Environmental shocks, religious struggle, and resilience: a contribution to the economic history of Ancien Régime France

Policy makers increasingly view the potential link between climate variability, conflict, and migration as a security issue. With global temperatures expected to continue increasing in the foreseeable future, projections indicate that the regularity and severity of natural disasters, including heat waves, droughts, and heavy rainfall events, will also increase. Climate variability and extremes raise critical challenges to agriculture and food production all over the world, and lead to diminished coping capacity, loss of livelihoods, as well as migration flows. The purpose of this dissertation is to inform these issues from a historical perspective by studying the consequences of weather shocks and out-migration on violence in early modern Europe. While formally independent, the essays in this dissertation all raise the question of resilience to shocks in pre-industrial economies using the cases of France and Savoy during the Ancien Régime. This dissertation contributes to various strands of the literature in economics and in history. It relates to the stream of French historiography that focuses on the causes of popular revolts and criminality in early modern France, as well as to the more recent literature in economics that studies the determinants of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts across the world. It also contributes to the empirical literature studying the role of institutions, and more specifically the agency of individuals within these institutions, in the mitigation of weather-induced income shocks. Additionally, it provides new empirical evidence to the literature examining the effects of out-migration as adaptation strategy to cope with shocks. Finally, it relates to the literature investigating the historical determinants and the socio-economic consequences of the Reformation in early modern Europe