1

Economic and demographic developments

Silvia Marzagalli

[pre-print version of chapter 1 of David Andress (dir.), The Handbook of French Revolution, Oxford

University Press, 2014, p. 3-20]

abstract

The reassessment of the driving forces leading to the French Revolution provoked the rejection of the

traditional Marxist interpretation according to which the Revolution was led by an emerging

capitalistic bourgeoisie strengthened by long-term industrial and trade growth, and the emergence of

interpretations based on political and ideological developments. This chapter argues that demography

and economy still offer important keys to understand the origins of the French Revolution, if they are

embedded in a broader analysis taking social, cultural and political aspects into account.

In stressing the escalation of social tensions provoked by an unequal redistribution of the resources

created by sustained growth in eighteenth-century French agriculture, industry and trade, analysis of

the demographic and economic developments of eighteenth-century France highlight the background

against which the convergence of political and short-term subsistence crises pushed rural and urban

masses to revolt in 1789. Without their actions, the political revolution led by a majority of the

representatives who met at the Estates-General in 1789 would have been repressed.

'keywords': French Revolution; France; economy; demography; eighteenth-century growth; social

tensions; crop failure; agriculture; industry; trade.

Many of those who witnessed the events of 1789 were aware of the importance of the French

Revolution, and debate over its causes began long before the radicalization that led Louis XVI to the

guillotine. Whereas some authors pointed to the depravity of French morals as its major cause, others,

like John Robinson, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and secretary of the Royal

Society, privileged conspiracy theories, conceiving the Revolution as the result of a destructive

alliance between Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasons.1 Some contemporaries, however, conceived the

Revolution as the consequence of long-lasting processes: whilst waiting to be guillotined in 1793,

Barnave explained the outbreak of the Revolution as the result of eighteenth-century economic

changes and growing political opposition between the aristocracy and the monarchy.2 In doing so, he

initiated a historiographical tradition conceiving the Revolution as the ineluctable issue of a complex

set of structural forces on the move.

1 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the

Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies, etc., collected from good authorities,

(Edinburgh, 1797). For a different configuration of conspiracy, see Abbé Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à

l'histoire du jacobinisme, 5 vol., (Hamburg, 1798-1799). 2 His Introduction to the French Revolution was first published in Oeuvres de Barnave (Paris, 1843).

2

Since the 1790s, the causes of the French Revolution, a founding moment of French political life as

well as a seminal event for Europe and parts of other continents, have been widely, and often

polemically, discussed. The debate on the origins of the Revolution and its driving forces is entangled

in the even harsher controversies on the inner logics – or teleology – of the revolutionary process once

the Revolution had started, on its alleged “degeneration” into mass violence, and in the diverging

evaluations of its consequences in terms of costs and benefits.3

More than other historiographical issues, the French Revolution is controversial. The general

acknowledgement that it represented a crucial event (or process) leading to a society and a political

system grounded on new principles increases the verve of those who prize or disdain the Revolution.

If they undoubtedly offer an interesting glimpse into historians’ age and culture, opposite

interpretations make it difficult for readers to reach a coherent understanding of the revolutionary

process itself: how it came into being, the respective importance of economic and demographic factors

versus political and cultural explanations, the balance between structures and conjuncture.

Debates opposing conflicting interpretations of the origins of the French Revolution largely reflect the

underlying weltanschauung on the leading forces of historical development. It is obvious that, for the

three influential generations of French Marxist historians who considered economic forces and

relations of production as the base determining the cultural, institutional and power relations of

society, any attempt to conceive this latter ‘superstructure’ as the commanding element of Revolution

was misleading. When looking at the causes of the Revolution, influential historians like Alphonse

Aulard, Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul, who dominated the historiography of

the French Revolution from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1960s, concentrated therefore

largely on the inner dialectic of the economic and social order of Old Regime France and its growing

contradictions, leading allegedly to its final explosion. The Revolution was conceived as the ultimate

consequence of the eighteenth-century rise of a capitalistic bourgeoisie aiming at disrupting the

existent feudal society: in introducing the French Revolution, Soboul wrote that it “marks the advent

of the bourgeois and capitalistic society [… and settles the problem] of the historical law of the

transition from feudalism to capitalism”.4 Economic growth was therefore conceived as a decisive

element of the historical process leading ineluctably to the triumph of the bourgeois Revolution.

Controversies on the social and economic background of the Revolution became particularly

acrimonious in the thirty years from the late 1950s, when the Marxist interpretation of its driving

forces began to be seriously challenged. Alfred Cobban, George Taylor, Colin Lucas, and Guy

Chaussinand-Nogaret among others contested the existence of opposition between a nobility attached

3 On the historiography of the Revolution and its causes, see Norman Hampson, “The French Revolution and its

Historians”, in Geoffrey Best, ed., The Permantent Revolution. The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789-

1989 (London, 1988), 211-234. 4 Albert Soboul, La Révolution française [1965], (Paris, 2010), 5.

3

to feudalism and a self-conscious bourgeoisie calling for a capitalist society. A wide range of

researches has since insisted on the community of interests among pre-revolutionary French elites

belonging to the second and to the third estate, and on the inner divisions within each estate. Parallel to

this revision, the goals of the urban and rural masses in the revolutionary process has been scrutinized

anew. It is widely admitted that their action was crucial in 1789 for the consolidation of the political

revolution which started with the opening of the General Estates, but the significance of their action

has raised controversial issues, as revolutionary masses largely expressed anti-capitalistic views: a fact

which increases the complexity of the interpretation of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and

capitalistic process.

The acrimonious intellectual fights both amongst Marxist historians (on the anachronism of recurring

to the notions of class struggle, class consciousness, or proletarian vanguard to interpret mass

behaviour in the Revolution), and between Marxists and the revisionist school (the latter considering

the Revolution as a political, as opposed to social, revolution and exploring its ideological origins

while rejecting class labels), have slowly and steadily calmed down after the peak reached during the

Bicentenary in 1989. Debate has not been vain, though, as it has contributed to promote a large

number of enquiries and case studies, offering the opportunity today to look at these phenomena with

a more distanced and possibly neutral eye – a result also of the evolution of global geopolitics after the

end of the Cold War and the decreasing ideological dimension of historiographical debates.

