The Statistical Study of French Crises

Two major themes have been developed by Ernest Labrousse in his well-known works on prices and income. One, a reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution, does not concern us here. The other, a theory of an agriculturally determined business cycle, has recently been confirmed for the early nineteenth century by a young historian and student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, and forms the subject of this paper. Chabert's first work offered time series of French prices from 1798 to 1820, a hitherto neglected interval falling between the monetary anarchy of the assignats and the period covered by the tables of the Bureau de la Statistique Générale. He has followed this with a more ambitious effort, a general study of the social and economic development of France during the same years, as reflected in the price series already presented and other data assembled since.