Educating in economic calculus: the invention of the enlightened peasant via manuals of agriculture, 1830–1870

ABSTRACT

This study is concerned with the process of the economic normalisation of agriculture in nineteenth-century France. The manuals published for rural inhabitants and for use in primary schools between 1830 and 1870 are presented as a means of analysing attempts at economic rationalisation which were underway during this period, in particular as it would affect the peasantry. Drawing attention to the content of agricultural, the study sheds light on the educational forms in which economic precepts and accounting techniques were presented and the manner in which those techniques were employed to promote ‘best practices’, so as to tentatively orient farm management and the farmer’s decisions. It highlights the social work of ideological production and behavioural guidance that unfolded in the first part of the nineteenth century. Our research emphasises the ethics embodied in these agricultural manuals, ethics that were directed towards a greater focus on profit maximisation on the part of the small- and medium-scale peasantry in tandem with an idea of disciplined and prudent personal and professional conduct.

KEYWORDS:

• Process of economisation
• accounting rhetoric
• agricultural manuals
• farm management
• nineteenth-century France

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the EHESS ‘Atelier de lecture en histoire et sociologie rurales’ and at the RiTME seminar (INRA 1323). I received valuable comments from two anonymous reviewers and the guest editor of this special issue. My gratitude goes to Nadine Vivier, René Bourrigaud, Yannick Lemarchand, Emile Choné and Pierre Morlon for the encouragement that they gave to this work. My thanks are extended to all. I am also indebted to Laura Sayre for her much appreciated translation work. Any errors are of course my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mathieu de Dombasle did not initially intend to create a new ‘farmer’s calendar’, but rather to translate that of Arthur Young, which he admired greatly. Confronted with innumerable differences in soil, climate, agricultural systems, and so on, in France, however, he decided to write a new work while still following the example of the English pioneer in the promotion of costing, cost allocation, and exit-value accounting (see Juchau 2002).

2. As Lethuillier (1999) has shown, the term cultivateur was in vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth century and tended to take the place of laboureur as used in the previous century. Cultivateur covered a wide range of social contexts depending on the region and the context. To signal the difference between small-scale and medium-scale farming, one also sees references to the ‘petit cultivateur’.

3. La Richesse du cultivateur ou les secrets de J.N. Benoit appears not to have been written by Mathieu de Dombasle. In 1821, La Richesse du cultivateur ou les secrets de J. N. Benoit was attributed to A. Lemercier in Quérard’s France littéraire ou Dictionnaire bibliographique du XIXe siècle, as was another excerpt from the Calendrier du cultivateur. The 1821 and 1830 editions of the Calendrier have A. Lemercier’s name on the title page. Lermercier had already published Le trésor du cultivateur ou Le moyen d’augmenter les richesses du laboureur en améliorant la culture des terres et plusieurs branches d’Economie rurale (1819). The preface to his Trésor says that the book was written ‘at the invitation of the Conseil d’Agriculture [and] the Ministère de l’Intérieur’. Lemercier had already employed the form of a dialogue between ‘a good cultivateur and a poor farmer’ as the narrative fabric for his 1819 agricultural catechism.

4. In his Quelques mots sur M. de Dombasle et sur l’influence qu’il a exercée; par un élève de Roville (1846), Meixomoron notes the great attachment of readers to the figure of Jean-Nicolas Benoît, many of whom believed he was a real person (1846, p. 24).

5. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber claimed to distance himself from Sombart’s position (27). However, when Sombart discussed in The Bourgeois (1913) the correspondence between the form of an economy and the spirit giving rise to it, he aligned himself with his colleague:

as Max Weber has shown with regard to Benjamin Franklin, this relationship and this correspondence is not a strict one and does not authorise us to conclude that such a form necessarily calls into being such a spirit, or vice versa. (Sombart 1913, 14–15)

Later, Sombart would advance an intermediate position between Marx and Weber.

6. It is this nearly ‘word for word’ equivalence between the writings of Alberti and those of Franklin that Weber would judge ‘unsustainable’ in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905, 29).

7. Bryer recurred to earlier studies, such as those of Tawney (1941) and Coleman (1963), on the accounting of large landowners who were closely connected with the business world in England from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Bryer pointed to certain failures in the bookkeeping and calculation methods of these semi-capitalists, but nevertheless drew from this re-reading a validation of Marx’s predictions regarding the emergence of capitalism in England.

