Un capítulo poco conocido de la historia de la patata en la región parisina durante el siglo XIX

Potatoes constituted one of the most important American plants to allow European countries to face the demographic growth during the end of the Early Modern History and the nineteenth century. But, contrary to what occurred in North-European countries, Galicia and north of Portugal, with few regional exceptions, potato did not play a major role in the food intake of French population. Nevertheless potatoes had constituted in some regions, in Paris Bassin for example, a very important crop. In this region, yield of potato was multiplied ten-fold between the end of the First Empire and the 1860s. Despite this increasing production, I show that potato was not an element of the diet of the Paris Bassin’s rural population but was an industrial crop used by starch industry ( industrie de la fecule in French) to produce, among other things, glucose and alcohol. Beyond the case of the Paris Bassin, I hypothesis that potato can become an element of the diet of the populations only if the price of fuel (wood, coal, charcoal or peat) and the price animal fat or vegetable fat were low.