ART. III. Economie Rurale de la France depuis 1789. Par M. LEONCE DE LAVERGNE, Membre de l'Institut, &c. Paris: 1860.

THE

HE most cursory traveller who is whirled by steam in less than thirty hours from the coast of Picardy to the shores of Provence, can hardly fail to be struck with the diversified aspects of the soil and rural economy of France. He leaves in the Department of the Pas de Calais a soil and climate less favoured by nature than the southern coast of England; he finds in the Department of the Var a region vying in its products with the valley of the Arno or the huerta of Valencia. But throughout this vast and varied tract of country, he will, if he has known the condition of France for any considerable period of time, be not less struck by the astonishing marks of agricultural improvement which are everywhere visible. When we, whose lot it is to belong to what must now be called the elder generation, first visited France in the years which succeeded the peace of 1815, the aspect of the land was that of a country empoverished and devastated by a quarter of century of domestic convulsions and of war. The progress which had commenced under the enlightened ministers of Louis XVI., and the passion for improvement which took possession of the French nation in the eighteenth century, were rudely arrested by the Revolution. Landed property itself was violently transferred from its former owners to a class of men who had for many years neither the confidence, nor the capital, nor the skill to improve the cultivation of the soil. Whatever was beneficial in the former relations of landlord and tenant had been destroyed; whatever is beneficial in the new order of things was as yet imperceptible. The Imperial conscription for the wars of Napoleon drained the rural population to an excess, from which it has not even now recovered in numbers or in physical strength. The appearance of a French village in those days was that of squalid discomfort, in which even the more wealthy of the peasant proprietors were content to live. Their dwellings mere cabins; their farm buildings mere hovels; the church dilapidated from neglect or defaced with whitewash. Carriageable by-roads were unknown: except on the great paved chaussées or royal routes constructed by Louis XIV., the country was intersected by mere tracks, which rendered it equally difficult for the farmer to obtain manure for his fields or

to dispose of the produce of his harvests. Stock was extremely scarce and the breeds of animals wretched. The only relief afforded to the exhausted soil was by a frequent but unintelligent system of fallows-scientific agriculture, rural machinery, artificial manures, drainage and irrigation were alike unknown. Such was the state of agriculture in France about forty years ago, and if we go back another forty years, we must in fairness add that such was the state of agriculture in England also. Modern agriculture is almost the creation of the present century.

Arthur Young lived and travelled about eighty years ago, and he has recorded with admirable truth and sagacity the actual condition of both countries in his time. It was given him to foresee, but not to realise, the splendid profits and advantages to be reaped from the new era, when the science he professed would regenerate the soil of Europe, and enable it to support with increasing wealth and prosperity countless millions of human beings. Few men now alive can be said to have witnessed this prodigious transformation in England, and the younger generation has a very imperfect conception of the agricultural operations of their grandfathers. A change has been wrought in the land somewhat more gradual, but certainly not less beneficial than those which have taken place in manufactures and in locomotion, though more than half the people of England are probably not aware of it. But in France a similar transformation is going on before our eyes. Owing to the causes we have adverted to it began much later; it has proceeded more slowly; but in these later years its progress is

* Arthur Young was sorely tempted in 1789 to purchase the estate of Riaux, within a few miles of Moulins, consisting of a château, two mills, nine farms, &c., in all 3000 acres of good land. The price then asked for the whole estate was 300,000 livres, the gross rental being 12,500 livres, and the net rental about 8000. The Englishman saw and recorded his conviction that the price was low for 3000 acres of land capable of tripling and quadrupling its produce and value in the hands of a farmer who could handle it; but he shrewdly adds, 'the state of the government, and the fear of buying 'my share in a civil war, prevented me from contracting this engage'ment at present.' At that time he was assured that there were six thousand estates for sale in different parts of France. M. de Lavergne has ascertained that this very estate of Riaux was sold in 1799 by its owner (who escaped the Revolution and did not emigrate) for 201,000 livres; in 1826 it was again sold for 315,000 livres; and at the present time such an estate in the Department of the Allier is worth about 600,000 livres, or double what it was in 1826, and triple what it was in 1800. This is a fair example of the increase of the value of land in France in the present century.

astonishing, and the results are the more striking as they are favoured by a climate in many parts of France very superior to our own. They are indeed apparent to the most superficial observation. A vast amount of building for farming purposes and for the abode of the rural population is rising on every side. Great as the architectural improvements have been in Paris and in all the great towns of France, the enormous increase of domestic rural buildings of solid materials and good workmanship is even more remarkable, for these are the practical unostentatious results of private wealth and industry. Here and there the old château or the new country house, surrounded by its park, and restored to the uses of country life, marks the increase of these tastes and pursuits among the upper classes. Roads and railroads have already opened the great majority of the departments.* The food and clothing of the peasantry have improved. Fallows are less frequently to be seen; there is an enormous increase of green crops, and a proportionate augmentation of stock; and the whole system of farming is neater, more liberal, and more productive.

