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  • Demography and Famine: A Pioneering Article
  • Isabelle Séguy and Christine Théré
    Translated by Catriona Dutreuilh
Keywords

Historical demography, subsistence crisis, mortality, Jean Meuvret

Jean Meuvret’s (1901–1971) article on subsistence crises is a classic of postwar historiography.(1) It was perfectly timed to lay the foundations for the study of population history, a field of economic and social history still unexplored at that time, whose importance had just been highlighted by Louis Chevalier (1946) in one of the first issues of Population. This “founding paper” has marked several generations of historical demographers, whether or not they had the good fortune to attend the classes taught by the author at the École pratique des hautes études from 1951.(2) Meuvret had exceptional knowledge of the archive collections that could be used by quantitative historians to explore research avenues whose contours were already clearly defined. He intended to follow these avenues himself and, above all, encouraged others to do so. He was among the first to reveal the neglected potential of the parish registers, an accessible and informative source for reconstituting population change in the pre-statistical era and for identifying demographic characteristics of the past. Meuvret thus set the stage for historical demography, be it the major survey on “the population of France from Louis XIV to the Restoration” launched by Louis Henry with the help of Michel Fleury in 1958, the pioneering work of Pierre Goubert (1960, 1966) or the masterful study of famine under the reign of the Sun King by Marcel Lachiver (1991).

Meuvret had been working for several years on a thesis on subsistence problems during the long reign of Louis XIV, and had published two articles in 1944, respectively in the Mélanges d’histoire sociale (les Annales, founded by Bloch and Lucien Febvre, had been renamed in 1942), and in the Journal de la Société statistique de Paris.(3) The first discussed the quality of goods price lists [End Page 541] (known as mercuriales) – the main data source for tracking the history of grain prices – using weekly records, if available, in preference to annual evaluations, and examined the pitfalls to be avoided in metrological and monetary conversions. The second made important methodological recommendations for reconstituting price changes, such as the use of a moving median rather than a moving average to eliminate the influence of outliers in very irregular data series. It also argued that the crop year was a more appropriate timeframe for capturing food price fluctuations, especially to study their impact on the populations exposed to price rises.

Two years later, in the Population article presented here, Meuvret brings greater depth and breadth to his analysis of the demographic “repercussions” of exceptional price rises. He examines their complex mechanisms and looks at ways of quantifying them. In his view, the exact share of deaths attributable to famine itself is impossible to determine “in statistical terms”. He also highlights the disruptive effect of famine migration which is liable to distort such measures. His scant use of figures to support his hypothesis may seem surprising. As pointed out by Albert Soboul (1972), the author “was not fatally attracted to numbers”, contrary to what some would have us believe. Another highly original feature of this article is the focus on a hitherto relatively unnoticed past phenomenon to be taken into account when assessing crisis intensity, namely the downturn in births, measured by the calendar of conceptions. It is as much a consequence and a characteristic symptom of crisis as excess mortality – if not more so. Last, the contrast revealed between the two major types of crisis – acute crisis and latent crisis – remains one of the major findings of this study, admittedly based on a limited volume of data and whose representativeness, at the level of the kingdom, was open to question. The graph is still as strikingly illustrative today, though the author says little about how it was constructed.

Twenty years later, Meuvret (1965a, 1965b) acknowledged that the source used for the price curve was “wholly inadequate”. But by that time he could refer to the work of his “disciples” – Pierre Goubert in particular – to reaffirm the often positive correlation between high...

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