The government's inability to stem the generalization and deepening of the crisis at the very end of the decade doomed liberalization. The new Controller-General, Terray, metaphorically portrayed the liberal experience as “the flood” and imagined his responsibility, in part, as channeling the waters back into their natural reservoirs and building dikes capable of withstanding future inundations of any sort. But he did not take a nostalgically antediluvian approach to the task—at least he tried not to. The problem was that de-liberalization did not bring instant recovery. Terray enjoyed virtually no respite from subsistence troubles during his four-year tenure and the subsistence troubles generated other political and economic problems which compounded the difficulty for him.

The discussion of his administration is divided into three parts which mark the boundaries of this and the following two chapters. The first concerns the return to a police regime, a transition not easily effected, and the nature of Terray's short- and long-term goals. The second examines the Controller-General's efforts to apply his subsistence policy throughout the kingdom during the years 1771–74 and the reactions of a broad spectrum of opinion to it. The third explores Terray's use of the king's grain, a vital instrument in his attempt to parry the ongoing dearth, and the political costs of government intervention on the supply side.

I

The abbé Joseph Marie Terray, “the best mind in the parlement,” a fifty-five year old clerical counselor from a modest bourgeois family which ascended slowly into the Robe during the last part of the reign of Louis XIV, became the new Controller-General. The departure of Maynon, a friend of the physiocrats and a stout defender of the liberal reforms, did not signify a determination within the royal council to change the grain policy. It was motivated by the financial imbroglio, not the subsistence crisis, two problems whose relationship at this point in time the king's advisers did not clearly perceive. Although Terray had expressed serious doubts about the May Declaration at the time of registration, he had asked his colleagues to give it a fair chance. He had not taken an active role in the parlementary campaign against liberalization.