The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

Leather prices remained fairly stable during the century, although the high military
needs and the impossibility to import cattle and leather from the continent, made
leather much more expensive during the period from 1790 to 1815 (fig. 1.2). We
will see also how taxation contributed to high leather prices in Britain after 1812.
1.4 Meat, cattle and leather
One of the problems for France was the size of its meat market. The chronic
absence of leather and the enforcement of a centralised system for controlling the
leather market have to be linked to the small dimension of the meat market. For all
the eighteenth century Paris had problems in being supplied with meat. A partial
solution was seen in the institution of the 'Compagnie pour l'approvisionnement
de Paris en boeuf. However, meat consumption remained low in France at least
till the first quarter of the nineteenth century when politicians and economists
showed an increasing concern about the number of animals slaughtered each year
and the rate of their replacement. In 1806, one of the Recherches Nationales
compared the livestock of England and France (table 1.8).
Table 1.8 - Livestock in France and Britain in 1806
England38 France
Population 9,000,000 (estimated) 32,691,263
Cows 1,337,976 3,194,394
Cattle 1,003,482 760,570
Young cattle 2,229,960 2,129,576
Sub total 4,571,418 6,084,560
Sheep 28,989,480 30,307,600
J.B.F. Sauvegrain, Consideration sur Ia population et la consommation dénérales du bétail en
France (Paris, 1806), p. 82.
The comparison showed how the stock of cattle in France was 1/3 higher than in
England, while the stock of sheep was in France only slightly superior than in
38 According to Wrigley and Schofield's estimations, the population of England in 1806 was
9,267,570. E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541-1871: a
reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), p. 534.
35