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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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At that time the monthly salary of a mason in Paris is at a little less than a livre.

daily, you mean.

The real question is how many days in a year does he need to work to feed himself? Let’s say he only consumes bread. One kilo of bread was 0.3 francs. So they both need, and ancien regime worker gets as his entire salary, say 200 working days times 3.33 kilos = 666 kilos of bread a year. Cheap bread’s 3 euros/kilo, so modern counterpart needs 2000 euros to live all year, or about a working month. Clothing and butter are even cheaper comparatively.

Edit: that’s... very little bread, actually. Hard to believe they were this close to starving. A kg bread is 2200 kcal, so he gets 3800 calories per day (not just working day) to feed his family. And nothing else. No meat, no clothes, no rent, no entertainment. I guess they must have eaten potatoes, which cost only 0.02 francs per kilo. That’s 10 tons of potatoes yearly salary, or 19 000 kcal per day. That’s more like it, now they can afford clothes and the poule au pot on sunday.

I think you're confusing franc and livre which were two different currencies used at different times.

You're correct that food was expensive though, the twilight of the Ancient Regime was a time of famine after all. But not that expensive. I recall reading people spent half of their income of food.

I got this random list of prices (page 8 of the pdf). http://www.numdam.org/item/JSFS_1944__85__7_0.pdf

Which lists prices in francs in 1788, and also says daily salary is 1 franc. So I naturally assumed 1 livre = 1 franc, which is sometimes ("Le terme perdura en tant que synonyme de la livre ") claimed. But if you know more, please share.

Yeah this seems like a reasonable reading of that list. I checked my copy of Hinckler's book again for the discrepancy and yeah it looks like it's my mistake, he was indeed talking about the daily salary in that passage. I must have taken it wrong in my cliffnotes.

Still seems like very expensive prices for bread even given other accounts I've read of the period in general, but I suppose you're not exactly going to get a much worse food situation than right on the cusp of Revolution.

Il semble que ces prix aient été ceux pratiqués pendant à peu près tout le XVIIIeme siècle. (2 lines below, traduction for readers: 'It seems that these prices were those practiced for almost the whole of the 18th century.')

Now I can't guarantee that monsieur de riedmatten in Paris 1944 didn't have an agenda, but that's what he says anyway, if you don't have anything better.

I have no reason to doubt him.

But as you must know Bourbons ruled for about four centuries, and that the Kingdom itself and its feudal institutions lasted for more then thirteen.

A lot can happen in that time. Including major changes in climatic conditions that are bound to effect food prices in agrarian societies.

In some sense none of the factual discussion we're having here is even about the medieval period in the first place.

Wiki's got similar, though slightly more favourable for the ancien regime worker, prices :

Daily wage around 1750-1780: 1.3 livre;

Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in 1782: 0.2586 livre;

Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in December 2013: €2.58.

Still, if they usually ate bread (and they must have, at least before the introduction of the potato), they were close to starving. (1.3 * 200 * 2200 / 0.2586) / 364 = 6076. It seems very hard to feed, shelter and clothe a family for 6000 kcal of bread per day all-in. No wonder kids had to work. And if economists are to be believed, they were already twice as rich per capita as in the middle ages, so I don’t think the medieval comparison, when they were actually serfs, helps your argument.

I was calculating it before, but I had trouble believing it: they were indeed starving, constantly. This article did essentially the same math.

Two and a half pounds of bread is 3,000 calories, almost exactly the average physiological minimum per head in a family of five. One can assess at one year out of four in the 18th century, and at one year out of five in the 17th, the number of years when this ration was reached. The average deficit for the other years can be evaluated, as we see, at a fraction as high as two-thirds of the needs.

The situation of the average man in the traditional period of mankind, i.e. before 1800, can therefore be summed up as follows: the purchasing power of the working classes depended essentially on the atmospheric situation ; the standard of living per head and per day of a working-class family fluctuating from a maximum of less than two and a half pounds of wheat in the best years, to an extremely low minimum, but which, in the middle of the 18th century, still often lowered below a pound of bread.

I should have figured it out earlier, with Henry IV and the sunday chicken he promised his subjects. Of course, they’d starve if they bought meat. I guess modern man is so insulated from such base concerns he has trouble grasping the concept of hunger.

I certainly won't argue that pre industrial times had plenty and that food insecurity wasn't a big problem. One need only try to live on their own farm produce to figure out how hard (and random) it is. But I'm not going to sign off on this idea you have of people having more food related hardship in the middle ages than right before Revolution.

First of all, and if only for the climatic factors I mentionned, not to mention other big factors like war, grain prices fluctuated a lot in 13 centuries.

All the numbers you quote here are from a specific period at the end of Renaissance where it is well documented that the grain price shot up because of successive years of poor harvest due to harsh winters that are widely cited as one of the main causes of the unrest.

But there are many other mitigating factors that make this analysis not say what you want it to say with any degree of certainty.

Probably the biggest one that I think I hinted at previously is the fact that a lot people simply didn't buy food at all. The price records we're looking at here are for cities, which only had access to agricultural surplus from the countryside. Most of France's food production wasn't even priced in. So modeling one's idea of living in those times from the standpoint of an anachronistic capitalist worker who would use goods traded on efficient public markets to assuage need instead of doing most of the work himself I don't believe to be accurate. Combine that with the lack of reliable records before the eye of the State turned to optimizing production and I'm much more likely to believe qualitative records of how life was back than these back of the envelope calculations.

Imo you’re retreating deeper and deeper into more far-fetched explanations and unknowable information. There is no reason why a tradesman or urban worker would be poorer than a peasant, it doesn’t match our experience, and he could always go back to farming. One of the quotes says the food situation was even worse in the 17th century than in the 18th, which matches with the unprecedented pop growth in the 18th. In light of this hunger equilibrium, I think it is absurd to discuss the “lower tax burden” they “enjoyed”. If it was higher they would have likely starved to death, like a fucked up Laffer’s curve.

The article also mentions, and calculates from, 290 days of work/y. So I don’t understand at all why you believe medieval peasants lead these easy lives. I can always bulverize about romanticizing the past and medievalists’ need to redeem their chosen field of study etc, but it’s not getting me any closer to understanding your perspective.

Can you give me one of those qualitative accounts/anecdotes, because from my perspective the weight of hard evidence is overwhelming. Maybe you have some skeletons that show how well-fed they were, anything. Although the skeleton guys tend to celebrate the bucolic charm of a different age, and attack peasants as underfed and overworked.

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