Despite low productivity, antiquated methods, and little sign of improvement, French agriculture had prospered in the middle decades of the century. Increasing demand from an expanding population coincided with a long series of good harvests to bring excellent prices and a sustained rise in rents and land values. From the late 1760s onwards, however, harvests became more uncertain and yields began to fluctuate sharply. Only three harvests between 1770 and 1789 were abundant everywhere, and provinces with shortfalls found it hard to import adequate extra supplies. The wine crop, upon which many peasants relied to supplement inadequate resources, also proved abnormally volatile during these years, failing completely in 1778 and over-producing subsequently. There were shortages in the mid-1780s too of flax and forage crops. Cattle owners unable to feed their stock adequately had to slaughter and sell at rock-bottom prices since everybody was doing the same. None of this dented the rise in rents and land values. Landlords and big farmers continued to do well. But for the small proprietors, leaseholders, and share-croppers who dominated French agriculture the reign of Louis XVI was to prove a time of difficulty and disruption. And because agriculture was far and away the most important economic activity in the kingdom, the shock waves were felt throughout economic life.
There was, in fact, no clear distinction between agricultural and industrial workers. Most industry was rurally based. Even ostensibly urban trades like construction, a major growth industry that was transforming the appearance of Paris and greater provincial cities, were largely dependent on migrant workers who took their earnings home to the country each winter. Metallurgy, scarcely yet affected by coal and coke technology, was a business of small-scale concerns located in remote forests where charcoal was plentiful. It is true that the biggest industry of all, textiles, was centred on cities—woollens on Amiens, Abbeville, Sedan, or Clermont-de-Lodève; cottons on Rouen and Elbeuf; silk on Nîmes and Lyons. But only in Lyons was much actual production concentrated in the town. The other textile towns were primarily markets, centres of distribution and finance, with most of their spinning and weaving carried on in peasant households anything up to 50 miles distant. Around Rouen that meant that perhaps 300,000 peasants were involved in cotton production. But if most of the industrial work-force were peasants, so were most of the consumers; and when harvests failed they had less money to spend on clothing themselves, or indeed on other manufactures. So demand fluctuated according to the harvests, and this made Louis XVI’s reign an uncertain time in industrial as well as agricultural terms. The silk industry of Lyons lurched from crisis to crisis. Markets for woollens and linens became extremely erratic, too. Only cottons continued the sustained expansion that all textiles had experienced in mid-century, and this was because their main markets were not in France but abroad, in southern Europe and the tropical colonies.
France did not have many such colonies by the 1770s. The British had practically expelled her from India in mid-century, and elsewhere east of the Cape only the Île de France (Mauritius) and the Île Bourbon (Réunion) were still in her hands. In the Caribbean she had managed to hang on to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and above all Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). But the value of these tropical islands was out of all proportion to their size. At the peace of Paris in 1763 Louis XV had been glad to give up the whole of Canada in order to get back Guadeloupe, and on the eve of the Revolution Saint-Domingue was the richest piece of territory in the world. Colonial wealth derived from the production of sugar, coffee, and other tropical luxuries by the labour of black slaves. There were half a million of them in Saint-Domingue alone, and transporting replacements from Africa was yet another aspect of a complex Atlantic trading network whose nerve-centres were the great seaports. Thanks largely to the output of these colonies, France’s overseas trade grew fivefold over the century, and the booming population, lavish rebuilding, and crowded harbours of Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, and even Mediterranean Marseilles testified to their prosperity. Nor, unlike the rest of the economy, did it show much sign of flagging, except during the war with Great Britain between 1778 and 1783. Even then British action did far less damage than in previous wars, and when peace was restored the boom reached new heights. But not much of this commercial opulence reached far inland. The real profits of the colonial trade came from re-exporting the precious luxuries to the ports of northern Europe. Even when trading profits were reinvested in land, as they often were, it was to secure assets rather than put them to further productive use.
There were, therefore, two French economies, only tenuously linked. Coastal regions, and the navigable lower reaches of the four great river systems, were integrated with international and intercontinental trading networks and shared in their benefits, which seemed destined to go on improving. But most of Louis XVI’s subjects lived in the interior, where communications were poor, economic life sluggish, and such improvements as good harvests had brought in mid-century were being eroded by climatic deterioration and an inexorably rising population. The famines of the seventeenth century, when hundreds of thousands died, were fading from memory; but thinking men became increasingly worried, as each harvest shortfall plunged whole populations into beggary, about the ability of existing institutions to take the strains they were coming under.
