Calendrier du 03 juillet 2024
Economic History Seminar
Du 03/07/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
ROUANET Louis (University of Texas at El Paso in the Department of Economics and Finance.)
Long live the Republic: The political consequences of revolutionary land redistribution
To be politically viable, a Revolution needs the support of key interest groups that benefit from the survival of the new regime. The redistribution of clergy property during the French Revolution created a group –the new owners of clergy assets- whose wealth depended on the Revolution’s fate, thus increasing political support for the Revolution. This land redistribution policy had long-run consequences on political support for republicanism. Using data on elections during the beginning of the Third Republic, we show that the sale of clergy assets during the French Revolution substantially reduced support for anti-Republican candidates. Our results suggest that Republicans may not have prevailed in the 1870s without the liquidation of the Church's wealth 80 years earlier. The sale of Church assets reduced Catholic worship and increased Protestant worship. We use the presence of monasteries prior to the Reformation and the Commercial Revolution as instruments to suggest our findings are causal. Finally, we rule out a reduction in landed inequality as the main channel explaining the effect of this revolutionary land redistribution on politics and ideology.