One key point emerging from these debates was the breakdown of a dominant image of the Revolution

as a long-lasting event, the phases of which were teleological determined from its very beginnings,

and to conceive it rather as a process capable of producing new and unpredictable outcomes, notably

through accelerating processes of politicisation amongst rural and urban populations under the

influence of their new contexts.5 If we admit this perspective, the question of the ‘origins’ of the

French Revolution consists no longer in finding out the underlying forces leading inexorably to a

decade-long Revolution, the nature of which is judged through the lenses of its long-lasting

achievements, but in understanding which factors led contemporaries to question so radically in 1789

the principles on which French society had previously been based. We also need to understand what

made them believe that collective action could efficiently lead to a change.

Refusing to conceive the Revolution as an intrinsic teleological necessity does not imply, however,

that eighteenth-century evolution of existing structures did not play any role. 1789 can be conceived as

the product of different groups’ demands converging, at a moment of major financial difficulties for

the state and under the pressure of a dramatic short-term economic crisis, to reverse a number of

established social, political and legal principles. The Revolution is not the result of a preconceived

plan of an organized group sharing clearly identified interests. The men and women who made the

5 On this issue, see François Furet, Penser la révolution (Paris, 1978), 32-46.

4

Revolution did not share, in fact, common goals. It is precisely because they had divergent ideas of the

regenerated society they sought and on the political priorities to be followed, that the revolutionary

process lasted so long and experienced such dramatic turning points.

The aim of this chapter, thus, is to highlight the elements in eighteenth-century French demography

and economy which help us to better understand the tensions which traversed French society in the

late 1780s and pushed contemporaries to action. Few would claim today that demography and

economics are the sole, perhaps even the main, underlying forces responsible for the Revolution. They

cannot, however, be disqualified as irrelevant, and if they are embedded in a broader analysis taking

social, cultural and political aspects into account, they offer important keys in a highly complex

puzzle. The outbreak of the Revolution – or rather of the three revolutions (M. Vovelle) occurring in

1789, namely the political one led by the third estate with the support of parts of the two other estates,

the popular Parisian one who saved it from repression, and the rural one, which appears as largely

autonomous – is an extremely intricate, multi-causal event. Its understanding requires consideration of

structural as well as short-term aspects, notably why a recurrent phenomenon like temporary grain

shortage could, in 1789, be an essential ingredient in a new explosive blend.

Demography

At the eve of the Revolution, France was the most populated country in Europe. The number of

subjects and the fertility of French soil contributed to make the French king one of the five sovereigns

playing a decisive role on the international arena, although keeping this role had an extremely high

cost for public finances, as it implied the involvement of France in all major conflicts.

French population increased from 22 million inhabitants in 1715 – a level already reached in a

previous peak in 1550 – to 28 million in 1789. This was part of the general demographic growth

Europe experienced in the eighteenth century, and growth rate in France was actually weaker than

elsewhere. 6 This argument has been used to deny any significant contribution of demographic factors

in explaining the French Revolution. Whereas the continent increased its population by 60 per cent,

France had in 1789 only 30 per cent more inhabitants than a century before. However, overall French

demographic growth was uneven, and whereas the population of the généralité of Rouen grew only 10

to 20 per cent between 1700 and 1787, the number of inhabitants of Alsace doubled. In certain parts of

France, thus, demographic pressure might have a more relevant impact than the national average

suggests. Besides, the consequences of demographic growth depend on the capacity of a given

economy to absorb it, an element which makes international comparisons of absolute demographic

growth rate less straightforward.

6 For a comparative overview, Massimo Livi-Bacci, The Population of Europe: A History (Oxford, 2000).

5

The technical explanation of French demographic growth lies in mortality decrease. Fecundity (birth)

rate (approx. 38-40 per thousand) remained stable or slightly decreased because young people

postponed their marriage, or through a moderate deliberate child control, (although this phenomenon

was mostly confined to elites and the urban population). Age at marriage was relatively high (25-26

for women, 27-28 for men) and tended to increase, as many young people had difficulty finding the

resources to start a household. Child mortality fell slowly – and unequally according to economic

conditions – but enough to increase overall life expectation. Even so, almost one child out of two did

not survive until adulthood, and life thereafter was still fragile: a child who was still alive at his or her

15th birthday could expect to live approximately another 30 years.

7

Beside the decrease in child mortality, a growing number of French people survived longer than the

previous generations because of the decreasing frequency of previously-regular ‘mortality crises’,

defined as an increase of at least 100 per cent of ordinary mortality over a year or more.

Contemporaries identified three major causes of demographic crises: epidemics, warfare, and harvest

failures. They had efficiently learned to prevent plague, the most dramatic cause of mortality: although

Marseille and the surrounding region lost half of their inhabitants in the early 1720s, the epidemic was

confined to this area through severe control on the circulation of goods and people. Thereafter, France

was free from such disease.8 Military campaigning affected French territory very little in the

eighteenth century, as wars were largely fought abroad. Harvest failures became possibly less frequent

due to climatic factors, and above all, when they occurred, their demographic consequences were less

dramatic than in previous centuries.

Whereas this was not the first time that the country experienced intensive century-long demographic

growth, the striking feature of eighteenth-century growth is that no dramatic drop followed, as it had

before as a consequence of increasing strain on resources, malnutrition and consequent vulnerability to

diseases. Contemporaries successfully faced the challenge of feeding approximately six million

inhabitants more on substantially the same agricultural base – the overall increase of cultivated land

being less than 2.5 per cent. We will evoke below how they managed to do so, but it is important to

stress here that eighteenth-century pressure on resources had demographical, cultural, social, and

economic consequences. Demographically, it provoked rural migration flows to towns (defined as

urban centre with more than 2,000 inhabitants). In 1789, approximately one person out of five lived in

a town or city, many of them in highly precarious economic conditions. Culturally, the fact that the

urban population was more spatially concentrated and more literate than the rural population – 65 per

cent of grooms versus 42 per cent respectively in 1780-89 could sign their name – increased the

7 On the demographic of Ancient Regime France, see Jack A. Goldstone, « Demography », in William Doyle,

ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, (Oxford, 2012), 201-218; Jacques Dupaquier, Histoire de la

population française, vol. 2 : De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris, 1988). 8 On the reasons why the well-known prevention system proved inefficient in Marseille see Charles Carrière,

Marcel Courdurie, Ferréol Rebuffat, Marseille, ville morte: la peste de 1720 (Marseille, 1968).

