Book Reviews 61.5

Les an&es de miskre: la famine au temps du Grand Roi, Marcel Lachiver (Fayard, Paris; 1991) 573 pp., 180 FF.

Louis XIV’s noble and royal contemporaries were dazzled by the brilliance of his court and the power which he managed to focus on his crown; many historians have been similarly dazzled. However the last years of Louis’s regime were clouded by a lack of military success, by high and growing taxes to pay for his wars, and by natural disasters. If Louis did indeed boast ‘Aprts moi, le deluge’, for thousands of his subjects a deluge, in the sense of famine, epidemic, and freak disastrous weather conditions struck well before the end of his reign. These years of misery-the terrible harvests of 1693-94, and Ie grande hiver of 1709, both presaged by earth tremors in different parts of France, are the subjects of Marcel Lachiver’s monograph. The book is, Lachiver stresses, a provisional synthesis, a picture of the daily life of his ancestors, when they suffered the hardest tests; it is designed to redress the balance away from those who glorified Louis XIV, to destroy the myth of ‘the good old days’, and to warn people against seeking a refuge from the present

in a romantic past. Lachiver begins with a survey of agricultural methods during the late seventeenth and

early eighteenth centuries in France-the kind of grains sowed, and an estimate of their yields. France in this period should not be compared with modern third world countries whose recurrent famine victims haunt contemporary television screens; in most years Louis XIV’s France grew sufficient to feed itself, though the diet of the majority lacked vitamins and fats leaving them vulnerable to cold. While bread was very much the staff of life, it was commonly eaten in some form of soup. Death was a daily event; not simply from old age and physical decrepitude but also from disease, from accidents at work and play, sometimes from hungry, marauding wolf packs, or from robbers and bandits. From this picture of the peasant’s life as often nasty, brutish, and short, Lachiver takes the reader on a chronological survey of the climatic pattern for the period 1680-1720 analysing how the weather affected harvests, notably in the appalling years of 1693 and 1694, and fostered epidemics as, for example, with dysentery in 1705-1707 and again in 1719. The appalling winter of 1709 he shows was the result of six waves of bitter frosts sweeping most the country from October 1708 to March 1709; a bumper harvest of barley, brought on by a glorious summer in 1709, prevented the situation from becoming an even greater catastrophe. This survey of weather, harvests and mortality is based on detailed statistical work drawing heavily on the as yet uncompleted and unpublished work of Jean- Pierre Legrand and Alain Blum: the former being a computer analysis of the weather records kept in Paris from 1676-1712 by Louis Morin, physician, botanist, and member of the Academy of Sciences: the latter being a detailed reconstruction, under the auspices of the Institut national dktudes dkmographiques, of the French population during the reign of Louis XIV. The statistics are amplified by the use of contemporary, anecdotal material much of which is drawn from the comments made by curts in their parish registers.

The whole presents a vivid picture of the lives of peasants and the poor during these bleak years. Generally it is carefully tied in with the pressures of Louis XIV’s wars, which hit internal commerce and, in times of famine, impeded the importation of grain by sea. Lachiver makes some telling comparisons, notably with the loss of life in World War I to stress the scale of the catastrophes: there was, he estimates, the same number of deaths in 1693 and 1694 as there were between 1914 and 1918, but in a population half the size and over a period half the duration. His analysis of the overall impact of the famines and epidemics on the French population will give historical demographers and historians of medicine plenty of food for thought. But curiously this rigorous analysis does not always follow through in other areas. He argues, for example, that the incidents of robbery increased dramatically in the bad years, yet this is based entirely on anecdotal evidence and while criminal statistics are far less an exact science than demographic ones, it would

616 Book Reviews

have been useful to have seen some statistical evidence here rather than assertion. Similarly he mentions the incidence of popular disorder as crowds marched into markets to fix prices or sought to stop the export of grain. Counting riots can be as dangerous and risky as counting crimes, but rather more analysis of when and where these disorders occurred might have been useful. Did, for example, the incidents differ between countryside, small town, and city, as John Bohstedt argues for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.

This additional detail would, no doubt, have served to make a big book even bigger, yet it would have made for a more rounded picture of Les an&es de mis&e. In sum this is an important book with a grim story powerfully told; its statistical tables and the forty or so pages of documents illustrating the story provide a useful source for teachers to pillage for lectures and seminars. But Lachiver has by no means closed the book on the social history of the concluding years of Louis XIV’s France.

Clive Emsley

The Open University, Milton Keynes