First published in 1980, this compact and useful book uses the earliest volumes of government-published statistics, and with the aid of computer-generated cartography, transforms the numbers there reported into an arrondissement-by-arrondissement comparative picture of French agriculture in the mid-1830s. Clout reviews problems of rapid population growth, scarcely adequate domestic food supplies and primitive systems of transportation, while attention is drawn to spatial variations in agricultural activity and productivity. Commercial, high-yielding farming was best developed in a northern multi-nuclear region, comprising of Ile-de-France, Normandy and Nord, with smaller foci of commercial orientation along an eastern axis from Alsace to Marseilles and in western areas from the Loire to the middle of the Garonne valley. Clout concludes that the revolutionary promise of national economic unity was far from being realised in the 1830s and was not to be achieved until national systems of transport and education were firmly established later in the nineteenth century.

List of Tables; List of Figures; Abbreviations; Preface; 1. Rural France - Terra Incognita? 2. Population Growth 3. Food Supply 4. Provincialism 5. The Look of the Land 6. Tradition and Innovation in the Arable Realm 7. Productivity, Production, and Prices in the Arable Realm 8. The Special Crops 9. The Woodland Realm 10. The Pastoral Realm 11. Feeding the people 12. A final View; Appendix: Documents and Data; Select Bibliography; Index