ABSTRACT
Villeneuve-sur-Lot was a large bastide, or planned town, sitting astride a navigable river separating its two asymmetric parishes. Its legitimate commoner sex ratios bounced from very low levels due to famine, to high peaks indicative of sex-selective infanticide in the first half of the seventeenth century. During the personal reign of Louis XIV, starting in 1661, this turbulence gave way to greater stability, until the crisis of the 1690s and the Great Winter of 1709–10, an event which was conspicuous in other places too. These peaks are particularly high in the working-class parish of Saint-Etienne.
