Eating, Working, and Saving in an Unstable World: Consumers in Nineteenth- Century France

Studies of the scale and pattern of food consumption in France during the early modern period down to the mid nineteenth century have usually underscored the extent to which households depended on local agricultural production. In a country which was still rural, even peasant in character, the means of sustenance were seen as regionally varied and almost immutable over time. In this view, most of the food available in a given place came from the family land or from farms in the neighbourhood, and people were thus assumed to have found more than go per cent of their consumption needs within a very small area, perhaps within a radius of three miles (...).