6

potential impact of the circulation of ideas. Migration to the towns was in many instances seasonal or

short-term, so that migration flows made also possible a wider circulation of ideas back to villages and

rural communities. Socially, it increased tensions, notably because agricultural prices grew faster than

salaries, producing differentiated effects on different social groups. Economically, it stimulated among

others proto-industrial activities and research into techniques for increased agricultural productivity.

Surprisingly, contemporary were hardly aware of this growth, and most of them actually believed that

the country was experiencing depopulation, just as Europe in general, if not the planet as a whole. In

the 113th Persian letter, Montesquieu wrote: “After a calculation as exact as may be in the

circumstances, I have found that there are upon the earth hardly one tenth part of the people which

there were in ancient times. And the astonishing thing is, that the depopulation goes on daily: if it

continues, in ten centuries the earth will be a desert.” This passage was quoted in the article

“Population” of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, without challenge. Perceptions of population

decrease had actually being contested since the midst of the eighteenth century by few proto-

statisticians, known as the “political arithmeticians”, like the intendant of Auvergne La Michodière in

1757, or the abbé d’Expilly, member of the Academies of Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid and

Copenhagen, in his unfinished Dictionnaire géographique, historique et politiques des Gaules et de la

France (6 vols., 1762-1770). The most radical challenge was produced in 1778 by a member of the

bureau of the Secretary of War, Jean-Baptiste Moheau (Recherches et considérations sur la population

de la France), and former secretary of the intendant of Provence (1773-1776). Moreau demonstrated,

through a path-breathing statistical method based on parish registers of birth that historians would

refine in the 1950s, that French population was indeed growing.

For Montesquieu – who discussed the topic in detail in his 1748 Esprit des Lois (book XXIII) – and

for his contemporaries, debating the causes of depopulation was generally the starting point to discuss

moral and political virtues of past and contemporary societies, to debate about related topics like

divorce and religious vow of chastity, or to argue on the consequences of warfare, economic policies

or colonization. Such considerations also produced immediate actions, for instance through

philanthropic associations working to improve conditions of child delivery or providing dowries to

young poor girls. In this sense too, demography did matter, as it added a piece in the global puzzle that

eighteenth-century thinkers were conceiving to understand the world they lived in under all its

possible facets, including politics, and in the connections they tested between the rational, open

analysis of a phenomenon and the concrete collective actions they undertook towards whatever they

considered as improvements.

Eighteenth-century French demography does not explain the Revolution in a mechanical way, but

offers a background for a better understanding of the social expectations and tensions in pre-

revolutionary rural and urban France. Demographic pressure on resources exacerbated social tensions,

7

and was a cause of concern and debate in itself, just as its effects increased the circulation of ideas

across the country. It is therefore difficult to conceive the French Revolution as the pure result of

political factors and to entirely dismiss the impact of the country’s demographic evolution over the

past decades. Demographic growth also brought to the forefront a generation of young men and

women who had enjoyed greater chances to become adults, and who felt they deserved a better world

to live in, although they certainly expressed different, if not opposite sensibilities about what this

better world should be. In analyzing popular rebellions in France from 1660 to 1789, Jean Nicolas

observes a more consistent participation of young people in riots in the second half of the eighteenth

century, and argues that juvenile turbulence took on a political content in 1787-89. Young people

added a decisive, destabilizing element to the recurrent conflicts within French society by backing

traditional popular demands for cheap bread, better job conditions or reduction of fiscal burdens.9

Economy

Analysts of the eighteenth-century French economy insist on the dynamism of its industry and trade

and on the considerable enrichment of some entrepreneurs, helping to bind together a wealthy elite

made up of both commoners and nobles. A part of the multi-confessional merchant elite in port cities,

for instance, was noble, and if successful bourgeois still bought their way into the nobility, they were

less inclined than in the previous century to abandon active business as a result. However, while some

of the elite shared a common willingness to be more involved in policy-making, and others debated

within the structures of eighteenth-century sociability, economic interests within this group were far

from homogeneous, and they did not act as a group, but rather promoted their own personal interests

though their personal networks.10

In some instances, entrepreneurs required the intervention of the state in order to take advantage of

specific economic opportunities, such as slave and colonial trade, to be granted monopolistic rights, or

to be protected from competition in domestic or external markets. In other instances, they wished the

government to suppress existing traditional protective mechanisms which countered their own

interests, such as collective rights on land, limitation in the circulation of cereals, interdictions on

specific industrial production or processes.11

Some of them took advantage of the monarchy’s massive

need for naval and military supplies, especially in times of war. These economic elites did not contest

the monarchy or the foundations of Old Regime society, which was solidly grounded on the principle

9 Jean Nicolas La rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale (1661-1789) (Paris, 2002),

479-482. See also John R. Gillis, Youth and History (New York, 1974). 10

On the importance of eighteenth-century sociability based on voluntary belonging to groups and affiliations,

see Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Sociability”, in Doyle, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, 375-387. 11

Jean-Pierre Hirsch and Philippe Minard, « ‘Laissez-nous faire et protégez-nous beaucoup’ : pour une histoire

des pratiques institutionnelles dans l’industrie française », in Louis Bergeron and Patrick Bourdelais, ed., La

France n’est- elle pas doué pour l’industrie ? (Paris, 1998), 135-158; see also Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves

du commerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise (1780-1860) (Paris, 1991).

8

of privileges, or “private laws” applying to an individual or a group. Many of the well-off, whether

they belonged to the more dynamic economic elites or to the traditional land-owners living from

seigneurial rights, land leases and agriculture, had actually very strong interests in the continuation of

the existing system, which among other benefits to them let the bulk of taxation fell on the peasants.