Poverty was France’s most visible social problem. Nobody could overlook it. All travellers noticed the misery of rural housing, and the poor appearance of the peasantry. ‘All the country girls and women’, noted Arthur Young in Quercy, ‘are without shoes or stockings; and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor stockings to their feet. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity. … It reminded me of the misery of Ireland.’4 Bands of roving vagabonds struck terror into the hearts of isolated farmers; and the streets of most towns swarmed with beggars. The poor, meaning those without adequate employment or other assured means of support, numbered at the best of times almost a third of the population; eight million people. In bad times two or three millions more might join them, as crops failed and jobs disappeared. Most of the poor were people too old, or too young, or too ill to earn their living, people whose families could not afford to feed them either. But as the population grew, increasing numbers of the able-bodied also had difficulty in finding work, or enough of it to make ends meet. Over the century prices rose three times faster than wages. ‘Workmen today’, wrote Jean-Marie Roland, inspector of manufactures in Picardy in 1777,5 ‘need twice as much money for their subsistence, yet they earn no more than fifty years ago when living was half as cheap.’ The result was described by a Norman parish priest.6
Day labourers, workmen, journeymen [he wrote in 1774] and all those whose occupation does not provide for much more than food and clothing are the ones who make beggars. As young men they work, and when by their work they have got themselves decent clothing and something to pay their wedding costs, they marry, raise a first child, have much trouble in raising two, and if a third comes along their work is no longer enough for food, and the expense. At such a time they do not hesitate to take up the beggar’s staff and take to the road.
Often that road would lead to the town, which offered (or so it was hoped) more opportunities of work.
Most town-dwellers were country people by birth who had left their over-populated villages early in life in search of a livelihood. The death rate in the insanitary towns was so high, especially among children, that they could not have flourished without this steady inflow of man and woman power. And even if no work materialized, in towns immigrants could find monasteries and convents distributing alms, hospitals and poor houses endowed to take in and relieve those no longer able to fend for themselves, and more chance of private charity than in native villages where everyone was as poor as themselves. Yet when they arrived, all too many immigrants found that none of these resources was remotely adequate. Under Louis XVI they were in fact becoming steadily less adequate, and not merely because of mounting claims on their services. Monasteries were cutting back on bread
doles under criticism that indiscriminate charity fostered idleness. Hospitals and poor houses found the charitable bequests on which they had always relied dwindling, and as ecclesiastical institutions they were cut off from further endowments by legislation of 1749 restricting mortmain. Revenues from investment in government securities suffered as a result of state bankruptcies and debt consolidations over the century, while inflation eroded the amount of supplies hospitals could afford from their shrinking resources. Here and there concerned laymen began later in the century to experiment with new approaches to poor relief. Masonic lodges set up charitable funds, and in several cities philanthropic societies were established in the 1780s to tap the wealth of the rich for the poor. The government began, gingerly, to toy with schemes of relief on a national scale, such as the establishment of workhouses (dépôts de mendicité) in each generality from the 1760s, and charitable workshops (ateliers de charité) from the 1770s. The background to these departures was mounting public concern about the problem of the poor. Vigorous debates, in the press, in the world of letters, and in learned societies and academies, testified to the worries of educated men that they faced a crisis that would soon be beyond control.
These fears were fuelled by the way the poor behaved. Naturally they took what work they could find; but when they failed, they turned to begging without shame. The sheer professionalism of many beggars made those they assailed suspect their good faith; and indeed faked ailments and hard-luck stories were common enough. Anything that made the better-off pay up was worth trying. When appeals to pity failed, intimidation might work better, and from there it was a very short step to crime. Petty theft was every pauper’s standby. Another was smuggling, a major industry in a land criss-crossed by countless tolls and internal customs barriers. In the country, there was poaching; in town, women in desperate straits became prostitutes, despite the fact that this almost invariably led to disease and further degradation. In the 1760s there were 25,000 prostitutes in Paris. The classic pattern was for a girl newly arrived from the country to be taken on as a maid, become pregnant, lose her job, and take to the streets to feed the child. Alternatively she might abandon it, and not only unmarried mothers adopted this way out of feeding an extra mouth. One of the most graphic indicators of the growth in poverty was the rise in the number of foundlings and abandoned children. They tripled over the century. By the 1780s perhaps 40,000 a year was the national figure. In Paris alone it was about 8,000 and even a small provincial town like Bayeux, with 10,000 inhabitants, produced about 50 annually. The hospitals who took such babies in could not possibly cope with their numbers. They tended to farm them out to wet-nurses, themselves usually poverty-stricken; and in these hands the majority were dead before their fifth birthday. Better-off observers thought all this was evidence of increasing moral depravity among the lower orders, and they agonized over how far it was safe to try to educate them out of it. Yet the heart of the matter was that the French economy could not provide a decent living for all the people being born in the countryside.
