4—
Interpreting Peasant Revolutions

The failure to develop a market for all forms of property rights had consequences for the economic potential of Old Regime France. Rural society was perhaps the single greatest victim of that failure. The access of peasants to local markets was restricted by their lords, who themselves were often denied access to international markets for their surplus grain. Wealthy peasants sought to exit from restrictive communal agricultural practices, while poor peasants generally wanted village common lands divided and, like the rich, demanded freedom from feudal dues. All were locked into property rights structures that prevented the optimal allocation of resources. Although the terms of trade and relative bargaining power had shifted during the eighteenth century, contract renegotiation did not occur. Those who paid for inefficient rights had no forum in which to buy out the rights of those who benefited from the arrangements. Bargaining between groups that held economic rights was restricted by the Old Regime's political structure, which permitted the king alone to redefine property rights. Since there was no possibility of direct bargaining, court cases and civil disobedience were the only venues left for renegotiating agrarian property rights.

To overcome the impasse, eighteenth-century French economic reformers, the physiocrats, attempted to convince the king that renegotiating the terms of the contract could enable even the humblest farmer to contribute to the expansion of the nation's wealth. Their belief that peasants would respond to the proper incentives by growing more and by utilizing more efficient methods contrasted sharply with the administrative and legal traditions of the Old Regime. Peasant production was burdened with seigneurial dues and royal taxes that consumed much of the extra income above subsistence produced by the peasants. In fact, the tax system led

peasants to simulate poverty, since signs of wealth invited heavy taxation. Peasants thus had few incentives to improve their lot in the ways advocated by the physiocrats. The negative incentives created by taxes and feudal dues were obvious to a wide range of social critics during the eighteenth century. Comparing the English to the French peasant, Voltaire wrote: "He is not afraid to increase the number of his cattle, or to cover his roof with tile, lest his taxes be raised next year. There are many peasants here [England] who own property amounting to some 200,000 francs, and who do not disdain to keep on cultivating the soil that enriched them."^[1] Adam Smith wrote that on account of the personal tax (taille ), "which is assessed in proportion to the stock which he appears to employ in cultivation," the French farmer is "afraid to have a good team of horses or oxen, but endeavors to cultivate with the meanest and most wretched instruments of husbandry that he can. Such is his distrust in the justice of his assessors, that he counterfeits poverty, and wishes to appear scarce able to pay for any thing, for fear of being obliged to pay too much."^[2]

Without taking into account the disincentives facing eighteenth-century French peasants, historians today often argue that premodern peasants preferred subsistence and security to production and individual wealth creation. The belief that moral considerations led peasants to adopt a subsistence ethic and communal property underlies the interpretation of the origins of peasant violence commonest in the writings of present-day historians. Georges Lefebvre was the most influential of the authors working out of this tradition. The economic logic of Lefebvre's explanation of rural protest during the Old Regime sharply contrasts with the notion that the peasantry's participation in a market system depends on the character of market incentives.

Lefebvre's discovery of a peasant revolution within the French Revolution is generally viewed as one of the fundamental contributions to the study of the French peasantry. In numerous publications, he asserted that during the French Revolution "there was a peasant revolution, which possessed an autonomy, its own origins, procedures, crises and tendencies."^[3]

[1] Voltaire, Philosophical Letters , trans. Ernest Dilworth (Macmillan, 1985), 38.

[2] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Adam, Black, & Longmans, 1850), bk. 5, art. 2, p. 386. Both Voltaire and Smith confused two separate phenomena: concealing wealth and producing it. Smith's analysis differs from contemporary economics, which emphasizes the return relative to outlay on the margin.

[3] Lefebvre's views on the peasant revolution are synthesized and forcefully stated in "La Révolution française et les paysans," first published in Annales historiques de la Révolution française in 1933, and then again in Cahiers de la Révolution française in 1934. It was reprinted in Georges Lefebvre, Etudes sur la Révolution française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), 338–67, the version quoted here.

In a revolution that was the culmination of a long social and economic evolution, which made the bourgeoisie the political, social, and economic masters of France, the peasants took another road. According to Lefebvre, peasants tried to find their way back to their pre-capitalist, pre-bourgeois past.

