Hugh Clout - Routledge Revivals: Agriculture in France on the Eve of the Railway Age (1980)

First published in 1980, this compact and useful book uses the earliest volumes of government-published statistics, and with the aid of computer-generated cartography, transforms the numbers there reported into an arrondissement-by-arrondissement comparative picture of French agriculture in the mid-1830s. Clout reviews problems of rapid population growth, scarcely adequate domestic food supplies and primitive systems of transportation, while attention is drawn to spatial variations in agricultural activity and productivity. Commercial, high-yielding farming was best developed in a northern multi-nuclear region, comprising of Ile-de-France, Normandy and Nord, with smaller foci of commercial orientation along an eastern axis from Alsace to Marseilles and in western areas from the Loire to the middle of the Garonne valley. Clout concludes that the revolutionary promise of national economic unity was far from being realised in the 1830s and was not to be achieved until national systems of transport and education were firmly established later in the nineteenth century.

Hugh Clout

First published in 1980
by Croom Helm

This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1980 Hugh Clout

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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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.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 81149132

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-50153-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-14445-0 (ebk)

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Agriculture in France on the Eve of the Railway Age

HUGH CLOUT

CROOM HELM LONDON

BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS TOTOWA, NEW JERSEY

1980 Hugh Clout

Croom Helm Ltd, 2-10, St John's Road, London SW11

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Clout, Hugh Donald

Agriculture in France on the eve of the railway age. (Croom Helm historical geography series).

1. Agriculture Economic aspects France History 19th century I. Title

338.1'0944 HD1945

ISBN 0-85664-919-8

First published in the USA 1980 by
BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS
81 ADAMS DRIVE
TOTOWA, NEW JERSEY, 07512
ISBN: 0-389-20017-4

This book was born out of professional, academic and personal frustration. As a university teacher and no more than a part-time researcher I had written a number of rather disparate articles which reflect prime commitment to teaching, by the written and the spoken word, and perceived limitations on research time. I needed to undertake a more sustained project. As a historical geographer, at least some of the time, I had been challenged by the extreme difficulty, even near impossibility, of charting rather than inferring social and economic processes in nineteenth-century France and in so many other contexts. In the present book I fight shy of that problem and attempt to reconstruct conditions at one specific time, not seeing that task as an end in itself or because of blind faith in quantitative cartography but in the hope that it will provide a datum plane which may be of interest to process-orientated researchers in the future.

Over the years I have received financial support for work in France from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Social Science Research Council, the Central Research Fund (University of London) and University College London. The present book and a number of earlier publications have been made possible in this way. My Head of Department, Professor Bill Mead, has provided every encouragement for me to maintain the 'French connection'. To Hugh Prince I owe a special debt of gratitude for kindling my academic interest in France and for monitoring all subsequent phases in my work, even to the point of critically reading an earlier draft of this book. Few resident members of the Maconochie Foundation have escaped my questioning on many relevant issues about which I was woefully ignorant. I thank them for their interest and enlightenment. In particular I extend my gratitude to members of the 'Monday group' 1977-8 without whose support and understanding this book would not have been completed. Outside the group, Bill Campbell provided moral support and invaluable technical assistance in generating the computergraphics. Only a small sample of his hard work is included in the present book. Rick Davidson and especially Christine Daniels shouldered a formidable cartographic burden during the early days when my desk calculator was producing results more speedily than the computer. Chris Cromarty photographed a large number of line drawings and developed new skills in handling micro-filmed computergraphics. Annabel Swindells, Claudette John and their colleagues typed and retyped so much, coping splendidly with my handwriting, unprofessional typing and mutterings into the dictaphone. My thanks to all of them for giving so much of their time and expertise.