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Medieval historian friend of mine gave me that particular figure, Of course it's more complicated than that, but if anything it's a lower bound you can work out out of Urban VIII's limitation of non sunday days of obligation to 36 in the 17th century. Bishops could institute at many new feasts for their dioceses as they wanted before then and you'll find larger lists if you look for them.
But really what we're arguing about is the total amount of work people put in and how comparable it is to the modern work week, which is unsurprisingly a debated topic. Lower estimates, such as what you'll find in Schor's heavily quoted book are around 150, higher estimates are about 300. But fittingly for this thread since Schor's book became popular it's become a culture war topic that people use to push various labor related agendas so I'm disinclined to believe any American view on the matter.
I'm mostly going off Pierre Goubert's account which is definitely on the lower side of that debate, but I don't have those books around me to give you a proper figure from him.
I'm really only talking about what I know and have been taught about, which is its form in Anglo-French civilization.
Oh I see what you mean.
I think a better measure is effective total tax rate. Though as you say that's more difficult to measure because there were so many different entities at the time and most of it was in kind.
We do have extensive scholarly work on that in my country because tax has such a storied history in France and was one of the specifically claimed reasons for the French Revolution.
The way the historians measure it, since it is mostly composed of indirect taxes, is to measure the amount of days worked a year.
François Hincker in his book on this topic Les Français devant l'impôt sous l'Ancien Régime, which I eventually read because it was quoted on one of my exams, gives us a pretty stunning figure that stayed with me:
18 days total, which can be compared to say, France's current mean total tax rate of 56.9% which with the equivalent average salary computes to 208 days yearly to pay taxes.
Now I'm not saying the comparison holds for every place in Europe at that time, but when De Jouvenel and others argue that the revolution actually worsened the tax burden for everyone including myself, I'm inclined to believe them.
Well, that is still lower than just weekends. So not sure is it a win for serfdom.
How many days of work for manor lord were obligatory for a typical serf? Or is it something that have not existed in England/France or was removed quickly? ( https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa%C5%84szczyzna seems to not have even equivalent page in English/French).
that seems quite likely given that events that lead to revolution started from France being basically bankrupt
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daily, you mean.
The real question is how many days in a year does he need to work to feed himself? Let’s say he only consumes bread. One kilo of bread was 0.3 francs. So they both need, and ancien regime worker gets as his entire salary, say 200 working days times 3.33 kilos = 666 kilos of bread a year. Cheap bread’s 3 euros/kilo, so modern counterpart needs 2000 euros to live all year, or about a working month. Clothing and butter are even cheaper comparatively.
Edit: that’s... very little bread, actually. Hard to believe they were this close to starving. A kg bread is 2200 kcal, so he gets 3800 calories per day (not just working day) to feed his family. And nothing else. No meat, no clothes, no rent, no entertainment. I guess they must have eaten potatoes, which cost only 0.02 francs per kilo. That’s 10 tons of potatoes yearly salary, or 19 000 kcal per day. That’s more like it, now they can afford clothes and the poule au pot on sunday.
I think you're confusing franc and livre which were two different currencies used at different times.
You're correct that food was expensive though, the twilight of the Ancient Regime was a time of famine after all. But not that expensive. I recall reading people spent half of their income of food.
I got this random list of prices (page 8 of the pdf). http://www.numdam.org/item/JSFS_1944__85__7_0.pdf
Which lists prices in francs in 1788, and also says daily salary is 1 franc. So I naturally assumed 1 livre = 1 franc, which is sometimes ("Le terme perdura en tant que synonyme de la livre ") claimed. But if you know more, please share.
Yeah this seems like a reasonable reading of that list. I checked my copy of Hinckler's book again for the discrepancy and yeah it looks like it's my mistake, he was indeed talking about the daily salary in that passage. I must have taken it wrong in my cliffnotes.
Still seems like very expensive prices for bread even given other accounts I've read of the period in general, but I suppose you're not exactly going to get a much worse food situation than right on the cusp of Revolution.
Now I can't guarantee that monsieur de riedmatten in Paris 1944 didn't have an agenda, but that's what he says anyway, if you don't have anything better.
I have no reason to doubt him.
But as you must know Bourbons ruled for about four centuries, and that the Kingdom itself and its feudal institutions lasted for more then thirteen.
A lot can happen in that time. Including major changes in climatic conditions that are bound to effect food prices in agrarian societies.
In some sense none of the factual discussion we're having here is even about the medieval period in the first place.
Wiki's got similar, though slightly more favourable for the ancien regime worker, prices :
Still, if they usually ate bread (and they must have, at least before the introduction of the potato), they were close to starving. (1.3 * 200 * 2200 / 0.2586) / 364 = 6076. It seems very hard to feed, shelter and clothe a family for 6000 kcal of bread per day all-in. No wonder kids had to work. And if economists are to be believed, they were already twice as rich per capita as in the middle ages, so I don’t think the medieval comparison, when they were actually serfs, helps your argument.
I was calculating it before, but I had trouble believing it: they were indeed starving, constantly. This article did essentially the same math.
I should have figured it out earlier, with Henry IV and the sunday chicken he promised his subjects. Of course, they’d starve if they bought meat. I guess modern man is so insulated from such base concerns he has trouble grasping the concept of hunger.
I certainly won't argue that pre industrial times had plenty and that food insecurity wasn't a big problem. One need only try to live on their own farm produce to figure out how hard (and random) it is. But I'm not going to sign off on this idea you have of people having more food related hardship in the middle ages than right before Revolution.
First of all, and if only for the climatic factors I mentionned, not to mention other big factors like war, grain prices fluctuated a lot in 13 centuries.
All the numbers you quote here are from a specific period at the end of Renaissance where it is well documented that the grain price shot up because of successive years of poor harvest due to harsh winters that are widely cited as one of the main causes of the unrest.
But there are many other mitigating factors that make this analysis not say what you want it to say with any degree of certainty.
Probably the biggest one that I think I hinted at previously is the fact that a lot people simply didn't buy food at all. The price records we're looking at here are for cities, which only had access to agricultural surplus from the countryside. Most of France's food production wasn't even priced in. So modeling one's idea of living in those times from the standpoint of an anachronistic capitalist worker who would use goods traded on efficient public markets to assuage need instead of doing most of the work himself I don't believe to be accurate. Combine that with the lack of reliable records before the eye of the State turned to optimizing production and I'm much more likely to believe qualitative records of how life was back than these back of the envelope calculations.
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