Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Social History and Agricultural Productivity: the Paris

This paper uses a sample of leases and a new method to examine total factor productivity in the Paris Basin during the years 1450-1789. After defending the methodology, the -------1=¥er_anacyzeS-thexesul~ample--,--wl±ic-h-sht>lliG-4ist>el-t-he--myth-ef-agfiettt&ttrfti----­ stagnation in Old-Regime France, at least in the Paris Basin. Historians should remain eternally grateful to Claude Sarasin. 1 Like all the canons at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in early eighteenth-century Paris, he could have led a life of uncontaminated leisure, with few obligations besides perfunctory attendance at daily offices. Although he did hold the post of archivist at the cathedral, the position was largely ceremonial, and no one actually expected him to sift through Notre Dame's voluminous papers. That messy task could be left to paid assistants, while Sarasin simply collected his pay. Yet Sarasin did not do what was expected of him. Obsessed with cracking vellum and bound leather registers, he began to compile a detailed index of Notre Dame's capitular acts, where, among other decisions, the leases of Notre Dame's extensive property holdings were recorded. He spent years on the project, and when he ceased work in 1743, his index comprised more than one hundred manuscript volumes in a squat Latin hand. Thirty-three alone were devoted to Notre Dame's properties--most of them farms in the Paris Basin--and in them one finds details of leases from the late Middle Ages up to the middle of the eighteenth century. Today his index, along with the rest of Notre Dame's papers, is stored in Paris at the Archives Nationales. The virtue of Sarasin's index is that it can be combined with other, equally valuable documents in Notre Dame's archives, such as records of land surveys and farm management, accounts of property seized at the beginning of the French Revolution, and, most important of all, a voluminous and well-organized collection of original leases. When linked together, the various records permit one to follow individual farms and pieces of agricultural land, with matching series of leases and property descriptions, from the fifteenth century to 1789. The records thus allow us to track a large number of identical properties through time, an advantage that has eluded most other historians working on leases. Indeed, most other researchers have worked with random samples of different properties, and the heterogeneity of the properties has clouded their conclusions.2 What follows is an analysis of 808 leases gathered from Sarasin's index and from the archives of Notre Dame.3 The leases form 39 series, each one concerning a separate property in one of 25 different villages scattered throughout the Paris basin (Figure 1 ). The properties in question lay on 1 The author wishes to express his gratitude to participants at seminars at UC Davis, the Univers!ly of lllmo1s, and Washmgton Un1vers1ty; and to members of the audience at the Second World Congress of Cliometrics and at the 1989 meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies and the All-UC Economic History Group. Robert Allen, Shawn Kantor, Jean-Michel Chevet, George Grantham, Peter Lindert, Ted Margadant, Larry Neal, Kate Norberg, John Nye, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Angela Redish, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Ken Sokoloff, and David Weir deserve special thanks for their comments and criticisms. 2 Leon Le Grand, "Claude Sarasin, intendant des archives du chapitre de Notre-Dame de Paris et sa collection d'extraits des registres capitulaires de Notre-Dame," La bibliographie moderne 4(1900): 333-71; Jean-Paul Desaive, "A la recherche d'un indicateur de la conjoncture: Baux de Notre-Dame de Paris et de l'abbaye de Montmartre," in Les fluctuations du produit de la dime: Con joncture decimale et domaniale de la fin du Mayen Age au XVI!Ie siecle, ed. Joseph Goy and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Paris, l 972), pp. 44-57. Desaive was the first to use Sarasin's index as a source of leases, but he tried to read from the leases an indication of farm grain output. My innovation has been to combine Sarasin with the original leases and property descriptions in the Notre Dame archives and to analyze the resultant series of leases in a very different way, using both economic theory and multivariate statistics. For other work with leases in the Paris region, see Jean Jacquart, La crise rurale en Ile-de-France. 1550-1670 (Paris, 1974), pp. 614-18, 637-39, 699, 772; idem, "La rente fonciere, indice conjoncturel? ," Revue historigue 514(1975): 355-76; and Beatrice Veyrassat-Herren and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ''La rente fonciere autour de Paris au XVII siecle," Annales E.S.C. 23(1968): 541-55. 3 Sarasin's index is in the Archives Nationales [henceforth AN] in Paris, LL 80-82, 233-352/354. The leases come from the index volumes LL 319-350/351 and from the originals in AN Sl23-462. AN Sl23-462 also contains property descriptions, land management records, and declarations n1ade when 1""otre Dame's property was seized in 1790, all of which I relied upon.