Contrasting Verdicts: Structural Adaptations and Short-Term Stress
For hundreds of years the rural population of East Belgium lived in a Malthusian system and responded to population growth in multiple ways. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, commercial and industrial revolutions, accompanied by the integration of national and international markets, ended long-established patterns and profoundly changed the regional economy of both the Land of Herve and the East Ardennes.
At a macro level, two main patterns emerged, and we can say that both the modern and the traditional countryside lost quantity and gained quality. First, one can consider their adaptations to economic change a success, because they achieved high and increasing life expectancies, even at the cost of gradual depopulation. Second, except for an increase in out-migration, neither the family system nor the demographic regime were modified in spite of the deep economic and social changes of the nineteenth century.Population pressure strained the family system which was already characterized by late marriage and high proportions never-marrying. Restricted access to marriage was reinforced, especially in the Land of Herve. The booming industrial towns offered a new outlet to the ‘losers' who could not be accommodated in rural areas, but the increasing flows from rural areas to the towns did not relax the Malthusian system. All those who could establish a household in the village did so, but they were few and becoming fewer. In the East Ardennes as well as in the Land of Herve, children who reached adulthood while continually living with their parents had to accept constraints that restricted their choices and chances. Among other things, their departures were more affected by parental and family needs than their own individual choices. Other studies tell us that the children who were able to establish themselves in the village were not selected by gender or birth rank (Neven 2000: 318—23).
From this point of view, the inheritance rules in the Napoleonic code continued old egalitarian regional customs. The small number of court cases disputing inheritances suggests that ties within the sibling group were usually good enough to divide inheritances informally (Servais forthcoming).Another indicator of the efficient management of the tensions inherent in a family system under pressure is that married people could rely on their children. Consistent with older theories of modernization, mortality in the Land of Herve and East Ardennes declined before marital fertility, which was uncontrolled for most of the nineteenth century. While urban populations started to control their reproduction in the 1850s or 1860s, the inhabitants of the countryside continued to see children as
a source of wealth and support in old age. The Malthusian system, especially the high proportion never-married, made this ‘strategy’ efficient, because few old people finished their life isolated. If necessary, parents, especially widowed mothers, could rely on children who had out-migrated to the industrial towns years earlier (Alter 1999: 20; Neven 2003). Parents' success in retaining their adult sons and daughters at home strained family ties. With average ages at leaving home of 25 years for women and 27—28 for men tensions between the generations were obvious (Capron and Oris 2000). Stress was apparently higher in a society where renters were predominant, like the Land of Herve, than in an area of small properties like East Ardennes.
The ties of children with their fathers and mothers were of different natures, based largely on the dichotomy of authority versus devotion (Alter 1999: 24). Since their domestic role placed adult married women in a good position to retain food resources for themselves, maternal devotion can be seen as the underlying cause of their excess-mortality and hyper-sensitivity to prices, which continued to affect married women even after the rest of the population stopped responding to economic fluctuations.
Clearly, the family system in nineteenth-century East Ardennes and the Land of Herve distributed an excessive part of the burden of hard times on married women and unmarried adults, while infants and to some extent the pater familias, were spared.A systematic study of the demographic consequences of short-term economic stress informs this general perspective. The experience of the East Belgian countryside shows how difficult it is to link behaviour to economic data. In the poor community of Sart during the period 1820—46, mortality and fertility were strongly affected by variations in the price of oats, the most basic sustenance of the poor. When oats were in short supply, the poor went hungry, and this hunger resulted in more deaths and fewer births. Marriage, however, responded to the price of rye not oats. This shows the difference between the physiological effects of food shortage and the psychological perceptions that govern a voluntary response. These responses also reveal the ambivalent position of an economically backward area in a rapidly advancing region.
After 1850, economic crises were rarely fatal, except for childbearing women, whose fecundity was also affected. This pattern is very clear and quite similar in two areas with completely different social, economic, and agrarian structures. Both the East Ardennes and the Land of Herve made a decisive step on the road from uncertainty to security after 1850.
This transition also put more emphasis on voluntary demographic responses. In the second half of the nineteenth century marriage and out-migration were dominated by family needs and the structural constraints of rural communities. Both responses became increasingly independent of short-term economic stress. In the Land of Herve, married adults were indifferent to price fluctuations. Only the out-migration of unmarried adults showed the effects of short-term economic stress. In fact, a more detailed study has shown that in periods of high prices the household tended to push out unrelated workers (day-labourer, domestics, etc.), but to hold kin,
especially children, more tightly (Neven 2000: 466).
Hervians adopted a ‘defensive logic', keeping everybody at home in bad times. Of course, this did not prevent them from leaving, since out-migration rates increased continuously from 1850 until 1900 (see Table 15.1). But a part of this increase, particularly as far as family migrations are concerned, is due to changing land tenure. Decreasing landownership among the peasants resulted in a growing class of renters, who were obliged to move from farm to farm within the same region.Another aspect of rising mobility was the departure of young adults from their parental homes. Their out-migration constituted an ‘offensive logic' of departures in good times. Recent research has challenged the traditional association between crisis and migration. Working on migrations between Ghent in Belgium and the French city of Armentieres during the nineteenth century, K. Dillen (2001: 446) noted: ‘migration was not in the first place an escape, but a fairly natural phenomenon....Subsistence migration was rather an exception and not the other way around. As a result, this means that migration was a positive choice most of the time.' The same could be said for mobility in Sart and the Land of Herve, which challenges the idea that ‘in the short run, particularly in the period between 1850 and First World War, crises in rural economy promoted mobility'(Moch 1992: 111). In the Land of Herve at least, structural adaptations provoked ‘crises' (as shown in Section 3), but short-term term variations followed a different logic.
In this chapter, we asked: how did demographic and family systems distribute the burdens of hard times? The answers offered here contribute to the Belgian debate on the standard of living (see Section 2.1). We also believe that our results show the general value of a demographic approach based on longitudinal data. The standard of living, much less the quality of life, cannot be understood without considering individual aspirations and trajectories in the context of families and households.