Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 316

The agricultural history of the Ile-de-France region has been well documented by researchers, but this study is unusual in that it focuses on developments within a 7-to-15 kilometre radius of the gates of Paris. Covering a mere 47,000 hectares, the Seine département was France’s smallest and in 1840 it contained a capital city, numbering one million inhabitants. Yet 74 per cent of the land surface of this tiny administrative unit remained firmly wedded to agricultural production. The story that unfolds can be summed up in the word ‘interface’: the peri-urban interface and the interface between intensive owner-exploiter cultivation and extensive cereal farming on the surrounding plateaux.

We know most about grain production (wheat, oats, and barley) in this context. Many historians have drawn attention to the high yields achieved in the region; yields that, by the end of the ancien régime, matched those being achieved on the best land in England. By continuing the investigation into the nineteenth century this author contributes three more bits of information. She points out that cereal producers planted wheat as much for straw as for grain in the first half of the century. The failure of observed grain yields to progress significantly can be linked to this practice because the seed-yield ratio used to ensure an abundant straw crop was more than twice the national average for cereals. Planting oats and to a lesser extent barley proved an increasingly attractive and reliable land-use strategy to farmers as well. As for the wheat grain, it was no longer conveyed directly to urban consumers by the nineteenth century. Instead, it was transformed into flour in technologically advanced mills (minoteries) situated on the outskirts of Paris. In Saint Denis, for example, three out of ten of the processing mills were steam powered by the 1820s.

The spur to these three developments was Paris, of course. The city’s livery stables housed a total of 23,000 horses in 1812; 34,000 in 1826 and, if donkeys and mules are added to the total, around 80,000 in 1880. Farmers transported straw litter and also hay and fodder into the capital and then filled their empty carts with stable manure, street sweepings and night soil for the return journey. This relationship is already known to agrarian historians, but not the price-sensitive context in which it operated, nor in its implications for land use and rotations.

The other main focus of this study is horticulture. The author demonstrates that intensive fruit and vegetable production on diminutive plots could be found cheek by jowl with tenanted cereal farms on landscapes almost within sight of the city. Whilst demand for bedding straw was constant and the price obtained for oats fairly stable, seasonal fruit such as peaches, strawberries, cherries, or indeed cut flowers, could be marketed at a considerable premium. The same applied to vegetables with beetroot and lentils achieving the best net profit. On the periphery of the capital the latter crop conveniently matured when neither Egyptian lentils, nor the produce of the south of France were available in the marketplace. Whole villages specialized using pioneering production techniques. Peach trees were nurtured in Montreuil within a grid of walled enclosures, apricots were grown in Arcueil, lettuce in Aubervilliers, cherries in Sceaux and rose bushes in L’Hay. In some villages vegetables were grown in open fields adjacent to wheat and other grain crops, whereas in others horticulture might be practised on separate holdings of no more than 400 or 500 square meters. Large-scale cereal production juxtaposed with what often amounted to kitchen gardening gave rise to differing arrangements in matters of tenure and agricultural machine use, not to mention contrasting patterns of employment, seasonal mobility and wage remuneration. But there were synergies to be had as well – particularly in the area of soil preparation and the protection of tender crops.

It has to be said that these valuable nuggets of information do not emerge very clearly. The book started off life as a doctoral thesis, which the author then adapted to make more accessible to a non-academic readership. This reformatting has produced very uneven results. The barely digestible and sometimes barely legible graphs and tables remain, but the author has added a lot of explanatory footnotes and narrative asides which do not sit comfortably with the text. A strong conclusion sorting the research grain from the incidental chaff would have been welcome. However, the conclusion consists mainly of musings (including comments on Scottish agriculture) that scarcely touch upon the specifics of the author’s claims about the hybrid yet hugely enterprising and innovative agriculture of the Seine département.