8. See Chiapello’s review of a few of the key texts involved in the post-Sombartian debate and the new interpretations some historians have proposed. In addition, Chiapello offers a fresh perspective on the origins of the idea of capitalism, arguing that ‘the concept of capitalism is indissociable from a representation of economic life shaped by an accounting outlook’ (2005, 264). For a discussion of the links between accounting and agrarian capitalism, see Bryer’s study of large landowners’ ledgers and practices of calculation in the East Anglian agriculture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2005). For a newer and more complete discussion, see Dean, Clarke, and Capalbo (2016), Toms (2016), and Bryer (2016).

9. A pioneer in agricultural training, Matthieu de Dombasle published in the second issue of his Annales agricoles de Roville (1825) a copy of all the articles recorded in the estate’s books during the month of May 1824, as well as about twenty tables he had composed himself. He seems to have been excessive with regard to records. He needed no fewer than 23 special auxiliary books to record the daily operations of the demesne, transferring the results to the journal and the grand livre on a fortnightly basis.

10. Industrialists were slow to adopt DEB and both it and the financial method were used in the eighteenth century, with DEB being definitively adopted only in the 1820s (Lemarchand 1995).

11. Base de références bibliographiques – traités et manuels de tenue des livres et de comptabilité français de 1657 à 1950, accessible at: http://www.msh.univ-nantes.fr/documentation/comptabilite/comptabiliteprivee/. For the purposes of this online database Lemarchand used a broad definition of works on accounting, also including agronomic works with a section devoted to bookkeeping. The database includes 196 references, more than 100 of which are from before 1900.

12. The term ‘Monsieur’ was the familiar term used for rentiers living off the products of/income from their land, the demi-bourgeois who, for Agulhon (1975), constituted an important segment of the rural élite in the nineteenth century.

13. During the French Revolution, the transfer of national goods, the division of inheritance, and the suppression of feudal servitudes all acted to favour peasant ownership, which continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, as shown by estate inventories. In 1884, out of 14 million estates, 74% were of less than two hectares (Barral 1968, 24).

14. The model of an autarkic peasantry, central to the opposition between the peasant and the entrepreneur, was particularly important in the work of Mendras, the father of French rural sociology. From La fin des paysans (1967), in which he established the foundations of his theory of the peasantry, to his more synthetic work Les sociétés paysannes (1976), we find the same prominence given to economic autarky, accompanied by a devaluing of peasants’ managerial practices, for example:

Within an traditional autarkic mixed farming system, the peasant had few choices to make, and economic and technical management were reduced to a few items: stay out of debt, save enough to get your children settled, and add to your stock of land if the opportunity arises. (Mendras [1967] 1984, 123)

‘Pay the levy and satisfy the household’s needs using the strength of the land and your own back, such was the simple equation that the peasant had to solve year after year’ (Mendras 1976, 46).

15. The Emmanuelle 5 database includes all publications taking old manuals as an object of study. In 1993 this national scientific observatory included 1271 references, see http://www.inrp.fr/emma/web/index.php.

16. For my survey of agricultural manuals and other books of popularisation, I consulted the catalogues of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the patrimonial library of Rennes, and the Bibliothèque ancienne of the Ministry of Agriculture in Caen. I also consulted the collections in the library of the Académie d’Agriculture de France. Other sources were found in publishers’ advertisements – particularly the Librairie de la Maison rustique and the Librairie encyclopédique de Roret – and in the bibliographic reviews appearing in the Journal d’agriculture pratique. I identified titles using various combinations of keywords including manuels, catéchismes, éléments d’agriculture, précis d’agriculture, causeries, and dialogues, associated with cultivateur, paysan, ferme, village, champs, habitants des campagnes, écoles primaires rurales, and so on. The first titles identified made it possible to gradually refine the search.

17. I also gathered a corpus of rural and domestic economy manuals (around 150 original titles identified between 1804 and 1945), analysis of which is beyond the scope of this article.

18. The doctrines of Smith, Say, and Ricardo found a large audience among those interested in agriculture. In the first volume of the cours de Gasparin (1843–1848), in the section on fermage, there is a summary of the three economists’ views on land rents (280–300). De Gasparin also devotes several pages to an analysis of ‘le salaire de l’intelligence directrice’, comparing the remuneration costs for head ploughmen and managers and considering the relationship between the manager and the accountant within an estate (380–387).

