The Shifting Property Structure of the Post-Phylloxera Vineyard and the Emergence of the "Industrial Vineyard"

Surprisingly, neither the short-term devastation of vines by the phylloxera nor the more or less permanently depressed market that followed radically transformed the property structure and landholding patterns of villages in the Aude. Rather, the pattern evident before the phylloxera crisis persisted: the coexistence of a large number of very small landowners at one end of the scale

with a small number of very large landowners at the other. Two parallel changes did occur, however, between the late 1870s and the years before World War I, and these were visible in Coursan. On the one hand, the proportion of medium and large proprietors declined in the period 1876 to 1911, and on the other, both the number and proportion of small and very small proprietors increased, and the parceling of vines continued (see Table 5).

This pattern in Coursan reflects a departmentwide trend. By the 1890s, just under half the property owners in the Aude owned less than one hectare (an increase over 1882), whereas the number of large property owners had declined, as had that of medium owners (see Table 4). At the same time, owners of over ten hectares in the department now controlled 59 percent of the land; those owning under one hectare, 8.4 percent.^[27] It is true that some large vineyard owners in the Aude sold undesirable parcels to offset the enormous costs of reconstitution, and again sold land during the great turn-of-century wine glut.^[28] By and large, however, owners of estate vineyards in Coursan (Pontserme, La Française, and La Ricardelle) profited from the 60–70 percent decline in the price of land by acquiring new land. The estate of Lastours grew spectacularly from 36 hectares in 1879 to 114 hectares in 1884, and the Laforgue family built its holdings from 28 to 107 hectares during the phylloxera years.^[29] Still more important, large estates continued to dominate the local economy not only in terms of size but also in terms of the vast quantities of wine they produced. The village of Vinassan near Coursan provides a striking example, for here the four largest vineyards accounted for almost 70 percent of the total wine produced in the village.^[30]

A few enterprising large vineyard capitalists managed to build estates from scratch in this period, among whom many were absentee proprietors. A case in point is Léopold Roudier, a wealthy banker from Béziers, who purchased 300 hectares of completely ruined vines for 700,000 francs in June 1892 to build the estate of Jouarres in the Minervois. By 1897, after an enormous capital outlay that included building an ultramodern winery and acquisition of an additional 218 hectares, Roudier's vineyard employed some 120 to 140 workers.^[31] As an absentee owner, Roudier typified a new type of entrepreneur who lived

far from his estate and relied on a manager (régisseur ) for daily vineyard administration. These men included Cyprien Crozals, a wine merchant from Béziers and owner of La Française in Coursan, and the owner of Lastours, Louis Cazals, an engineer from Bordeaux. By the turn of the century 340 absentee proprietors held land in Coursan, as opposed to 133 at midcentury.

Another new type of entrepreneur became increasingly common in the late nineteenth century as well: the multiproprietor, who owned two and sometimes three estate vineyards, not all necessarily in the Aude. Between 1897 and 1900, sixty-five such men in the arrondissements of Narbonne and Carcassonne owned a total of 139 estates.^[32] Adolphe Turrel, opportunist deputy from Narbonne, accumulated five large vineyards in the vicinity of Narbonne; the comte de Beauxhostes, president of the Comice agricole de Narbonne, owned five even more widely dispersed estates that together produced a mammoth sixty-six thousand hectoliters of wine annually. In the Narbonnais, the enormous output of these multiproperties accounted for one-third of production in the area. As Rémy Pech has observed, the combination of size, production capacity, and management style (by régisseur ) were all suggestive of "viticultural capitalism and a viticultural industry."^[33]

This, then, was how large vignerons experienced the subtle changes in landownership of the post-phylloxera vineyard. But what of the small petty bourgeois vintners who continued to dominate production in the hilly Corbières region south of Carcassonne and who still figured prominently in the Narbonnais? If capital emerged from the end-of-century crises reinforced, how did labor fare?

Amazingly, small vineyard owners managed to survive the era of crises that to all appearances should have wiped them out. These individuals, mainly vinedressers and artisans, held on to their precious if capricious vines. In the Aude overall, vinedresser landowners declined in number during the phylloxera crisis and after (from 26 percent in 1882 to 19 percent ten years later).^[34] By 1896, vinedressers in the land records of Coursan amounted to only some 12 percent of total landowners (see Table 1), and they also owned less land than previously (0.53 versus 0.65 hectares). Nonetheless, these records identify only

two-thirds of the landowners in that year, and it is possible that they underestimate the true number of vinedressers who possessed land in the village. It is also possible that even within the Aude conditions varied. In the arrondissement of Narbonne, for instance, almost 50 percent of the vinedressers owned vines, and in the Minervois as many as 65 percent of the workers may have owned land around the turn of the century. In the village of Arzens, some 90 percent of the vinedressers owned their own vines before World War.^[35] Some artisans also benefited from falling prices and land sales during the phylloxera and were able to acquire new land. Antoine Jacques Pagès, a cooper who had purchased a minuscule five ares of vines in Coursan in 1873, increased his holdings to twenty-six hectares by 1911.

Overall, though, continued landownership no longer automatically meant material comfort. Just as Harvey Smith has found for Cruzy, Hérault, the continued parceling of land resulted in lower status for small landowners in the Aude, who could now barely eke out an existence from their vines. How did these courageous men and women cope—and why did the grande bourgeoisie vinicole allow them to survive?

Small owners, like large, benefited from local and national financial assistance, as well as from the suspension of land taxes. Ultimately, however, they survived by eliminating labor costs, performing the work themselves, and by working from dawn to dusk. In the Minervois, friends and neighbors exchanged labor services and formed "bourrades" to help one another cultivate their vines on Sunday mornings.^[36] Some of the agricultural associations (syndicats agricoles ) that appeared in the Aude and elsewhere after 1884 also assisted small vineyard owners by enabling them to purchase equipment, fertilizer, and vines cheaply. Large owners lent equipment and the use of their wineries to small vintners in return for labor services on their estates. And, as we have already noted, they lent money. In fact, more than a few small landowners financed the reconstitution of their vines after the phylloxera by becoming indebted to les grands .

Large vineyard owners, it seems, were convinced that small property ownership combined with entrepreneurial paternalism would ultimately guarantee social stability. Moreover, it was in their interest to encourage the survival of small vineyard

property: the little income that workers could now eke out of their tiny properties would justify keeping their wages low. The continued existence of small owners would also provide a reserve army of labor that would not burden employers with a permanent wage bill. Finally, some large owners saw vinedresser-owners as potential allies in the battle to defend their interests before the state.^[37] Whether these visions of a community of vignerons were borne out is another matter, as we shall see later.

Repeated economic crises, even as they reinforced the dominant position of large vineyards, created a new entrepreneurial mentality, and brought about important changes in the wine market, did not destroy small peasant producers at the bottom of the social ladder. The gradual and visible impoverishment of small vignerons led them to form alliances not with les grands , but with landless workers, to whom they grew increasingly close in both economic status and shared interests.