That Languedoc was one of the most prosperous and commercially advanced provinces of France in the eighteenth century tends to surprise the twentieth-century observer. All the more so, perhaps, because the region's largely wine-producing population justifies its present rural existence in terms of the sanction bequeathed by centuries of continuous cultivation of the soil. But in fact discontinuity, rather than continuity, has been the characterizing feature of Languedoc's development. Modernization and industrialization involve regional specialization and Languedoc's role in a modernizing and industrializing France has involved the abandonment of its industrial and commercial traditions for a concentration on agricultural production.

The visitor to the region who disregards the propaganda of the ‘viticulteur’ rapidly appreciates this essential discontinuity. It is betrayed above all by the region's towns whose size, antiquity and splendour signal a past prosperity and development which clearly could only in small part have been generated by agricultural wealth.