one or two baptisms per year. The second half of the century saw increasing attention from France and Lorraine was periodically invaded from the west as part of Louis XIV's project to extend France's eastern frontier to the River Rhine. Nevertheless, during a century when plenty of villages in Lorraine simply disappeared. Marriage records from the years 1697 - 1720 indicate several people moving into La Neuveville from neighbouring parishes, and by 1736 the population of the parish seems to have increased sharply. The potato was probably unknown here in 1703 since it did not feature on a schedule of crops subject to the tithe in that year. A legal case of 1745 involving a priest's claim to a tithe payment in nearby Poussay refers to potatatoes in a manner indicating that they were commonplace, so by 1545 potatoes had presumably been cultivated here for some years: that is consistent with population increase because potatoes have a far higher food value per acre than the grains and root crops on which populations in the region depended before the eighteenth century. The Seven Years' War burdened the village with fresh demands for fighting men and requisitions of supplies, but the growth nevertheless seems to have continued over the century as a whole, with the number of taxable homesteads increasing from 20 in 1703 to 110 in 1788, by which time the total population in the village was probably up to about 480. In 1779 the community decided to build a school house in Church Street (la rue de l'Église), and it is recorded that in 1785 the church itself had become too small by this time so that each Sunday more than 100 people had to remain outside the church during Mass and follow the service from the adjacent graveyard. A new larger church was constructed and consecrated in 1790. The French Revolution ushered in 25 years of republican and imperial wars which involved military glory and rural depression. A large young men of working and fighting age were called to the service of France: from parish records it is clear that many never returned. The census of 1820 painted a picture of continued depression. La Neuveville was more badly hit than neighbouring parishes because the civic coffers had been emptied by a massively costly legal dispute with the presbytery of Vair which lasted sixteen years. Despite the hardship, the population