Economic elites also shared the benefits of the profitable credit system, draining money toward the

increasing insatiable needs of state expenditures.

This picture of a relatively prosperous French economy contrasts singularly with the increasingly

dramatic condition of public finance. At the eve of the French Revolution, half of state income was

paying interest on the public debt. Failure of reiterated attempts to reform the fiscal system proved

fatal to the absolute monarchy, leading to the convocation of the Estates-General and awakening hopes

of a profound reformulation of the relation between the king and the country’s economic elites.12

The

latter wished to take part in societal decision-making processes in a more decisive way. This followed

the emergence of forms of sociability and writings which promoted a vast debate on reforms through

the second half of the eighteenth century, affecting all fields. Economic change contributed, together

with non-economic factors, in making such debate possible, but it produced at most a push toward

political change, and not toward radical political upheaval.

The effects of eighteenth-century economic dynamism and demographic growth, however, were not

confined to elites. Price growth, notably for agricultural products, encouraged land-owners to seek a

share of rising incomes by raising rents. The latter doubled between 1730 and 1780.13

This factor,

combined with demographic pressure, increased pauperism among the significant part of the rural

population which did not owe the land they cultivated and produced essentially for self-consumption.

Those who depended on wages to make ends meet were affected by the fact that agricultural prices

tended to grow more rapidly than wages in agriculture. Eighteenth-century decrease in real wages for

urban workers was probably less significant than assumed, but they too were affected by rising food

and lodging prices.14

The fact that the French economy was increasingly, but incompletely integrated – the price of wheat

on local markets could vary by 300 per cent – and that some sectors were globalized and depended on

international economic and geopolitical factors, complicates any attempt to present a coherent national

12

John Francis Bosher, The Single Duty Project. A Study of the Movement for a French Customs Union in the

Eighteenth Century (London, 1964). 13

David R. Weir « Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française », Annales. Economies,

Sociétés, Civilisations 46, 4 (1991), 928. 14

Labrousse estimated that salaries increased by 25 per cent between 1726-1741 and 1785-1789, and wheat

prices by 60 per cent. Camille-Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au

XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1932), but revised this pessimistic assumption in his later works: David R. Weir « Les crises

économiques et les origines de la révolution française », Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46, 4

(1991), 930, suggests that salaries increased rather by 40 per cent, although with major differences between cities

and job sectors. He also stresses that, compared to British workers, French real wages declined much less,

although the overall level of salaries in Great-Britain was higher (ibidem, 919-921).

9

picture, as almost any case-driven assertion can be countered by looking at a different area, city, or

economic sector.15

However, the relevant problem is to understand why, whereas neither demographic

pressure nor rises in prices were new as such, they resulted in the 1780s in increasingly structured

political demands, and mass participation.

Agriculture

At the eve of the Revolution, the French economy rested on agriculture, and the relation of individuals

and groups to landed property and revenues largely determined the structure of society. Because of the

low productivity of land (compared to today’s standards, and with the remarkable exceptions of North-

East France) the vast majority of the population was engaged with the production of food for their

own, and the wider society’s, survival. Moreover, whether they lived out of agricultural rents and

incomes, from wages, or public charity, virtually all French people were sensitive to agricultural

prices.

The centrality of agriculture ought to be stressed, as the dynamism of other sectors of the eighteenth-

century French economy which historians often point to – such as colonial trade and industry – tends

to mask this basic reality. The distribution of rural profits and crops largely shaped French Old

Regime society, and virtually all elites possessed land. In fact, agricultural revenues were a more

stable and substantial component of income for the urban bourgeoisie than those coming from trade

and industry, with which this category is often identified.16

A set of relevant contemporary debates

were linked to agriculture: over the best basis of taxation, the legitimacy of feudal privileges on land

and people, the role the state should play in facilitating the emergence of a national market for cereals,

the right to access to bread at a fair price and the role of authorities in facilitating this right. Studying

how different groups engaged with these crucial questions offers an insight into the positions they

adopted once the Revolution had started.

Given the centrality of cereals in feeding the French – who ate up to two kilograms of bread daily

when they could eat their fill – availability and affordability of flour was a major concern for

governments and local authorities, although views, like economic interests, differed widely on how to

reach this goal.17

Large parts of the French population were extremely vulnerable to price increases in

food, and popular unrests in 1788-89 cannot be understood without noting the grain shortages and the

high prices of bread since the poor harvest of 1787 and crop failure in 1788. Prices, however, had

increased just as dramatically in the late 1760s-early 1770s, provoking unrest, but no revolution. The

15

David R. Weir « Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française », 926. In 1781-1787, an

hectoliter of wheat cost, 7.93 livres tournois in Douai (Nord) and 23.37 livres tournois in Aix (Bouches-du-

Rhône). 16

William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 129-30. 17

Steven Laurence Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the

Eighteenth Century (Ithaca and London, 1984). Reynald Abad, Le grand marché: l’approvisionnement

alimentaire de Paris sois l’Ancien Régime (Paris 2002).

10

fact that rural and urban unrest had a broader political meaning than previously is linked to the

evolution of popular perceptions of responsibility for the 1789 situation, but also to the long-term

effects of economic changes affecting the redistribution of income within society. Such tensions over

the redistribution of the material and symbolic fruits of the land make the economy – both in terms of

its long-term evolution and of its unforeseeable pre-revolutionary situation – an essential ingredient to

understanding the French Revolution, although these economic factors acquired their political

meaning only via the cultural and political lenses through which the French perceived them.

Since the 1720s and 1730s, French agriculture had been changing to meet increased demand

stimulated by demographic pressure. Those who were able to produce surpluses benefitted from

increasing prices and growing economic integration to wider markets. The question of the

transformations of eighteenth-century French agriculture provoked a vivid scholarly debate opposing

Jean-Marc Moriceau and Michel Morineau, among others, about the existence of an agricultural

revolution in eighteenth-century France.18

Globally, the absence of major demographic catastrophes

despite a consistent increase in population proves that France was able to face the challenge of feeding

more people. Historians suggested that better climate, wider diffusion of minor but cumulative

technical improvements, diversification of crops limiting the impact of climatic accidents, improved

transport possibilities, increasing integration of French territories, and a more market-oriented

management of large estates, all contributed to increase production without necessary provoking

significant (or “revolutionary”) productivity changes. From the 1720s to the 1760s, France did not

experience major crop failures on a nationwide basis. The overall growth process, however, did not

prevent increasing pressure on resources and consequent tensions in the distribution of agricultural

revenues. When agricultural difficulties occurred in the mid-1760s, against a background of a more

densely populated landscape and high rents, French peasants were less inclined than their forefathers

to accept grain shortage and famine as an inevitable result.

