What was the subsistence crisis? Why did it occur in
France during the Old Regime?
Answers
Answer:
Subsistence crisis can be defined as an extreme situation where the basic means of livelihood are endangered.
Explanation:
It was in France that the notion of a subsistence crisis was first formulated by Meuvret in 1946, and greatly popularised by Goubert in 1960 through his influential study of the Beauvaisis in Beauvais. The theory of subsistence crises, in its contemporary guise, was first formulated by Meuvret in 1946. As an economic historian and specialist in price history Meuvret was struck by the coincidence between high prices and the increase in the number of deaths in the region of Gien in 1709–10. He then posed the problem of the nature of demographic crises, very tentatively at first, since he thought it was a hopeless quest to try to distinguish statistically between phenomena that were so closely associated: namely, mortality through simple inanition (starvation); mortality caused by disease, though attributable to malnutrition; and mortality by contagion, which in turn was linked to the scarcity that helped both spawn diseases and spread them through the migration of poor beggars.