Conclusion

Abstract

Like many parts of the third world today, old-regime France was obsessed with subsistence—and for good reasons. Dependent for the most part on a single foodstuff whose production and distribution were hostage to a host of uncertainties, it is no wonder that the people of this society agonized over their material life. They had no sense of control over their environment—either the sociojuridical structure around which their lives were organized or the economic and physical circumstances in which they lived. Nor could the Enlightenment provide a dose of confidence and courage powerful enough to reach the bulk of the population. Not all the philosophical tracts on man’s earthly potential, nor all the manuals on the application of vetch or the use of sainfoin, nor all the inoculations practiced on the children of princes could convince the little people of the eighteenth century that they lived in a world on the verge of mastering, or at least reaching an accord with, nature. Subsistence, of course, was not the whole story of man’s predicament, but preoccupation with it was sufficiently universal and relentless to remind men every day of the precariousness of their situation and of their relative helplessness to change it.