increased twelvefold, from 210,000 tons in 1550 to 2,500,000 tons in 1700 and nearly 5 million tons by 1750. France was more heavily forested than England, but increasing deforestation prompted Jean Baptiste Colbert, France’s minister of finance, to predict that “France will perish for lack of wood.” By the late eighteenth century deforestation had become an issue even in Sweden and Russia, where iron production had become a major industry. Poverty and Violence Even in the prosperous Dutch towns, half of the population lived in acute poverty. Authorities estimated that permanent city residents who were too poor to tax, the “deserving poor,” made up 10 to 20 percent of the population. That calculation did not include the large numbers of “unworthy poor”—recent migrants from impoverished rural areas, peddlers traveling from place to place, and beggars (many with horrible deformities and sores) who tried to survive on charity. The pervasive poverty of rural and urban Europe shocked those who were not hardened to it. In about 1580 the mayor of the French city of Bordeaux (bor-DOH) asked a group of visiting Amerindian chiefs what impressed them most about European cities. The chiefs are said to have expressed astonishment at the disparity between the fat, well-fed people and the poor, half-starved men and women in rags. Why, the visitors wondered, did the poor not grab the rich by the throat or set fire to their homes? 2 In fact, misery provoked many rebellions in early modern Europe. For example, in 1525 peasant rebels in the Alps attacked both nobles and the clergy as representatives of the privileged and landowning classes. Th ey had no love for merchants either, whom they denounced for lending at interest and charging high prices. Rebellions multiplied as rural conditions worsened. In southwestern France alone some 450 uprisings occurred between 1590 and 1715, many of them set off by food shortages and tax increases. A rebellion in southern France in 1670 began when a mob of townswomen attacked the tax collector. It quickly spread to the country, where peasant leaders cried, “Death to the people’s oppressors!” Authorities dealt severely with such revolts and executed or maimed their leaders. Women and the Family Women’s social and economic status was closely tied to that of their husbands. In some nations a woman could inherit a throne (see Table 17.1 on page XXX for examples)—in the absence of a male heir. Th ese rare exceptions do not negate the rule that women everywhere ranked below men, but one should also not forget that class and wealth defined a woman’s position in life more than her sex. Th e wife or daughter of a rich man, for example, though oft en closely confined, had a materially better life than any poor man. Sometimes a single woman might secure a position of responsibility, as in the case of women from good families who headed convents in Catholic countries. But while unmarried women were routinely controlled by fathers and married women controlled by husbands, some widows independently controlled substantial properties and other assets. In contrast to the arranged marriages that prevailed in much of the rest of the world, young men and women in early modern Europe oft en chose their own spouses, but privileged families were much more likely to arrange marriages than poor ones. Royal and noble families carefully plotted the suitability of their children’s marriages in furthering family interests. Bourgeois parents were less likely to force their