Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution: Rural Society and Economy in Southern France, c. 1789-1820 (review)

Any student of French history will immediately appreciate the meticulous research at the heart of Noelle Plack's study of the impact of the French Revolution on provincial France. Plack's work sets out to look at the ways in which the lives of peasants were changed at the local level as a result of agrarian reforms at the national level between 1789 and 1820. In both method and approach (if perhaps not time span), her book recalls the best of the Annales historians.

With a focus on privatization in the department of the Gard, this is a work that will be of interest to not only students of the French revolution but also those interested in the dynamics of small holding in one of France's most prolific wine-producing regions. Plack, senior lecturer at Newman University College in Birmingham (UK), argues that the privatization of the commons that started during the French Revolution gave peasants in southern France, specifically in the department of the Gard, land for the vineyards that transformed wine production in nineteenth-century France. The result was real tangible benefits as small-holding peasants kept surpluses that would have gone to seigneurial dues and the tithe and turned their attention to commercial viticulture. The expansion of small holdings in particular had a profound impact on wine production.

While changes in Revolutionary and Napoleonic agrarian legislation had a profound impact on viticulture, this is a book that is more about the process of privatization itself. The bulk of this short book explores the national legislation authorizing common land privatization. In this way, the story of common land is told more from the perspective of Paris than the Gard. Plack's conclusions about the consequences of Parisian-based legislation are important. While the radical Jacobins might have decreed the end to commons land in 1793, only 18 communes of 361 communes in the Gard carried out the division of the commons as legislated (p. 83). Most partitioned some of the land but retained sections of commons into the nineteenth century. The reason for this was complex. Common land stood as a "tangible symbol of rural collective life and identity" even if the commons was more often monopolized by the wealthy and peasants made due with collective pasturing on private lands (p. 156). Peasants and communities acted in their own best interests at a pace that suited local needs.

Wine figures much less in the book than one might have expected from the title. Those interested in the connection between privatization and wine production might be disappointed to discover wine and wine markets relegated to the sixth and final chapter. This is puzzling since wine figures so centrally in her conclusions. Large numbers of the villages of the Gard were affected by privatization and almost half of the commons land was converted to vineyards. "The origins of the 'viticultural revolution' that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century in southern France," she writes, "can be traced back to the Revolution of 1789 and its legislation to privatize common land" (pp. 150-1). Her meticulous research is quite convincing.

Nonetheless, Plack has pointed not to the end of a story but to the beginning. Much work remains to be done on the dynamics between this shift in landholding, vine planting, and the development of regional and national wine markets. Markets take up less than ten pages in this slim volume and yet a "viticultural revolution" could hardly take place without them. Moreover, the dramatic shifts in southern wine production came from changes in vineyards in the Gard in combination with those in the more productive neighboring department of Hérault. Any conclusions about the expansion of viticulture as a result of Revolutionary era privatization would have to take into account this much larger and, in some ways, more important production area...