Because land, rents and agricultural incomes represented the crucial source of wealth, and abundant

crops were the basis of the prosperity of the country and its king, agriculture was an object of public

concern, intensive theoretical debate, and reformist efforts. Reformists believed that the government

18

Jean-Claude Toutain, « Le produit de l’agriculture française de 1700 à 1958. 1. Estimation du produit au

XVIIIe siècle », Cahiers de l’Institut de Science économique appliquée 115 (July 1961) ; Jean-Marc

Moriceau, Les fermiers de l'Île-de-France. L'ascension d'un patronat agricole (XVe -XVIII

e siècle) (Paris 1994) ;

Jean-Marc Moriceau « Au rendez-vous de la ‘Révolution agricole’ dans la France du XVIIIe siècle. À propos des

régions de grande culture », Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 49, 1 (1994), 27-63 ; Michel Morineau, Les

faux-semblants d’un démarrage économique : agriculture et démographie en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris,

1971). David R. Weir suggests the possibility of conciliating these different positions in stressing that

productivity gains could be reached without increasing the production per surface, though increased integration:

David R. Weir « Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française », 919-922; for a critical

review of the debate on the performance of eighteenth century French agriculture, see Christian Morrisson, « La

production française au XVIIIe siècle : stagnation ou croissance ? », Revue européenne des sciences

sociales [Online], XLV-137 | 2007, Online since 01 July 2010, connection on 28 July 2013. URL :

http://ress.revues.org/224 ; DOI : 10.4000/ress.224.

11

could and should favour economic development, and abolish what was perceived as a backward set of

local traditions preventing an expansion of market economy. Changes affecting the circulation of

crops, taxation mechanisms, or the access to commons in the second half of the eighteenth century

provoked fierce reactions from those who felt their positions were endangered. They had major

political consequences too, as they undermined the traditional vision of a paternal king efficiently

policing the grain markets in order to guarantee his subjects’ subsistence. As Steven Kaplan has

shown, the king’s role was the counterpart of the subjects’ acceptance of the duties imposed by the

State on individuals and communities. Liberal reforms in the 1760s and 1770s, which occurred

alongside bad harvests, generated the rumour that the government, and ultimately the court and the

king, were responsible for the grain shortage, or at least that they were unable or unwilling to stop

‘monopolists’ speculating on grain prices. 19

In shaking this fundamental element of state legitimacy,

the reforms paved the way to the politicization of traditional popular actions occurring whenever the

prices of flour and bread went beyond what contemporary consumers perceived as the fair price.

The analysis of eighteenth-century agriculture does not converge towards a uniform picture of a

triumphant march toward capitalism, leading to a bourgeois Revolution. Eighteenth-century

agriculture shows, instead, a complex web of conflicting interests and a diverging redistribution of

revenues. Whereas major landowners welcomed the possibility of integrating national and

international markets and took advantage of rising agricultural prices, they opposed any attempt to tax

land and incomes in a more substantial way, and defended their existing privileges. The Church, for

instance, was not only exempted from all taxes on property – although it paid yearly to the crown a

voluntary (negotiated) amount of money (don gratuit) – but benefitted also from the right to collect the

tithe on crops and livestock. It also benefitted from the seigneurial system. The latter, while open at

the top for commoners to become seigneurs, worked by controlling peasants’ communities and

imposing taxes and duties in kind or cash on local inhabitants, besides other constraints. French

provinces differed greatly as far as seigneurial rights were concerned: whereas they deprived peasants

of approximately 15 per cent of their revenues in the region of Toulouse, they were consistently

heavier in Bourgogne or Brittany. Before they paid taxes to the state and set aside the seeds for the

next sowing – which might alone require 20 to 25 per cent of the harvest – peasants had delivered to

the Church and the local seigneur up to a quarter of their crops. In abolishing these duties, the French

Revolution undoubtedly contributed to improve the situation of the peasantry, but although the cahiers

de doléances expressed grievances on these issues, they targeted what was perceived as an abuse or

abnormality, and not their existence as such.20

19

Steven L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-century France (Philadelphia 1982) ; Edward P.

Thompson et al., Guerre du blé au XVIIIe siècle : la critique populaire contre le libéralisme économique au

XVIIIe siècle (Montreuil, 1988).

20 Jean Gallet, Seigneurs et paysans en France, 1600-1793 (Rennes, 1999).

12

Rising agricultural prices encouraged owners and those who enjoyed privileges allowing them to tap a

part of the crops to augment their own production, their leases, and the shares they could obtain on

other people’s production. In order to do so, they could increase the area under cultivation (for much

land remained wood and ‘waste’), revive older privileges, increase existing ones, or annex parts of the

village commons to their own profit. Historians studying this so-called ‘feudal reaction’ have found a

considerable number of conflicts opposing seigneurs to peasant communities in the 1770s and 1780s,

as well as a widespread perception among contemporary observers that peasants were more reluctant

than before to comply with seigneurial rights. While it is clear this conflict no longer set a purely

noble ‘class’ against the peasantry, social tensions were undoubtedly high.

These tensions were due to both absolute and relative impoverishment: over the long term agricultural

revenues were more and more unequally redistributed. As peasants only owned approximately one

third of the land, most were involved in paying rent for at least some of the fields they worked. From

1726-1750 to 1781-1787, rents increased more than agricultural wages and less than wheat prices.21

Land-owners were therefore the main winners from agricultural growth. Most rents went to a

relatively narrow elite: the Church owned 10 per cent of French soil, the nobility slightly less than a

third, and members of urban bourgeoisie approximately a quarter. As state taxation fell on peasants

rather than land-owners, the French state did not benefit from the enrichment of the latter, and in

seeking to increase taxation to meet its rising financial needs it merely worsened peasants’ living

conditions.

