Les biens communaux: Common lands, property rights, and agrarian modernization in early modern Burgundy, 1550--1789

Historians of early modern France long construed agrarian modernization as a process working to transform, and eventually to eliminate, traditional peasant agriculture and collective property rights. Finding no such transformation, they long focused attention on accounting for the causes and long-term consequences of agricultural underdevelopment and even stagnation. This long-term historical study of communal property rights in Burgundy contends that transformational modernization theories tend to minimize, if not ignore, the positive contributions that traditional rural societies have made to the making of the modern world. It demonstrates that in spite of exploitive lordships and powerful village communities, modern private property rights emerged at the local level when seigneurs adapted traditional feudal prerogatives to secure the benefits of commerce.;This process of adaptation created a hybrid property structure that never undermined the basic integrity of traditional open-field agriculture. Nor was it intended to. People at every level of rural society and government shared deep ideological commitments to common lands and traditional open-field agriculture. The question was who would dominate the system and for what purposes. This study therefore focuses attention on the social, cultural, and legal underpinnings of property disputes between village communities, their lords, and landowners. Those disputes confirm that a dynamic feudalism, not nascent productive capitalism in agriculture, provided the social and legal framework in which agrarian modernization, understood as a process of adaptation rather than transformation, emerged and evolved. Thus we find a history of structural modifications of property rights designed to secure, expand, and defend traditional claims to common lands, collective use rights, and the many benefits they provided.