Customary law governed most European societies during the Middle Ages and early modern period. To better understand the roots of legal customs and their implications for long-run development, we introduce an atlas of customary regions of Ancien …
This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the …
We test Le Play’s (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France’s early fertility decline. In 1793, a series of inheritance reforms abolished local inheritance practices, imposing equal partition of assets among all children. We …
During the First World War in France, annual government spending reached unprecedented levels, accounting for 50 percent of GDP. A significant portion of these expenditures was allocated to support industrial warfare, at a time when the country’s …
In 1925, of the 22 countries that could be classified as democracies, only four —France, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland— had yet to extend suffrage to women. France is an intriguing exception: as a co-belligerent in WWI, the country experienced …