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 this paper, we investigate the socio-economic consequences of the Eden Agreement, focusing on its profound impact on Normandy, one of France's most industrialized 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. Numerous Norman manufacturers were unable to withstand the intense competition, leading to reduced production, worker lay-offs, and bankruptcy. The repercussions of this economic upheaval quickly rippled through Normandy. Rising unemployment and vagrancy contributed to heightened social conflicts in various parts of the province. This paper delves into the intricate relationship between these socio-economic consequences and political behaviours during the French Revolution. Using newly collected data on industries and social conflict at the parish level, we highlight the impact of the Eden Agreement on localities with a specialization in the textile industry. We further document how these adverse effects catalysed political attitudes, ultimately fostering 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]

  In this paper, we propose to analyse the evolution of Norman wages from 1300 to 1600. We rely on new data on wages and prices to estimate series of wages for daily rural and urban skilled and unskilled labourers as well as a tentative series for male annual labourers. In Normandy as elsewhere in Europe, the Black Death and the plague of 1361 initiated a severe demographic crisis. Beyond plagues, Normandy had also to face the consequences of the Hundred Year War between England and France. The effect of the occupation of Normandy by English troops between 1417-9 and 1450 is, however, quite uncertain. The constant demand of supplies certainly drove increases in crop prices, but the demand for craftsmen to construct new fortifications required to hold the territory also plausibly increased labour scarcity and wages. Using data on population derived from hearth rolls for various years and spatial variations in the exposure to the English occupation, we try to understand how plagues, wars and labour scarcity articulated and could explain the formation/evolution of wages during the 15th century in Normandy.

• Trust in the Fields? Institutional Trust and the Rural-Urban Divide across European Regions (1980-2018) with Leo Azzollini (University of Oxford)
  [Abstract]

  How does the classic “urban-rural” divide (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) shape/affect trust towards institutions? While agricultural policies historically played a central role in European integration, recent studies indicate lower political trust in national governments among rural rather than urban residents (Mitsch et al., 2001). In this paper, we examine empirically if a similar trend exists regarding trust in the European Union (EU) linking the urban-rural and integration-demarcation cleavages (Kriesi et al., 2006). This study investigates the relationship between trust in EU institutions and place of residence, alongside socio-economic factors such as the regional share of agricultural employment. Analysing 38 waves of Eurobarometer data from 1980 to 2018 across 14 European countries, 136 regions, and around 400,000 EU citizens, our research reveals that residing in rural or small-town areas correlates with a statistically significant but minor decrease in trust in the EU compared to urban areas (−4% standard deviation). However, this urban-rural trust gap varies with socio-economic conditions, particularly the prevalence of agricultural employment in regions. In areas with fewer agricultural jobs, the urban-rural trust disparity widens (−6% SD), but it becomes insignificant in regions where agricultural employment is more prevalent. This effect extends to individuals with lower levels of education, whose trust in the EU significantly rises (+20% SD) in regions with a higher share of agricultural jobs, relatively to areas where the latter is lower. Overall, our results suggest that agricultural employment is a key factor in moderating the urban-rural divide in terms of trust in institutions.

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

• Reassessing the 'Backlash' of Manufacturing Job Loss in US Presidential Elections with Anne-Marie Jeannet (University of Milan)
  [Abstract]