Lefebvre's belief in the pre-capitalist nature of peasant culture led him to account for the initial conditions, origin, and design of rural institutions, characteristic patterns of change, and psychological traits of rural dwellers. His explanation of peasant political violence has dominated most subsequent treatments of the subject and is often cited by theorists of modernization in other fields.^[4] Lefebvre's emphasis on "the pre-capitalist tendencies" of peasant revolutions^[5] is now open to question, as much has been learned about rural institutions since the ideas that influenced Lefebvre were formulated.^[6]

Peasants and Markets

Lefebvre believed that the violence that erupted in the early years of the French Revolution reflected efforts by the peasantry to protect their pre-capitalist culture from the advance of capitalism. The pre-capitalist institutions of peasant society in France, he tells us, were attacked by a coalition of lords and state wanting to "liberate cultivation from all regulation, allow producers to freely sell their produce, suppress collective rights, especially communal pasture rights, and divide communal property. The royal administration was inclined toward the innovations; no doubt the interests of the privileged tipped the balance. Most of them did not care about na-

[4] A good example of Lefebvre's influence is Barrington Moore, Jr., "Evolution and Revolution in France," in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 40–108.

[5] See Robert H. Bates, "Some Conventional Orthodoxies in the Study of Agrarian Change," World Politics 11 (1984); Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); H. Binswanger and M. Rosenzweig, "Contractual Arrangements, Employment and Wages in Rural Labor Markets: A Critical Review," in Contractual Arrangements, Employment and Wages in Rural Labor Markets in Asia , ed. H. Binswanger and M. Rosenzweig (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); M. Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); T. Schultz, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); T. Schultz, ed., Distortions of Agricultural Incentives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

[6] Lefebvre, in turn, owes much of his vision to the ideas of Jules Guesde, who founded a Marxist workers' party in Flemish Wallone. See Adeodat Constant Adolphe Compere-Morel, Grand dictionnaire socialiste du mouvement politique (Paris: Publications sociales, 1924).

tional production: they wanted to increase their revenues. The theories of the economists provided them with the pretext of serving the national interest."^[7] A reactionary and archaic peasantry, Lefebvre tells us, united to resist this offensive against their traditional rights and properties. Why were the pre-capitalist institutions and practices so valuable to the peasantry?

Lefebvre explains that the pre-capitalist institutions of the peasantry expressed collective moral values that were threatened by capitalism. The pre-capitalist culture embodied what Lefebvre called the droit social . This meant that "superior to property are the just needs of the community, in which all the inhabitants have a right to live. This notion of the 'droit social ,' conserved since the beginning of history in the heart of the rural communities, is what present-day socialism should consider the seed of the contemporary [socialist] movement, and [was something] the peasants had not forgotten when they left the village for the factories."^[8] The communal institutions of the village institutionalized the droit social .^[9]

By "capitalism," Lefebvre seems to mean a system of resource allocation dictated by markets and characterized by private property. Applying the labor theory of value, Lefebvre explains that capital was accumulated by the separation of labor from the means of production.^[10] He thus came to believe that the rise of capitalism was deleterious to peasant well-being, because capitalism by definition turns peasants into a proletariat, denied control over the means of production.^[11]

Lefebvre believed that the norms of country dwellers were incompatible with the culture of possessive individualism, which he associated with the rising bourgeoisie. Elite culture, he assumes, was more open to capitalism and market behavior than was popular or peasant culture. Peasant institutions and norms functioned to preserve basic peasant values: membership, equality, and subsistence. Concerned with production for use rather than exchange, Lefebvre's peasants wanted only to reproduce their families. Market participation was subordinated to reciprocity and redistribution, and

[7] Lefebvre, "La Révolution française et les paysans," 350–51.

[8] Ibid., 349.

[9] Lefebvre's theory of peasant political violence is still very much alive. Florence Gauthier and Guy-Robert Ikni endorse Lefebvre's approach in La Guerre du blé au XVIIIsiècle (Paris: Les Editions de la passion, 1988), 7–31.

[10] Private property and separation of the means of production are not the same. One can have either without the other.

[11] Lefebvre's successor, Albert Soboul, was even more explicit in applying the labor theory of value to the history of the French peasantry. See "The French Rural Communities in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Past and Present 10 (1956): 78–96.

their resources were allocated by values determined by communal, as opposed to market, relationships. Opposition to bourgeois values, then, provided the revolutionary ideology that inspired the peasantry.

