I

At every level of administrative life, public officials expended enormous amounts of time, energy, and money in dealing with the subsistence question. Virtually everyone who practiced or wrote about public administration, or what was commonly called “police” in the Old Regime, considered provisioning to be among its paramount concerns. “The abundance of grain,” intoned Colbert, “is the thing to which we must pay the most attention in the police.” A hundred years later his eulogist, Necker, wrote that “the subsistence of the people is the most essential object which must occupy the administration.” Dupont, physiocracy's chief merchandiser and a mordant critic of what he believed to be the Colbert-Necker continuum of policy, remarked ironically on the “abundance” of the subsistence subject and deplored the fact that it dominated so much of public business: “nothing can better prove to you that this branch of Administration is truly the first of all [of them] than the multitude of Laws, Regulations, Arrêts of Parlements, Ordinances of Judges, Ordinances of Municipalities, Ordinances of intendants or royal agents which have come into place in all times on the matter of the provisioning of grain.”

Management of food supply was directly or indirectly connected with some of the policies we associate with the growth of the state. To sustain cities, huge supplies of food had to be wrenched from the countryside (and partly because of the difficulty of provisioning them, old-regime governments tried to limit the size of certain urban centers). To promote industrial development and enable France to compete internationally—so Colbert maintained—an easy and sure subsistence had to be provided for the working population. On a more general plane, without regard to particular economic or political doctrines, an easy subsistence seemed to serve the public interest. A sufficiently nourished people would produce more (goods and children), earn more, buy more, and pay more taxes, and thereby enhance national prosperity and strength. To support an army, the government had to marshal regular stocks of food. Food management was a bewilderingly complex business and it generated many conflicts of interest, between various public institutions such as the armed forces or hospitals and the society at large, between cities and hinterland, between competing regions, etc.