Les systèmes fonciers locaux. Approche historique des rapports entre formes d'usage du sol et croissance industrielle

Abstract

Local Land Systems : A Historical Approach to the Relationship between Forms of Land Usage and Industrial Growth After recalling how, at the end of the 18th century in Great Britain, industrialists managed to have protectionism abolished, a measure that ruined English agriculture, the author describes the major local land systems that have marked French agriculture since the Revolution : large properties organized around a castle (western France) ; the share-cropper system in central France ; the system of "sacred egoism" in Brittany and Normandy ; the convivial system in the Beam and Basque regions, the Massif Central and Alsace ; and land systems based on direct owner farms in the southern and eastern Massif Central. Unlike Great Britain, these various land systems and the industrial sector have never come into contradiction, because French capitalism was, above all, centered in the banks. But the land systems have come undone since World War II. as the family farm, composed of an old "core" of lands in freehold and of land rented from several small farmers, has developed.