ABSTRACT
Subsistence crises caused considerable suffering and anxiety and led to serious and widespread disorder. Even during the first half of the nineteenth century the structure of economic crises was growing more complicated as industry developed and generated crises peculiar to it as well as suffering the consequences of harvest fluctuations. The easing of cyclical variations and the levelling out of spatial variations were clear indications of a transformation of economic conditions. The changes occurring in agriculture and in the overall economic structure led, according to most commentators, to improvements, unique in their amplitude, in living standards for most of the population from the early 1850s and especially in the 1860s. Modification of the material and moral economies of the poor had been caused by significant changes in the political, and especially the socioeconomic, structures of France. The process of change was centuries old, but only from the 1850s, with railway development, could it culminate in a social and economic revolution.
