There were, therefore, two French economics, only tenuously linked. Coastal regions, and the navigable lower reaches of the four great river systems, were integrated with international and intercontinental trading networks and shared in their benefits, which seemed destined to go on improving. But most of Louis XVI's subjects lived in the interior, where communications were poor, economic life sluggish, and such improvements as good harvests had brought in mid-century were being eroded by climatic deterioration and an inexorably rising population. The famines of the seventeenth century, when hundreds of thousands died, were fading from memory; but thinking men became increasingly worried, as each harvest shortfall plunged whole populations into beggary, about the ability of existing institutions to take the strains they were coming under.
— The Oxford History of the French Revolution (William Doyle)
