Research

Book Manuscript

Across Seas and Countryside: An Environmental and Economic History of Normandy (1300-1850). I am currently working on a revised and extended version of my PhD dissertation.

Work in progress

• Trade Shocks and Political Behaviours in Revolutionary Normandy with Cédric Chambru (ENS Lyon)
  [Abstract]

  In 1787, the implementation of the Eden Agreement marked a pivotal moment in the history of trade between France and England. It introduced a competitive trade system by reducing customs duties on various manufactured goods, setting the stage for a significant transformation in the textile industry. In the short run, many manufacturers, in the textile industry, were unable to withstand the competition from English products and went bankrupt. Many labourers in these industries were dismissed and faced unemployment, at a time when grain prices were rising due to consecutive poor harvest in 1788 and 1789. In this paper, we investigate the socio-economic consequences of the Eden Agreement, focusing on its impacts on Normandy, one of France's most industrialised regions, particularly renowned for its textile production. Because of the newfound competitive trade, the imports of cotton textiles from England surged while local textile production in Normandy dwindled. The repercussions of this economic upheaval quickly spread through Normandy. Rising unemployment and vagrancy contributed to heightened social conflict. To address these questions, we assemble a new dataset at the parish level gathering information on their socio-economic characteristics. We further complement these data with a new database on the diffusion of industries prior to the French Revolution (c. 1780). This database contains more than a thousand of quotes giving information on the location, type, and intensity of industrial activity, and significantly extends previous work on the topic. We link these data with information on the occurrence of social conflict, the complaints raised in cahiers de doléances, as well as political behaviour during the French Revolution. We document how the Eden Treaty translated into a significant economic shock in parishes which specialised around textile production. We show that these parishes had significantly more food riots after 1786 than their counterparts, but not before. These parishes further reported more concerns about the consequences of the Eden Treaty in the cahiers de doléances and were more likely to complain about high staple prices. During the revolutionary years, we also observe that these parishes were more likely to host a priest who accept the Civil constitution of the Clergy, and more likely to start a Société populaire-- two measures of political attitudes showing their support for the French Revolution and the Jacobin government in the 1790s.

  • Media coverage: Le Monde

• A Tale of Two Datasets: Historical Research and Food Riots in Early Modern France with Cynthia Bouton (Texas A&M University) and Cédric Chambru (ENS Lyon)
  [Abstract]

  On May 2nd 1775, helpless police watched rioters gather on the market of Gournay-en-Bray in Normandy to lower the price of grain. Reading accounts from the provincial administration, Jean Nicolas noted that the composition of the crowd was unknown. Working on similar documents, Cynthia Bouton identified female protestors. Were mistakes made? This type of discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of quantitative studies to investigate such questions as the agency of women in social conflict during the early modern period. More generally, such discrepancies seem to validate recent concerns about the reproducibility of research across all fields of social sciences and humanities. Among these, historical research has long faced many difficulties to achieve higher reproducibility, whether because of the geographic dispersion of archives, biases related to the recording of events and/or the survival of archival materials, and the scarcity of resources to create a documentary corpus. While historians have often acknowledged the limitations these factors impose, very little attention has been paid to the choices and mistakes made by historians when compiling historical quantitative databases. What type of errors are concerned, and can they result in biases and perhaps facilitate erroneous conclusions? At a time of resurgence of quantitative history and the widespread use of historical data in all fields of social sciences, these questions raise significant questions about the reliability of results and the uses of such data. In the 1980s, scholars in Europe and the United States launched projects to study the incidence and character of collective violence in the early-modern and revolutionary eras. Some of these scholars specifically targeted food riots for analysis because they seemed to signal the clash of popular politics with shifts in economic and social policy on the eve of the age of revolution. In this paper, we propose to assess concerns related to reproducibility and explore the mistakes made in two unique and independent large-scale research projects on riots in early modern France (Bouton 2000; Nicolas 2002). To do so, we rely on the work of the HiSCoD project (Historical Social Conflict Database; https://www.unicaen.fr/hiscod), which gathers information on more than 20,000 episodes of social conflicts from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century. Our objective is to systematically study the extent to which these two projects, which relied on similar historical sources, resulted in the creation of comparable datasets. By comparing the original records established by the two researchers, we analyse the role played by errors of palaeography, categorisation, coding, or interpretation in the analysis of the same event. We further include one additional regional sample created to expand the initial work of Jean Nicolas (Maneuvrier-Hervieu 2020) to discuss how more thorough investigations in the archives might help us revise Nicolas’ and Bouton’s conclusions about the dynamics and trends in food riots in Normandy. Overall, we highlight why and how inadvertent errors of sampling by historians could threaten the reliability of historical research and the findings of studies using quantitative historical data.

