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La consommation dans les campagnes françaises dans les années 1880-1914 : un régime de transition: XVIIe-XXIe siècle : regards franco-espagnols
Abstract
From the 1850’s onwards, the French rural areas underwent changes that intensified after the Great Depression. Consumption now held a crucial part: from then on food became more varied and nourishing, clothes more convenient and elegant, furniture more comfortable and abundant, houses were bigger, better equipped and healthier. However, these changes were not uniform: the gaps between regions and between the various rural groups remained important. Though country people consumed an increasing amount of shop-bought products, they still relied massively on self-production. Thus, the consumption pattern that emerged before World War I was both hybrid and transitory and it would not disappear for good until the Trente Glorieuses.
... At the end of the nineteenth century, small farmers gradually adopted the urban model of consumption, but their practices remained widely diverse and particularities did not disappear. Rural populations still consumed a large amount of their own production (Daumas, 2015). ...
History, sociology and anthropology have devoted many studies to furthering the understanding of how consumers’ desires develop. They have shown interest in the ways in which consumers, their identities and their tastes are the product of specific techniques, activities and actors within societies. In this chapter we draw from historical and sociological studies, to show how market actors but also the state and civil society, as well as consumers themselves, contribute to the social making of consumers’ identities, in both the modern and contemporary periods, and in various geographical regions. These studies show the extent to which representations of the consumer are rooted in specific political or moral projects, so that consumption is determined as a social and political practice with an impact way beyond the domestic sphere. But, they also demonstrate that the construction of the consumer requires that he or she be given agency, which in return produces effects on the construction of the representation of consumers themselves
Transformation of Rural Food Habits between 1850 and 1936.
Having studied 357 answers to a questionnaire issued by the Encyclopédie française in 1935 on rural eating habits, the author has attempted to trace the evolution of food habits between 1850 and 1936 from a quantitative as well as a qualitative point of view with a breakdown into different periods. In a further stage, the emphasis has been laid on studying innovations as perceived by a rural milieu in particular on the consumption of beef and veal in relation to feasts and the social corresponding occasions.
Au milieu du XIXe siècle, la culture de la châtaigne occupe en France près de 580 000 ha (enquête décennale de 1852). En 1975, on n'en retrouve plus que 32 000. Sa production, estimée à 512 000 t en 1880, n'est plus que de 42 000 en 1976. Encore faut-il distinguer la production totale de la production commercialisée (22 000 t). Le reste, pour l'essentiel, pourrit sur place.
On pourrait souligner le gâchis que représentent à l'heure actuelle les milliards de protéines qui se perdent annuellement sous les arbres (environ 70 000 calories par arbre !), ou relever que la balance commerciale française en châtaignes et marrons est nettement déficitaire tandis que le Japon est en passe de devenir le premier producteur mondial de châtaignes après plantation massive de 30 000 ha en 15 ans ! Mais notre propos est de nous interroger sur les raisons du déclin formidable d'une production dont la fiche signalétique pourrait comporter les éléments que voici :
Micheline Baulant Estimate of standard of living. A problem and a solution.
In order to synthesize hundreds of indicators included in inventories of personal estate and evaluate the degree of welbeing of families, the author proposes to construct a standard of living index which shows the main changes which took place during the 17th and 18th centuries, to measure the contrasts and the shifts between towns and country, and even to characterize specific behaviours of various human groups.
For this purpose, five lists of objects or characteristics were elaborated. Two of these lists bring together objects of daily life. Other lists concern comfort, luxury and civilisation, and merge less frequent objects indicating intellectual and artistic activities, which form a kind of superficiality.