Hugh D. Clout - The Land of France 1815-1914

Volume 3

HUGH D. CLOUT

First published in 1983 by George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd

This edition first published in 2018

by Routledge

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1983 H. D. Clout

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-89481-5 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-11336-4 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-73945-1 (Volume 3) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18403-6 (Volume 3) (ebk)

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Hugh D.Clout

London

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN

Boston Sydney

H. D. Clout, 1983.

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First published in 1983

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Clout, Hugh

The land of France 18151914. (The London research series in geography; 1)

1. Land use, Rural France History

I. Title$II. Series

333.760944 HD645

ISBN 0049110039

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Clout, Hugh D.

The land of France, 18151914.

(London research series in geography, ISSN 02610485; 1)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Land use, Rural France History. 2. Agriculture France History. 3. Cadasters France History.

I. Title. II. Series.

HD645.C56 1983 333.76130944 8213880

ISBN 0049110039

Set in 10 on 12 point Bembo by Nene Phototypesetters Ltd

and printed in Great Britain

by Mackays of Chatham

My interest in the French countryside goes back to vacations as an undergraduate when I tramped through the lanes and fields of Normandy and Poitou with a notebook in my hand, a camera slung round my neck, and a tent stowed in the rucksack on my back. As well as recording the intricacy of fields, farms, barns and land use in the 1960s, I discovered the maps and registers of the ancien cadastre and came to realise that it would be possible to reconstruct aspects of the rural scene that had existed more than 100 years previously. A research studentship enabled me to investigate a much wider range of source materials in a study of the Pays de Bray from 1750 to 1965 and in subsequent years I turned part of my attention to investigating various aspects of change in the French countryside, sometimes working at the national scale, at other times framing my enquiries in particular regional contexts. Visits to archives in many parts of France demonstrated the rich potential (as well as the shortcomings) of 19th-century cadastral data, agricultural enquiries and professional writings for the rural geographer and encouraged me to make use of some of them in a cross-sectional study of Agriculture in France on the eve of the railway age (1980).

In that book I demonstrated the role of quantitative cartography in adding an areal dimension to complement all too familiar national averages and in providing a spatially sensitive statistical framework to which the results of regional and local monographs might be related. In short, I tried to provide a single datum plane of information which might be of interest to process-orientated researchers. In subsequent months I began to realise how ignorant I was of the varied pace of social, economic and landscape change in Frances component provinces and pays during the 19th century. The point was hammered home by a couple of research trips to Gascony and to Provence which confirmed my growing feeling that the character and chronology of rural change in the Midi since the ancien rgime had been substantially different from what I was familiar with in northern, western and central France. One particular visit to the upper valley of the Durance showed me agricultural landscapes that had been abandoned 120 years ago, while in Finistre land was being brought freshly into cultivation as recently as the 1920s!

The land of France explores the content of successive agricultural enquiries, cadastral revisions and a large number of official and academic reports in an attempt to elucidate my problem by reconstructing conditions at a series of dates between 1815 and 1914 and by demonstrating or inferring land-use changes that occurred during clearly defined intervening periods. In so doing I am well aware that the study of rural France in the 19th century may be likened to a well ploughed field, which already has yielded many rich harvests. In recent years a number of historians have probed the persistence of traditional mentalits and have exemplified the gradual and uneven transition from localism to national unification that occurred during the 19th century. Of late some historical geographers have alluded to the importance of politics and social conflict in comprehending the reorganisation of economic space that took place during that period but, although their argument is persuasive, their empirical contribution strikes me as being somewhat unconvincing. In my opinion, splendid theory has not yet been wedded effectively to hard evidence in this new brand of historical geography. Undoubtedly such achievements will be made in due course. The present volume adopts a much more conservative stance in full recognition of the limitations of available sources. Nonetheless, it is written in the fervent hope that future scholars may find ways of bridging the tantalising gulf between general theory and partial empirical records.

Unlike my earlier book, which involved the reconstruction of a single chronological cross section, The land of France seeks to pursue a more explicitly dynamic, yet still modest, approach. The present work is focused quite deliberately on the study of land use; this choice having been made, first, in response to the uneven record of many other rural themes between 1815 and 1914, and secondly, with due deference to the opinions of French reviewers regarding the hazards of using 19th-century sources to calculate indices of food consumption by country dwellers or the financial yield of farming activities. Hence these themes and a number of other issues, such as commodity prices and crop combinations, are either omitted or treated with brevity in the present discussion. In addition, the scale of analysis is shifted from the