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Abstract
Unsatisfied with the traditional history, d’Avenel focused on quantitative data to understand the past. He built series of prices of multiple goods and services from 1200 onwards to document long-term changes in incomes and prices as a result of the technical progress and in inequalities as captured by the top 1%. Criticised by some contemporary historians, his data were used by Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Ragner Frisch or Alfred Marshall and are still exploited. His analysis fertilised various fields in particular the Annales School and his findings on social evolutions attract the interest of 21st-century social scientists.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 When dealing with this issue, Vibha Kapuria-Foreman and Mark Perlman (Citation1995) coined the expression of an “economic historian’s economist” in order to highlight the credentials of Simon Kuznets.
2 Arthur Mangin, a highly recognised populariser of science, was the journal’s science columnist.
3 Fernand Braudel wrote a devastating critique of Hanotaux in Annales, 1951, 6–2: 285.
4 Arthur Reed Ropes (better known under his pen name Adrian Ross), whose parents lived in Normandy, was the intermediary between Rogers and d’Avenel. In 1883 he graduated from King’s College with a first-class degree, winning the Lightfoot Scholarship for history and a Whewell Scholarship in international law. He was elected a fellow of the College (Revue de l’Avranchin 1886, Séance du 10 novembre 1887: 605).
5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material from French sources are our own.
6 This quote is from a chapter entitled: “The value of money and its purchasing power”.
7 He provides a short table of the purchasing power of the poor in d’Avenel 1894–1926 vol. 3: 382.
8 Care should also be taken with volume 5 of the history of prices, as d’Avenel explains (350) that from that point on he would automatically apply an adjustment for the purchasing power; however, that adjustment applied only to the text while the tables were still expressed in gold francs.
9 The RDDM is available through JSTOR, although it can be difficult to distinguish his articles from his “Chronique de la quinzaine”. Most of the RDDM is also now digitised on Gallica.
10 “Whenever there’s a famous man in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t always be M. de Borelli, of course, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel” (Proust Citation1919, 43–4).
11 The archives of the Académie have kept many applications but there is no record of the ballots, which were secret.
12 Among the lecturers, the authors of Revue des Deux Mondes received the lion’s share.
13 Unfortunately, the Harvard archives did not record who attended these lectures, but several future researchers in economic history were PhD students at the time.
14 See d’Avenel (Citation1893a).
15 Correspondance et papiers de Joseph Reinach. > I – Correspondance > I-XXXV Correspondance générale. > II Appell-Aynard. Manuscrits NAF 13528.
16 Rouxel, Revue critique des publications économiques de langue française, 185 et suivantes, Nr. 8, Août 1890. The Journal des économistes argued repeatedly for the separation of church and state. See for example the article published in September 1872, Nr. 81, Séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat, par l’abbé ***, 310–347.
17 Lexis probably relied on Levasseur’s report because it is doubtful that he had access to a copy of d’Avenel’s books. However, in the second edition, published in 1898–1901, Lexis quoted various data from the two first volumes of d’Avenel’s Citation1894–1926 book.
18 This quote is taken from an unpublished memorandum from 1929 with which Beveridge launched the Committee’s project (“Memorandum on Suggested History of Prices and Wages (4.3.29)”, in: Report 1). The characterisation of d’Avenel’s work as “nearly useless” would be repeated in W. H. Beveridge, “Preface”, in Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 1: Price Tables: Mercantile Era, W. H. Beveridge (ed.), 2nd edition, London, Cass, 1965, XLVIII.
19 A work that is still in progress, supervised by the Comité Fourastié: https://stats.fourastie-sauvy.org/index.php?cmd=regroupementClasse
20 “The income from invested capital is in fact only a part, and the least, of the nation’s general revenue: the 12 billion in salaries, workers’ and farmers’ wages, the 3 to 4 billion in annual profits of the patentees of commerce and industry, the 2 to 3 billion in salaries of the public and private sectors, and the fees of the liberal professions make up, each year, a sum that is certainly twice as large as the 9 billion in interest earned from movable property and land” (d’Avenel Citation1894–1926, vol. 5, 84)
21 Nevertheless, he compared his results with those of Léon Say, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu and Victor de Laveleye (especially in d’Avenel 1894–1926, vol.1).