Landed estates in operation
In historical scholarship the economics of elite landowning in modern France remained for a long time ‘an almost virgin field’. As Theodore Zeldin observed, ‘historians have been interested far more in the history of peasant ownership’. Understanding peasant experiences is crucial for rural history that scholars such as Lefebvre, Le Roy Ladurie, and others placed at the very heart of French history, especially as it was practised within France. This chapter explains the economic operations of landed estates and the tripartite relations between owners, managers, and labourers. The analysis draws on Bourdieu’s writings about gift exchange and reproduction of social capital, and it uses correspondence, accounts, contracts and other archival evidence to document rural social relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.