• Plagues, Wars and Wages in Late Medieval Normandy with Cédric Chambru (ENS Lyon)
  [Abstract]

  This paper examines the evolution of wages in late medieval Normandy (1300-1600), a region deeply impacted by demographic and geopolitical shocks of the time. In Normandy, the Black Death and the plague of 1361, coupled with the Hundred Years War between England and France, created a complex environment characterised by demographic decline, economic disruption, and changing labor markets. For instance, the effect of the occupation of Normandy by English troops between 1417-9 and 1450 is quite uncertain. While the English occupation likely drove up food prices, it also generated demand for skilled labour to (re)-construct fortifications. We use newly assembled data on wages and prices to estimate series of nominal wages for daily rural and urban skilled and unskilled male labourers. We further analyse tax data to derive population estimates at the parish level to understand how demographic changes contributed to shape wage dynamics during the fifteenth century. Overall, we found that nominal wages remained stable until the beginning of the sixteenth century (c. 1520s) before significantly increasing during French War of Religions. While the urban premium for skilled labourers remained stable at 50 percent over the period, we do not obersve such a difference for unskilled labour-- a pattern already higlighted for the decades prior to the Industrial Revolution. Preliminary estimates of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) display similar long-run trends but demonstrate much higher year-to-year variability. For the early fifteenth century, our findings diverge from the commonly observed inverse U-shaped pattern of real wages observed elsewhere in Europe. This discrepancy may be attributed to the unique combination of factors affecting Normandy during this period. To refine our estimates and analysis, we are currently working to collect additional quotes for daily wages as well as data on yearly wages for male labourers, enabling a more comprehensive comparison with wage trends in other European regions.

• Trust in the Fields? Institutional Trust and the Rural-Urban divide across Western European Democracies with Leo Azzollini (University of Oxford)
  [Abstract]

  How does the classic rural-urban divide affect trust toward institutions and to what extent does this depend on economic performance and social stratification? Historically, agricultural policies and structural investment funds for regional development have played a central role in European integration. However, recent studies indicate that rural residents exhibit lower levels of political trust in national governments than their urban counterparts. In this paper, we examine empirically if a similar trend exists regarding trust in the European Union (EU) linking the rural-urban and social stratification cleavages. We investigate whether institutional investment can be a compensatory measure and remediate political distrust in rural areas with a focus on a key institutional investor: the European Union and its policies to foster regional development and cohesion. Analyzing 17 waves of Eurobarometer data from 2003 to 2020 across 15 European countries, 71 regions, and around 250,000 citizens, our research reveals that residents of rural areas are less likely to trust European Institutions than their urban counterparts. We found that this rural-urban divide can be mitigated in the regions that receive the most funding. Social stratification plays a further role: the difference in trust in the European Union between individuals in the upper and lower social strata is larger in urban areas. This is driven by those in the upper social classes and those with a university degree, who are less likely to trust the European Union if they live in rural rather than urban areas.

  • Currently under review

• Democratic Disservice: Social Stratification, Service Economy and Satisfaction with Democracy with Anne-Marie Jeannet (University of Milan) and Leo Azzollini (University of Oxford)
  [Abstract]

  How does the rise of the service sector affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy across different social strata? A strong narrative links socio-economic disadvantage and deindustrialization to skepticism toward democracy. In this paper, we address this topic by examining how social class and education affect satisfaction with democracy in Europe, and how the regional share of service employment moderates this relationship. Our analysis is based on the two main European surveys. We rely on Eurobarometer data for 15 European countries, 71 regions, and around 500,000 citizens (1980-2020) and on European Social Survey (ESS) data for 24 European countries, 88 regions, and around 400,000 citizens (2002-2020). We then integrate these data with socio-economic data at the regional level (NUTS 1). We first find that in regions with higher share of service employment members of low social strata are considerably less satisfied with democracy than members of upper strata. We further explore the mechanisms behind this ‘democratic disservice’ effect of the rise of the service sector at the regional level.

• Industrial Exposure, Deindustrialization, and their Political Effects from the New Deal to the 21st Century with Anne-Marie Jeannet (University of Milan)
  [Abstract]

  Do the political consequences of deindustrialisation differ across places? A strong narrative associates deindustrialisation and life in post-industrial areas with the emergence of embittered and reactionary voters motivated by their declining social position. However, recent research suggests that similar people in similar deindustrialised areas of the United States support opposing political parties. In this paper, we investigate the factors underlying these divergent trajectories, focusing on the role played by social conflicts induced by the industrialisation at the county level in the early 20th century. We argue that industrial exposure shaped political identity from the New Deal to the 21st century and is a key factor for understanding how places have responded to economic decline and the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent decades. Using data on local unions, newspapers production, and strikes of the Industrial Workers of the World (1905-1930) as well as census data on manufacturing establishments and railroad access, we compute an industrial exposure index at the county level as the weighted mean of the interpolated values using inverse distance, nearest neighbour and universal Krigin. We then create a balance sample of counties using propensity score matching to compare counties with similar characteristics.