Adrien de Gasparin, a great agronomist in nineteenth-century France, criticized the rigid theory of the "Anglomania" school and tried to show another way of renovation for French agriculture. This original standpoint of Gasparin was born from his observation on the agriculture in Mediterranean Southern France where he lived, and whose specific climate and civilization were to obstruct the introduction of the capitalist farming of English type. In his work written in 1820, Gasparin idealized the small landowners' society in Southern France and in Switzerland, while criticizing the large landownership in England, Spain and southern Italy. Independent small landowners were, in his view, the real basis of agricultural progress as well as of industrious economic life and of political freedom and social equality. The division of land was especially important for Continental agriculture because the scale of landed property must be proportioned to the small quantity of capital available among the farmers there. Gasparin's support for the small landownership was founded on the prosperity of intensive farming of industrial crops such as madder, mulberry in Southern France. He thought this type of small-scale farming the most promising and found other examples in Flanders, Alsace, Tuscany, Switzerland and in the environs of large cities. Gasparin considered the intensive small-scale farming the suitable form of agricultural progress in Southern France, because the major problem of traditional agriculture based on metayage and two fields system consisted in farmers' long leisure and idleness, and the introduction of industrial crops could awake the enterprising spirit in farmers and induce them to work and invest capital incessantly. Thus Gasparin perceived, before Max Weber, the importance of the "spirit of capitalism" for agricultural modernization and this mental point of view was inspired "by his own ascetic Protestantism. Gasparin's thought can be summarized as the conception of "small-scale capitalistic farming" as against large-scale capitalist farming of English type. The truth of his theory was proved by the development of agriculture in Southern France from that time on.