Peasant farming in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and the transition to capitalism under Charles de Gaulle

Abstract

Historians assume that capitalism had been latent in France until the towns aroused farmers to specialize in lucrative commodities and make improvements to capitalize on the market opportunities. I argue, in contrast, that conflicts of the feudal period left a configuration of peasant parcels of land and seigneurial classes backed by the monarchy. Peasants labored intensively and deprived themselves to obtain more land. Noble and bourgeois landowners exploited peasant labor through seigneurial and sharecropping rents but did not invest in agriculture. The peasant revolution in 1789 and continued labor-intensive husbandry further entrenched farming for use-value despite the growth of industry and cities in the 1800s and 1900s. Technocrats under de Gaulle in the late 1950s finally transformed this system into capitalism by regulating access to land, pressuring farmers to take out loans, and forcing them to produce for the European market to service debts. Farmers thus had to improve husbandry on account of market competition. French agriculture had long lagged behind its European and American rivals but emerged as a leading exporter in the 1960s and 1970s.