By locating the origin of agrarian rebellion in efforts to protect peasant institutions from the corrosive effects of market culture, Lefebvre's analysis raises a number of questions about the desirability of markets. The peasants were "above all profoundly attached to collective rights and to regulation, that is, to pre-capitalist economic and social systems, not only by routine but also because the capitalist transformation of agriculture worsened their living conditions." Since he assumed that the spread of markets threatened peasant welfare, Lefebvre argued that the pursuit of improved social welfare would have led the peasant to reject market solutions. "It mattered little to him that productivity was increased because it was he who would have to pay the price of this progress, while the benefits—at least in the beginning—would be reserved for the large landowners who produce in order to sell to the market. In short, he opposed with all his force the capitalist transformation of agriculture."^[12]

Lefebvre argued that the peasantry's common fields and rights, which institutionalized pre-market values, were essential to its pre-capitalist identity. "All the thoughts of the poor peasant tended toward limiting the right of individual property in order to defend collective rights, which allowed him to survive and which he regarded as a property as sacred as the others, and to prevent the supplies necessary to his existence from becoming inaccessible."^[13] The agricultural system to which Lefebvre was referring included a mixture of privately and collectively owned land. The arable land was divided into a few large, open fields, with families owning strips in each field. Although peasants possessed fields in each strip, separate, fenced-off parcels were not permitted. The village collectively decided what would be planted in the open fields, which, in northern France, were divided into three. One third was usually planted in wheat, one in spring grain (barley or oats), and the remainder was normally fallow. All villagers had the right to pasture their livestock on common fields, wasteland, and the stubble of harvested fields. Communal restrictions on land ownership, Lefebvre tells us, were designed to ensure a subsistence minimum to all members of the community and were thus especially important for the poorer peasants.^[14] Common rights, he believed, provided the

[12] Lefebvre, "La Révolution française et les paysans," 344, 348.

[13] Ibid., 348.

[14] Georges Lefebvre, "The Place of the Revolution in the Agrarian History of France," translated and reprinted in Rural Society in France, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 36. Here Lefebvre reiterates some familiar themes: "Progress in agricultural techniques could only be achieved at the expense of the poor" (36), which explains why "the great majority of rural people wished to uphold the traditional agriculture and time-honored regulations which, in effect, curtailed individual property rights" (38).

poor peasants with a safety net: insurance against the threat of complete destitution. Protecting their communal property, then, was an essential means of securing this entitlement.

Lefebvre argues that one would find much more sympathy for nascent capitalism among the rich than among the peasant masses. The wealthy alone benefited from the spread of markets, because capitalism, which spread inequality and thrived by exploitation, could only result in the inevitable proletarianization of the peasantry. Here, Lefebvre asserts the Marxist claim that capitalism required cheap proletarian labor. The traditional peasant smallholding had to be sacrificed so that the essential separation of labor from the means of production could occur. Thus, the rise of capitalism implied greater political and economic domination of the majority of the peasantry by the capitalist class. A further implication of this argument is that markets invariably reduce peasant well-being by exposing the poor to a greater risk of falling below the subsistence level. Lefebvre backs up his claim by arguing that, during the late eighteenth century, the expansion of market relations resulted in an agrarian crisis and increased rural poverty.

Lefebvre assumed that the majority of the peasants opposed the expansion of private property and preferred communal property, but did common rights play the role he attributes to them? During the Revolution, the poor in commercial regions often clamored for the division of the commons into individual parcels, while the rich worked for their preservation.^[15] This anomaly can be explained if we look at the example of Burgundy, a region characterized by a highly commercial agriculture. There, well-to-do peasants had much to gain from the preservation of communal fields and meadows because they dominated those fields with their herds of sheep and cattle. The wealthy were also strong defenders of communal woods when the king ordered during the eighteenth century that they be distributed according to tax payments. Wealthy peasants, then, supported communal rights because of the private benefits they derived from them.

[15] On wealthy peasants and common rights, see Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 16, 95–97, 125, 138–39, 153, 216–17, 228.

Moreover, membership in the community entitled peasants to use the community's rights and properties. Vagrant workers, the poorest peasants, were denied membership in the community and thus received no benefit from common resources. Furthermore, in crisis after crisis, poor peasants learned that common rights and fields could not protect them from falling beneath the subsistence minimum. Once they began to fall below that minimum, they invariably lost their livestock and could no longer benefit from communal properties. The preservation of common rights could increase inequality and stratification among members of the peasant community. Inevitably, peasant commitments to communal agriculture varied according to the proximity of markets. Nevertheless, common property was not a necessary component of the subsistence ethic.

