Abstract EN:

On the basis of exhaustive computerised processing of land-ownership documents and sources enabling classification of owners, this body of work performs a comparative study of land-ownership in the Southern French Jura in 1750 with that of 1830. The comparison of the land registry (cadastre) with Ancien Régime sources shows the progress of the farming class, losses of the nobility, the disappearance of the clergy, and the decline of the communes’ share of agricultural land. The outcome for the bourgeoisie was more uneven, as they gained in forests what they lost in agricultural land. Laws of 1790 and 1813 explain the disappearance of the clergy, and the losses of the communes. But changes in private property come mainly from voluntary sales. As had already begun under the Ancien Régime, the decline of the nobility (and of the bourgeoisie in terms of their share of agricultural land) is a continuing trend over the entire period studied. Analysis of the registration tables was completed by a study of forty individual farms over the period from 1750-1830: the sales, often following a death, generally involved sellers whose principal residence was situated far from the assets being sold. This thus leads to the theory that the exodus of the traditional elites represented, in the region studied, the key factor in changes in the structure of land-ownership. The immediate reasons (whether marital or professional) of these departures should not be allowed to cloud the deeper forces at work: a world whose distances were shortened by improvements in transport, small towns in decline, and individual and collective horizons moving from a provincial level to a national level