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.