Although Lefebvre associated the existence and preservation of communal rights with peasant values, in numerous cases, royal policy ensured the survival of communal rights and properties. The Crown, beginning with Louis XIV, attempted to reverse a trend toward the loss of communal rights and properties by prohibiting their sale. To provide communities with regular income, royal administrators encouraged lease auctions of village pastures. Royal officials wanted to protect communities that used their common properties as collateral for loans from the risk of losing their properties outright and ensure that communities would have enough income to pay taxes owed to the king.^[16]

Far from being vestiges of a pre-capitalist value system, communal properties played an important part in the commercial economy of the eighteenth century and in the calculations and market strategies of peasants. Even the poorest peasants were able to find important commercial uses for common rights. They often pastured sheep for town butchers and in exchange were allowed to keep some of the profits.^[17] As communal rights became commercialized, they provided the capital that guaranteed the existence of communities. Villages had a greater incentive to commit resources to defend those properties as their value increased.^[18] This incentive to defend collective rights would not have existed if alternative uses of the capital tied up in the land were possible. However, the Crown barred villages from selling the land and investing the proceeds in alternative assets such as dams, roads, and mills. Villages were similarly barred from

[16] See ibid., ch. 1.

[17] See Françoise Fortunet, Charité ingénieuse et pauvre misère: Les Baux à cheptal simple en Auxois aux XVIIIet XIX siècles (Dijon: Editions universitaires de Dijon, 1985).

[18] See Root, Peasants and King, ch. 4.

selling the land and turning the proceeds over to the Crown in exchange for a lower tax rate.

Stronger participation in the market economy was not achieved at the expense of village properties and rights, and those rights did not insulate peasants from the external economy.^[19] By treating collective properties as commodities to be leased at peak commercial value, commercialization protected those properties from usurpation and dissolution. There was no implicit contradiction between communal property and production for the market; rather, communal properties sustained market activity.

The Subsistence Ethic

Theorists of moral economy coming after Lefebvre have attempted to explain the rationale for the emergence of institutions that Lefebvre describes. That rationale is most clearly articulated in the writings of James Scott, who draws heavily on Lefebvre for historical evidence.^[20] Scott explains that peasants exist in an environment in which they must constantly struggle for survival: given the caprices of nature, primitive technology results in a state of chronic insecurity. To cope with this insecurity, peasants develop institutions and norms that emphasize safety first.^[21] The institutions designed to provide minimum subsistence were built upon a logic that Lefebvre and Scott argue was both moral and egalitarian: moral because all members of the community were guaranteed a subsistence minimum; egalitarian in the sense that an attempt was being made to ensure that no one in the village starved unless everyone starved.

Both authors believe that, left on their own, peasants would have preferred common property to private property and subsistence production to market production. Markets and private property, they tell us, were imposed on peasants by outside forces. These forces might be states or dominant classes whose exactions imposed on peasants a need to produce a surplus and to take it to market. The pressure came from seigneurial capitalists during the late eighteenth century who, under cover of feudal rights, introduced new methods of estate management, forcing peasants

[19] Florence Gauthier elaborates on Lefebvre's position by arguing that communal independence was threatened by the leasing of communal properties. See Gauthier, La voie paysanne dans la révolution française: L'example Picard (Paris: François Maspero, 1977).

[20] James Scott, Jr., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

[21] "The small peasant cultivates above all for his subsistence and he was tortured by the fear of dearth [la peur de 'manquer' ]" (Lefebvre, "La Révolution française et les paysans," 348).

into market production.^[22] This argument, that the struggle against the market was a struggle against feudal rights, has been popular even with revisionist authors like Alfred Cobban. Turning traditional Marxist categories on their head, he suggested that the so-called aristocratic reaction of the eighteenth century reflected the influence of bourgeois values on the behavior of rural seigneurs.^[23] Like Lefebvre, he argued that the seigneurs were not traditional and retrograde but forward-looking and capitalistic. Hence, peasant resistance was not anti-aristocratic or anti-feudal but anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.

An alternative hypothesis for increased hostility to feudal dues during the Old Regime can be suggested. Prior to the so-called capitalist period, the dues paid by peasants to their lords were less often the subject of contention. The expansion of markets in the eighteenth century changed peasant attitudes toward feudal dues. The dues put peasants at a competitive disadvantage because the structure of dues collection allowed the lords to capture a disproportionate percentage of the gains from trade. For example, the lords claimed monopoly control of capital goods such as ovens, mills, and wine presses, and they collected dues that in some areas imposed taxes of 20 percent on peasant production. The burden of the feudal dues thus seemed less and less fair and was more strongly resented as market opportunities expanded. Relations between lord and peasant were further aggravated because the increases in production earmarked for national market consumption enabled lords to find a monetary equivalent for the feudal dues they had originally collected in kind. The expansion and integration of markets provided the lords with an increased incentive to collect dues vigilantly. In the jargon of economics, as markets expanded, so too did the opportunity costs to peasants denied access to the surplus produced for those markets. Both sides would have benefited if the contract imposing the collection of feudal dues could have been renegotiated. Then the struggle would have been over how the percentages should be divided. But the alternative of renegotiating the original allocation of rights would have been too costly under the Old Regime. A market in which the rights could be traded did not exist.