19. Two leaders in the workers’ education movement were the polytechniciens Dupin and Bergery. In Paris as in provincial France, free courses in industrial drawing, mechanics, and geometry were offered, and they were often supplemented with published booklets to reinforce key ideas through reading. Dupin and Bergery both composed cheap popular booklets of this sort (Dupin 1827; Bergery 1829). Among the five booklets written by Dupin for Le petit propriétaire français, the second (1827) relates to the small agricultural landowner.

20. Royer had an unusual career compared to the other prize winners. Coming from a poor family, he began as an apprentice gardener at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, eventually becoming director of the experimental/trial gardens. He went on to manage several farms, held posts as head of works and head of accounting (from 1828 to 1832) and then secured a position as postmaster (1832–1836). After several years as a professor of rural economy at Grignon, he was named inspector general of agriculture in 1843 (Zert 1999).

21. See Boulet, Lelorrain, and Vivier (1998).

22. See Tochon (1877).

23. Cf. Blanchemain’s obituary (1880).

24. See Fourchon (2016).

25. In 1835, Rendu had already published Notions of Agriculture in Maître Pierre ou le Savant du village, a collection created by the Librairie Levrault. These small 18 volumes sold for between 40 and 60 cents and addressed a wide range of topics (geometry, astronomy, education, health, morals, etc.). They reflect the active role of publishing houses in popularising science at this time (Bensaude-Vincent 1993).

26. This figure may need to be qualified, as the analysis of the corpus underway shows that some provincial authors were published by Parisian booksellers. A complete analysis of the corpus should make it possible to map the results.

27. It is not easy to understand the reason for this exception. Broadly speaking, one could propose another analysis of manuals’ place of publication that would seek to draw a comparison with the distribution of various categories of landholding in the different parts of France. From this point of view, Brittany is among the areas most strongly characterised by small landholdings (Agulhon 1975, 91).

28. The ‘catechism’ format was used in several fields of knowledge (medicine, banking, etc), and was adopted by the authors of some of the earliest books on accounting in France, including those of de La Porte (1685) and Gobain (1702).

29. Curiously, the second manual by this author, recognised by the committee in 1840, devotes not a single line to accounting.

30. Conscious of the fact that certain values are only registered at key moments of the year (before fairs or markets, when animals are ready for slaughter, etc.) and that wear and tear could detract from farm output, Royer outlined a provisional budget using a system based on records made of farm activities.

31. We should note however the publication of two works devoted to the teaching of accounting to a young audience: the first was by Bahier (1840), a former professor at the Institut de Lannévez and former accountant at the student farm at Garland (Côte du Nord). Bahier was awarded a silver medal by the Société nationale et centrale d’agriculture for this work. The second title was by Querret, inspector of agriculture for the arrondissement of Morlaix. This was a remarkable work, an agricultural catechism written for Breton youths, and included an example of accounting for one year for a small Breton family farm, with all the various registers and account books specified.

32. Carruthers and Espeland used a sample of accounting textbooks over several centuries drawn from the holdings of the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature (1991, 35).

33. Among others, see Postel-Vinay’s call (1998) to rethink peasants’ social networks and their capacities for accessing information, credit, and markets, far from ‘a vision of peasants attached to their fields, their lord, their landlord […] with professional and family trajectories remaining restricted within the limits of the farmyard or the hamlet’ (15).

34. These works have discussed in particular the introduction of a capitalist relation of production in agriculture, land rent as a central point in the exploitation of the peasantry, the proletarisation of the poorest peasants, etc. For an overview of these arguments, see Gavignaud (1978) and for a fuller discussion, Postel-Vinay (1971) and Mollard (1975).

35. Koning (1994) presents a comparative analysis of agrarian policies in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA from 1846 to 1919, concluding that agriculture failed to establish itself as a profitable industry independent of government. Moser and Varley (2013) contend that agriculture was finally integrated into capitalism through a process of subordination; Herment locates capitalist development both upstream and downstream from the farm.

36. For more details on farmers’ writing practices, see my historical and ethnographic research on the role of the agenda (a kind of diary or notebook) (Joly 2000, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of UMR CESAER (INRA 1041).