Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV

Steven L. Kaplan

Description

Second edition of the classic historical study on the political economy of deregulatory reform before the French Revolution

 A new edition of Kaplan’s landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan’s classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. The study focuses on the radical legal changes “freeing” the grain trade in the 1760s, and the ensuing subsistence crisis that violently buffeted the realm and profoundly impacted French life. In the course of the analysis, Kaplan offers crucial insight into the liberal movement, the reform impulse within the government, the character of parliamentary politics, the operation of local administration, the collective attitudes and behaviour of consumers, the famine plot persuasion, the organization of the grain and flour trades, and the management of royal victualing enterprises.

Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, “The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy’ Forty Years Later.”

List of Illustrations; Foreword to the Second Edition; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The Police of Provisioning; 2. The Regulations and the Regulators; 3. The Origins of Liberty; 4. The Response to Liberalization: Theory and Practice; 5. Forcing Grain to be Free: The Government Holds the Line; 6. The Reforms and the Grain Trade; 7. Paris; 8. The Royal Trump; 9. The Government, the Parlements, and the Battle over Liberty: I; 10. The Government, the Parlements, and the Battle over Liberty: II; 11. From Political Economy to Police: The Return to Apprehensive Paternalism; 12. Policing the General Subsistence, 1771–1774; 13. The King’s Grain and the Retreat from Liberalization; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index

Sujets

• Politique
• Europe
• France
• Economic history
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• HISTORY

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783084791
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV
Illustration 1. Map of France in the eighteenth century showing provinces and customs divisions. Necker, Compte-rendu (Paris, 1781).
Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV
Second Edition
Steven L. Kaplan
Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Steven L. Kaplan 2015 Foreword copyright © Sophus A. Reinert 2015
First edition published in the Netherlands by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1976; re-released by Springer Science+Business Media B. V., 2013. The author gratefully acknowledges the devolution of publishing rights.
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 510 2 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 510 6 (Hbk)
Cover image: The Golden Legend by René Magritte, 1958, © 2015 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
This title is also available as an ebook.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword to the Second Edition by Sophus A. Reinert
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter I. The Police of Provisioning
Chapter II. The Regulations and the Regulators
Chapter III. The Origins of Liberty
Chapter IV. The Response to Liberalization: Theory and Practice
Chapter V. Forcing Grain to Be Free: The Government Holds the Line
Chapter VI. The Reforms and the Grain Trade
Chapter VII. Paris
Chapter VIII. The Royal Trump
Chapter IX. The Government, the Parlements, and the Battle over Liberty: I
Chapter X. The Government, the Parlements, and the Battle over Liberty: II
Chapter XI. From Political Economy to Police: The Return to Apprehensive Paternalism
Chapter XII. Policing the General Subsistence, 1771–1774
Chapter XIII. The King’s Grain and the Retreat from Liberalization
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Map of France
2. Itinerant market-bakers
3. The making of the mercuriale : the measurers’ register
4. Grain passport
5. Grain arrivals and sales: the porters
6. Grain-to-bread cycle
7. Paris bakeshop
8. Economic milling
9. Leprévost and the famine plot
10. The Bagarre by Galiani
11. The international grain market at Marseilles
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
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. 1 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.’” 2 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. 3 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. 4
The book being republished here, almost forty years after its initial appearance, remains the most thoughtful and rigorous reconstruction of the political economy of subsistence in eighteenth-century France and, arguably, anywhere. No scholar has done more to unpack the real and symbolic importance of bread, in France and elsewhere, in the past and the present, than Steven L. Kaplan. Though his Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV has often been lauded as magisterial, it was merely the opening salvo in what would eventually become a tetralogy if not a heptalogy of often massive tomes dedicated to analyzing and explaining what Kaplan would later call the “breadways” of French history. 5 To a naïve modern reader, this might seem like an easily circumscribed task, even in a bread-obsessed country like France. Yet Kaplan’s mastery, not only of the historian’s art, but also of its craft, makes of the “bread nexus” a lens through which to view practically all aspects of society, from popular culture to high theories of political economy: a trenchant, conscious example of what a Lucien Febvre or a Fernand Braudel might have called a “total history.” 6 The volume indeed straddles diverse historiographical traditions that all too seldom communicate: the high and the low, the intellectual and the socio-economic, theory and practice, focused textual analysis and broad archival wisdom. 7
Fundamentally, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV grapples with the politics, economics and culture of subsistence in the century leading up to the French Revolution. It centers on the ravages of chronic food insecurity, the nature of governmental regulation, the relationship between incessant policing of every aspect of the grain trade—from the planting of seeds to the sale of baked loaves—and emerging theories of political economy, and, most particularly, on the radical nature and consequences of dangerously flawed reforms adopted from 1763 onward to liberalize the grain trade. The immediate inspiration for these reforms was the extremely successful work (both in theoretical terms and with regard to public relations) of a sect of political economists known as the Physiocrats, named for their advocacy of “Physiocracy,” or “the rule of nature.” The roots of the modern discipline of economics lie deep in Physiocracy, invariably mentioned in scholarly work and mainstream media as the beginning of “scientific” economics. 8
Grain regulation was not a peripheral issue in the larger enterprise of political economy; it cut to the core of French society and contemporary notions of the social contract—not the ideal social contract theorized by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but the tacit and continuously renegotiated relationship between citizen and authority, subject and sovereign. The Hungarian social scientist Karl Polanyi asserted that all economies are by necessity embedded in wider social and cultural matrices, and that modern societies are subject to destabilizing shocks when excessive faith in nature’s supposedly self-regulating proclivities creates disorders that in turn generate counter-movements to safeguard the social fabric. 9 As Kaplan demonstrates, Enlightenment France represents an exemplary case of these dynamics. The idea that the king was “victualer of last resort” was sacrosanct in much of Europe, and the Physiocratic project was revolutionary in freeing people from such conceptual paternalism in favor of a radically new cosmology based on private property and a “natural order” of self-interested and, crucially, self-regulating market transactions. 10 Grain prices were to move freely according to the dictates of supply and demand, and, in a country characterized by great regional variety in agricultural output, food was to find its own way to where it was needed most.
The theoretical tenets and reformist zeal of Physiocracy strikingly prefigure the general direction take