In the election district of Confolens a piece of property rented for 2,956 livres in 1665, brings in only 900 livres in 1747.  On the confines of la Marche and of Berry a domain which, in 166o, honorably supported two seigniorial families is now simply a small unproductive tenant-farm; “the traces of the furrows once made by the plow-iron being still visible on the surrounding heaths.”  Sologne, once flourishing,[27] becomes a marsh and a forest; a hundred years earlier it produced three times the quantity of grain; two-thirds of its mills are gone; not a vestige of its vineyards remains; “grapes have given way to the heath.”  Thus abandoned by the spade and the plow, a vast portion of the soil ceases to feed man, while the rest, poorly cultivated, scarcely provides the simplest necessities[28].

In the first place, on the failure of a crop, this portion remains untilled; its occupant is too poor to purchase seed; the intendant is often obliged to distribute seed, without which the disaster of the current year would be followed by sterility the following year[29].  Every calamity, accordingly, in these days affects the future as well as the present; during the two years of 1784 and 1785, around Toulouse, the drought having caused the loss of all draft animals, many of the cultivators are obliged to let their fields lie fallow.  In the second place, cultivation, when it does take place, is carried on according to medieval modes.  Arthur Young, in 1789, considers that French agriculture has not progressed beyond that of the tenth century[30].  Except in Flanders and on the plains of Alsace, the fields lie fallow one year out of three, and oftentimes one year out of two.  The implements are poor; there are no plows made of iron; in many places the plow of Virgil’s time is still in use.  Cart-axles and wheel-tires are made of wood, while a harrow often consists of the trestle of a cart.  There are few animals and but little manure; the capital bestowed on cultivation is three times less than that of the present day.  The yield is slight:  “our ordinary farms,” says a good observer, “taking one with another return about six times the seed sown."[31] In 1778, on the rich soil around Toulouse, wheat returns about five for one, while at the present day it yields eight to one and more.  Arthur Young estimates that, in his day, the English acre produces twenty-eight bushels of grain, and the French acre eighteen bushels, and that the value of the total product of the same area for a given length of time is thirty-six pounds sterling in England and only twenty-five in France.  As the parish roads are frightful, and transportation often impracticable, it is clear that, in remote cantons, where poor soil yields scarcely three times the seed sown, food is not always obtainable.  How do they manage to live until the next crop?  This is the question always under consideration previous to, and during, the Revolution.  I find, in manuscript correspondence, the syndics and mayors of villages estimating the quantities for local subsistence at so many bushels in the granaries, so many sheaves in the barns, so many mouths to be filled, so many days to wait until