In the modern scholarly view of the sixties, which has brought considerable order and sophistication to the study of eighteenth-century France, the dominant motif is constitutional, the lingering crisis is the Brittany affair, and the denouement is the stunning coup engineered by Maupeou. I have viewed the decade from a different vantage point. I have suggested that another issue preoccupied Frenchmen in the sixties and in many ways cut more deeply and touched more people than the well-known political confrontation. I have focused upon a social and political crisis concerning subsistence, which set the stage for the outburst of absolutism in 1770–71 by producing widespread economic disruption and recession.

From this perspective, the main themes of parlementary action eddy against the prevailing current. What is striking are not the claims of parlementary union and indivisibility, but the deep divisions among the sovereign courts; not the political pretensions of the parlements, but their vitally important administrative and regulatory responsibilities; not the obscurantist attitudes and obstructionist tactics for which they are famous, but their critique of government mismanagement and royal abuse, which had much in common with what we conventionally call “enlightened”; not their adamantine hostility to change and their persecution of truth, but their inability to decide amongst themselves what changes were best and what opinions were true; not their egotistical defense of privilege, but their discussion of the nature of la chose publique; not their desire to curtail royal authority, but their debate on the responsibilities of kingship. The parlements of the grain crisis were the same parlements which thwarted Bertin's intelligent reforms, burned LaBarre, and mercilessly harassed the king. But the view of France from the marketplace differed sharply from the scene perceived from La Chalotais’ prison or the fauteuil in which Louis presided over lits de justice, even as it differed from vantage points in Rouen, Toulouse, Grenoble, and Paris. The issues raised by the grain crisis differed from the problems posed by the constitutional quarrel and elicited different responses from parlements for whom politics was a very complex and subtle business. The constitutional question, as important as it was, must not obscure the existence of other matters of urgent public concern and other dimensions of parlementary behavior.

The government's inability to stem the generalization and deepening of the crisis at the very end of the decade doomed liberalization. The new Controller-General, Terray, metaphorically portrayed the liberal experience as “the flood” and imagined his responsibility, in part, as channeling the waters back into their natural reservoirs and building dikes capable of withstanding future inundations of any sort. But he did not take a nostalgically antediluvian approach to the task—at least he tried not to. The problem was that de-liberalization did not bring instant recovery. Terray enjoyed virtually no respite from subsistence troubles during his four-year tenure and the subsistence troubles generated other political and economic problems which compounded the difficulty for him.

The discussion of his administration is divided into three parts which mark the boundaries of this and the following two chapters. The first concerns the return to a police regime, a transition not easily effected, and the nature of Terray's short- and long-term goals. The second examines the Controller-General's efforts to apply his subsistence policy throughout the kingdom during the years 1771–74 and the reactions of a broad spectrum of opinion to it. The third explores Terray's use of the king's grain, a vital instrument in his attempt to parry the ongoing dearth, and the political costs of government intervention on the supply side.

I

The abbé Joseph Marie Terray, “the best mind in the parlement,” a fifty-five year old clerical counselor from a modest bourgeois family which ascended slowly into the Robe during the last part of the reign of Louis XIV, became the new Controller-General. The departure of Maynon, a friend of the physiocrats and a stout defender of the liberal reforms, did not signify a determination within the royal council to change the grain policy. It was motivated by the financial imbroglio, not the subsistence crisis, two problems whose relationship at this point in time the king's advisers did not clearly perceive. Although Terray had expressed serious doubts about the May Declaration at the time of registration, he had asked his colleagues to give it a fair chance. He had not taken an active role in the parlementary campaign against liberalization.

The government responded to the burgeoning unrest—popular revolts and police resistance—with a hard and determined line, starkly re-affirming its commitment to liberalization and to high prices as an express policy of state. Laverdy correctly believed that traditional attitudes toward subsistence constituted the single greatest barrier to change. But, like many self-consciously enlightened ministers and reformers, he neither understood nor sympathized with the workings of popular psychology, nor did he know how to deal with it. Diffusing light, to be sure, was no easy matter; since all men were not equally equipped to seize the truth, often it was necessary to force them to accept it. To re-educate the public, Laverdy saw no alternative to brutal and relentless reconditioning.

