On August 26, 1935, delegates from sixty-five American Federationof Labor locals in the automobile industry gathered in Detroit to launch the International Union, United Automobile Workers of America. Although many of the delegates thought that the A.F. of L. had unnecessarily delayed the convocation of this convention, they were no doubt mindful of the fact that an international was being formed in an industry where only a little more than two years previously unionism had been conspicuous primarily because of its absence.

Taken as a whole the half century from 1835 to 1885 was a periodof substantial economic growth in the United States. The population increased nearly fourfold, or at an annual rate in the neighborhood of 2½ to 2½ per cent per year. Estimates of the national income show a figure at the end of the period six- or sevenfold as large as that at the beginning, the equivalent of an average growdi rate of about 3½ to 4 per cent per year. A crude available estimate of national wealth suggests about a tenfold change, or an annual growth averaging close to 5 per cent. These growth rates for income and wealth do not need to be adjusted downward for price changes, because the available wholesale price indexes suggest that in the middle of the 1880's the price level was a little lower than in the middle of the 1830's. The figures are not to be taken as first class statistical data. They merely indicate the apparent order of magnitude of the degree of growth.

Today's best-known price indexes for Wholesale Price and Consumer Price Indexesthe Unitedof theStates are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Indexes of Prices Received and Paid by Farmers, issued by the Department of Agriculture. These indexes, however, are comparatively new. The “Wholesale Price Index” dates from 1902 with indexes covering the years 1890-1901. The “Consumer Price Index” is of even more recent origin. Retail food price indexes were established on a regular basis in 1901, again with data back to 1890. Other goods and services were not added until after World War I, with estimates back to 1913 based on special studies in shipbuilding cities. The “Index of Prices Received by Farmers” was issued by the Department of Agriculture in 1924 and “Prices Paid by Farmers” in 1928. Botfi of these series were extended back to 1910.

The works of Labrousse and Chabert on income fluctuations in pre-and post-revolutionary France have already been subjected to abundant criticism by Professor Landes in the November 1950 issue of THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY. The present note results from an attempt at resolving in a constructive way certain of the contradictions observed between Labrousse's inferences and his data. The argument, originally developed on the basis of observations in the decade immediately preceding the French Revolution, was extended to cover the thirty years (1815-1845) following the fall of Napoleon's empire. After a short review of Labrousse's “grain crop” interpretation of French economic cycles, it is shown that (1) his computations of feudal revenues do not agree with his description of their cyclical pattern and (2) grain revenue figures are only consistent with an elastic demand for bread over a certain range. This squarely contradicts the inelasticity assumption which underlies both Labrousse's theory and Landes' criticism of it. The treatment of eighteenth-century bread demand as price-inelastic had already wide currency among contemporary economists, and does not seem to have been seriously challenged ever since. An inductive analysis supported by scattered pieces of empirical evidence is then developed, with the conclusion that demand for bread (and grain) should indeed be elastic over the relevant region. The last section represents an extension of this interpretation to crop and price data in the post-Napoleonic period.

We have reason to be grateful to Mr. Danière for bringing the thesis of Professor Labrousse to our attention once again. For this is not just an ordinary thesis. Since its statement in the thirties, it has become a staple of French historiography, shaping and informing the work of a whole generation of scholars. Such terms as “crise d'ancien type,” “crise de sous-production agricole,” and “économie des blés et des textiles” have become stock phrases, and few French historians would think of discussing any trade crisis before the middle of the nineteenth century without laying special stress on the causative role of inadequate harvests. Indeed, the fame of this thesis has so flourished with time and Professor Labrousse had become so closely identified with the problem of agriculture and the cycle, that any kind of link between harvests and farm income on the one hand and business conditions on the other–even where the relationship observed is the opposite of what the Labroussian model would lead one to expect–has been enough to make scholars cite his name in evidence.

I am not aware of having “censored and manipulated” the data, unless rejection from the sample of the revolutionary year 1789 and of the two years following the 1815 collapse is to be viewed as unreasonable.