6 - Markets and mortality in France, 1600–1789

Summary

Quantitative studies of subsistence crises provided an early meeting ground for economic history and historical demography. French scholars must be considered pioneers in the field: following the studies of economic crises and price history by Labrousse, Sée, Simiand, and others in the interwar years, Jean Meuvret opened the modern study of prices and mortality with a famous article in Population. The topic gained even wider recognition with the publication of Beauvais et les Beauvaisis by Pierre Goubert, a student of Meuvret, and has since become a staple of regional and urban histories.

Andrew Appleby was instrumental in bringing the study of prices and mortality to England, and remains one of the few scholars to have attempted a comparative history of France and England. Ronald Lee introduced greater econometric sophistication into the topic. In his study of the Paris Basin, Jacques Dupâquier notes that Meuvret expected that more and better data on prices and deaths would demonstrate the phenomenon more and more clearly. The accumulation of mercuriales and parish registers is rapidly bringing his dream to reality. But it appears that now, just as the data are beginning to accumulate and the statistical procedures become more exacting, the usefulness of the topic is being called into question.