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Jean Meuvret and the Subsistence Problem in Early Modern France

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Le problème des subsistances à l'époque Louis XIV. By MeuvretJean. La production des céréales dans la France du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle. 2 vols.: Text and Notes. Paris: Mouton, 1977.
La production des céréales et la société rurale. 2 vols.: Text and Notes. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987.
Le commerce des grains et la conjoncture. vols. 2: Text and Notes. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1988.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

George Grantham
George Grantham
Affiliation:
McGill University
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 184 - 200
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Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989

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References

The author is Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7, Canada.

I owe much of this account to conversations with some of Meuvret's students, including Gilles, Postel-Vinay, Pierre, Jeannin, Hermann, van der Wee, Stephen, Kaplan, Lionel, Rothkrug, and Hugues, Neuveux. The epigraph is taken from Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées, trans. Martin, Turnell (Bloomfield, CT, 1971), p. 172.Google Scholar

1 Alexander, von Humboldt, Kosmos, Entwurf einer physichen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart, 1845–1862).Google ScholarAnnales, économies, sociétés, civilisations, founded in 1929 under the title Annales d'histoire économique et sociale by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch as a vehicle for a total social and economic history that supposedly went below the superficialities of narrative political history. The founders of the Annales school believed that they were adding history to the kind of human geography represented in Germany by Friedrich, Ratzel'sAnthropogéographie (Stuttgart, 1882–1891)Google Scholar and in France by Jean, Brunhes in La géographie humaine (Paris, 1910).Google Scholar See Lucien, Febvre's programmatic statement, La terre et l'évolution humaine (Paris, 1922).Google Scholar For a brief review of the Annales production, see Robert, Forster, “Achievements of the Annales School,” this JOURNAL 38 (03, 1978), pp. 58–76.Google ScholarFernand, Braudel's magisterial work is La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéan a l'époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949, 2nd rev. ed. 1966),Google Scholar appearing in English translation as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972).Google ScholarJean, Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution Française ed. Mathiez, Albert (Paris, 1922).Google ScholarGeorges, Lefebvre, Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution FrançaiseGoogle Scholar and Labrousse's, C. E., Esquisse du movement des prix et des revenus en France au xviiie siècle (Paris, 1933).Google Scholar

2 Fernand, Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, (Baltimore, 1977), p. 17.Google Scholar A Malthusian element was added in the 1950s and early 1960s, most notably in the theses of Pierre, Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis 1600–1730 (Paris, 1960),Google Scholar and Emmanuel, Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966).Google Scholar

3 Claude, Lévy-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966),Google Scholar chap. 2, “The Logic of Totemic Classification.” In addition to the works of Braudel, see André, Varagnac and Marthe, Chollot-Varagnac, Les traditions populaires (Paris, 1981).Google ScholarEugen, Weber'sPeasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976) draws on this tradition,Google Scholar as does William, Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar For a sensitive and sensible use of material from the folklore tradition, see Ronald, Hubscher, “La France paysanne: réalités et morphologie,” in Yves, Lequin, Histoire des Français, xixe–xxe siécles. Vol. 2: La société (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar

4 Pierre, Goubert's textbook L'ancien régime. Vol. 2: Les pouvoirs (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar is an important and notable exception. An elaborate example of the macrosociological approach is Theda, Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979).Google Scholar For a critique, see Hudson, Meadwell, “Peasant Autonomy, Peasant Solidarity and Peasant Revolts,” British Journal of Political Science, 18 (01 1988), pp. 133–40.Google Scholar

5 Paul, Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (New York, rev. ed., 1961).Google ScholarHenri, Sée, L'évolution commerciale et industrielle de la France sous l' Ancien Régime (Paris, 1925)Google Scholar and Histoire économique de la France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939).Google ScholarHenri, Hauser, Les débuts du capiralisme (Paris 1931).Google Scholar

6 As represented in the various “stage” theories of economic development, in which the whole economy is conceived as a stage linked evolutionarily to earlier stages. See the comments of A. P. Usher as reported by William, N. Parker, “A. P. Usher: An Appreciative Essay,” in Europe, America and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 264–65.Google Scholar

7 See his comments on Usher's work on the grain trade in vol. 1: La production des céréales/texte, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