Impetuously, the people believed that their right to subsist took precedence over all the rights prescribed by natural law as the basis of social organization. They assumed that it was the solemn duty of the state to intervene when necessary to guarantee their subsistence without regard for so-called natural rights. Such views, in Laverdy's estimation, were erroneous and pernicious; they misconceived the role of the government and its relation to the citizenry and did violence to the soundest principles of political economy. In a word, they were irrational; the Controller-General refused a dialogue with unreason. “The people,” he lamented, “hardly used their reason in matters of subsistence.” Surely the bulk of police officials who dealt with these problems day to day would have found it singularly fatuous to rebuke the people for being unreasonable when they were hungry, impoverished, or simply anxious. It was the job of the authorities to be reasonable about provisioning; for the public, especially in time of stress, it was virtually impossible to avoid subsistence terror. Insofar as popular fears were often imaginary—a fact which had little bearing upon the clinical state of fright or its consequences—and popular solutions were illegal and myopic, Laverdy would not acknowledge them either as manifestations of a legitimate problem or even as authentic symptoms of a congenital psychosomatic disorder.

To combat and discredit this mentality, Laverdy chose to belittle and insult it with all the sophistry of progressive thinking. It consisted of nothing more than a crazy quilt of “prejudices.” “Prejudice” was one of the harshest epithets in the political vocabulary of the Enlightenment; it acquired added force when accompanied by Laverdy's favorite metaphors, light and sight.

What can we learn from Luther today? Here are a few clues, tentative and certainly selective, and by all means subjective. They are answers, which the material presented in the preceding pages can – but by no means has to – offer especially in the light of the issues of our times (this is one but by no means the main or exclusive function of history). Times will move on and situations change; therefore, the following points are above all a snapshot. However, as has been argued in previous chapters, the crucial points Luther made in this text are timeless, and chances are that they will be equally important to economic reasoning in future decades if not centuries to come, in a similar way as they applied to Reformation Germany at the dawn of the modern age. They are by no means exhaustive or authoritative; the reader is left to choose her own interpretation by reading the original pamphlet Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher (On Commerce and Usury, 1524) herself which is presented in a new translation at the end of the present volume.

Lesson Number One: We do not have to accept the economy and financial markets as a given. This does not mean that free markets in general, and deregulated financial markets in particular, are bad things per se. But rather than working to some often invoked eternal economic laws, the economy and markets are malleable. We are – that means we ought to be – in control of markets and not the other way round. In recent years, especially with the recent elections to the European Parliament (May 2014) people have, for instance, voiced their anxiety relating to specific problems of governance vs. agency. There seems to be an increasing awareness of the power we have taken away from the states over the past thirty years or so and handed over to supra-territorial institutions which are not under democratic control any more but will implement major decisions that are likely to affect the well-being of society at large without much possibility of the community or society to control or respond to these things.

The police were structurally fragmented and often divided by interest and ambition, but they shared a number of basic ideas about the provisioning question. This chapter deals with the police view of the grain trade and the ways in which the police translated their attitudes into action. It is the story of persistence rather than change, of an overwhelming sense of continuity informed by a belief that things— at least subsistence things—are at bottom always the same. The police clung to the old ways because they were proven ways. Yet it would be a mistake, I argue, to infer from the immobility and the tone of police regulations that the police operated in a mindless, mechanical, and timeless fashion. On the other hand, there were limits to flexibility and adaptability. The police were wholly unprepared for the radical innovations that they had to face in the 1760's when the government turned against the multisecular tradition of regulation.

I

The rules developed to govern the grain trade were based upon the tenet that grain was essentially unlike any other commodity commonly exchanged and thus must be treated differently. As an item of “first necessity” and ultimately a matter of life or death for millions of consumers, grain could not be legitimately compared with goods whose exchange merely complemented subsistence or enhanced pleasure. As a rule, in other sorts of commerce, shortage, tardiness, deception in transaction, or other defects and vices caused inconvenience only to individuals and never in lethal doses. In the grain trade, however, “the least error almost always affects the public,” threatening the entire community at its most vulnerable point. Given its special nature, those who undertook to deal in grain, the police believed, assumed solemn responsibilities toward society.