Lefebvre's description of the majority of peasants in Old Regime France as "semi-subsistence producers" tells us little about their access to markets. Their being "semi-subsistence producers" does not mean that peasants

[22] W. Doyle criticizes Lefebvre's belief in the link between the seigneurial reaction and the Revolution. See Doyle, "Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France?" Past and Present 57 (1972): 97–123.

[23] Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).

were not interested in increasing their wealth beyond subsistence. The core of Lefebvre's explanation of peasant unrest in the late eighteenth century was his belief that peasants wanted to defend the pre-capitalist nature of peasant culture. He assumes that peasants had initially had a communal economy at some time and that adequate markets for peasants' produce did not exist, or that peasants were unaware of their benefits. However, what if potentially adequate markets for agricultural goods did exist, but peasants were unable to take advantage of them? If peasants could not compete effectively in the marketplace, they would indeed have resorted to localized communal economies out of individual self-interest. Lefebvre's argument is contradicted by C. E. Labrousse's claim that most peasants had to satisfy their basic subsistence needs at the marketplace.^[24]

Poor peasants, who typically needed credit and access to markets to pay off debts, were particularly vulnerable to exploitation by lords. Often, poor peasants needed producer credit to buy inputs before a crop could be raised. When poor peasants are able to contract loans, it is usually at higher interest rates than those available to peasants with more collateral. Because interest payments eat up a larger portion of small farmers' output, poor farmers are even more dependent than their wealthier counterparts on fair access to the market for the sale of their produce.

The subsistence ethic Lefebvre emphasizes might have been a rational response to the risky conditions under which peasants lived before adequate market opportunities were available, mainly because regional and interregional markets were not reliable enough to provide supplies at times of local shortage. In the 123 years between 1618 and 1741, there were 65 years in which shortages were registered in some region of France and 20 years during which prices tripled from their norms, causing great hardships. Nevertheless, during none of those years were the harvests as bad as those in 1767, 1768, or 1769, by which time greater liberty trade had eliminated some of the worst discrepancies in price.^[25] Markets expanded because intendants prevented local officials, mayors, and parlements from closing markets to outsiders during times of difficulty. By the late eighteenth century, peasants in many regions could depend upon broader markets for acquiring goods in times of shortage and selling in times of abundance. Local resources could thus be supplemented to pull peasants through local shortages, and local abundance did not result in disastrously

[24] C. E. Labrousse, Esquise du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIsiecle (Paris: Dalloz, 1932), and Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 a 1730 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1960).

[25] Cited in BN, Joly de Fleury, 2536, "Memoire sur le commerce des blés" (August 4, 1770), 300–301.

low prices during good years. Peasants may have rationally selected greater market participation once presented with the prospect of larger markets. With new market opportunities, the emphasis on subsistence in peasant survival strategies diminished. Conflicts to eliminate feudal dues at the end of the eighteenth century thus reflected a struggle by the peasants to gain access to new and improved forms of insurance provided by the development of a national marketing system. Studies of peasant decisions of what to plant would help illuminate this point. We know, for example, that smallholders were often inclined to take great risks by growing purely commercial crops like grapes. Wheat was also grown mostly with urban markets in mind.^[26]

Lefebvre ignores the ability of lords or urban grain consumers to obtain unfair trade advantages through their political position vis-à-vis the state and instead assumes that peasants do not take advantage of markets. Yet seigneurial and urban authorities dictated the time, the place, and the price of grain, because peasants were not allowed to sell grain directly out of their own granaries. Peasants were not even allowed to sell on the basis of samples; instead, they were required to bring their entire stock to prescribed marketplaces so that market taxes called droits de halle could be assessed.^[27] Seigneurial and urban officials generally reserved the right to requisition, on behalf of local consumers, additional stocks from peasants during times of shortage. Even less tolerable was the apparently innocuous right of town officials to decide which merchants had a right to buy in the marketplace. The urban authorities would entitle certain merchants accredités or assermentés, effectively establishing an oligopsony on purchases from farmers and a corresponding oligopoly with respect to distribution to consumers. Merchants lacking proper authority risked the confiscation of their produce. For example, the city of Rouen granted a monopsony to a corporation of grain dealers by allowing them exclusive rights to purchase grain in the province's four most important markets. In support of this monopsony, the local parlement found a merchant guilty for selling grain at a reduced price during a shortage and fined him. The parlement

[26] R. Romano, Commerce et prix du blé a Marseille au XVIIIsiècle (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1956). Peasants in Provence put aside a large percentage of their harvest for commerce with the Italian cities. In turn they imported darker, less costly grains, which they consumed.