Peasants accounted for 80 per cent of the French population. Only a fifth of Louis XVI’s subjects lived in communities of more than 2,000 people. A good quarter of a million probably lived in no community at all, a floating population of vagrants, feared and despised by more settled folk, an awful warning of what might happen at any time to millions who lived on or just beyond the poverty line. The livelihood of most peasant families was an amalgam of makeshifts. Even those with land seldom had enough, so like the landless they were dependent on income from day or seasonal labour, cottage industry, or exporting surplus members of the family to places where work was known, or thought, to be available. ‘The only industry the inhabitants have’, noted a report on an Auvergne parish in 1769, ‘is to leave home for nine months of the year.’7 Yet paradoxically families in circumstances like these were the mainstay of rural communities. Not only did they constitute a majority of the inhabitants; they found valuable extra resources in the communal rights which most villages enjoyed. On common lands they could pasture a cow and gather firewood. In the open-field areas of northern France they could glean after harvest and their cattle could graze on the stubble. In some areas, too, especially in the south, there were powerful traditions of communal defence against threats to local customs. Communities could sue lords who tried to levy excessive seigneurial dues or exercise dubious rights. From the 1760s onwards the enclosure and division of common lands and the termination of collective rights was authorized in many eastern and certain south-western districts; but little was done to take advantage of this legislation. Those lords or large landowners tempted to do so were deterred by the obvious readiness of village communities to fight the issue through the courts, not to mention by riot or other more passive ways of resisting. Similar tactics could be employed against tithe-gatherers, especially when the proceeds went to lay or monastic impropriators rather than the parish priest for whom God had ordained them. The curé, after all, was an important figure in every village. In most he was probably the only resident of education and authority, a natural leader quite apart from his spiritual power and guardianship of the only common building in most parishes, the church. As such, he was a powerful cement to village solidarity. Traditionally his most persistent opponents were those who shared least in that solidarity—the small minority of fortunate peasants who owned or leased enough land to be economically independent.
So much marked this prosperous handful off from the bulk of their fellow inhabitants. They alone had no fear of ruin if famine or disease struck. They alone in the village had jobs to distribute, since they farmed too much land to work entirely by themselves. Only they owned equipment, carts, and draught animals in any quantity. Others had to hire from them, just as they came to them to borrow seed or ready cash in difficult times. When, as often happened, the hapless debtors could not repay them, they would foreclose and thereby accumulate yet more property. It is true that these were the men whom communities normally nominated as syndics, local tax-collectors, or churchwardens. But only they had the leisure and resources to shoulder such duties. It was not necessarily any tribute to their popularity. The only solidarity they normally showed with their fellow villagers was in resistance to outsiders, such as gros fermiers who threatened to outbid them for leases, tax-exempt nobles or townsmen whose privilege pushed up everyone else’s tax-bill if they bought land in the parish, or lords whose hunting and shooting rights, manorial monopolies, or feudal dues and levies in cash or kind damaged the assets and ate into the profits of rich and poor peasants alike. But coqs de village regarded rich outsiders and lords of the manor primarily in the same light as the parish priest: as rivals for power and authority within the village community. When the opportunity came to strike such rivals down, it was eagerly seized.
There was a sense in which this tight-fisted minority of independent yeomen were the truest countrymen: they alone could shun the towns. The rest of rural society was far more bound up with urban life than first appearance might suggest. The majority who could not grow all the food they needed had to buy in local market towns. The networks of cottage industry were organized from towns too, and their products were marketed in them. Few peasant families did not have some member who had worked for a spell in some distant city, or who had migrated there permanently. In all these ways urban and rural life interlocked. Nor was the distinction between towns and villages always obvious. Animals were raised and pastured and crops grown even in the heart of the most densely populated conurbations. Ninety per cent of French towns had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, and only nine cities had more than 50,000. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century was a period of rapid urban growth. Paris grew by perhaps 100,000 people, Bordeaux and Nantes more than doubled in size, and Lyons and Marseilles expanded by more than half. It is true that towns bypassed in the commercial expansion of the century—places like Toulouse, Besançon, or innumerable small cities vegetating behind crumbling ramparts unmanned for over a centur
y—had tended to stagnate. But a third more of the French population lived in towns under Louis XVI than at the beginning of the century, and they included nearly all the richest, best educated, and most dynamic of the king’s subjects.
Even so, most town-dwellers were poor, and completely unskilled. Urban poverty was concentrated and eye-catching, a pool of labour there was never enough work to drain. ‘Misery … ’, complained a Rennes magistrate in 1772, ‘has thrown into the towns people who overburden them with their uselessness, and who find nothing to do, because there is not enough for the people who live there.’8 From these ranks were recruited the innumerable casual labourers, porters, chairmen, dockers, waiters, shoeshine boys, general dealers, old-clothes merchants, and hucksters who could be met in any city street. They lived crowded together in cellars or the upper storeys (four or five floors up in Paris) of lodging houses. When times were hard and they could not pay the rent they swamped the hospitals and the criminal courts. The lucky ones among unskilled immigrants became domestic servants, perhaps the largest single occupational group in most towns of any size. In Paris there were 40,000 or 50,000 of them; in most provincial cities they made up anything between 5 and 7 per cent of the population. Sheltered, fed, often clothed as well as paid by their employers, servants had a privileged existence that other unskilled workers might well envy them. As often as not, in fact, they appear to have despised them. For servants were dependent, completely at their masters’ mercy, with little real life of their own. Condemned to celibacy because married servants were expensive and inconvenient, their proverbial cupidity arose as often as not from saving to buy themselves out of service and into family life. The turnover of servants in most households was notoriously high, suggesting that for all its apparent security a life of subjection to the whims of the better-off brought more than its share of tensions and dissatisfactions. Among the floating population of casual labourers, beggars, petty criminals, and prostitutes of every town there must have been many who had at some time glimpsed a more fortunate world during a spell in service. They knew what they were missing; and no doubt they felt it all the more acutely from the certain knowledge that they could never hope themselves to break into that world—unless perhaps as burglars.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 3