Suchergebnisse

This article combines uniquely detailed household-level tax assessments with reconstituted family histories for an eighteenth-century agricultural village near Paris. The tax records reveal substantial diversity in income among taxpayers despite the exemptions given privileged landowners. High-income households had significantly lower levels of infant and adult mortality, earlier age at marriage of the wife, and slightly lower rates of emigration by their surviving children. Marital fertility was high at all income levels. These classic Malthusian patterns were found at the household level more than a generation after the last great subsistence crises and resulted in a much higher local rate of replacement for the better-off families.

This article re-examines the secular improvement in human heights in France. Adult heights reflect consumption as children, so the distribution of resources between children and adults, determined primarily within households, should have influenced heights. The intrahousehold distribution of resources was influenced by the level of income and by the calorie demands of working adults. Results show that the early decline of marital fertility in France was accompanied by a small but significant increase in expenditures on child quality as measured by heights. Reductions in mortality, independent of the level of food intake, also contributed to improved heights.

Dans l'espoir de redonner à l'histoire économique sa place légitime dans l'historiographie des origines de la Révolution, nous étudierons, dans cet article, les données quantitatives concernant les conditions et les résultats de l'économie française au XVIIIesiècle. Des historiens appartenant à des écoles de pensée différentes se sont attaqués à l'interprétation économique de l'histoire; néo-tories anglais, néo-tocquevilliens français et spécialistes américains de l'histoire des cultures et des sociétés . Curieusement alors que ces analyses cherchaient à donner le coup de grâce aux interprétations d'inspiration marxiste de Jaurès, Mathiez, Lefebvre et Soboul, elles ont donné à l'historien C.-E. Labrousse, spécialiste des questions économiques, une place d'honneur dans une de ces chapelles latérales où brûlent en permanence des cierges mais où ne se célèbre plus aucun service. Ceux qui tiennent à souligner l'autonomie de la culture politique s'accommodent bien de Labrousse qui, tout comme Simiand, insistait sur l'autonomie des forces économiques. Il est possible de réciter ses statistiques économiques comme une litanie sans qu'il soit nécessaire de réfléchir à leur signification possible dans l'ordre politique. Cette séparation de l'économique et du politique appauvrit notre compréhension de l'économie au XVIIIesiècle et des origines de la Révolution.

Tontines were used more extensively by France than Britain. Comparative tontine history illuminates the differing evolution of public finance in the two countries and its political consequences. Archival materials establish the number of participants in French tontines. Internal rates of return on tontines and alternatives show subsidy of tontines by the French government. Repudiation in 1770 contributed to the political attitudes of life annuitants, the most important class of state creditors, during the fiscal crisis of the late 1780s.

The question at issue is whether estimates of GNP and unemployment before 1930 exaggerate cyclical volatility enough to produce a false impression of increasing economic stability over the twentieth century. Based on research to be reported in detail at a later date, the answer is no. The range of possible exaggerations is small relative to the observed change.

Most explanations of fertility change in preindustrial England empha size changes in age at marriage. This paper shows that, even after correcting for possible exaggerations in estimated celibacy rates, it was celibacy and not age at marriage that accounted for most of fertility variation before 1750. New research and new models of marriage behavior are needed. It may be necessary to abandon homeostasis to arrive at an adequate explanation of English fertility history.

Comparative methods are used to examine two hypotheses derived from Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. Contrary to their expectations, economic shocks produced greater marriage responses in France than in England, and the early onset of family limitation in France did not increase the responsiveness of marital fertility to living standards in the aggregate. Mortality was strongly dependent on economic shocks only in France prior to 1740. The results question the usefulness of Maithusian models for early modern European economic history.

This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borrowing became substantially higher than the yields on old debt, resulting in increasing government reliance on expensive life annuities.