[27] These droits had different names in different regions of France. Sometimes they were referred to as droits de courtage, sometimes as droits de minage and droits de leyde . These were quite unevenly and unequally applied and were sometimes collected twice on the same product in the same parish. Dominique Margairaz, Foires et marchés dans la France préindustrielle (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1988), 25–26.

upheld the view that any savings to consumers resulting from low-priced grain should not come at the expense of the distributor's monopoly rights. The money from the fine was then given to the corporation in recognition of the damage to its interests.

The control of market officials over access to grain markets encouraged the public's fears of conspiracies among merchants and officials and fueled rumors of famine plots in which the government and the dealers colluded to raise the price of grain. To regulate large movements of grain during a shortage, provincial intendants were entitled to grant exclusive trading permits to a handful of merchants. Although allegedly designed to guarantee a constant flow of grain, this practice made possible the very hoarding that the rules were designed to prevent, while the possession of permits enabled preferred merchants to ruin their competitors.

Although a declaration of May 25, 1763, decreed that grain could freely circulate in the kingdom, there were many ways municipal officials, mayors, and parlements could circumvent this order.^[28] Tolls were a particularly effective method of preventing grain from moving freely throughout the kingdom. For example, to prevent the shipment to Lyons of grain from the Franche Comté, the city of Gray, through which the grain had to pass, imposed tolls of 20 sols per septier of wheat, while the price of a septier of grain in Lyons was only 24 sols. Such tolls made it impossible for the Franche Comté to provision Lyons, even during periods when farmers in the Comté had considerable reserves. The tolls were established because Gray's market officials feared that if local grain prices climbed to the level of those of Lyons, the standard of living in Gray would fall. Local unemployment and lower consumption of manufactured goods would result in Gray, they believed, because the higher price of necessities would reduce the surplus available to consume locally produced manufactured goods. Local leaders did not consider that a wealthier peasantry might consume larger quantities of city-made goods.

The monarchy was well aware of the many negative consequences that resulted when local officials isolated local markets from national trends. Unable to influence the decisions made by market officials, peasants were often left with unsold stocks and accumulated debts even in the best harvest years. Moreover, the passage of grain through intermediary jurisdictions made shipments subject to seizure by local officials. For example, even when merchants of Lyons were able to buy additional grain in Gray,

[28] What follows is based upon BN, Joly de Fleury, 2536, "Memoire sur le commerce des blés" (August 4, 1770), 288–306. See also "Memoire sur les lettres patentes concernant le commerce les grains," 260–72; and the parlement's response, 274–87.

grain in transport could be confiscated at Macon by officials who wanted supplies for local provisioning. As a result, Lyons was forced to buy Italian grain in Marseilles, while the farmers in the Comté were ruined by low prices. The public authorities in both regions blamed their difficulties on free trade, but the problem was that trade was subject to regulations that contradicted economic sense.

Despite efforts by the Crown to keep communication and trade open between regions, local authorities continued to confiscate grain passing through their jurisdictions. The jurisdictions of the various authorities claiming rights to regulate the grain trade overlapped. Royal prohibitions did not prevent the parlement of Dijon from taxing all grain destined for markets under its supervision. Merchants from neighboring regions were often imprisoned for exporting wheat without permission. Similarly, grain in transit between Germany and Switzerland could not be sent the shortest distance through Alsace for fear of confiscation by the Alsatian authorities. The parlements of coastal provinces such as Rouen similarly restricted trade during local shortages; Rouen typically taxed or confiscated grain headed for higher-priced Parisian markets.

As a result of regional restrictions on the transport of grain, one province could experience a shortage while a neighbor experienced abundance. Not surprisingly, French grain prices fluctuated quite sharply during this period. Thinking of his native Burgundy, one contemporary analyst observed that "the price of wheat will reach 33 livres in bad years but only nine livres during the good years."^[29] If free trade were guaranteed, he speculated, warehouses would be organized during the abundant years and the price difference between the good and bad years would be less significant. Being denied a market during surplus years, peasants were less able to save money for difficult years. Even when capable of saving, a peasant was not assured of being able to find supplies during local shortages. If a peasant did have a surplus during years of local shortages, he might be forbidden to sell his grain at prices high enough to allow him to survive the years of low prices.

