Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/125

 REVIEWS

La France economique et sociale d la veille de la Revolution: Les campagnes. Par Maxime Kovalewsky, professeur a rUniversite de Saint-Petersbourg, ancien president de rinstitut International de Sociologie. i vol. in-8o de 392 pages, 1909. Paris: Girard et Briere, 16, rue Soufflot. (Tome XXXIX de la Bibliotheque Sociologique Interna- tionale dirigee par M. Rene Worms.) Prix: broche, 8 francs; relie (reliure de la Bibliotheque), 9 francs.

It will be noticed by the title-page that this is an essay on a subject in which a further volume may be expected. The present volume deals with economic and social France in the period of the Revolution, with special reference to rural and agricultural France. In a subsequent volume Kovalewsky proposes to furnish a similar study of industrial France in the period of the Revolution, in which he will give special attention to the relations which existed beetween capital and labor at that time. The present volume does not touch this subject except indirectly. The fundamental con- clusion of his investigation appears on the first page.

It is an error [he says] to believe that at the end of the eighteenth century the nobility and the clergy were the only possessing classes in France. The gradual evolution which had for its result the recovery into the hands of the bourgeoisie not only of movable property but also of land commenced long before 1789; but that evolution was masked by the fact that the citizens growing in wealth generally passed in the upper classes either by virtue of an act conferring nobility or by being a noble directly.

It is in consequence of the existence of this new order of nobility grafted upon the old that noblemen in the period of the Revolution were par excellence the possessors of the soil. Their contempo- raries, however, did not confuse these new lords with the feudal nobility. Kovalewsky does not share the opinion of those who, like De Tocqueville, trace the origin of the small peasant proprietor to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows by numer- ous citations that the cultivator of lands possessed them in many instances by more than a mere title of tenancy for a long period.