It is quite remarkable that the important groups of studies on French agriculture in the eighteenth century lay the emphasis on agrarian theory; on the political, and even philosophical, aspect of the question, rather than on the technical. The authors of the standard works on these subjects are chiefly concerned with questions like the repartition of land, its mode of tenure, agricultural taxes, consequences of the feudal regime, and the connection of agriculture with the broader problems debated in that century, relating to political economy or statistics.

This tendency in the French agricultural literature of that period, though curious, is understandable. Questions of rural economy soon tended to leave the field of political economists for that of a more restricted group of specialized agricultural scientists. While both approaches to the question co-existed in the eighteenth century, the history of Agriculture in this period has often been treated by giving this word the wide meaning it possesses in English, whereas the history of Farming (a word for which there is no equivalent in French) has too often been disregarded.

In the eighteenth century itself, no distinction was drawn between them, since both studies were in their infancy. The public, not discriminating between the two tendencies, praised writings on both subjects with equal appreciation. The writings of the French agriculturists, however, have attracted the historians less than the more brilliant literature of the economists, with whom they have often been confused. This attraction is intelligible, in that the tradition of economic history writing in France derived from the physiocratic movement, whereas the tradition of the agricultural literature was continued in more purely scientific works. The former led to the interpretation of the agrarian features of eighteenth century France and their general economic consequences; the latter, to the elaboration of agriculture as an applied science. To their contemporary readers, both points of view were of equal interest; but discrimination between them today affords us a most interesting angle from which to study the period 1750-89—a period of important discoveries and of intense experiments, anticipating certain features of French agriculture of the following century.

The whole question seems, in fact, to have been sometimes misunderstood. In drawing one's information from the statements of the economists, the resultant picture of the state of French agriculture at this period is rather gloomy.