Review

Reviewed Work(s): Conjoncture Economique, Structures Sociales. Hommage a Ernest

Labrousse by Fernand Braudel
Review by: Philip Dawson
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Summer, 1976), pp. 150-154
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202392
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150 | PHILIP DAWSON

wrong to separate the two parts in this way, for several important
interlocking implications-not to say awkward questions-arise. In-
deed, it is not the least virtue of the methodology that it directs attention
to them.
Sandberg argues that, in view of the inter-war collapse of the
international market, "a mass installation of automatic looms in
Lancashire prior to World War I would probably have resulted in a
worse situation than that which actually occurred" (205). Presumably,
therefore, it was lucky for Lancashire that it had kept a more labor-
intensive method of production because it was quite obvious that this
could not meet a new challenge. Automatic looms would have led to a
less humane situation by holding out a possibility of survival which was
chimerical. Furthermore, a declining Lancashire industry which had
been previously equipped with valuable automatic looms would have
exported them second-hand at a loss; whereas, by not having invested
in them in the first place, this was happily avoided. Are we to conclude,
then, that until I914 Lancashire ran obsolescent machinery, which was
(largely for historic reasons) still economically profitable, in order to
make a once-for-all killing in an extremely precarious international
market ? And, if the Lancashire entrepreneurs are consequently to be
congratulated on their economic rationality, did they realize what they
were doing ?
P. F. Clarke
University College, London

Conjoncture economique, structures sociales. Hommage a Ernest Labrousse.

Edited by Fernand Braudel and others (Paris, Mouton, I974) 547 pp.
n.p.

Labrousse's first book is forty-four years old, and he is over 80. Still
his influence continues. It has shaped, among other things, much of the
content of Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations in the last thirty
years. The effects of his thinking remain direct, as well. The Histoire
economique et sociale de la France, in volume II (1970) and volume III (in
press), summarizes much of it for the benefit of a new generation of
readers.' A scholarly publication in Labrousse's honor was planned ten

i Vol. II is reviewed by Isser Woloch in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IV

(1974), 435-457.

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REVIEWS | 151

years ago. Now that one has finally appeared, it must first be welcomed
for its purpose, recognition of a great historian.
This is a collection of thirty-one briefarticles by some ofLabrousse's
pupils and some of their pupils, with a preface by Fernand Braudel. As
might be expected, there is a concentration on eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century France. But it is notable that other countries are not
excluded. Frederic Mauro sketches major economic trends and social
structures in Latin America since the early sixteenth century. Vitorino
Magalhaes-Godinho outlines the rate and causes of emigration from
Portugal between 1420 and I970. Bartolome Bennassar interprets the
monetary actions by which the imperial policy of Castile drained that
country of the huge capital accumulated in the sixteenth century.
Maurice Aymard examines economic stratification in a Sicilian moun-
tain town from I548 to 1637. Jean Georgelin analyzes the seasonal
fluctuations of prices of wheat and maize in Venetia in I782-I80o.
Francois G. Dreyfus reflects on the significance of the German "social-
ists of the chair" of the I87os and I88os. FranCois Bedarida describes the
social class character and ambivalent political consciousness of the
district of Poplar in London's East End in I850-I914. Claude Fohlen,
surveying American historical writing from George Bancroft to the
New Left, sees in pluralism the distinctive qualities of the American
past. This internationalization of French historical attention follows
logically from Labrousse's comparative viewpoint, even though it is
not exemplified in his research.
Labrousse's history is impersonal, without heroes or villains; yet, it
is not without passion. The ideal of equality and the facts of inequality
have animated all of his work. And there is the constant concern for
methods which can be used on research problems other than the one
immediately at hand. He has sought intellectual structure in his own
and his pupils' work as insistently as economic and social structure in
the French past. Equality and structure are not historical themes for
everyone's taste (and, accordingly, neither is the book under review).
They have, however, lent great persuasive power to Labrousse's specific
contributions. Risking a derisory reduction of published writings which
total more than 3,0oo pages, we may select three major contributions of
Labrousse's work: I) Methods of criticism and validation, and historical
use of statistical documents and time series, involving a shift of mentality
from the methods pertinent to such other sources as narrative accounts
of individual witnesses; 2) An explanatory paradigm linking economic
fluctuations and trends to social, even revolutionary, conflict within a

