------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (June 2010)

Noelle Plack, _Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution: Rural
Society and Economy in Southern France, c. 1789-1820_.  Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. xiv + 215 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN:
978-0-7546-6728-5.

Reviewed by Jonathan J. Liebowitz, Department of History, University
of Massachusetts Lowell.


Since Arthur Young and the physiocrats, common land has been regarded
as a burden on agriculture.[1]  Because no individual had a property
right to the commons, all villagers would pasture more animals than it
could sustain and overuse it.  In Young’s eyes, common lands were a
sorry sight, run down and desolate, a picture that Garrett Hardin’s
famous article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” has helped transform
into a stylized fact of modern economics.[2]

From social history comes the other widely accepted fact about common
land, that poor peasants needed it for survival -- grazing for their
animals, wood for fires -- and resisted enclosure. The loss of the
commons is said to have doomed them to proletarianization.

Recently these conclusions have been challenged.  Historians have
discovered that early modern farmers were as smart as modern
economists and understood the dangers of an unregulated commons.  To
avoid overgrazing, villages limited how many animals could be
pastured.  And rather than the poor, it was often the wealthy, with
large herds of animals, who benefited from the unenclosed commons.

Noelle Plack, senior lecturer at Newman University College in
Birmingham, UK, accepts the conclusions of the last group of scholars.
 Her thesis it is that the privatization of the commons begun during
the Revolution gave peasants in southern France, specifically in the
department of the Gard, land for the vineyards that transformed wine
production in nineteenth century France.  Though this argument calls
for an emphasis on the connection between privatization and wine
production, the actual focus of the book is on the privatization
process itself.  For a brief volume of 159 pages of text, it is
unfortunate that the author felt the need to cover both national
legislation and its local consequences.  She could have made a greater
contribution had she focused on the latter topic, which, as she
herself writes, is where research is needed.

Instead, the bulk of the book is a detailed narration of the
legislative activity that affected the status of the commons from the
start of the Revolution through the early post-Napoleonic years.
Plack begins just after 1789 when the revolutionaries set about to put
into practice their belief that common lands should be eliminated
because they were a drag on agriculture.  The revolutionaries wanted
to privatize them, but how much to give each family or individual
proved contentious.  The radical Jacobins decreed in the law of June
10, 1793 that all inhabitants of a commune should share the land
equally, but it remains uncertain how much the law was put into
practice.  Plack’s evidence shows that only 18 out of 361 communes in
the Gard actually carried out the division of the commons (p. 83).

When the conservatives and then Napoleon took power, further division
of the commons was halted because of property holders’ concern that
their rights were threatened by the 1793 decree.  Those who had gained
land under that decree and even so-called usurpers (who occupied land
without following official procedures) were able to keep it.  Further
decrees of the Napoleonic and early Restoration eras moved additional
land to private ownership.

Plack’s history of the French Revolution and common land is mostly
told from the perspective of the various Parisian legislative and
administrative organs.  It follows closely and adds little to Nadine
Vivier’s presentation in _Propriété collective et identité communale:
Les biens communaux en France 1750-1914_ (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1998), which she frequently cites.

The original feature of the book is its focus on privatization in a
single department, the Gard, which Plack introduces at the start in
best _Annales_ fashion.  Situated on the Mediterranean coast just west
of the Rhone River, its territory included the marshy Camargue, near
the sea; a fertile plain inland from that; bushy scrub known as
_garrigues_; and the rugged Cévennes Mountains.  With the diverse
terrain came diversity in the regional economy.  Not only wheat, but
grapes, olives, and in the Cévennes chestnuts were grown.  Silk had
been important, but it, along with livestock, was declining in the
late eighteenth century.  “Almost everyone” owned some land, but there
were considerable divisions between the owners of tiny plots (0-1
hectares) at one extreme and those whose properties exceeded 40
hectares at the other (p. 28). The land that no one owned, that is the
commons, was mostly used for pasture.  It comprised about 14% of the
total area of the department in 1846 when it was first measured.
Access to the commons was determined by the amount of taxes paid, but
the landless were allowed to pasture a few beasts.  Because of its
central role in animal husbandry, the commons was vital to the
functioning of the agricultural economy.  Plack provides the reader
with a well crafted sketch of the Gard landscape as it appeared on the
eve of the Revolutionary changes.   Where there are gaps, like the
important absence of data on the extent of pre-Revolution common land,
these derive from gaps in the sources themselves

Plack returns to rural economy and society in her conclusions.  Since
a significant portion of the Gard’s villages (42%) were affected by
privatization and much of the former commons (about half), especially
the _garrigues_, was converted to vineyards, she believes it
legitimate to conclude that “the origins of the ‘viticultural
revolution’ that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century in southern
France can be traced back to the Revolution of 1789 and its
legislation to privatize common land” (pp. 150-151).

She may well be right.  Certainly the understanding of the department
she has gained from her deep immersion in its archives and other
sources is impressive.  Yet evidence of the link she posits is sparse.
 There is room for her in future work to study vineyards in the Gard
and the even more productive neighboring Hérault to determine whether
the privatized commons did lead the way in the expansion of
viticulture.

Notes:

1. Note that Plack and therefore the present discussion is about land
held undivided, not about common rights over property otherwise used
individually (as in open fields).

2. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”_ Science_, Vol. 162,
No. 3859 (13 December 1968), 1243-1248


Jonathan J. Liebowitz is professor of history at the University of
Massachusetts -- Lowell.  His research interest is French agriculture
during the late nineteenth century with an emphasis on responses to
the crisis of that time and on land tenure.

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