Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860

by Judith A. Miller

• ISBN13: 9780521628891
• ISBN10: 052162889X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables

Abbreviations

Old Regime weights and measures for wheat

Acknowledgements

Introduction: two crises: 1709 and 1853

The Market of the Enlightenment, 1720-1789

The structure of mill and market

Simulated sales: shaping supply and demand in the Old Regime marketplace

Scripting G++freeG++ trade

Narrowing the focus: bakers and bread, 1760-1789

Maximum: Feeding France in Revolution and War

1789: municipal revolutions and the origins of radicalism

Unity and interests

Recreating the market: Thermidor and the directory

The State Learns, 1800-1860

The last maximum: 1812

The routines of the restoration

Relinquishing control: bakers and the end of the Paris reserve

The market mastered

Archival sources

Selected bibliography

Index

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