National averages mask great differences: peasants’ property, for instance, accounted for less than 10

per cent in the region surrounding Versailles, but 50 per cent in the Limousin. Their vulnerability to

cereal prices or decreasing demand for agricultural work in case of crop failure was therefore

extremely variable from one province to the other, and sometimes from one village to the next, where

for example much could depend on extremely variable grape-harvests. Peasants’ interests, indeed,

were not homogeneous. Only a minority of peasants possessed enough land to feed their family

conveniently and was able, in a moderate year, to sell a part of it on the markets. The majority owned

or rented farms which could hardly guarantee their survival, unless they obtained some revenues as

agricultural or proto-industrial wage-earners. With cereal prices and rents rising quicker than wages,

they became increasingly indebted, and the most vulnerable among them had to sell their property.

From the mid-1770s, different sectors of agriculture were hit by a series of accidents – livestock

diseases (late 1770s-early 1780s), and hay failure (1785 and 1786) – whilst grape-harvests alternated

bad years, such as 1778, and overproduction, from the mid-1780s. Pauperism provoked an increased

number of beggars and vagabonds.

21

Weir, « Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française », 925, 934-935.

13

Under these circumstances, duties and taxes demanded by seigneurs, the Church and the state were

met with growing hostility. Peasants were increasingly inclined to believe that the crown, the

government and the rich in general were responsible for their situation, when not deliberately

conspiring against them. At different occasions in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s, the government tried to

favour the expansion of an integrated market economy by lifting existing constraints on the circulation

of cereals.22

These measures deprived local rural communities of parts of the crops which were sold on

distant markets. Peasants’ opposition to reform – and more generally, their overall attitude toward the

emergence of a more market-oriented economy and the extension of larger, profit-oriented estates –

was fundamentally anti-capitalistic in scope and aimed at protecting existing communitarian

structures.

The amount of social unrest expressing economic and fiscal grievances augmented considerably in the

period 1765-1789 (3,350 events, 60 per cent in villages or small towns) and peaked in the months

preceding the opening of the Estates-General.23

The Grande Peur in the second half of July 1789

should be understood on the background of growing tensions. Although the rural revolution was

largely autonomous from the events in Versailles and Paris since the opening of the Estates-General

and from the implosion of Old Regime municipal institutions, it was not unrelated to the general

context.24

The mobilization of rural communities for the drafting of the cahiers de doléances played an

essential role in increasing the conviction that existing difficulties were amenable to political solution

from a benevolent king listening to his people. Circulation of model cahiers by urban-based reformers

and discussion through the drafting process among the representatives of different villages favoured

increasing political consciousness. The convocation of the Estates-General created an immense hope

of regeneration throughout France, and news of the political stalemate in May-June 1789 magnified

the sense of frustration. But only the political void created by the collapse of the state allowed peasant

aspirations to approach reality.

The intensity of the peasants’ unrest in July 1789 pushed the National Assembly to abolish personal

feudal rights on the night of 4 August 1789, and to foresee the repurchase of feudal rights based upon

property. This was a decisive moment, as the representatives in Versailles eradicated by the same

token the principle of privilege, on which Old Regime society relied.25

Three months before, at the

opening of the Estates-General, none of the representatives had ever thought this outcome as possible

and only an insignificant number of their electors had ever wished it. The decision was not the result

22

Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (Den Haag, 1976). 23

Nicolas La rébellion française, 34-35. 24

On the autonomy of the peasants’ revolution, see the pioneer works of Georges Lefebvre, La Révolution

française et les paysans (1932), in Etudes sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1954) ; Georges Lefebvre, La

Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris,1932) ; and Paul Bois, Les paysans de l’Ouest. Des structures économiques et

sociales aux options politiques depuis l'époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans, 1960).

25 Anthony Crubaugh, « Feudalism », in Doyle, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, 219-235.

14

of a conscious political program, but the product of a specific political and economic conjuncture in a

socially explosive context. The further radicalization of the Revolution and the refusal of peasants to

pay for the redemption of rights would result in the feudal system’s eradication. This development

ultimately accelerated the process of privatization of land ownership, which was not necessarily what

the large majority of rural inhabitants had wished for. The dramatic financial situation of the state,

increased by the reluctance of the king’s subjects to pay taxes in the expectation of a major fiscal

reform, led to nationalization of the properties of the Catholic Church and to the consequent,

unplanned redistribution of land through the sale of the biens nationaux. This decision had hardly any

benefits for the small peasantry – the number of land-owners increased by only 10 per cent – and

ultimately accelerated the emergence of a post-revolutionary society and a political system based on

an elite of capitalist land-owners.26

Industry and Trade

French industrial production experienced an impressive growth in the eighteenth century, based on

several pillars: a wide rural putting-out system, factories like Anzin, Saint-Gobain, or Creusot, and

national and international trade.27

Setting aside the question of the emergence of a numerically

increased elite and of its composition, which we discussed above, analysis of how these economic

sectors might be related to the origins of the French Revolution leads us to question whether some of

their structural or short-term features increased social tensions.

In analyzing the state of French industry by the 1780s, French historians have been obsessed by

comparisons with Great Britain, and the basic question of whether the Revolution was responsible for

allowing the British to gain industrial primacy in the nineteenth century.28

A similar debate exists with

regard to the state of French external trade.29

Fully assessing the comparative performance of French

industry in international context is behind the scope of this chapter. More relevant for our purpose is

the fact that French industry faced difficult conditions in the late 1780s. The Eden-Rayneval treaty of

1786, which entered into application in May 1787, opened French markets to cheap British

manufactured goods. French imports of British cotton goods, for instance, increased fifteen-fold

26

Bernard Bodinier and Éric Teyssier, L’événement le plus important de la Révolution. La vente des biens

nationaux (Paris, 2000). 27

For an example of a proto-industrialised region and its links to the West Indies, see Claude Cailly, Mutations

d’un espace proto-industriel: la Perche aux XVIIIe-XIX

e siècles (Lille, 1993). Gérard Gayot, Les draps de Sedan,

(Paris, 1998) ; Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce : entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise,