M. de Lavergne has undertaken to relate the course of this economical revolution in the unpretending but highly interesting and instructive volume now before us. We need hardly remind our readers that M. de Lavergne, whose admirable volume on the Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland' we had occasion to notice at some length on a former occasion, (Ed. Rev. No. 209, 1856), is the most distinguished writer of the day on a science which he has made peculiarly his own, and which we must call, for want of a better name, 'agricul'tural economy.' The term rural economy' is commonly applied in a narrower sense to the conduct of rural operations, and the management of land. But agricultural economy embraces all the varied and important questions which arise in connexion with the production and distribution of agricultural wealth: these are, in other words, precisely the most important questions political economy has to deal with, for the soil is the

* There are in France about 250,000 miles of roads, of which about 20,000 are first-class highways, 50,000 second-class, the rest country roads. It has been calculated that twenty-five years would be required to put these all in good condition at the expense of the communes. One of the latest measures of the Emperor has been to allow a million sterling in aid of the improvement of rural roads, justly observing that a complete system of roads is the best present he can make to the peasantry, and will be one of the most glorious monuments of his reign. A much larger sum is however required to perform this vast work.

fertile mother of almost all produce, and the arts which increase and develope that produce have the most direct bearing on all the political and social relations of man. M. de Lavergne is not merely a scientific writer on agriculture, for on that ground we have probably several agriculturists in England who are his equals. But he has brought his agricultural knowledge to bear with great ingenuity and good sense on the whole state of his country. By this key he explains with remarkable lucidity the natural geography of France; he interprets the national character and the past history of the people; and he has given us a book of simple facts and sound reasoning, which is an excellent guide to the true state of the nation. We strongly recommend every intelligent traveller in France to give M. de Lavergne's volume a place in his carpet-bag by the side of Mr. Murray's indispensable red handbook. It is, in a very portable form and a most agreeable style, a complete topography of the rural districts of France, which are still far less known to our travellers than the remotest corners of Germany and Italy, although to the archeologist, the politician, and we may now add, the agriculturist, no part of the Continent deserves a more careful attention.

The reign of Louis XVI. is a period in the history of France to which very scanty justice has been done. The tremendous catastrophe which closed the career of that unfortunate sovereign in blood and darkness, seemed to have erased from human memory the preceding fifteen years, from 1774 to 1789,which were devoted by the King and the ablest of his ministers to useful and intelligent reforms. It is not too much to say that the reign which began by M. de Turgot's celebrated ordinances for opening the trade of the country and abolishing the Corn Laws, and which carried into effect in 1786 the Commercial Treaty with England, did in reality anticipate some of the most important economical reforms of the present century. Before Turgot's reforms the agriculture of France lay under a system of close protection. The price of corn, the trade in corn, and even the amount of corn to be sown were regulated by authority. All changes in the usual course of husbandry were prohibited, as if corn could be grown without other crops. Vines could not be planted without the permission of government. To all these absurdities Turgot gave the death-blow when he declared, in the preamble to one of his laws, The 'prosperity of the country is mainly based on the cultivation of the land, on the abundance and profitable sale of its produce, 'which is the only proper encouragement of husbandry. This 'profitable sale can only be the result of the most absolute

liberty in buying and selling. It is this liberty which secures to the farmer his just recompense, to the landlord a fixed income, to the industrious labourer regular and proportionate wages, to the consumer what he needs, and to citizens of all ranks the enjoyment of their rights.' This language was used by the ministers of Louis XVI. thirteen years before the commencement of the Revolution. The same enlightened spirit manifested itself in the Provincial Assemblies of 1776, in which many of the great nobles and prelates of France took a most active part. The records of these assemblies prove that the Church and the aristocracy of France were not, at that time, insensible to the wants of the country; and that they might, under judicious direction, have laid the basis of constitutional government and national prosperity.

If the government of which Turgot was the head had had the power to carry three such measures as an Act for the Commutation of Tithe, an Act for the Enfranchisement of Copyholds, and an Encumbered Estates' Act, it is perhaps not too much to assert that the worst effects of the French Revolution might have been averted. But the monarchy, though nominally absolute, had no such power, for absolutism is essentially weak unless it is backed by great military strength. The measures which Turgot did propose were for the most part defeated by a combination of the privileged orders. It became necessary to convoke the States-General to obtain the sanction of the nation to necessary and indispensable reforms; the States-General overshot the mark, and the whole social edifice was thrown down.

M. de Lavergne doubts whether the abolition of tithes and seignorial charges on land had the beneficial influence on agriculture which has commonly been attributed to them by French writers, and he points to the example of this country to show that great progress may be made in agricultural improvements without any violent invasion of the property of the Church or the rights of the Manor. The annual value of the tithes in France before the Revolution was about three millions. sterling, to which must be added another million lost in the process of collection*; but the maintenance of the ecclesiastical

* In the concluding chapter of this work M. de Lavergne states that the tithes of France amounted in 1789 to 133,000,000 on two milliards and a half of gross produce, but this includes the lay impropriations. Tithe in France did not amount to above one-twentieth of the gross produce, and Arthur Young remarked that this charge was proportionately much heavier in England than in France. The whole