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This article investigates the distributional impact of the abolition of 'feudalism' during the French Revolution. Landlords ostensibly benefited from laws permitting them to raise rents by the equivalent of the former tithe. Increasingly, however, the state appropriated this windfall by raising land taxes. Tenants ultimately shouldered a double burden of higher rents and heavier taxes, and the often responded with acts of evasion. But the new financial pressures on tenants and landlords were often offset- and occasionally overbalance- by substantial productivity gains, which cushioned their disposable incomes in the face of these new obligations.

This article examines the complex manufacturing process of the southwest of France in which pottery production and an agrarian economy were linked together. The authors argue that pottery and cheese production had reached an industrial scale during the period of the Roman Conquest, approximately 2 B.C., contrary to the belief that an industrialized economy did not exist until the 18th century.

French economic ideology from the latter half of the 18th century is discussed, covering the Old Regime and the early French Revolution. Ideologies of the Physiocrats, the Girondins and the Jacobins are considered.

Cliometrics is discussed in relation to French economic history and the new institutional economics. An agenda for future research is also presented.

Recent work in the economic history of France is discussed. Topics include new interpretations of the French Revolution, new interpretations of absolutism, new tools focusing on transaction costs, and the undercutting of old theories by new interpretations in economic history.

A threshold error correction model incorporating the transport cost adjusted law of one price as the standard for commodity market integration is developed and applied to 19th century wheat prices in France.

Jewish merchants in 17th century Metz, France played a significant role in the operation of the local economy and this increased their dealings, both negative and positive, with the Christian population. Town records show that kosher butchers were used by Metz's officials to break the monopoly held by Christian butchers. They allowed the Jewish butchers to sell certain cuts of meat to Christian customers, provoking a storm of protest from Christian meat sellers. In another dispute, the town's Christian clothmakers strongly defended the rights of Jewish cloth merchants to buy and sell locally made textile goods.

The history of French banking since the French Revolution has a long tradition dating back to the pioneering studies of Bertrand Gille,(1) Jean Bouvier,(2) and Maurice Levy-Leboyer(3) in the 1950s [...]

Many studies have given rise to the common belief that industrial activity in Paris, France, was at a standstill in the first half of the 19th century. Such studies used inappropriate criteria such as mechanization, firm size, production for mass markets and the use of mineral fuels. Deconstruction of long-held beliefs and performance of industrial and occupational censuses showed that Parisian industry was actually very dynamic in the first half of the 19th century. An analysis of supply and demand factors was also made to demonstrate the dynamics of Parisian industry during that period.

French history has suffered from the over-use of concepts of crises and revolution. An ongoing rural crisis has appeared to account for the French Revolution. Labrousse's interpretation of France, and of the 1780s in particular, postulates a static rural world in which chronic surplus led to progressively worse rural conditions. The theoretical framework behind this sequence became even more rigid in Braudel's hands. While there was social malaise in France in the 1760s and 1770s, it was part of a wider one in the Atlantic world prompted by the effects of the Seven Years War, more central demands on resources, and the conflicts they engendered. Fiscal crisis apart, the economic problems of the late 1780s in France were of themselves transient, and overstated.

This article calculates the minimum share of the population employed in producing the subsistence food requirements in a closed economy on the basis of pre-industrial agricultural technology. The evidence is drawn from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. By an early date European economies had the potential for extended division of labour. This potential was not immediately exploited because a large proportion of the labour force was needed for temporary harvest work; a more specialized economy could not develop without simultaneous evolution in the labour markets that organized the temporary movements of workers.

GILLES POSTEL-VINAY and JEAN-MARC ROBIN. Eating, working, and saving in an unstable world: consumers in nineteenth-century France. By reconstructing a demand system from data drawn from a nationwide survey of mid nineteenth-century budgets, this article examines how French farm labourers (a large proportion of the population) altered their consumption behaviour in response to price and income changes. Contrary to expectations, budgets were very sensitive to these variables. The consumption patterns of farm labourers were neither dictated by local supply nor were they the resul of a severe rationing of necessities. Rather, they showed flexible responses to varying economic situations. The results are used to assess the effects on trade in food and other items of the huge changes in prices and income that occurred between the Statistiques agricoles of 1852 and 1862.

The signing of the 1860 Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce is the central event that ushered in the first great era of free trade in Western Europe. Yet we still lack a thorough analysis of the history and the economics of the treaty. The two questions that need to be answered are: (1) What effects did the treaty have on French national welfare? and (2) What explains the timing and successful shift toward more open trade of a nation that had been staunchly opposed to tariff reform for over half a century? In this essay, I estimate a system of export equations as a first step toward a comprehensive analysis of the 1860 treaty. I argue that real changes in the nature of world trade increased the potential benefits to be derived from free trade and raised the costs of the existing system of prohibitions. The changing external conditions combined with internal political considerations to make a regime of moderate tariffs increasingly desirable to a larger segment of the French populace, thus sustaining what would otherwise have been a wholly unacceptable action on the part of the Emperor Napoleon III. Moreover, the trade estimates suggest that the French economy benefited from the abolition of prohibitions and the move to lower tariffs. [C] 1991 Academic Press, Inc.

Did workplace characteristics, such as the degree of mechanization or the level of managerial control, systematically influence occupational mortality rates in France at the beginning of the 20th century? Data from an early 20th-century study of occupational mortality in France led us to conclude that long hours of work, under conditions where labor had limited control of the pace of work, represented the most serious occupational risk facing early French workers. The effect of long hours of work on mortality dwarfed the impact of either mechanization or size of establishment.

The presumption that capitalism emerged in the 18th century with the creation of modern financial institutions was challenged by examining the records of Parisian borrowers and lenders also in the 18th century. Their dealings contained data on how credit markets can function efficiently.