The government felt that it could surmount the crisis provided, above all, that the situation in Paris remained under control. As long as it did not have to face massive disaffection and disorder in the capital, the ministry felt it could win the day in the rest of France, where the mutinies were relatively small and widely scattered and where there was still to be found considerable sentiment in favor of the new regime. In this chapter we shall examine the impact of the crisis upon the capital and the way in which the Paris police tried to deal with it. In the following chapter, we shall consider the extraordinary efforts which the central government made, not without serious reservations and contretemps, to spare the capital the most terrible costs of dearth.

I

The quarantine of Paris proclaimed by the clauses of exception in the liberal laws proved singularly unsuccessful in preserving the capital from fear, dearth, and the disruption of its provisioning trade. Once the rest of France was liberated, the special guarantees regarding Paris provisioning became largely illusory. At the confluence of her great rivers, in the very center of the realm, the capital simply could not be isolated from the rest of France by fiat. Provisioning was a twoway affair. It made little sense to stand on the Port of the Grève or the carreau of the Halles and declare that nothing had changed while at the same time telling the rest of the nation that things would never be the same again. The exemption provision created a bizarre disjuncture between the capital and the hinterland, enjoining the police of the latter to conform to the very liberal code which it empowered the police of the former to ignore.

According to the May and July laws Paris was to continue to provision itself as it always had done in the past. The survival of the old way, however, depended upon the preservation of both the traditional regulatory apparatus and the familiar trading patterns. Liberalization, as we have seen, jarred them both mightily, and the disarray of each encouraged the further breakdown of the other. The maintenance of the old Paris police system depended primarily upon the vigorous support of the Controller-General, the freedom of action of the Lieutenant General, and the cooperation, or subjugation, of the officials in the provisioning zones.

This chapter may be kept brief; it is only intended as a general survey of Luther's economic thought. Its main aim is to correct an earlier notion that Luther was either ignorant or disinterested in economic questions or that accordingly his economics was rather primitive. Neither of these charges is accurate. The key points of Luther's economics and business ethics can be grasped from the monographs and articles by Roscher, Schmoller, Barge, Fabiunke, Strohm, Scott, Pawlas and more recently the present author; as well as the monographs focused on particular aspects of Luther's economics, such as Prien's volume on business ethics, Rieth's volume on the concept of avarice in Luther's theology or Koch's more recent dissertation on business ethics from the Middle Ages to the modern period. They all have some minor as well as (in some cases) major weaknesses, and not always have they advanced the field considerably or significantly. The interpretation to be found in the following lines will, accordingly, differ in places. By sketching out the cornerstones of Luther's economic ideas, this will provide us with the context for the analytical summary of his Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher in (chapter 5).

Myths

As suggested in the introduction (chapter 1), there are many myths – let us call them oversimplified meta-narratives – about Luther and his times. Let us here consider only those relevant for the present purpose. An older tradition, based not only on Schmoller and Roscher but also on some twentieth-century Marxist historians and their concept of an Early Bourgeois Revolution, had it that at Luther's time early modern capitalism came to the fore and that Luther's economics, as well as the early mercantilist authors, with whom he shared some convictions (see chapter 5), would classify as the ‘first economic doctrine of the Bourgeoisie’. This is, of course, wrong. Capitalist practices, such as profit-making for profit's sake, had existed for ages. The thirteenth-century Italian giant family firms and ‘medieval super-companies’ of the Medici, Bardi and Perruzzi and thirteenth-century financial institutions in Siena and Genoa had provided the blueprint and algorithms for modern banking; setting the scene for the sixteenth-century Augsburg Fugger, Welser, Höchstetter and many others of the ‘last medieval super-companies’.

The Powers of Space

Two things must be noted when locating Luther in the idiosyncratic coordinates of his times and space. First, he was an agrarian man. He spent the majority of his career as a reformer in Wittenberg. Wittenberg was located in the north-west of Saxony, in the Kurkreis or electoral Saxony – there were two Saxon territories, one ruled by the duke and the other by the elector – that is the part of the Saxon lands which had by far the largest share of grain sales in total Saxon government revenue at the time (if we may interpret revenue accounts as reflective of this area's stage of development and structure of economic activity). The area produced regular grain supplies that were used in provisioning those parts of Saxony further to the south-west, in the Erzgebirge Mountains, where employment and production were geared towards non-agrarian activities, mainly mining. Here, in the Erzgebirge Mountains and its offshoots, native grain production had for a long term proved unable to keep up with the surging demand for foodstuffs. This was due to the structural changes in this area which saw increasing numbers of people emerge outside the agrarian sector. At Luther's times day after day whole caravans of carts loaded with grain would ply Saxon roads southward from the northern areas, passing through Grimma near Leipzig and other staging posts where the Saxon rulers levied the Geleit payment, a convoy duty, leaving us with an ample record of quantitative sources documenting the frequency and intensity of domestic transport patterns. Thus, the areas in need were relieved from those areas with a grain surplus. In 1525 circa 3,500 carts with teams of up to 14,000 horses and oxen carrying a total of perhaps 8,000 tons of grain passed through the Saxon Geleit or toll of Borna to the south of Leipzig, bound for the Erzgebirge Mountains.

I

Many monographs will have to be written before one can properly assess the impact of Terray's policy. De-liberalization wrought no miracles. It did not herald the general return of abundance and it did not restore universal social tranquility. Even in those places which enjoyed a marked change of fortune after the end of 1770, it would be difficult to show that the improvement in conditions was due to the reinstitution of controls. Yet there is no question that Terray's law buoyed the morale of the police, infusing them with a sense of confidence that they had not felt for years. There were still frequent denunciations of “disorders” and “monopolies” in the trade, but the police no longer complained that they were impotent to act; they once again located the source of the vice in the malice and greed of the dealers rather than in the laws, and they resorted to “the usages of authority” when necessary to furnish their markets. There is some evidence that consumers in parts of the Hainaut and the Paris region received the news of the government's regulatory law with enthusiasm. An observer in Champagne reported that the break with liberalization helped to “revive” the “courage” of the people. Large numbers of merchants began to register with the police in order to secure permission to traffic in grain.

As always, execution of the law depended heavily upon the parlements; in this regard the Maupeou purge changed very little. It was precisely in order to assure the widest possible diffusion and enforcement that Terray had the December law enveloped in letters patent requiring registration. Though a number of courts, such as the Parlements of Paris and Metz, gave their approbation without difficulty, it should not be imagined that registration was either universal or uncontested. None of the liberal parlements endorsed the letters patent. By not insisting on registration at the beginning of 1771, the government, after a fashion, discharged its debts to these courts for having supported the king's position on the grain question so fervently in the sixties. Aware that it would take a “combat of authority” to secure registration and convinced that a forced registration would serve no purpose, Terray decided to wait for the evolution of events and opinion to cause the liberal courts to gravitate toward the police system on their own.