Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 147

The long-term transformation of the common lands of France is a question that has held a central place within French rural history of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period since at least the 1920s. As in Britain, historians (and contemporaries) saw the transformation of the ownership of the commons as a key indicator of agrarian modernization and, as with Britain, the debate over this transformation has also been marked by an ideological dimension. In France, in studies of the revolutionary period in particular, much of the debate has centred around the role of the peasantry in the enclosure and/or regulation of common land and the subsequent effects of that role on the nature of peasant society and class formation in the rural areas. For many years the orthodox view was that of Georges Lefebvre. At the most basic level this was that the peasantry, especially the poor peasants, were opposed to the enclosure and division of the common land since, once the land was lost, they had nothing. Against this, Anatoli Ado and adherents of the marxisant views of Soboul following Lenin saw the peasants, especially the middle peasants, as key actors in the creation of agrarian capitalism. To them enclosure and division of the essentially wasted commons was the first key step on the ladder to a viable peasant proprietorship. More recent work, especially that of Nadine Vivier, has shifted the argument, in the first instance at least, away from grand narratives to a much more nuanced and localist interpretation. Vivier argues that it was not so much the act of enclosure that was important as how the land was to be divided – the mode de partage. This in turn depended crucially on regional, economic, social and agrarian variables.

It is within this model that Plack’s study is set. Taking Vivier’s insistence that the nature of the enclosure and partage of common land can only be understood when studied over a long perspective, it follows one region of southern France through the Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Restoration legislation that fostered the privatization of common land. The region studied is centred on the modern department of the Gard. The Gard, as Plack’s study shows, was a region of several agricultural regions, but the dominant landscape form was (and is) that of garrigues, a barren landscape of low scrub produced by the long-term burning and grazing of forests. It was in the regions of garrigues that most of the common land was concentrated and where the changes in the years from the 1780s to the 1820s had most effect. Outside these regions change was lass obvious. For example to the north of the Gard the region of the Cevennes saw little change and the pre-revolutionary pattern of tiny arable holdings and large communal pastures was maintained. Against that, the majority of communes in the south and east of the region saw some changes in the years between the 1780s and the 1820s, and most of these were in areas of garrigues or the arid Mediterranean plain.

Plack’s study follows this process at two levels, first as represented in the discussions at national level, mainly in Paris and, secondly, in the local response to national and mainly legislative change. In this, the discussion of the revolutionary period takes most time and space with the complex, and often opaque, relationships between the desires of the legislators, local and national, carefully charted. However, for the agricultural historian, there is an often a frustrating lack of precise detail as to how this worked out at the level of the commune. Nevertheless the discussion of the regional impact of these reforms does add a further local study of the effects of land reform on land holding and landowning and landownership in this period. Against this there are important caveats. For example, although 42 per cent of communes in Plack’s study region experienced some privatization of common land. In most of these some communal land was retained well into the nineteenth century and in some communes until the present period. This mix, as Vivier has argued more generally, enabled the petit producteur to straddle the world of both the collective and the individual forms of agricultural production, combining the peasant worlds of both Lefebvre and Soboul.

In the final chapter, which looks at the socio-economic impact of the changes in land tenure, Plack looks at the more conventional ‘agrarian history’ of the region during the period. What we see here is not a ‘revolution’ in productive techniques, but rather a building on existing methods and structures. To the non-specialist (like this reviewer) the long-term trend in this region would appear to be the expansion of viticulture, and indeed that is certainly reinforced here. Yet the importance of land reform is rather less clear. There had been considerable increase in the amount of land under vines before 1789, but that there was a further increase before 1850 cannot be doubted. What is not always clear from this study is precisely where and how land ‘reform’ contributed to this. However, it does seem clear that in some communes at least the expansion that lead to the ‘golden age’ of wine in Languedoc after 1850 was based upon ‘new’ peasant exploitation of former communal garrigues. But, it is equally clear that, for many petits, the privatization of communal resources meant simply more expansion on the old system. As Plack says, ‘a balanced polyculture still dominated most villages in the Gard during the early nineteenth century and traditional forms of exploitation were carried out on new plots (p. 150)

Like many regional studies, this study makes important points about the agrarian changes wrought during (if not by) the French revolution. While it may lack the grand narratives and great explanations so many British writers have come to expect of French historical writing, its contribution to the complex mosaic of French rural French history is clear. It also presents, almost en route, a clear and precise discussion of the debates and methodology around the question of the commons in the revolutionary period and from that discussion raises important points, which are of interest well beyond the wild garrigues of the Gard.