Abstract
From the 1930s through the 1970s, French historians composed some of the greatest rural history—indeed, the greatest history—ever written. Scholars such as Marc Bloch, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie produced extraordinary works of social history, which pioneered in borrowing techniques from other fields such as geography, demography, and anthropology. Many of their best books—such as Ladurie's Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974)—were local or regional studies; and although they were by and large uninformed by neoclassical economics, they created a consensus about the rural economy of Old Regime France. According to that consensus, French agriculture stagnated because rising population levels fragmented landholdings, and because the peasants' attitudes and village institutions blocked economic growth. The consensus endured for a number of years, but it has now begun to collapse under the weight of exciting new research conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of this research is cliometric; some is innovative social history. Nearly all of it is fascinating, but it is proliferating at such a rate that it is hard to keep track of, even for the specialist. It is even harder to see whether a new consensus is beginning to form.
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