Mastering the market

the long version

The grain trade - a crucial sector of the French economy - caused enormous concern through-out the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls frequently triggered periods of unrest. The royal government had no effective means of drawing foodstuffs into restless cities during these times. 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 local and national levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. Miller draws on an extensive range of archival material from Parisian and Departmental sources to show that free trade in grain was rendered workable only through the French state's intervention.