1780-1860 (Paris, 1991). 28

See for instance Pierre Chaunu, « Préface », in François Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la

France. L’économie et l’imaginaire, XVIIIe-XX

e siècle (Paris, 1985), p. III : « At the end of the Ancient Regime

Régime […] nothing prevents us to suppose that […] France would ultimately gain. […] In eight years, from

1792 to 1800, all chances were wasted ». 29

See for instance Jean-Pierre Poussou, « Le dynamisme de l’économie française sous Louis XVI », Revue

économique 40, 6 (1989), 965-984. For a divergent point of view, Michel Morineau, « La vraie nature des choses

et leur enchaînement entre la France, les Antilles et l’Europe (XVIIe-XIX

e siècle) », Revue française d’histoire

d’Outre-mer 84, 314 (1997), 3-24, and Silvia Marzagalli, « Le négoce maritime et la rupture révolutionnaire : un

ancien débat revisité », Annales historiques de la Révolution française 352, 2 (2008), 183-207.

15

between 1786 and 1788. This competition created major difficulties in northern and north-eastern

France, both for proto-industrial and factory workers, reflected in the cahiers de doléances and in an

increasing level of disorder.30

In the Amiens-Abbeville region, the number of working looms dropped

by a third between 1785 and 1789.

Unemployment or underemployment affected rural and urban workers at the very moment where the

price of the cereals was dramatically increasing. In late spring 1789, urban wage-earners spent 80 per

cent of their wages on bread, compared to 50 per cent when crops were average. Moreover, by

obliging people to postpone all other expenses, the agricultural crisis accentuated the fall in demand

for manufactured goods, and thus increased the difficulties of the industrial sector. The conjunction of

unemployment and high bread prices increased considerably the number of food riots: Jean Nicolas

counted 58 riots in 1788, and 231 during the four first months of 1789. Fifty-three per cent of them

occurred in cities.31

Although the army was generally able to repress popular riots in short times, there

was increasing concern about soldiers’ willingness to do so. As is well-known, bread prices reached a

peak in Paris on 14 July 1789.

Whereas the industrial sector was affected by a temporary crisis at the eve of the French Revolution,

with dramatic results, there is no visible sign of difficulties in trade, which had experienced

considerable growth throughout the eighteenth century. This was the result of the expansion of

national markets and increasing integration with growing international and colonial markets.

Eighteenth-century growth of agricultural and industrial production led to an expansion of internal

exchanges, which was accompanied by the authorities’ efforts to facilitate trade. Within the country,

an extremely dense network of local markets – 2,500 according to Dominique Margairaz, 60 per cent

of which were in towns and villages of less than 2,000 inhabitants – and fairs (4,200 places had at least

one fair each year) contributed to knit together the different parts of the kingdom.32

Beside an essential

economic function, they also made the circulation of information easier, and they created spaces for

informal discussions.

External trade grew strongly throughout the eighteenth century. French ship-owners carried to

Marseille half of the total exports of the Ottoman Empire to Western Europe, and French merchant

houses were particularly successful in Cadiz, a gateway to the Spanish Empire. However, the most

impressive growth occurred in relation with the French West Indies: the colonial and slave trades, and

colonial re-export trade to northern Europe and the Levant (through Marseille), explain the

considerable growth of Bordeaux, Nantes and Le Havre, both demographically, and in terms of

wealth, and the rapid recovery of Marseille after the dramatic plague in 1720. At the eve of the French

30

Nicolas, La rébellion française, 291-293, records 63 conflicts in the 1770s and 99 in the 1780s. 31

Nicolas, La rébellion française, 260-261. 32

Dominique Margairaz, Foires et marchés dans la France préindustrielle (Paris, 1988).

16

Revolution, the French West Indies produced half of the sugar and the great majority of the coffee

consumed in Europe. Sugar imports increased twentyfold between 1720 and 1789.33

Whilst attacking the Marxist interpretation according to which a triumphant commercial bourgeoisie

was a major actor of the French Revolution, some historians have insisted on the catastrophic

consequences of the Revolution on this group.34

Questions have been raised, however, on the long-

term viability of the eighteenth-century structure of French foreign trade and on its performance.35

By

1789, colonial imports from the West Indies represented a third of French total imports, and an

increasing part of French exports consisted in colonial goods, which were mostly re-exported without

being transformed, together with other agricultural products, such as wine and oil. In other terms, trade

did not contribute to foster industrialization. Moreover, re-exports occurred mainly on foreign vessels,

without contributing to a greater development of the maritime sector. The part of industrial products in

the structure of French exports was far less significant than for Great Britain, and they amounted to

less than 15 per cent of exports to colonial markets. The whole colonial system relied on slavery, and

increase in colonial production and trade occurred through an intensification of the plantation system

and slave exploitation – a factor which created an explosive situation in Saint-Domingue (today’s

Haiti) – and not through decisive technological changes in colonial production.36

Moreover, despite impressive growth rates in production, the plantation economy in the French West

Indies suffered from a crisis after the Seven Years War due to rising production costs, whereas the

prices of colonial crops stagnated, or in the case of coffee declined. Planters owed increasing amounts

of money to French merchants, and by 1788, colonial debt amounted to 148 million livres. French

merchants frequently acquired plantations in repayment of debts, but were rarely able to run them as

profitably as they hoped.37

Michel Morineau has suggested that the enormous increase in colonial

production might have been nothing else than the attempt to pay off debts.38

33

Silvia Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, in Nicholas

Canny and Philip Morgan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c. 1450-c1820 (Oxford, 2011),

235-251. 34

François Crouzet, « La ruine du grand commerce », in François-Georges Pariset (ed.), Bordeaux au XVIIIe

siècle (Bordeaux, 1968), 485-510; Poussou, « Le dynamisme de l’économie française sous Louis XVI ». 35

Louis Meignen, « Le commerce extérieur de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime », Revue historique du

droit français et étranger 56, 4 (1973), 583-614. Pierre Léon, « Structure du commerce extérieur et évolution

industrielle de la France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle », in Conjoncture économique, structures sociales. Hommages

à Ernest Labrousse (Paris, 1974), 407-432. 36

The 1791-slave revolt in Saint-Domingue is both related to political developments in France and to local

tensions provoked by the past decades of economic development of the island production. However, if the

colonies play a relevant role in French revolutionary process and in the political decisions taken in Paris – see

Yves Bénot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris, 1987) - their role in discussing the origin of the

1789-French Revolution is mainly confined to their contribution to the emergence of a rich merchant elite in

French ports. 37

Françoise Thésée, Négociants bordelais et colons de Saint-Domingue. « Liaisons d’habitations ». La maison

Henry Romberg, Bapst et Cie, 1783-1793, Paris, SFHOM, 1972. 38

Michel Morineau, « La vraie nature des choses et leur enchaînement entre la France, les Antilles et l’Europe

(XVIIe-XIX

e siècle) », 13-14.