Since society depended entirely on grain commerce for its subsistence in ordinary times, the police viewed the trade as a kind of public service. They made demands and imposed restrictions upon grain traders that other merchants escaped. The grain merchant had obligations to the public that would sometimes require him to resist the promptings of his self-interest, which the police recognized as his chief source of motivation. He had to be satisfied with a “just and legitimate gain” based upon his investment, his labor, and the energy with which he served the public rather than on the cunning with which he manipulated supply and demand factors.

The Political Economy of Subsistence

“Let Them Eat Baklava” was the title of a recent article in The Economist about how rising food prices help explain unrest and revolution in much of the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The venerable London magazine saw no need to explain the jocular title; the story on which it draws—a sovereign suggests luxury desserts as a substitute for basic food—long ago became the stuff of legend. Indeed, it might be the world's best-known anecdote about the politics of food: reacting to news that the people of Paris could not afford bread on the eve of the French Revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette exclaimed, “Let them eat cake!” The cartoonish evil of the scenario might help explain its enduring appeal in spite of scholars long ago having debunked it, noting, for example, that already Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was still a young girl, had mentioned “a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: ‘Let them eat brioche.’” As a historical trope, a cruel ruler taunting her famished subjects lies somewhere beyond the realm of simple memes or urban legends, being timeless and prevalent enough that countless variations of it, dating at least as far back as the Eastern Jin Empire in fourth-century China, have received the classification number AaTh 1446 in the influential Aarne-Thompson typology of folktales. Although apocryphal, or rather because apocryphal, it speaks to the sprawling and often undigested array of thoughts and emotions—from incredulity through consternation to righteous rage—that food can evoke across time and space. Disentangled from the particular circumstances of Marie Antoinette and the dawning of a particular Revolution, this infamous trope speaks to far deeper transhistorical processes. The incomprehension between rulers and subjects to which it testifies, the sometimes opaque wall between popular and elite politics, strikes at the very core of human coexistence. Material inequality is a polyvalent and often poorly understood force in any society, conducive simultaneously to emulation and jealousy, to social progress and disintegration, but food is somehow different. Food is so conspicuous because it is, by nature, existential.

Whereas Laverdy used the king's grain to facilitate the transition from a police to a liberal regime, Terray used it to facilitate the transition from a liberal to a police regime. There are of course other important differences and many striking similarities between the government grain operations of the sixties and of the seventies: we explore some of them in the pages that follow.

This chapter begins with an examination of the situation inherited by Terray when he replaced Maynon d'lnvau at the end of 1769. It considers the broad outlines of the new Controller-General's strategy before turning to several case studies of victualing enterprises. The operations launched under Terray's aegis were far greater in scale and ambition than the provisioning activities undertaken in the sixties in the shadow of liberalization. The men involved were in the main much more like Leray de Chaumont than Pierre Malisset, bankers and négociants rather than bakers and millers. Instead of signing a contract with a group of suppliers, Terray created a quasi-governmental organization called a régie. This chapter focuses on the practices and problems of the régie. Of the many troubles encountered or generated by the régie, the most serious concerned its reputation in the eyes of the public: we shall see that the famine pact persuasion did not die with the demise of the liberals, even if it changed somewhat in tone and emphasis. The last third of the chapter is devoted to denouement—not only the outcome of the king's grain administration under Terray, but in a more general sense the unraveling of some of the questions which have preoccupied us from the outset.

I

Maynon d'lnvau passed the king's grain operation to Terray in a highly equivocal state. Maynon, as we have seen, would have liked to abjure the government supply role completely. Like the économistes, he regarded official grain dealings as improvident, unavailing, and inimical to the development of a powerful, autonomous grain trading community serving the general interest according to the laws of nature. He warned his intendants that they could not count on the central government for assistance and he announced that he would not renew the provisioning connections with several provinces which the ministry had arranged.