A few short years after the proclamation of liberalization, the government found itself faced with a burgeoning subsistence crisis and embroiled in a growing debate on the judiciousness of the reform. The reforms were meant to change the way in which the grain trade was conducted. The May Declaration radically altered the conditions of internal commerce and the July Edict opened the frontiers to exports. Taken together, these measures were supposed to build a stronger, more resilient, and more dependable commercial structure at the same time that they generated powerful incentives for agricultural expansion. In this chapter we shall consider the impact of the reforms on domestic and foreign trade and especially on the customary patterns of provisioning. In addition, we shall examine the way in which partisans and adversaries of the May and July laws explained the relationship between liberalization and dearth.

I

Contemporaries were never able to assess dispassionately the impact of liberalization upon the grain trade and the patterns of provisioning. The proliferation of scarcity, spiraling prices, and disorder polarized feelings toward the reform legislation. The parties to the debate were more interested in ascribing and denying political and moral responsibility for the crisis than in studying the processes of cause and effect. Resentful of the dearth that jarred their serenity, the liberals viewed it as an accident, ill-timed but banal, which bore no intrinsic relation to the implementation of liberalization. On the contrary, they claimed that it was a vindictive legacy of the old police system, for were the liberty perfect in its application, dearth by definition would be impossible. If prices were occasionally excessive, it was due to the persistence of the old prohibitions, to the inclemency of the weather, or to other traditional sources of fluctuation. The opponents of liberalization ridiculed the idea that the reforms and the scarcity were merely coincidental occurrences. After all, the avowed purpose of the laws was to open new markets for the grain trade and to raise prices. The dismantling of controls led directly to the flight of grain and the vertiginous increase in prices to which, in the eyes of the police party, the popular disturbances furnished eloquent testimony.