Individual peasants might respond to unpredictable grain markets by attempting to assure their own subsistence. Peasants often grew a diversity of crops, despite the unsuitability of the soil; for example, wine grapes and hemp were grown throughout the kingdom, even where the soil was inhospitable. Although they reduced overall productivity, these second-best solutions made good sense from the perspective of the individual peasant household.

[29] Cited in BN, Joly de Fleury, 2536, 300–301.

The persistence of feudal dues was another disincentive to participating in the market. Predicated on the basis that the lords would provide the peasantry with justice and administration, the dues lacked any justification, since the seigneurie no longer provided such services by the late eighteenth century. When, in a paper titled "The Inconvenience of Feudal Dues," a contemporary advised that dues prevented peasants from enjoying their share of market profits, the president of the parlement of Paris responded that such speculation would only arouse unrest and condemned the author for expressing "criminal views," declaring, "this brochure contains ... a plan that leads to nothing less than the systematic reversal of all the maxims and laws of even the constitution of the monarchy itself, which would shatter the social hierarchy and arm the peasants against the lords, fomenting war in the nation's body between the king's subjects."^[30]

The cause of free markets was taken up by a number of reformers and was openly discussed by the political elite, but discussion of the disincentives to market production imposed on peasants by feudal dues was taboo. Since the elite were the principal recipients of the dues, openly articulating a general opposition to the dues was virtually impossible. Instead, the battle against feudal dues was fought in thousands of costly court cases, in which lawyers working for peasant communities disputed the legitimacy of particular dues in complex legal arguments.

Insights from a wide range of literature on peasant politics suggest an explanation of the origins of peasant radicalism that differs from that of Lefebvre and Scott. Subsistence only made sense when peasants were not assured of being able to buy from or sell to distant regions at times of crisis. Because the expansion of markets can potentially provide a better form of security than traditional peasant institutions, subsistence strategies declined. Markets lead to more regular flows of supply, because deficits in one region can be made up for by surpluses in another. Moreover, as Adam Smith recognized, the growth of markets generates specialization, which in turn increases the total supply of food. Thus, given fair opportunities to participate in markets, peasants could in fact defend themselves more effectively against environmental hazards.^[31] In choosing markets, eighteenth-century peasants were not any less risk-averse than their ancestors; they were opting for an improved form of insurance.

[30] Hagley Library, W2 4594, March 5, 1776. Mentioned in Oeuvre de Turgot, ed. Gustav Schelle (Paris: Alcan, 1913–23), 5:270–71.

[31] Often peasants possessing the smallest parcels engaged in some of the most risky forms of cultivation, producing wine, vegetables, and, in the nineteenth century, flowers.

Economic theory explains peasant behavior in ways Lefebvre and the moral economy school did not anticipate. There is evidence that markets do not necessarily make peasants worse off. The willingness of the peasantry to participate in a market system depends on the character of the incentives rather than on innate cultural predilections. As eighteenth-century peasants came to depend on markets to reduce the probability of starvation, incentives to conform to traditional collectivist norms and communal practices diminished. Peasants might not automatically accept the market and abandon those norms, but they had an incentive to orient their production to markets and diminish their dependence on traditional practices. Markets provided better insurance than traditional norms predicated on the village's ability to provide for its own subsistence.

Once the development of competitive national and international markets gave individuals greater certainty of finding supplies in times of need, the critical concern became an individual's ability to save or to find wage-paying employment. This way the age-old communal traditions were replaced by individualistic norms. Peasants became farmers or wage laborers. Markets evened out peasant food requirements over time. While technological limitations prevented the storage of crops, peasants could sell part of their current produce in exchange for money and use the latter for purchases of food during a bad year. Larger markets prevented a disaster in one town from drastically affecting the availability, and thus the prices, of food in another: the reduced variability diminished the utility of communal practices and properties.

