L'évolution d'une société rurale : lîle Jésus au XVIIIe siècle

Set in i le Jesus, just north of the island of Montreal, this thesis has a two-fold objective: to study the problem of the growth of agricultural production and to analyse the structure and the evolution of Canadian rural society in the eighteenth century.The study proceeds in five stages. In order to determine what factors govern agricultural production, prevailing economic circumstances, land distribution and the system of production are examined in succession. Next, the inquiry turns to inheritance customs and peasant estates, with the aim of measuring the economic hierarchy within the peasantry, determining its nature and explaining its dynamics.The study concludes that the slow growth of agricultural production stems essentially from limitations on production resulting from the productive framework of the family farm and the system of inheritance. On the one hand, at each generation, this system pushed the majority of young peasants out to the fringes of settlement, where they could not produce surpluses. On the other hand, it slowed down the development of older, settled land by requiring the sons who established themselves on it to recompense their co-heirs.Moreover, the analysis of peasant estates reveals the existence of an economic hierarchy among the peasantry, a hierarchy that persists over time. The study shows that well-to-do peasants generally benefitted from early access to cleared land through inheritance. As inheritance customs were relatively egalitarian, these privileged peasants were mainly the sons of families sufficiently well-off to establish all or most of their heirs comfortably. This initial advantage becomes particularly decisive once the market for agricultural products becomes more active. One can therefore conclude that even if inheritance customs imply a certain redistribution of family property, they do not equalize peasant society at each generation