Subsistence Crises and the Demography of France Under the Ancien Régime

The major subsistence crises, such as those of 1693 or 1709, were characterized by an exceptional increase in grain prices, coinciding with a no less exceptional upsurge in deaths and a decline in conceptions. But these phenomena cannot be clearly detected unless the counts are made by crop year, and not by calendar year. While crises of this type disappeared in the first half of the eighteenth century, price increases continued to influence demographic behaviours in a manner which, though less visible, was none the less considerable.

“Through our various investigations, we have obtained proof that the years when the price of corn was highest were also those in which mortality was most severe and illness most common”. It was in 1766, in a memoir entitled Réflexions sur la valeur du blé tant en France qu’en Angleterre depuis 1674 jusqu’en 1764 [Reflections on the value of corn in France and England from 1674 to 1764], later published in Messance’s Recherches sur la population [Research on population] that a key problem was first raised: that of the effect of subsistence crises on the demography of France under the Ancien Régime. A highly complex problem, indeed, which can be broken down into numerous questions, of which some have no answer, at least in the form in which they are habitually posed, while others may be resolved over the shorter or longer term by means of research yet to be undertaken, but whose principle must first be established.

How can mortality due to subsistence crises be measured? We note the scientific caution exercised by the author of the Réflexions. He starts out from a statement of fact, namely that years of exceptional corn prices coincide with years of exceptional mortality, but goes on to point out that these years were also years of exceptional morbidity. It would thus be rather pointless in statistical terms to seek a specific difference between such closely linked phenomena: mortality from starvation alone, mortality from disease but attributable to malnutrition, and last, mortality by contagion, this contagion being inseparable from the state of dearth which contributed not only to the development of disease but also to its spread. In the modern era, apart from the extreme case of “physiological misery”, what share of deaths can be attributed to food supply problems when the officially reported causes of death make no suggestion of this?

We can, on the other hand, define with precision the years of exceptional mortality in which excess mortality can be linked to a subsistence crisis. These years are easy to identify, since the scale of the phenomena is so large that concurring testimonies abound. Even historians with little interest in studying economic and social realities cannot be unacquainted with events such as those of 1693 or 1709. Indeed, the numerous monographs at our disposal leave no doubt as to the existence of a causal relationship between price rises, poverty and death.

But difficulties arise if we try to identify more clearly or to quantify this mortality. Statistics on population change existed during the Ancien Régime, but not until 1772, when the major mortality crises due to an exceptional rise in corn prices were a thing of the past. To study these crises, we need to move further back in time, to the reign of Louis XIV and earlier, when no such statistics existed. However, we do possess the registers of births, marriages and deaths – a vital source for all retrospective demographic studies. They are sporadic and often of doubtful quality up to 1667, but wellconserved and of generally high quality from 1667. The final years of Louis XIVth’s reign thus appear to be the most favourable – or in any case the least unfavourable – period for research of this kind.

But a trap awaits us, which is so glaring that one wonders why so many excellent scholars have fallen into it, and so serious that it must be very clearly pointed out. We believe we know what we are saying when...