We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Role of the Peasantry in French Industrialization, 1815-80 .
- Authors
Heywood, Colin
- Abstract
The article focuses on the role of French peasantry and small family farms on the country's industrialization from 1815 through 1880. Numerous economic historians have echoed that the small family farms which continued to be of importance in nineteenth-century France retarded the process of industrialization. If the picture of an agricultural system still stagnant, backward and primitive in 1840 is now generally considered overdrawn, the incompleteness of its transformation before 1880 continues to be emphasized. That is to say, underlying the increases in agricultural output and the growing aura of prosperity in the villages, there was a persistent reluctance to invest and a failure to increase yields. This pattern occurred because the small farmers lacked the financial resources and human skills to introduce technical innovations and because they were steeped in a traditional culture which shunned the incentives of the market, and fixed surplus population on the land. Nonetheless, in recent years various agricultural economists have begun to rescue the peasant from general opprobrium. It has been suggested that institutional and cultural influences are not the "critical attributes" checking progress in traditional agriculture, and that the tenurial system of a country can only be judged in the light of specific historical, geographical, economic, social and political conditions.
- Subjects
FRANCE; PEASANTS; FAMILY farms; INDUSTRIALIZATION; ECONOMIC history; SMALL farms
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1981, Vol 34, Issue 3, p359
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2595878