Law for the protection of peasant homes from distress.

The concept of zadruga has shown its persistence over a long historical time and on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. The zadruga was positioned as key political ideal for Svetozar Marković's early socialists since the early 1870s, but it was also a key ideal of the extreme right in the 1930s and 1940s (Dimitrije Ljotić, Milan Nedić). As a key political term, zadruga was employed in very different contexts – from an imaginary idyllic socialist society of equals in the mid-1800s to the cornerstone and bulwark of racial purity almost a century later. In this article zadruga is explored as a polical, economic and social ideal. This comparative study has revealed deep similarities between populist socialism and extreme right-wing ideologies of the 1930s and 40s. Although those movements were temporally and ideologically distant, there was a single conceptual pattern that united them, and which can be summed up with a single word – the zadruga, as a persistent ideological cornerstone.