Historiography

In Autumn 1963 the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) recommended, on the advice of Ernest Labrousse, that systematic research be undertaken on the fluctuations in agricultural production during the French ancien régime, on the basis of such sources as estate accounts, leases, tithe registers and the contracts made with tithe collectors. Labrousse made this suggestion because he wanted to draw the attention of economic historians to a type of source which a few bold spirits had exploited in an attempt to calculate the relationship between population, production, revenue and consumption, as precisely as possible and preferably over the long term. At this point, important progress was being made in historical demography, thanks to the work of Pierre Goubert on the Beauvaisis, and the research directed by Pierre Chaunu, Louis Henry and Marcel Reinhard, not to mention the iconoclastic hypotheses formulated by René Baehrel in his study of Provence. The ‘new rural history’ of early modern France had much more to say about the landscape, the agrarian systems, the social structure and prices than about yields, productivity and, above all, production. Two works which appeared more or less simultaneously were crucial in the evolution of ideas about French rural society in the early modern period.