Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 119

This is a quite special volume, offering invaluable insights into the present state of research in the agrarian history of France and Germany, together with a highly instructive summary of the way present-day scholars see the work done over the last fifty years. The editors tell us that their agrarian history sank into obscurity in the 1980s and they recognize a fresh start in the 1990s. Strong misgivings had arisen concerning the facile acceptance of narrow economic criteria and statistics in explaining change, and they moved towards broader exploration of other explanatory factors, encompassing social and cultural influences. Some of the judgements on the primacy that was once given to economic history as a discipline are surprisingly harsh. The themes chosen here plainly show a new generation of researchers focusing on a fine analysis of social relations among peasant families. They are noticeably sensitive to the logic and good sense they find in the diverse strategies used by 120 the agricultural peasants to survive changing circumstances. Viewpoints have undoubtedly shifted, and the new approaches are stimulating, some connecting with our current interests, some not.

This book of twelve essays springs out of a colloquium at Göttingen in 2000, when the French and German historians decided that they ought to communicate directly with each other instead of working at the same problems in isolation. So they presented to each other their research and reflections on agrarian development during the years 1700–1900, also offering suggestions for future research. They themselves refer to this period of study as the moment of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, but, in practice, their papers do not pay attention to industrial growth in rural communities. Rather they concentrate on social and cultural investigations into people’s dealings with their land. These light up the great diversity in peasants’ manoeuvres to acquire and hold land while lords, adopting varying attitudes, held control in the background. With some exceptions, they pay little attention to the way the land was actually cultivated. But they all agree in eschewing large, national generalizations, for everywhere they identify strong regional, and lesser, local differences; in short, their histories exemplify the resourcefulness and ingenuity ofhumanity, however humble, while spelling the deathof single generalizations.

Twelve essays span a large spatial territory. Dealings in the land market are one prominent theme, not something that we English historians examine at present. Werner Trossbach discusses intriguing questions concerning the relations of lords and peasants east of the Elbe when cereal exports from the Baltic expanded massively, yet without stirring protests from an oppressed labouring population living in a distinctly underpopulated countryside. Since the fall of the German Democratic Republic, a group of historians in Potsdam has set to work on this question. Annie Antoine in sceptical mood examines longstanding assumptions about the heavy burdens laid by parasitic lords on French peasants before the Revolution. She favours the study of lordship as one of several other institutions shaping the practical routine of peasants. Jean-Marc Moriceau asks whether the large farms of the Île de France were indeed at the heart of agricultural improvement. They have received all the credit, and still do, but this overlooks the different ways in which small farms were also innovative. Leasing to halves is mentioned as one such device at this point, along with other technical improvements in traction and cultivation; the author also pays welcome attention to the new editions of Maison rustique issued between 1721 and 1763 and the new farming methods they publicized as a result. (It is history review doubtful if English historians yet realize the influence on the gentry in England of the first editions of that same book in its French original, followed remarkably quickly by two English translations.) This spirited piece leads on to another arresting essay by Jean-Michel Boehler on innovative small farmers in the Rhineland, between Flanders and Alsace, in the eighteenth century. While the Physiocrats set all their hopes on large farms only, small farms were slowly but surely cultivating their small holdings like gardens, using masses of dung, industrial waste, and road sweepings to produce spade-cultivated alternative crops, like carrots, turnips, cabbage, peas, beans, onions, mustard, hemp, flax and tobacco. The whole area has been called a laboratory of invention, engaged in a kind of farming that was totally ignored by the ‘salon agronomists’. Boehler cites a significant statement by the Abbé Fauchet in 1789 powerfully denouncing the errors of the economists in believing that small farms were less productive than large. We may hope that that cogent argument will be proclaimed again, as family farmers in the European Union once more fight to save themselves from extinction.

Frank Konersmann explores the variety of social manoeuvres on family farms, paying tribute to the work of Schlumbohm, Medick and Sabean at the Max-Planck Institute in elucidating family structures and inheritance practices by their local studies. Susanne Rouette discloses the alarming superficiality in old generalities about inheritance customs, revealing instead the common-sense practices that were negotiated within families and between peasants and lords. They modified the nonsensical rigour of theories that would have imposed single heirs or resulted in the excessive parcelling of farms between sons.

The role of women inheriting farms as widows looms large in the essay of Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, emphasizing again the flexibility in their practices and ingenious strategies for keeping families in existence without legitimate heirs. Heide Wunder analyzes the division of labour on farms between men and women, identifying the women’s strengths in undertaking tasks of great diversity. It makes a mockery of the convention among historians of allowing only salaried work into their record,and when farms are more finely classified by size, the division of labour presents a yet more complex picture.

Reiner Prass and Nadine Vivier both enquire into the use of commons, dismissing the negative judgement that they were always badly managed, as writers claimed in the later eighteenth century. Chronological and regional histories reveal phases and places with very different experiences: the notion of the commons as ‘the patrimony of the poor’, they say, was born some time after 1760. Finally, Gérard Béaur and Stefan Brakensiek focus on land sales, Béaur identifying them as a mirror of family strategies that had different objectives at different times, and were governed by family needs rather than current market conditions, Brakensiek summoning some widely scattered examples of research to show regional variations.

All the papers in this volume are written in French, and follow the publication of a German version of the same essays in 2003. It stirs reflections by this reviewer on the loss of contact that we have suffered in England with German and French scholars. Admittedly, relations with French historians have recently been renewed at Le Mans. But when the Agricultural History Review started in 1953, it set a fine example in reviewing the agrarian history of German and French scholars; foreign book reviews were especially numerous in the years between about 1962 and 1982. In contrast, the rich bibliography at the end of this book contains a wealth of references to work that has never been reviewed in the Review. So this volume is a precious summary that richly deserves to be widely read.