From macro to micro

4.1.1 Standard of living and demographic sensitivity in East Belgium

Our discussion of the macro regional context raised an apparent contradiction since poor areas, where the need for labour was decreasing, benefited from higher life expectancy.

We adopt here an indirect and dynamic concept of the standard of living designed for longitudinal microanalysis in the Eurasia Project, that is, vulnerability to short-term economic stress. As Bengtsson (2004) explains, ‘from a modern perspective, one would believe that family heads would do everything to smooth consumption in the short run in order to secure the survival of all the members of the family'. Among the demographic behaviours, he distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary responses. Migration and postponed marriage belong to the first category. In the same way, sending young children to live with relatives, or sending older children to work elsewhere and remit their incomes can be considered as solutions to overcome bad times.

Overall and without even considering some particular sub-populations, the Land of Herve and the East Ardennes were both potentially vulnerable to economic fluctuations embodied in price movements. In the pastoral Herve area, scarcely 10%

of the land was not devoted to meadows and orchards; 88% of the arable lands were devoted to pasture (agricultural census 1846). Milk and butter, the main local products, were produced for the market. Thus, the inhabitants of the Land of Herve could not resort to subsistence farming. They bought foodstuffs on the neighbouring markets of Aubel and Verviers, which were imported from Germany or the rest of Belgium (Deprez 1948: 46—7), and they were at the mercy of price fluctuations in these markets. From this point of view, Hervian rural society was more urban than rural, in contrast to the East Ardennes where the inhabitants produced a large part of what they consumed. However, the East Ardennes was so poor that it could not produce enough to sustain its population without imports of additional food (Hoyois 1981; Oris 1998: 10—11). In Sart, this situation existed in the eighteenth century, but the problem worsened between 1800 and 1850, when the population grew from 2,000 to 2,400 inhabitants. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a third of the exploitable land was devoted to basic crops, which benefited from the industrial and demographic growth of the Verviers market.

Due to their deeply different agrarian structures, it was obviously impossible to use common economic series for both areas. For East Ardennes prices for the main crops of the area, rye and oats, are used. For the Land of Herve we prefer an approximation of the cost of living and a rough estimate of incomes.

4.1.2 Sart in eastern Ardennes: oats and rye

By all accounts, Sart, our study area in the Belgian Ardennes, was a poor community. Elsewhere, we have analysed heights from military conscription lists, which show that men in Sart were very short, a sign of poor nutrition during childhood (Alter and Oris 2000). Poverty made the demographic system of Sart highly sensitive to economic stress, but we find a complex interaction between a relatively primitive local agricultural system and a highly dynamic regional economy. As described in the preceding section, the ambivalent position of Sart in the emerging urban industrial economy is indeed reflected in differing demographic responses to its two main crops, oats and rye. During the nineteenth century, rye was the main cereal used for bread in eastern Belgium. Although bread from whitened wheat flour was preferred, it was still too expensive for most families (Scholliers 1994). Potatoes also played an important role in the diets of urban workers, but they were probably not a significant factor in Sart until the second half of the century (Hoyois 1981: 786—91). During the ‘Potato Famine' of 1846 urban mortality rose, but Sart was unaffected (Alter and Oris 2000: 339—40). In the rural Ardennes, the poor supplemented their diet with a bouillie (porridge) of oats, which could not be made into bread. Thus, oats and rye played different roles in the urban and rural markets.

Both rye and oats were grown for home consumption in Sart (census of 1846), and surpluses could be sold in nearby urban markets. The long-run evolution of their prices appears in Figure 15.1. The prices of both grains, but especially rye, decreased in the 1820s, as conditions normalized after the great crisis of 1816—17 (Deprez 1948). From the end of the 1820s, an upward trend was observed, slow and progressive for oats, quicker for rye. At the beginning of the 1860s, oats prices stagnated, while rye, once more, decreased more clearly. Then, the trend turned up again and prices reached their peak in 1873—4, before dropping sharply in a context of economic depression and the invasion of American cereals. Prices only rose again in the last decade of the nineteenth century (Oris 1998: 4).

Apart from these common trends, the short-term dynamics of these grain prices differed. Although the prices of oats and rye were moderately correlated with each other, the price of rye was much more volatile than the price of oats. Rye prices reached higher highs and lower lows. Furthermore, rye prices tended to rise about a year before oats prices at least until 1850. That year marks a major turning point, because price fluctuations were more pronounced and more numerous during the first half of the nineteenth century. From 1811 to 1849, the average difference between the annual price and the price trend was 2.20 francs for oats and 3.50 francs for rye.⁴ Those differences fell to 1.22 francs and 2.44 francs respectively between 1850 and 1900. Increased price stability is also evident in the decrease in the number of years with high prices, especially for oats: from 1811 to 1849 the annual price was 10% above the trend in 21 years, while there were only 12 similar peaks during the fifty following years.

Figure 15.1 Prices and trends in Sart, 1811-1910

diet (wheat and potatoes), we believe that rye prices are a better indicator of real wages (or incomes) for Sart peasants. On the other hand, oats played a special role during hard times as the last resort of the poor in rural areas. One must also notice that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the balance between these cereals reversed: the collapse of prices in the 1870s affected rye more deeply. From then on, rye was cheaper than oats, which had previously been the lower price grain.

4.1.3 Land of Herve: cost of living and butter prices

Due to lack of information concerning real wages, we chose to use the cost of living index created by Scholliers (1993) for the whole of Belgium. This index is based on the accounts of the charity institutions of Ghent and of the socialist cooperative Vooruit as well as the average rents of 332 buildings. Information in the family budgets collected during the 1850s and the beginning of the 1890s is used to weight the commodities included in the index. These two sets of family budgets take into account changing consumption patterns over this half century, resulting in two different weighting scales (see Scholliers 1993: 231). This cost of living index considers about 85% of the total expenses of a worker's family, and it can be considered very representative of expenses at the time. Although it is not perfect, it is the best index currently available in Belgium, especially because there are no similar data specifically for rural areas. Since it is based on numbers collected in northern Belgium, however, it might not reflect local trends in other places. This weakness primarily concerns the first decades of the nineteenth century, when ‘east Belgium suffered from its extreme position, near the borders with Prussia and the Netherlands, far away from major rivers that permitted much cheaper supplies (half as expensive)' (Oris 1998: 13).

Butter prices in the Verviers market from 1851 to 1910 provide information on potential incomes for the Land of Herve.⁵ A large proportion of land was devoted to dairy farming, and even during the proto-industrial period, the value of dairy products clearly exceeded the value of textile production. All Hervians did not sell butter, but the Land of Herve was so highly specialized in dairy production that overall incomes almost certainly rose when the price of butter increased.

Both series used for the Land of Herve are smoother than the cereal prices used for the Ardennes (Figure 15.2). Major peaks were less numerous: between 1846 and 1900, only six or seven years were more than 10% higher than the trend. The last significant increase in the cost of living index and the price of butter occurred in 1867, when times were good for the whole country. A major turning point in 1873-4 is not apparent in the two indexes used here. On the contrary, prices continued increasing until 1880, which can easily be explained in the Hervian context. The agricultural crisis of 1873 first affected farming based on cereals. The Land of Herve, which had already made the transition to a new agricultural system, based on

Figure 15.2 Prices and trends in Land of Herve, 1846-1910

pasture and dairy production as explained above, was not affected by competition with the American products. The price of butter only began to decrease seven or eight years later, when other rural regions of Belgium moved towards the Hervian mode of production and became direct competitors.

4.2