8 Sartre's lampoon is related by Raymond, Aron in his Mémoires, (Paris, 1983), p. 32.Google Scholar

9 On the subsistence crises, see his “Les crises de subsistances et la démographie de la France d' Ancien Régime,” Population, 1 (01–03 1946), pp. 643–50, and “Demographic crisis in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,”Google Scholar in Eversley, D. E. and David, Glass, eds., Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 507–22.Google Scholar On the grain trade, see “Le commerce des grains et des farines à Paris et les marchands parisiens à l'époque de Louis XIV,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 3 (1956), pp. 169–203;Google Scholar with Baulant, M., Prix des céréales extraits de la mercuriale de Paris, 1520–1698 (Paris, 1960–1962);Google Scholar and with Dupâquier, J. and Lachiver, M., Mercuriales du Pays de France et du Vexin français, 1640–1792 (Paris, 1968).Google Scholar

10 Des derniers temps de l'age seigneurial aux préludes de l'age industriel (1660–1789) (Paris, 1970),Google Scholar edited by Fernand Braudel and Ernst Labrousse, although he is represented there by his student Pierre Goubert. Meuvret is rarely noticed by scholars reviewing the Annales school. Forster barely mentions him in passing in “Achievements of the Annales School,” and Peter, Burke's introduction to the collection he edited, Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales (New York, 1972), omits his work altogether.Google Scholar

11 The most important of them were published in 1971 in Etudes d'histoire économique (Paris, 1971).Google Scholar

12 That they were published at all is owing to the dedication of his wife, who preserved and classified her husband's manuscripts and notes so well that most of the finished parts of the work were able to be reconstituted.

13 Part of an outline was found in his papers and is reproduced in La production des céréales dans la France du xviie et du xviiie siècle/texte, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

14 See Parker, William N., ed., Economic History and the Modern Economist (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

15 Les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, “De l'homme,” no. 128.

16 Harvest shortfalls prior to 1630 usually increased prices in the short run by 40 to 80 percent. In the next 80 years, shortfalls produced increases of 300 to 450 percent, triggering devastating episodes of mortality.

17 Dupâquier estimates that the population of France within its early eighteenth-century boundaries grew from about 21.9 million in 1675 to only 22.4 million in 1705 and 23.2 million in 1720 (La population française aux xviie et xviiie siècles [Paris, 1979], pp. 35–36).Google Scholar See also David, Weir, “Life Under Pressure: France and England, 1670–1870,” this JOURNAL, 44 (03 1984), pp. 27–47.Google Scholar

18 Clean, of good—that is, uniform—quality, and marketable. Practically, this meant that the grain had to be perfectly free of debris and the seeds of weeds and unmixed with inferior cereals such as rye. The more distant the market, the more important these qualities became in securing a sale.

19 This is why the debates over the English Corn Laws in the 1820s, which did much to spread the idea that free trade stabilized prices because it spread the risk of local harvest failure to the whole of Europe, give a distorted picture of the true risks of trade. The risks that were shared were the risks of British harvest failure. Areas with poorer systems of communication and facilities for storage, or that lay upstream rather than downstream of corn suppliers, faced a different set of opportunities.

20 A balanced portfolio of money and stocks of grains requires that the equilibrium demand for money fall in response to a rise in the rate of return to holding grain caused by a fall in existing or anticipated grain reserves. To the extent that the corn market was a cash market, however—as it almost had to be in retail transactions and in wholesale trade between regions that did not normally engage in the grain trade—a corn shortage exacerbated by a speculative “flight” to corn actually increased the demand for means of payment. This could be accommodated only by a rise in the velocity of money.

21 His research into the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monetary system is condensed into two pithy articles, “Circulation monétaire et utilisation économique de la monnaie dans la France du xvie et xviie siècle,” Etudes d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1947), vol. 1, pp. 15–18, and “Circuits d'échanges et travail rural dans la France du xviie siècle,” Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milan, 1957), vol. 2 pp. 1129–42.Google Scholar The articles are reprinted in Meuvret's Etudes d'histoire économique. The former article has been translated as “Monetary Circulation and the Economic Utilization of Money in 16th- and 17th-century France,” in Rondo, Cameron, compiler, Essays in French Economic History (Homewood. IL, 1970).Google Scholar

22 The population of Paris rose from 220,000 in 1600 to 430,000 in 1650 to 510,000 in 1700; see Jan, de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), p. 275.Google Scholar The size of the French army rose from about 50,000 in the late sixteenth century to over 400,000 by the late seventeenth century; see Pierre, Goubert, L'ancien régime. Vol. 2: Les pouvoirs (Paris, 1973), pp. 127–28.Google Scholar

23 A rente is a property right in land that takes the form of a perpetual stream of payments. In contrast to a mortgage, the rente is a liability of the land and not of its owner. This made it a highly desirable mode of lending to rural people, because the obligation survived personal bankruptcy.

