The Problem of Leasefarming in Eighteenth-century Piedmont and Lombardy

Abstract

There are good reasons for taking up the problem of leasefarming in eighteenth-century Europe. The leasefarmer, paying cash rents in return for control over all the harvest, was the central figure in the physiocratic program of economic growth, the champion who could revive and expand the French economy with proper support from the laws. For the Swiss scholar Herbert Luethy, Quesnay's idea of winning the crown over to agriculture of large landed estates administered by 'capitalist farmers' was so much the apt attempt at saving the old regime from itself that, in comparison, Voltaire's attack on physiocracy, his UHomme aux quarante ecus (Geneva, 1768), coming from the pen of the feudal lord of Ferney, can only appear as an act of bad faith. Indeed, in a massive thesis of 1994 about the leasefarmers in the Ile-de-France in the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau has brought to life an astonishing collection of these physiocratic entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial families, whose secular accumulations of capital and leaseholds, whose technical achievements and social promotions, bringing wealth and status to themselves and enrichment to the national economy, are sufficiently impressive to raise doubts about the established understanding of pre-Revolutionary France as a brilliant but fatally sclerotic civilization. Conversely, the American Philip Hoffman, in a recent study in econometrics, claims that making sense of this kingdom