Contrary to Adam Smith's assertions about the effects of royal taxation on peasant behavior, many indirect examples of savings by peasant families have been provided by historians of Old Regime France. Peasants used savings to provide for social mobility and for farm implements, buildings, and schools.^[32] The most striking indirect evidence concerns the growing ability of peasants to absorb harvest failures. Generally, during famines, incomes did not increase in proportion to increases in food prices. Yet David Weir offers evidence that harvest failures of one year had little influence on mortality in eighteenth-century France.^[33] This evidence sug-

[32] See Jean Jacquart, La Crise rurale en Ile-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974); Gaston Rupnel, La Ville et la campagne au dix-septième siècle: Etude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris, 1922); and Pierre de Saint-Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du nord au dernier siècle de l'ancien régime (Dijon, 1960).

[33] See David R. Weir, "Markets and Mortality in France, 1600–1789" (MS, Yale University, 1984), which suggests that the impact of harvest conditions on mortality was considerably reduced after 1715. And see, too, Jean Meuvret, "Les Crises des subsistances et la demographie de la France de l'ancien regime," Population 1 (1946): 643–50, and "Demographic Crisis in France from the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Population and History, ed. David Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London: E. Arnold; Aldine, 1965); and David R. Weir, "Life under Pressure: France and England, 1670–1870," Journal of Economic History 44 (March 1984): 27–47. Harvest failures did not result in shortages, because grain could be brought in from the outside, although at higher prices.

gests that peasants were able to use savings and/or to borrow from informal credit markets to pay for higher-priced grain.^[34]

There is one major caveat: The growth of markets made it possible for successful peasants to exit the system of collective rights and practices. Tocqueville may have missed the full significance of the defection of the wealthy from the village when he spoke of a countryside deprived by the towns of its most articulate and resourceful members. His point, nevertheless, is critical; the departure of the wealthy peasantry—and their rights, privileges, and properties—created many losers in the countryside. The withdrawal of the wealthy peasantry's production from that of the village reduced the value of those collective goods that remained. Then there was also the effect of their departure on existing social networks, the value of which can never be measured in monetary terms. The net result of the defections was the isolation of the village and the impoverishment of the village's remaining collective rights and privileges. Because the village community is a public good, people who opt out are seen as free riders. The defection of the successful from the communal system, and ultimately from the village, was the underlying cause of the tension within the village that scholars often link to the growth of markets. Although the right to exit the communal system had always existed, the development of a more active market economy made it possible for the most dynamic elements of village society to depart in great numbers. By offering the wealthy greater means to exercise their right of defection, the spread of economic opportunity undermined the value of communal social and economic arrangements.

Lefebvre argued that a pre-capitalist mentality motivated the outbreak of hostilities between lord and peasant. This theme gave coherence to Lefebvre's work and has passed into the broader debates on peasant politics and violence. Lefebvre viewed the expansion of markets and the monopoly authority of elites as interchangeable and mutually dependent. He and the

[34] A succession of bad harvests such as occurred in 1708 and 1709 would, however, increase mortality. This suggests that successive bad harvests would deplete local savings. On the existence of local rural credit markets, see Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, "Credit Markets and Economic Change in Southeastern France, 1630–1788," Explorations in Economic History 30 (April 1993): 129–57.

moral economists he inspired usually argue that the monopoly power of elites was an inevitable outcome of markets, but a more likely culprit would seem to be the political structure that determined the social distribution of surpluses generated by markets.

The restrictions on the direct marketing of grain imposed on peasant production in premodern France by lords and towns are examples of political influence, not competitive production strategies. If inequality in market access, not the existence of markets, ultimately led to a deterioration in peasant welfare, then peasant resistance may be reinterpreted as a response to the monopoly of control by elites over the surpluses created by the market. A conflict over equal access to the kingdom's growing market economy, then, put lord and peasant at loggerheads in 1789.^[35]

All social groups were affected by the redistributive consequences of mercantilism and absolutism. The peasantry's "moral economy" was a response to the economic risks and uncertainties produced by the institutions that distributed the nation's income away from the countryside and toward the cities, where powerful interest groups could threaten the monarchy's political security. The relative bargaining strength of the peasantry in the context of a particular set of political institutions was the critical variable underpinning the peasantry's economic potential during the Old Regime. Those political structures evolved in response to the incentives, strategies, and choices of well-organized groups in French society.

[35] Rodney Hilton came to the same conclusion about lord-peasant conflicts in medieval England: "The essential quarrel between the peasantry and the aristocracy was about access to the market. It was not that peasants were worried about the impact of the market in a disintegrating sense upon their community; they wanted to be able to put their produce on the market and to have a freer market in land which would enable them to take advantage of the benefits of the market" (Hilton, "Medieval Peasants—Any Lessons?" Journal of Peasant Studies 1 [1974]: 217).