17

Whereas these debates do not directly question the origins of the Revolution, the structure of French

external trade is related to the difficulties which led to the Revolution. Michel Morineau suggested that

the logics of a colonial empire built to favour metropolitan interests created a set of imbalances which

required complex international compensation mechanisms, of which warfare was a major component.

Building on this idea, I suggested that warfare was necessary to keep eighteenth-century French

colonial system viable.39

Given the fact that war represented the main cause of the desperate financial

situation of the French monarchy at the eve of the Revolution, and the reason which forced the king to

accept the convocation of the Estates-General, the development of eighteenth-century French trade and

the political choice to favour colonial trade can be considered as an element leading to the outbreak of

the Revolution.

Contemporary French elites clearly perceived the importance of colonies and were concerned with

conceptualizing their role for France: Paul Cheney has recently shown how the growth of colonial

trade affected contemporaries’ thought on the relation between trade, politics, moral and taxation. The

evolution of discourses created the ideological background against which Barnave and Mirabeau,

among others, faced the challenge of imagining the place of the colonies and of slavery in a post-

revolutionary world.40

Conclusion

Ultimately, when analyzing the economic origins of the French Revolution, it becomes evident that

their understanding requires a consistent awareness of the interactions between politics and economic

life, both of which are embedded in a complex web of social and cultural interactions among

individuals and groups.

The reassessment of the composition of French elites at the eve of the Revolution which has been

undertaken in the past forty years no longer supports the view of an emerging capitalistic bourgeoisie

strengthened by long-term industrial and trade growth, fighting against a feudal nobility to access

political rights. However, rejection of the traditional Marxist interpretation does not eliminate

demography and economy from the picture of the origins of the Revolution. The French Revolution

cannot be understood by only taking political and cultural factors into account. In stressing the

escalation of social tensions provoked by an unequal redistribution of the resources created by

sustained growth in agriculture, industry and trade, analysis of the demographic and economic

developments of eighteenth-century France helps to understand the background against which the

convergence of political and short-term subsistence crises pushed rural and urban masses to revolt in

39

Morineau, « La vraie nature des choses et leur enchaînement entre la France, les Antilles et l’Europe (XVIIe -

XIXe siècle) » ; Silvia Marzagalli, “Is warfare necessary to the functioning eighteenth-century colonial systems?

Some reflections on the necessity of cross-imperial and foreign trade in the French case”, in Catia Antunes and

Amelia Polonia (ed.), Beyond Empires: Self-Organizing Cross-Imperial Economic Networks versus Institutional

Empires, 1500-1800 (forthcoming, 2014). 40

Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce. Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, 2010).

18

1789. Without their actions, which cannot be explained without this background, the political

revolution led by a majority of the representatives who met in Versailles would have been repressed.

It is much more questionable whether the political revolution itself had an economic origin. Like all

historical processes, the French Revolution is the result of long-term tendencies and situational events,

to which actors add their own perceptions and intentions. Looking at the causes of the Revolution by

observing its consequences is therefore misleading, because in doing so, historians erase the

uncertainty of the present in which actors lived, and which influenced their actions. Looking at the

results, historians attribute a consciousness in the pursuit of goals which ought to be demonstrated

instead of postulated. The French Revolution produced indeed a turn toward a capitalistic world in the

sense that it freed property from collective rights and complex jurisdictional webs, and put the

working classes under stricter control. The Revolution ultimately gave political rights to a new social

category of landed proprietors, in which non-nobles were numerous. Assuming that the Revolution

occurred because a capitalistic class-conscious bourgeoisie aimed to achieve these goals is simply

contrary to historical evidence. But it could be advanced that the eighteenth-century evolution of the

French economy reinforced and shaped an elite of wealthy people, almost all of which were land-

owners, with some investing in industry and trade, and that this elite, experiencing a long

revolutionary process which brought the mass of the population to the fore time and again, might

come to recognize its common interest in guaranteeing social control over them.

Bibliography

Ado Anatoli, Paysans en Révolution. Terre, pouvoir et jacquerie, 1789-1804, Paris, Société des

Etudes Robespierristes, 1996.

Béaur Gérard, Histoire agraire de la France au XVIIIe siècle : inerties et changements dans les

campagnes françaises entre 1715 et 1815 (Paris 2000).

Braudel Fernand and Labrousse Ernest, Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris 1970).

Daudin Guillaume, Commerce et prospérité. La France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005).

Doyle William, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988).

Dupaquier Jacques, Histoire de la population française, vol. 2 : De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris,

1988).

Kaplan Steven L., Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (Den Haag, 1976).

19

Labrousse, Camille-Ernest, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle

(Paris, 1932)

Labrousse, Camille-Ernest, La crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début

de la Révolution (Paris, 1944).

Lemarchand Guy, L’économie en France de 1770 à 1830. De la crise de l’Ancien Régime à la

révolution industrielle (Paris, 2008).

Morineau Michel, Les faux-semblants d’un démarrage économique : agriculture et démographie en

France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1971).

Nicolas Jean, La rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale (1661-1789)

(Paris, 2002).

Soboul Albert, La Révolution française [1965] (Paris, 2010).

Weir, David R., « Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française », Annales.

Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46, 4 (1991), 917-947.

Woronoff Denis, Histoire de l’industrie en France: du XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1994).