When I launched my research for Bread, Politics and Political Economy, I began with a number of regnant historiographical assumptions concerning the eighteenth century that framed my questions and were likely to condition as well the answers I would find. One of the most important concerned the parlements, from Voltaire to Michel Antoine, distinguished historian of the monarchy and its institutions, portrayed collectively as benighted enemies of “progress,” archaic and scheming obstructionists, self-regarding and self-aggrandizing defenders of privilege and position and so on. One of my teachers, R. R. Palmer, in his lecture course and his writings, castigated the sovereign courts for paralyzing the monarchy and undermining reform and derided them for their inability to distinguish significant from petty issues (in the latter instance, denigrating their opposition to Turgot's recasting of the corvée as a quasi-universal fiscal obligation, a point of view that I have since come to view as a fundamental misreading of the ways in which parlementaires viewed the social order).1 Based on robust research and reflection—I will not raise here the crucial question of ideological refraction—the secondary literature, globally hostile to the parlements, was quite convincing. After several years in the archives, however, some of it spent in the X series in Paris and parallel parlementary archives in the provinces featuring debate reported in the Conseil secret and the process of drafting remonstrances, supplemented by correspondence and memoirs of numerous magistrates, I could no longer subscribe to the prevalent interpretation.

The point of view with which I emerged was not a logic of rehabilitation, but the need to reexamine the governing stereotypes, in part by reassessing the motives, intentions and behavior of the parlements and their magistrates in virtually all domains of their activity, and in part by deconstructing the binary system that casts the eighteenth century in terms of white hats and black hats, heroes and villains, patriots and egoists and so on. In the white corner stands the modernizing and rationalizing monarch, relooked version of the frayed figure of the enlightened despot, comforted by progressive ministers and buoyed by forward-looking intellectuals called philosophes.

I wrote Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV as a doctoral dissertation at Yale. I had been studying the history of the American South with C. Vann Woodward, a wonderful teacher and splendid person whose deep social humanism and wise criticism I have never forgotten. My fascination with the South began at Princeton, a university deeply marked by its historical ties with the South. Princeton was still home to descendants of slaves manumitted by their student masters at graduation, some of whom worked in the eating clubs for which the university was (in-)famous. It also still attracted some of the South's best and brightest, as the formula put it, who were in search of an Ivy education in quasi-familiar terrain, a number of whom became my roommates and club mates. This was the more exotic component of a Brooklyn Jew's encounter with the wider Wasp world. If Princeton helped to incarnate a certain image of the South, my involvement in the civil rights movement had already drawn my interest to the southern experience. In retrospect, I suspect that my keen interest in the South, so deeply, emblematically and enigmatically an expression of America, had something to do with my own conflicted sense of needing or wanting to become more American, residue of a long-simmering feeling, not rare among the children of immigrants, especially early in their lives, that I did not belong.

I did not live this sentiment of unrootedness traumatically. On the contrary, it enhanced my curiosity for everything unfamiliar. I saw it as a sort of availability or receptivity. The burden of being an outsider had marked me indelibly, but I had begun to espy its advantages as well. I suspect that my French turn spoke to this quest to construct my “self.” Perhaps in order to anchor one identity, I needed to acquire another. Indeed, I had nourished a long-standing flirtation with things French, begun in undergraduate courses taught by Charles Gillispie, Ira Wade, Albert Sonnenfeld and David Bien, kindled at work in a wine factory at Ivry-sur-Seine for three months (1962), and subsequently fostered by a Fulbright year at Poitiers (1963–64).

The eminent historian R. R. Palmer, with whom I worked first as an undergraduate and then a graduate student at two different institutions, was not enamored of French historians. Yet, to judge by his affection for this aphorism, which he attributed to them, they got at least one idea right: comparaison was not raison. Palmer himself practiced comparative history brilliantly and soberly, but he warned his students tirelessly against confusing comparison with proof and exhorted us to be extremely vigilant in the use of analogies, notably between past and present, always a high-risk exercise. Alert historians are allergic to reductionism, linearity and sophism, among other things, and they know that association is not causality (or intimation of guilt), that cultural genealogy is not paternity and that consumption (of ideas, for example) is simultaneously production and reappropriation, again blurring relations of etiology and even of “influence” (a lever as subtle as it is insidious). Still, historians are understandably interested in connection, redolence, continuity/discontinuity, claimed kinship, common idiom and tonality, shared referents and representations, lineage of values, constructs of identity and affinity, clues of all sorts however (apparently) remote or elliptical. Much of what we do involves not only integrating disparate elements, but also bringing them closer to each other and to us, a rapprochement that is often ventured with a view toward seeing more clearly rather than reconciling discordance or aligning with a point of view.

None of this is simple, save perhaps for journalists, especially in online and audio-visual media, who bombard us daily with extravagant and irresponsible analogies linking today's putative perfidies and/or prodigies with fascism, communism, the Holocaust, Yalta, Munich, the reign of terror, the Stasi, the Dark Ages, Athens and Sparta, the Inquisition, apartheid, the Sputnik moment, religion in all guises, oil, the American Revolution and so on.

The social order, especially in the towns and cities, was always a work in progress, a daily construction. It was framed and constrained, but not irrevocably determined and articulated by royal, parlementary and municipal law. The law enforced and reinforced it, but could not on its own produce and reproduce it. By social order, I mean a system of relatively stable relations among groups and individuals founded on certain implicit reciprocities (such as respect for each others’ vital interests and customary rights) and on open-ended negotiations concerning respective claims upon the community and the polity whose urgency varied according to shifting circumstances. The understandings that undergirded this process of forging order did not by any means preclude frictions and even frank conflict. These counterpoints did not, however, ordinarily compromise the state of public tranquility that constituted the collective objective. Despite fundamental socio-economic, psychological and cultural cleavages, by and large no one had reason to subvert this order, if the integrating mechanisms functioned. They included built-in forms of recourse, institutional and informal, local and central, for dispute settlement, and for compensations and sanctions that obtained general approbation (allowing for protest at the margin).

Everyone concurred that a reliable system of provisioning was the sine qua non for the maintenance of social peace and a modicum of social cohesion, and for the fruitful operation of the economy on which everyone depended, directly or indirectly. That meant, at least in urban locus, a regular supply of grain and flour, almost exclusively for bakers, and of bread in sufficient quantity, of satisfactory quality and at accessible prices for the final consumers. The quest for daily bread was the cardinal preoccupation of the vast majority of inhabitants. At this social moment, norms and expectations had to be fulfilled: it was the litmus of success, not only for the authorities of all stripes but also for the community as a whole. Save for the usual number of cynics, misanthropes and proto-anarchists, no one had an interest in seeing it explode or implode. The rich and the poor, the dominant and the dominated all shared a stake in sustaining tranquility, for disorder, in its various avatars, menaced them all (while opening opportunities for a small number at various places in the social hierarchy).