Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [70]
Most of those tens of millions of extra Europeans were peasants, as more than 90 percent of Europeans remained rural well into the nineteenth century. But the land couldn’t support this expanded population. In places where inherited peasant land was divided among sons, as was the case in western and southwestern German states, the plots soon became unsustainably small, unable to supply even a single family’s nutritional needs (as is the case in central India today); the ruined farmers were driven into the city. Elsewhere, younger offspring were simply forced to hit the road. “The surge of population growth that set in after 1750 thus put enormous and all but insupportable strain on village communities,” McNeill observes. “Too many extra hands as they came of age had nowhere to go. Towns soon became desperately overcrowded by immigrants seeking a livelihood on the margins of urban society, and in the villages all suitable land was already taken up. It was against this background that the French Revolution broke out.”5
The Revolution—or, at least, the specific events that propelled it forward—took place within a new sort of urban space, one that had not existed as such in previous generations. Populated with recent rural arrivals, it was a low-rent district offering a complex web of mutual-help circles, often organized around place of origin and profession. The historian Olwen Hufton provides an eloquent description of this new European site of rural arrival:
Each town and city had its streets or entire quartiers gradually taken over and ultimately swamped by [rural] immigrants and their families and contacts. They were invariably the most derelict, dank, ill-lit and ill-provided for in the way of water supplies, areas about which public authorities demonstrated the least concern, but where lodgings could be cheaply found … These centers usually included important churches, cathedrals, and convents, for they were the oldest sections, mediaeval slums which were infested with rats and lice … yet their location meant that the immigrant was strategically placed near the ports, docks, warehouses and near important arteries to public buildings. If he had to beg his living, what better place to command than the approach to the cathedral or the doors to convents? Many of the keepers of the garnis were his compatriots who had made out in the city; perhaps he could even expect a little credit … he had sisters and cousins who were urban servantes, brothers, uncles, cousins, friends who were valets and domestiques, and these lived in the prosperous sectors. If he sought a casual job on the streets or docks as portefaix, water-carrier, or errand goer, he needed to know where to go for jobs.6
France, by far the most populated and advanced country in Europe in the eighteenth century, was the first to experience a full-fledged arrival city. Paris in 1789 had an official population of 524,000, but a grave famine that year in the countryside had expanded that number to as many as 700,000, as tens of thousands of peasant women and men flooded into the city in search of cash incomes. Jacques Necker, the revolutionary finance minister, described a central city that today sounds strikingly like the Chinese cities of the early twenty-first century. Its occupants, he wrote at the time, were “the great ‘floating’ population of the hotels and furnished lodgings … many thousands of villagers from the