Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 180

The survival of the peasant farm as an intergenerational enterprise has been one of the central themes of European agrarian history ever since Romantic thinkers proposed an ineluctable tension between traditional peasant culture and the mercantile valuations of land and labour that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century seemed everywhere to be gaining ground. The present volume of conference papers falls squarely in that hallowed dialectical tradition. With few exceptions, the communications concern the legal and extra-legal techniques employed by French peasants to maintain their holdings intact from one generation to the next in the face of the strict partible inheritance regime promulgated in the Civil Code of 1791. From the perspective of the tension between market and traditional values, the recourse to subterfuges in order to bequeath the family farm to a single heir in regions that had practised non-partible inheritance of agricultural wealth expresses the persistence of traditional social values in the face of modernization imposed by the state. The theme is well-worn.

The superabundant source material deposited in archives of civil registrations, parish records, cadastres, and notarial minutes supplies ample information for tracing inheritance practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Despite that documentary luxuriance, the results reported in the studies included in the present collection are disappointing. It is hardly news that in regions where farms were passed to a single heir (with compensation for the other heirs), the Civil Code had little immediate impact on regional patterns of property transmission. The articles make minor rectifications to Jean Yver’s study of regional inheritance practices in France, which was based on legal texts, but they do not significantly alter his broad conclusions. Most of the articles on France are preliminary investigations of archival resources rather than finished products of exhaustive study of well-defined questions. What is missing is a clear statement of why anyone besides legal historians should be interested in the trivia of inheritance practices. A few essays nevertheless stand out. Desaive’s analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century petitions for ‘emancipation’ of minors from wardship in the Auxerrois indicates a growing willingness of tutors to emancipate female wards at a younger age in the eighteenth century. This is a track worth following up as an indicator of changing mentalités: its significance for rural history seems rather thin, however. In another interesting essay, Rémy describes how in recent times the high Alpine pastures that were exploited (but not owned) in common in the Tarentaise region of Savoie became an object of contention among their several owners as a result of declining agricultural and the rising recreational value of Alpine open spaces.

Perhaps the most interesting communications concern French Canada. The studies by Dessureault and Dépatie provide intriguing evidence on how the structure of local economic activity affected the composition of the household labour force in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Craig’s study of four rural general stores in the 1830s and 1840s shows how the consumption of market-supplied commodities evolved in a very a remote district of upper New Brunswick. Lafleur, Paquet and Wallot demonstrate the richness of the Canadian sources for analyzing the evolution of family land holding. Wien gives an original analysis of the effect of the demand for labour in the fur trade on the small pool of available farm labour in eighteenth-century Quebec. These are excellent essays, but their connection to the issues that inspired the conference that gave birth to this volume seems distant. On the whole, the collection is disappointing. It would have benefited from a more ambitious introduction to the material, and more severe editing of unripe fruit that in time may give a real harvest.