330Chapter 18
folklore, but they made travel risky for the few who
could afford it.
The fastest travel, for both people and goods, was
often by water. Most cities had grown along rivers and
coasts. Paris received the grain that sustained it by
barges on the Seine; the timber that heated the city was
floated down the river. The great transportation proj-
ects of the Old Regime were canals connecting these
rivers. Travel on the open seas was normally fast, but it
depended on fair weather. A voyager might be in En-
gland four hours after leaving France or trapped in port
for days. If oceanic travel were involved, delays could
reach remarkable lengths. In 1747 the electors of
Portsmouth, England, selected Captain Edward Legge
of the Royal Navy to represent them in Parliament;
Legge, whose command had taken him to the Ameri-
cas, had died eighty-seven days before his election but
the news had not yet arrived in Portsmouth.
Travel and communication were agonizingly slow
by twenty-first-century standards. In 1734 the coach
trip between Edinburgh and London (372 miles) took
twelve days; the royal mail along that route required
forty-eight hours of constant travel by relay riders. The
commercial leaders of Venice could send correspon-
dence to Rome (more than 250 miles) in three to four
days, if conditions were favorable; messages to Moscow
(more than twelve hundred miles) required about four
weeks. When King Louis XV of France died in 1774,
this urgent news was rushed to the capitals of Europe
via the fastest couriers: It arrived in Vienna and Rome
three days later; Berlin, four days; and St. Petersburg,
six days.
Life Expectancy in the Old Regime
The living conditions of the average person during the
Old Regime holds little appeal for people accustomed
to twenty-first-century conveniences. A famous writer
of the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, de-
scribed the life of the masses as “little to be enjoyed and
much to be endured.” The most dramatic illustration of
Johnson’s point is life expectancy data. Although the
figures vary by social class or region, their message is
grim. For everyone born during the Old Regime, the
average age at death was close to thirty. Demographic
studies of northern France at the end of the seventeenth
century found that the average age at death was twenty.
Data for Sweden in 1755 give an average life of thirty-
three. A comprehensive study of villages in southern
England found a range between thirty-five and forty-
five. These numbers are misleading because of infant
mortality, but they contain many truths about life in the
past.
Short life expectancy meant that few people knew
their grandparents. Research on a village in central
England found that a population of four hundred in-
cluded only one instance of three generations alive in
the same family. A study of Russian demography found
more shocking results: Between 20 and 30 percent of all
serfs under age fifteen had already lost both parents.
Similarly, when the French philosopher Denis Diderot
in 1759 returned to the village of his birth at age forty-
six, he found that not a single person whom he knew
from childhood had survived. Life expectancy was sig-
nificantly higher for the rich than for the poor. Those
who could afford fuel for winter fires, warm clothing, a
superior diet, or multiple residences reduced many
risks. The rich lived an estimated ten years longer than
the average in most regions and seventeen years longer
than the poor.Disease and the Biological Old Regime
Life expectancy averages were low because infant mor-
tality was high, and death rates remained high through-
out childhood. The study of northern France found
that one-third of all children died each year and only
58 percent reached age fifteen. However, for those who
survived infancy, life expectancy rose significantly. In a
few healthier regions, especially where agriculture was
strong, the people who lived through the terrors of
childhood disease could expect to live nearly fifty more
years.
The explanation for the shocking death rates and
life expectancy figures of the Old Regime has been
called the biological old regime, which suggests the
natural restrictions created by chronic undernourish-
ment, periodic famine, and unchecked disease. The first
fact of existence in the eighteenth century was the
probability of death from an infectious disease. Natural
catastrophes (such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,
which killed thirty thousand people) or the human vio-
lence of wartime (such as the battle of Blenheim in
1704, which took more than fifty thousand casualties in
a single day) were terrible, but more people died from
diseases. People who had the good fortune to survive
natural and human catastrophe rarely died from heart
disease or cancer, the great killers of the early twenty-