24 The relation between market exposure and stability is at the core of Dale, Edward William's discussion in “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766,” Past ' Present, 104 (08 1984), pp. 56–73.Google Scholar

25 See Abbot, Payson Usher, The History of the Grain Trade in France, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, MA, 1913),Google Scholar and Steven, L. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1984).Google Scholar The final breakdown in Normandy is chronicled by Judith, A. Miller in “The Pragmatic Economy: Liberal Reforms and the Grain Trade in Upper Normandy, 1750–1789” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1987).Google Scholar

26 An attempt to apply the insights of rational expectations to food markets in these conditions has been made by Martin, Ravallion, Markets and Famines (Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar

27 See Pascal, Saint-Amour, “Market Integration and France's Grain Markets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century” (Master's thesis, McGill University, 1988).Google Scholar

28 These volumes, subtitled La production des céréales dans la France du xviie et du xviiie siècle and La production des céréales el la société rurale, are each further subdivided into one volume of text and one volume of notes.

29 Proper analysis of the speculative outbursts that trigger the four- and five-fold increases in grain prices would have necessitated employing a variant of rational expectations to analyze the way the price system transmits incomplete information and influences behavior of traders and stockholders. The financial mechanisms associated with seventeenth-century markets are even more complex, because of the variety of clearing mechanisms available to traders and their fluctuating substitutability. These problems are only today attracting the attention of professional economists. See for example, Ravallion, , Markets and Famines,Google ScholarNicholas, Economides and Aloysius, Siow, “The Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of Liquidity,” American Economic Review, 78 (03 1988), pp. 108–121.Google Scholar

30 “It remains to try by a variety of research to discern how and why money penetrating popular strata remained there in only feeble quantities, why often so little reached there, and what fluctuations its naturally restricted purchasing power was subjected to” (vol. 2, p. 203).

31 In particular, “The Condition of France, 1688–1715” in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia, 1688–1725 (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar

32 See “The Condition of France.”

33 He took as his motto the maxim that reformulates the Cartesian sequence of doubt, analysis, synthesis, and measurement: “Avant la synthèse, l'analyse, mais avant l'analyse, la prospection” [“Before synthesis, analysis; but before analysis, prospecting”] (vol. 1, p. 48).

34 There are obvious parallels between the development of biological systems of taxonomy and the methodology of economic history; see Ernst, Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA, 1982).Google Scholar

35 Similar points are have been made by Carol Heim and Philip Mirowski in their critique of Jeffrey, Williamson's thesis that war finance crowded out private investment in early nineteenth-century Britain. “Interest Rates and Crowding-Out during Britain's Industrial Revolution,” this JOURNAL, 47 (03 1987), pp. 117–40.Google Scholar

36 As a form of landed property rentes were subject to the taille, but a peculiarity in collection that reflects its seigneurial origin as a temporary contribution laid on villagers to support their chief at war facilitated evasion. The taille was assessed at the owner's residence, making it easy to conceal properties and especially rentes held in other localities. As the courts did not allow tax collectors to invade the privacy of notarial records to determine the taxable capacity of wealthy Frenchmen, only that part of the income unencumbered by rentes was effectively subject to tax. This technique of evasion was more important than the much-publicized privilege of exemption by virtue of noble status, which in principle extended only to one medium-sized farm, and was of course available to commoners and the military nobility alike.

37 The true nature of the problem can be seen in the fact that many owners of meadows sold the rights to their hay separately from the arable farms they held in the same village, making it difficult for their own farmers to obtain the needed forage.

38 See Octave, Festy, L'agriculrure pendant la Révolution française: Les conditions de produclion er de récolte des céréales; Etude d'hisroire économique 1789–1795 (Paris, 1947).Google Scholar

39 Turgot argued that if rents were competitively set, they would adjust for differences in the rate of taxation. Philip Hoffman's collection of leases demonstrates this to have been the case as early as the sixteenth century. Philip, T. Hoffman, “Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: Land Sales,” this JOURNAL, 46 (03 1986), pp. 37–55.Google Scholar

40 The case for royal protection for peasant rights was most recently argued by Hilton, Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley, 1987).Google Scholar

41 For example, Robert, M. Townsend, “Economic Organization with Limited Communication,” American Economic Review, 77 (12 1987), pp. 954–71.Google Scholar