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).