Research

Publications

• Cédric, Chambru and Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2024). Introducing HiSCoD: A New Gateway for the Study of Historical Social Conflict, American Polticial Science Review, 118(2), pp. 1084-1091, doi: 10.1017/S000305542300076X. [Website] [Raw data] [Replication package] Media coverage: Le Monde and Ouest-France

• Cédric, Chambru and Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2023). The Evolution of Wages in Early Modern Normandy (1600-1850), The Economic History Review, 76(3), pp. 917-940. doi:10.1093/ereh/heac017

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2021). La Normandie dans l’économie atlantique au XVIIIe siècle. production, commerce et crises, Annales Historiques de la Révolution française, 406(4),pp. 203-214. Link. Media coverage: Ouest-France and Podcast: Cause commune Radio

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2018). Entre Honfleur et les Antilles : les journaux de bord de la traite des esclaves, Annales de Normandie, 68(1), pp. 113-137. doi: 10.3917/annor.681.0113

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2017). La Révolution française vue et vécue par un villageois du Pays de Caux, Histoire & Sociétés Rurales, 47(1), pp. 137-180. doi: 10.3917/hsr.047.0137

Monograph

• I am currently working on book manuscript based on my dissertation. Provisional title: Across Seas and Countryside: an Environmental and Economic History of Normandy (1300-1850) My PhD dissertation is available online at Link.

Book Chapters

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul, and Cédric, Chambru (2025). Working Time, Holidays, and Labour Conditions in Early Modern Normandy, A Historical Casebook of Wage Formation: Wage Determination and wage bargains of the pre industrial world, (eds. Luca Mocarelli, Giulio Ongaro and Judy Stephenson). Forthcoming 2025. [Working paper]

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul, and François, Rivière (2025). Les mondes de la production en France, Nouvelle Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France, (eds. Pierre-Cyril Hautcoeur and Catherine Virlouvet), Passés Composés. Forthcoming, September 2025.

• Anne, Bocquet-Liénard, Moitrel, Patricia, Paul, Maneuvrier-Hervieu, et. al. (2025), Le Sucre en Normandie : commerce, sites de transformations et ustensiles de raffinage en céramique du XVIe au milieu du XIXe siècle, Les céramiques de raffinage du sucre du XVIe au XIXe siècle. Productions, circulations et contextes d’usages dans l’espace transatlantique français, (dir. Sébastien Pauly), Presses Universitaires de Caen. Forthcoming, 2025.

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul (2023). La Normandie, porte d’ouverture privilégiée pour l’économie atlantique, _Les ports normands dans la traite atlantique (XVe-XXIe siècles), (dir. Eric Saunier), Silvana Editoriale, pp. 121-134.

• Maneuvrier-Hervieun, Paul, and Cédric, Chambru (2021). Les révoltes populaires en Aquitaine dans la base de données HiSCoD, Les révoltes populaires en Aquitaine de la fin du Moyen Âge à nos jours, (dir. Alexandre Fernandez, Jean-Pierre Lefèvre, Pierre Robin), éditions d’Albret, pp. 21-34.

• Maneuvrier-Hervieu, Paul and Carole, Dornier (2018). « Écrits sur la famine », Écrits sur l’économie, les finances et la fiscalité, in Les écrits de l’abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, (ed. Carole Dornier), Presses universitaires de Caen (Fontes & Paginæ – Sources modernes), doi: 10.51203/sources.puc.000094

Work in progress

• Cultivating Trust? The Role of European Union Investments in Bridging Rural-Urban Divides, with Leo Azzollini and Anne-Marie Jeannet
  [Abstract]

  Over the last decades, agricultural policies and structural investment funds for regional development have been central to European integration. However, the political effects of these funds, designed to enhance economic and social cohesion within the European Union and address regional disparities, remain contested. Existing research has established that rural residents tend to exhibit lower levels of political trust in the European Union compared to their urban counterparts. In this paper, we empirically examine whether institutional investments can mitigate the urban-rural divide in political trust toward the European Union. Specifically, we explore the potential of EU funds to enhance trust by fostering regional economic dynamics, and if this is socially stratified. Analyzing 17 waves of Eurobarometer data (2003-2020) across 27 European countries, 99 regions, and around 370,000 individuals, we find that the rural-urban divide tends to be mitigated in regions receiving higher levels of investment. Moreover, we observe that EU investments disproportionately predict higher trust among individuals from middle to lower socioeconomic strata compared to those from upper strata, narrowing the gap at higher levels of investment (15 to 18 % of a standard deviation). Examining the intersection of rural-urban and socio-economic divides, we observe that EU funds are more likely to predict higher trust amongst individuals from lower social strata in rural areas, and the lowest trust among those from upper social strata in urban areas. Our results imply that localized institutional investment can compensate for social stratification gaps and reduce the urban-rural divide in political trust.

  • Revise Resubmit, Electoral Studies

• Trade Shocks and Political Behaviours in Revolutionary Normandy, with Cédric Chambru
  [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 and Cédric Chambru)
  [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
  [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.

• Industrial Exposure, Deindustrialization, and their Political Effects from the New Deal to the 21st Century, with Anne-Marie Jeannet
  [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.

• The Making of Physicians: Medical Graduates of the University of Caen in Early Modern Normandy, with Xavier Humbert

Other publications

• Les campagnes normandes dans l’économie Atlantique au 18e siècle, Historiens & Géographes, dossier n°459, août 2022. Link.

• Mars 1789 : les « Normands ont la parole ». La mise par écrit des cahiers de doléances, in Bulletin de la Société Historique et Archéologique de Lisieux, n°84, 2e semestre 2017. Link.

• Les Normands dans la « Guerre du blé » au XVIIIe siècle, Les Normands et la guerre. Actes du 49e Congrès de la Fédération des Sociétés Historiques et Archéologiques, Rouen, 15-18 octobre 2014, Textes réunis par Bernard Bodinier, Louviers, 2015, FSHAN, p. 175-183. Link.

• « L’Amour Interdit : femmes et clercs dans le registre d’Eudes Rigaud (1248-1269) », Être Femme(s) en Normandie, Congrès de la Fédération des Sociétés historiques et Archéologiques de Normandie, Bellême, 2014, p. 469-476. Link.

Book Reviews

• “Les Européens et les Antilles, XVIIe siècle-début XVIIIe siècle” by Bernard Michon (dir.), published in Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2021/4 (76e année), p. 847-849.

• “Cul-de-Sac. Patrimony, Capitalism and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue” by Paul Cheney, published in Histoire & Sociétés Rurales, n°49, 1er semestre, 2018.

• “The Country People of Guernesey and their Agriculture 1640-1840” by Richard Hocart, published in Annales de Normandie, n°67, 1er semestre 2017.

• “La guerre des forêts. Luttes sociales dans l’Angleterre du XVIIIe siècle” by Edward P. Thompson, published in Histoire & Sociétés Rurales, n°43, 1er semestre 2015.

• “Le Grand Ferré. Premier Héros paysan” by Colette Beaune, published in Histoire & Sociétés Rurales, n°40, 2e semestre 2013, p. 182-184.