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152 [ PHILIP DAWSON

particular type of system, the grains-and-textiles economy of the

regime; 3) A proposal for methodically exploring social stratificat
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably its central elem
the bourgeoisie.
Of these, the first two mentioned are in Labrousse's major boo
which in fact constitute a unified achievement.z In the volume at h
Pierre Chaunu assesses this achievement as the turning point in tw
tieth-century historical thought, in France at least, "the discours
method of the new scientific history" (25). More accessible to deb
or to test, is Pierre Vilar's recommendation that a "Labrousse mo
should be systematically used to compare subsistence crises and th
political concomitants in twentieth-century Russia, China, Sp
Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.
But another way of honoring a scholar is to criticize his work
Labrousse's analysis of the grains-and-textiles economy is being e
tended, modified, limited, and in part decomposed. In this volum
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie contributes an essay on the French peasa
in the sixteenth century. He observes that in the i55os the restoration
the medieval ecosystem was completed. It was at the cost of f
mentation of the land, property transfers from peasants to others
pauperization of rural wage-earners; and it was followed by revolts
by the growth of a counterculture manifested in witchcraft, whil
northern France the Reformation passed over the peasants' heads.
of the processes that Labrousse described were occurring, but the resul
were different. After I720 or so, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, a b
change intervened. We are left free to infer that it made possible
operation of the "Labrousse model." More deliberately problemati
is Pierre Goubert's essay on "twenty contrasting peasantries" of t
eighteenth century. In characteristically trenchant fashion, Goub
asserts: "The French peasant [this is the title of Labrousse's cours
lectures published in 1962] never existed" (378). He says that w
emerges from research is rather a typology: ten or more kinds of r
economy; three kinds of seigneurial institutions (strong, weak, a
"modernized"); and a succession of periods marked by improvemen
the material conditions of peasants' life, increase in the number of you
adults (born in the I75os and I76os and entering the labor market ab
two decades later), the steep rise in incomes from land rents descr
2 Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1
La crise de 1'economie franfaise a la fin de l'ancien regime et au debut de la Revolution
Aperfus gene'raux, sources, methode, objectifs; la crise de la viticulture (Paris, I944).

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REVIEWS 1 I53

by Labrousse, and technical progress in surveying and map-making

which assisted the more rational management of landed estates. The
explosive mixture of I789 thus appears more complicated, more vol-
atile, and (especially) more evanescent than the crisis which Labrousse
found emerging from the inexorable forces of price- and wage-
movements.

A paradigm should oversimplify. In this instance, the cr

introduction of complexity will have to take account of
research in historical demography, a whole new discipline
since Labrousse's major books. It also ought to involve a
systematic examination of the relations between the structur
characterizing the different regions of France before I7
successions of events in those regions thereafter.
Labrousse's proposal for study of the bourgeoisie was not
as an explanation, but as the definition of a topic and the de
some methods.3 It called for a census, by occupations and i
the people between the highest and the lowest classes. In t
volume, a half-dozen articles represent the latest state of th
To these writers, the simple idea of a census appears insuf
capture the social reality of the bourgeoisie. In Georges Livet
Strasbourg in the eighteenth century, in Gabriel Desert
between Bayeux and Honfleur in the nineteenth centur
Maurice Agulhon's suggestive discussion of some towns i
there is a recurrent distinction between an "old" bourge
"new" bourgeoisie, a distinction based on economic functio
mentality or consciousness. In the reflections on methods p
Adeline Daumard, Andre-Jean Tudesq, and Georges Dupeux
suggestions are offered: reconsider the social relations wit
tween classes; reintroduce the analysis of events into the stu
structure; and investigate the nature, extent, and form
mobility, particularly by comparing many family historie
branch of the studies inspired by Labrousse, there persists
uncertainty, much more than in the research that followed his
books. This subject itself is less definite: concentrations of
power interacting with political institutions, in ways that are in
difficult to elucidate and are recalcitrant to some of the p
methods that Labrousse proposed. Perhaps more important,
3 "Voies nouvelles vers une histoire de la bourgeoisie occidentale aux X
siecles (I700-I850)," Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionate di Scienze Sto
I955), IV, 365-396.

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154 | PETER H. AMANN

to organize and stimulate subsequent research by proposing methods,

but not exemplifying their use, can rarely be as effective as presenting
methods, hypotheses, evidence, and conclusions together.
A half century ago, Labrousse began to study the origins of
French social insurance in the doctrines and experiences of the revolu-
tionary period, and conceived the idea of summarizing, as a brief
introduction, the history of prices and wages in France in the eighteenth
century. This volume in his honor provides some suggestive views of
the extensive territory surveyed, mapped, and subdivided since then.
Philip Dawson
Brooklyn College

The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930. By Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and

Richard Tilly (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1975)
354 pp. $I5.00

This is a major book which succeeds exceptionally well in its inter-

disciplinary approach to a highly significant problem. Above all, The
Rebellious Century is important for testing the two basic and rival
hypotheses on the nature of collective violence that have divided
sociologists, political scientists, and historians, not to mention politi-
cians, commission report writers, and editorialists. Both hypotheses are
perfectly plausible and have been persuasively presented in various
guises and with many refinements. Until now they had never been
proved or disproved or, for that matter, systematically examined in the
light of historical evidence. An open-minded, yet cautious, reader of
the evidence which the Tillys have gathered, presented, and analyzed is
likely to concur with their findings: at least in France, Italy, and
Germany between c. I830 and 1930, one of the hypotheses seems to fit
the facts, while the other-the more widely held of the two-does not.
This may seem much ado about a rather modest result. It is not. Con-
sidering how few, if any, explanations of collective behavior have been
verified, the Tillys' work is an impressive pioneering feat, particularly
as they go on to formulate an explanation of collective violence and
collective action that is congruent with their data.
The two groups of hypotheses on collective violence that provide
the leitmotiv for this book are what the authors label, respectively,
breakdown and solidarity theories. Breakdown theories, in their
modern form traced back to Emile Durkheim, consider collective

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