La boutique et les différentiels intra-régionaux de l’offre : le cas de la Lorraine à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
Résumé
In eighteenth-century Western Europe, consumption in commodities such as textiles, costume accessories, furniture, tableware or groceries increased significantly and became more diverse. However important social and geographic differences in consumption may have been, they should not be overestimated. In fact, probate inventories show that, within a same region, the differences in goods ownership between cities, smaller market towns and villages were not very large. How were these commodities distributed to people in rural areas? What role did rural merchants play in this process, in regard to merchants from cities or from smaller market towns? The present work is based on taxation records and bankruptcy inventories from late eighteenth-century Lorraine, at the end of a 70-year-long era of economic growth. Merchants appear to have been relatively ubiquitous at the time, since a retailer could be found in at least one out of four villages. The business range of rural commodity traders appears to have been as large as that of urban traders. Their business specializations were similar: many rural retailers were textile sellers, mercers-haberdashers or grocers. Besides, merchandises held in stock suggest that the offer in commodities was deeply integrated at the regional scale: the same varieties of low- and medium-quality cloth or calicoes were sold everywhere, as well as groceries, sugar and many sorts of dying products or condiments. By offering to their clients almost the same goods, village merchants probably stood as major competitors for the merchants of cities or smaller market towns, although their actual part in rural consumption remains impossible to evaluate.