1 - Population and resources in pre-industrial France

Summary

Historians have too often allowed their interest in dramatic political events to obscure more fundamental historical realities – the continuities in the economic and social structures that so profoundly shaped political systems. France remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society for centuries, with rural inhabitants continuing to account for around 85 per cent of the total population even in the eighteenth century. The pace of change was slow and subject to regression, with farmers barely able to produce sufficient food to support themselves, let alone the élites and town dwellers who depended upon them. Throughout the centuries considered in this chapter, although productive techniques in both agriculture and industry improved and the organisation of communications and trade became more efficient, there were no fundamental structural changes in the mode of production and distribution of commodities. The process of capital accumulation was inevitably limited by mass poverty. The repeated cycles in which population growth first stimulated increased production, but was then brought to an end by shortages of food and demographic crisis, are proof of this. Only towards the end of this long period, in the eighteenth century, can signs of fundamental change and the emergence of a new, far more productive economic and social system be detected.