What is required from agriculture during the course of industrialization is an increase in productivity. This allows the primary sector to meet the inevitable rise in demand for food and industrial materials, and also to ‘release’ resources (principally labour and capital) to industry and the services. The ‘revolutionary’ measures that would make possible higher productivity took two forms. First, there was the diffusion of new techniques for cultivating the soil: the advanced crop rotations and heavier stocking of animals that permitted an intensification of mixed husbandry, and later, after about 1840, chemical fertilisers and farm machinery. Second, there were organizational changes, notably enclosures and the consolidation of holdings. So gradual was this revolution in France that historians have had great difficulty in pinning down its progress. Yet the chronology of change is of critical importance in the debates surrounding French agriculture. Three key questions have to be confronted when assessing the responsiveness of French agriculture to change. When did productivity on the land begin to rise? What was the influence of the system of land tenure? And what role did agriculture play in overall development?

At one extreme, an early start to the agricultural revolution would be consistent with a strong or ‘propulsive role’ for the primary sector in the development process. Bairoch champions the thesis that profound changes in the system of agriculture would be necessary before any industrial revolution could take place [24, 452–506].