The standard of living debate in Belgium
The conventional view about the standard of living in nineteenth-century Belgium is the product of three traditions. The first one is the closest to our own approach, since it focuses on demographic responses.
Following Goubert and Meuvret's footsteps, Belgian researchers have observed the classic process in which mortality crises became progressively less frequent and less severe. Much attention was devoted to the last major crisis between 1845 and 1847. The combination of potato blight, bad weather that reduced cereal harvests, a typhus epidemic, and the decline of proto-industrial textile production caused a crisis in Flanders, which is often compared with the Great Irish Famine.2At the national level, correlations have been calculated between demographic rates and food prices. Andre and Pereira- Roque (1974: 52-8) noted that the crude birth rate was negatively associated with prices. They concluded that Belgian women were able to control their reproduction in poor economic conditions well before the decisive fertility decline began in 1873. Such an interpretation is
debatable, however. First, from a statistical point of view, most of the correlation between food prices and birth rates is due to common trends: increase between 1850 and 1872, decrease since 1873. When the series are de-trended, the relationship becomes unclear or disappears. (See Bruneel et al.1987: 314, for the same observation about the eighteenth century.) Second, variations in fertility can be due to other factors, like the physiological impact of hunger on fecundability or the psychological consequences of stress (less frequent sexual relations), that do not imply intentional birth control. Overall, the conventional view is that Belgian mortality became independent from economic fluctuations after 1847/50, but nothing is really clear as far as fertility is concerned.
Franklin Mendels based his famous theory of proto-industrialization on the case of Flanders. His views of the link between marriage and labour market stimulated a rich flow of excellent research, but little work has been done on the nineteenth century (for a recent synthesis, see Devos 1999). Yoo (1996) demonstrated that even during the twentieth century marriage remained extremely sensitive to economic fluctuations. Research has also established that the definitive break with the Malthusian system of late marriage and high proportions remaining unmarried occurred around 1860, starting in the centres of the Industrial Revolution, especially coal and iron districts (Lesthaege 1977; Devos 1999). Recently, Patricia van den Eeckhout and Peter Scholliers (1997: 160) were surprised to note the lack of research about links between labour markets, real wages, and migration, except two case studies about the coal and iron town of Seraing (De Saint-Moulin 1969; Oris 1997).
A second research tradition pays more attention to tensions between population and resources, stressing the importance of structural constraints and their transformation during the formation of an international, then global economy. Bruneel et al. (1987) offer a good synthesis of the debate between Malthusian and Boserupian interpretations of the relationships between demography and economy. Belgian experience since 1700 clearly demonstrates a predominance of population growth over increasing agricultural production. Martine Goosens (1992: 180) has shown that the demographic expansion of Belgium was 30% faster than the growth of agricultural production from 1806 to 1846. During the eighteenth century, the substitution of potatoes for cereals offered a partial solution, but food prices rose until 1873. In that year, the massive arrival of American cereals produced a sudden drop in prices and a new era for the rural population (Bruneel et α∕.1987: 313).
Two things prevented this rising Malthusian pressure from resulting in major demographic disasters, other than the crisis in Flanders.
First, Belgium was the first country in continental Europe to follow the British example. The Belgian Industrial Revolution was rapid, intense, and successful, and it resulted in a continuous increase in the wages of workers in factories and mines during the 1850s and 1860s (Gadisseur 1981). These higher incomes covered the cost of rising food prices, which was profitable for the peasantry and induced food imports from neighbouring countries (Deprez 1948; Degreve 1982). Second, improvements in roads and the early development of a dense railway network led to a unification of prices by themiddle of the century (Oris 1998: 12—17). In this context the classic question of the English debate—was the standard of living decreasing or increasing during the Industrial Revolution—remains open. It was an immediate concern for officials and intellectuals during the nineteenth century, and dozens of workers' family budgets were collected and published in 1855 and 1891.
Time series or ‘serial’ analyses were conducted during the interwar years in the Department of Economics at the Catholic University of Leuven. This tradition—the third one in Belgian historiography—has been carried on almost continuously by the Flemish historians in Ghent and the Free University of Brussels, who use a variety of sources to explore (usually annual) fluctuations of food prices, wages, real wages, and consumption. In the most recent synthesis, Peter Scholliers concluded that the standard of living declined between 1800 and 1850, and then rose (Scholliers 1996).
There is no agreement among historians about the interpretation of this rise. An optimistic view stresses the impressive progress of real wages between 1850 and 1873. By the end of the depression, the labour force participation of married women had fallen according to a comparison of the 1853 and 1891 budgets, which was a sign of improvement in the family wage economy (Alter 1984). Leboutte (1987) has suggested that the shock of depression in 1873 initiated fertility decline.
A pessimistic view, based on wage and price data, pays less attention to the progress observed during the third quarter of the century. Scholliers (1991, 1996) argues that the contribution of adult married women to the household economy remained vital in 1891, and that the situation in 1900 was merely a return to conditions of 1800.Such differences of interpretation show that many questions remain open in spite of the quality, quantity, and diversity of the studies. First, research focused on the modern proletariat is mainly concentrated on the Walloon industrial cities, while the peasantry and rural populations have only been well explored in the Flemish part of Belgium (see Vandenbroeke 1984 for a valuable synthesis, and more recently Vanhaute 1992 and Scholliers 1996). This two-sided historiography reflects the widening gap between ‘poor Flanders’ and industrializing Wallonia during the nineteenth century. But almost nothing is known about the rural Walloon populations who lived in close proximity to the Industrial Revolution. The standard explanation is a stereotype: a rural exodus towards growing towns. However, Vandermotten and Vandewattyne (1985) have clearly shown that the number of inhabitants in the Walloon countryside did not decline before the very end of the nineteenth century. Questions about the structural adaptations of the rural populations of Wallonia and the evolution of their standard of living have been completely untouched.
A second set of questions revolves around chronology and transitions. Was 1850 a turning point, the decisive transition ‘from hunger to modern economic growth’ (Bengtsson and Saito 2000)? What about the economic depression between 1873 and 1890? At a micro level, we need to translate these problems into questions about individuals and their families: When did people stop dying in years of high prices? Was the family able to cope with medium- or short-term stress? How did they choose among household members when there was too little food for everyone?
In particular, when did the situation of married women improve? Between the micro and the macro views, a regional perspective is also important. At this level, we can consider differences and changes in agrarian structures, various ties to urban areas, and the nature and intensity of pressures from the industrial world on rural society. For this reason, our analysis compares two distinctive rural communities.
2.2