Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:19:15.119Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Agricultural Revolution in Nineteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

William H. Newell
Affiliation:
St. Olaf College

Extract

The literature on French economic history generally dates the onset of the agricultural revolution in France from the midnineteenth century. However, the available empirical evidence on national agricultural trends, brought together in 1961 by Toutain, shows that the rapid, sustained growth in both total and per capita agricultural production comes earlier, during the period from 1815–24 to 1865–74. This article explores the sources of this rapid national growth by assembling and analyzing previously unutilized regional data on production and hectares of major field crops. The southern diffusion of mixed farming is identified as the change in the productive process which may account for the French agricultural revolution.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

This paper is an outgrowth of two chapters of my dissertation done at the University of Pennsylvania under Richard Easterlin, who provided invaluable assistance on previous drafts. I wish to acknowledge suggestions on earlier versions of this paper made by William Parker, Vernon Ruttan, and discussants at both the Yale Conference on Economic Issues in European Agrarian History, and the Agricultural Development Workshop of the Minnesota Economic Development Center. Any errors are, of course, my own. Research was partially funded by NSF grant GS-2621.

1 Clapham, J. H., Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815–1914, 4th edition, reprinted 1966 (England: Cambridge University), p. 6.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 158.

4 Augé-Laribé, M., L'évolution de la France agricole (Paris: A. Colin, 1912).Google Scholar

5 Augé-Laribé, M., La révolution agricole (Paris: A. Michel, 1955).Google Scholar

6 Cameron, R., France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914, 2nd edition (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), p. 52.Google Scholar

7 Kindleberger, C., Economic Growth of France and Britain: 1851–1950 (New York: Simon Schuster, 1965), p. 215.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p, 217.

9 Toutain, J. C., Le produit de l'agriculture française de 1700 à 1958: II.—La Croissance in Cahiers de L'Institute de Science Economique Appliquée [Histoire quantitative de L'économie française (2)], (Paris: I.S.E.A., 1961).Google Scholar

10 Morineau, M., Les faux-semblants d'un démarrage économique: agriculture et démographie en France au xviiie siècle, in Cahiers des Annales, vol. 30, (Paris: A. Colin, 1971), pp. 787, esp. p. 15.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 69.

12 Collins, E., “Labour Supply and Demand in European Agriculture 1800–1880,” E., Jones and Woolf, S. (eds.), Agrarian Change and Economic Development (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 6194.Google Scholar

13 Pautard, J., Les disparities régionales dans la croissance de l'agriculture française (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1965), p. 39.Google Scholar

14 France. Ministère de l'Agriculture, Récoltes des céréales et des pommes de terre, 1815–1876 (Paris: 1913).Google Scholar

15 Gille, B., Les sources statistiques de l'histoire de France (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1964), p. 158.Google Scholar

16 Toutain, Le produit, p. 42.

17 When changes in crop composition are taken into account, the proportion of the change in output explained by the change in yield is more nearly three times that explained by change in hectares planted. The faster growth in area cultivated in relatively low-yield wheat than in high-yield oats is responsible for the understatement of the importance of growth in yields. The. overstatement of labor force growth leads to an understatement of the growth in labor productivity relative to the growth in potential labor force.

18 When extremely rough estimates of wine production are included in per capita production the north-south differential persists, with the exception that region north-west, where virtually no wine is grown, drops relative to other regions. Other crops are either of small quantitative importance or, like vegetables, serve to accentuate the higher levels of the north. Sugarbeets, for example, are relatively unimportant and confined to the north until after mid-century. Their exclusion, necessitated by the unavailability of departmental figures for the early part of the period, understates the growth in output and productivity for the second half of the period. They have minimal impact on land use, however, accounting for only 253,000 hectares in 1873, at the end of the period of rapid growth.

19 Pautard, Les disparities, p. 67–68.

20 Ibid., p. 61: “The agricultural censuses of 1840… and 1852 furnish the only departmental statistics existing for the first half of the 19th century.”

21 21 Toutain, Le produit, pp. 214–215.

22 Slicher van Bath, B. H., The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D., 500–1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966).Google Scholar

23 Sée, H., La Vie économique de la France sous la monarchie censitaire, 1815–1848 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1927), p. 27.Google Scholar

24 Pautard, Les disparities, p. 118.

25 Clapham, Economic Development, p. 27.

26 Gironde is retained in the sample because, unlike the departments containing the three largest cities, it remains primarily agricultural throughout the period.

27 The rapid yield increase in Ardèche, for example, might appear more plausibly explained by movement of ill-suited land out of cereals or potatoes into cash crops than by the introduction of mixed farming. However, total area under cereals and potatoes increases, and changes in crop composition explain less than 7 percent of the change in output.

28 The results in this section still obtain when fewer cities are used in the urban measure.

29 Hohenberg, P., “Change in Rural France in the Period of Industrialization, 1830–1914,” Journal Of Economic History, XXXII (March 1972), 220.Google Scholar

30 Schultz, T., “A Framework for Land Economics,” in Schultz, Economic Organization of Agriculture, p. 147. For a summary of the literature, see Hayami, Y. and Ruttan, V., Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 3436.Google Scholar

31 Hayami and Ruttan, Agricultural Development.

32 Toutain, Le produit, pp. 214–215.

33 France. I.N.S.E.E., Annuaire statistique de la France, Vol. 73, (Paris: 1967), pp. 199200.Google Scholar

34 A more detailed description of the aggregation process and its assumptions is available in Newell, W., Population Change and Agricultural Development in Nineteenth Century France (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1971), p. 5863.Google Scholar

35 Pautard, Les disparities, pp. 27–32.

36 Collins, “Labor Supply,” p. 65.

37 Dutens, J., Essai comparatif sur la formation et la distribution du revenu de la France en 1815 et 1835 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1842), pp. 100101Google Scholar and 104–105.

38 Newell, Population Change, pp. 59–60.

39 Toutain, Le produit, p. 13.

40 Ibid., p. 171.

41 Delefortrie, N. and Morice, , Les révenus départementaux en 1864 et en 1953 (Paris: A. Colin, 1959), p. 16.Google Scholar