Like the French Revolution, the trial of the king is not over. Feckless in many ways, Louis XVI also paid the price for his once beloved, later detested grandfather Louis XV, who was more kingly in his vices if not his virtues, though we don't know whether he would have faced the guillotine with such surprising equanimity. Still, it is easy to excoriate a king, especially when the monarchy declared itself absolute and of divine instauration: such pretension gave it (and him) little margin for error or for doubt. Yet Michel Antoine, foremost student of the monarchy in our time, is right to emphasize that the exercise of kingship was a “hard job”. The royalist school knows, however, that it cannot count on mitigating circumstances. Thus, its proclivity to radicalize the debate in binary fashion: “monarchy or anarchy,” for example. Since well before the Revolution (and thus, lest our enthusiasm for him induce us to forget, long before Tocqueville), the king was on the defensive, precisely because he was so implicated, so exposed, so (theoretically) omnicompetent and responsible for all outcomes. His advocates, from Voltaire and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau to Pierre Gaxotte and Antoine in the twentieth century, made the correct strategic decision that the best defense was offense. Hence their depiction of the king as a reformer, a modernizer and, despite his expressed horror for innovation, a trailblazer. More liberal partisans of monarchy—liberal in the American denotation of the term—ended up aligning prince and philosophes in the alchemy of Enlightened Despotism, an industrious oxymoron.

Paradoxically, though the parlementary onslaught weakened and discredited the king, it also unwittingly cast him in the role of resistant bearer of the oriflamme, not only (or not primarily) of tradition, but also of Enlightenment-vintage rationality and progress, heralded as the sole alternative to narrow-minded self-regard and reactionary obstructionism. In a certain sense, the Manichean view of the eighteenth century served the interests both of the exponents of kingship and of the parlementary path. Historiography has not yet extricated itself from this impasse, despite robust “revision” on both sides. This chapter looks at the monarch at work with his ministers on some of the principal questions of his time.

Probably no single issue poses the question of regulation more starkly than that of famine. An apocalyptical happening, famine places drastic strain on every system that underpins a social organization. Despite a long tradition of rejection of the naturalistic explanation, famine is characteristically the product, at least in substantial part, of grave and/or cumulative “agro-meteorological” disturbances. Famine may be simultaneously engendered or aggravated by market failure (severe exchange and distributional inefficiencies), social failure (a breakdown of cohesion), or political failure (a paralysis or abuse of power, and/or a breakdown or deficiency of regulation).

The Grim Reaper portends death the way politics (fore)shadows famine (or “merely” dearth). Culturally diverse in its performance, the Grim Reaper can in some cases actually cause the victim's death, just as politics can be plausibly called to account for the intensification and extension of famine, if not for its (technical) genesis, and for the horrors and hecatombs that follow in its wake. The irony of the Grim-Reaper motif is particularly chilling in reference to the dyad politics–famine because its central image evokes a harvester, associated in good times with the gathering of foods of first necessity, with survival if not festivity. Flourishing a scythe, the Grim Reaper harvests death rather than abundance, even as politics often dispenses indifference and mistreatment rather than succor and security.

I construe regulation, in a broad sense, as the intervention of the state, or other branches of public authority, in the name of some fundamental principles bearing upon the social bond, such as justice, equity and/or solidarity, to prevent or repair harm incurred by various members of the community as a consequence of acts committed by other members, or by outsiders, or as a result of acts considered as natural disasters (according to the formula commonly understood today).

In recent years, the study of political economy has acquired a fresh vitality and intellectual cachet. It has (re-)emerged both as a free-standing problématique on its own, with an epistemological self-consciousness and reflexivity heretofore largely absent, and as a powerful lever for making sense of the rest of history, from which it has often been unyoked and even cloistered, sometimes by choice. If this estrangement seems not to have been resisted by liberals, who enjoyed a certain dominion in the subfield, it certainly was favored by the collapse of Marxism, which had begun, at least on the margins, to question the utter subordination of superstructure to infrastructure, that is to say, to reconsider the relation between things and ideas. At roughly the same time that the Soviet empire imploded, and postmodernism began to hector the complacent mainstream, in both rewarding and perverse fashions, more and more historians took the culturalist turn: a rejection of the usual methodological hierarchies and causal ontologies, a fundamental interrogation concerning the relation of texts to contexts (predicated upon an absolute refusal to reduce texts, images and myriad artifacts to the status of reflections of their time), a heightened sensitivity to the claims of language and an ambition to fathom more rigorously the linkages between ideas/words and actions/“reality.”

Some of these historians began to reexamine political economy as a discursive practice and as a worldview, a reflection quickened by burgeoning ambient anxieties about the “financialization” of the economy, the profoundly unsettling impact of globalization, growing disparities between rich and poor not only between different economies, but also within manifestly wealthy societies, and a budding realization of the subterranean sway of what could be called economic ideology, lodged within a characteristically unexamined (a-)moral philosophy. If the midwife to the rebirth of political economy was cultural in spheres of Anglo-American influence, in France it was as much economic and sociological as cultural. Some of the most creative French scholars entering this field, often formally trained as economists, less frequently as sociologists, nourished their historical investigations with robust theoretical tools drawn from these disciplines and others.

During the past forty years, very few studies have appeared dealing with the provisioning trade. This dearth of production is especially striking in the 1970s and ‘80s when social history still rode its quasi-hegemonic tide, barely challenged until the run-up to the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Long before the relatively recent globalizing turn, foreign trade, largely focused on colonial relations, commanded substantial interest. Commerce within France, dominated by cereals, in terms of magnitude and significance, elicited hardly any curiosity. It seems hard to impute this situation to the considerable older literature, scholarly and “antiquarian,” denser in its concern for the regions than for the capital, which was very often badly dated. Nor did the great “urban” theses, under the aegis or influence of Ernest Labrousse of the Sorbonne, former secretary to Léon Blum, champion of an incipient quantitative socioeconomic approach, more or less in the spirit of the Annales, devote keen attention to the subsistence question. Labrousse himself seemed to have exhausted the arena of price studies; and the uncertainty regarding the discreet, herculean labors of Jean Meuvret, another pioneer in the socioeconomic realm, specialized in agricultural, especially grain-related issues—how much of what was bruited had he completed and when, if ever, would it come out?—doubtless had a dissuasive effect. My Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1984), the first probing research into the elementary structures of the grain and flour trade in the greater Paris area, a socioeconomic and cultural study blending quantitative and qualitative analyses, did not spur any vocations, notwithstanding its efforts to recast notions of markets and of regulation. I was especially disappointed that no one explored further the milling trade/industry, still a largely virgin domain of inquiry, despite its crucial place in the French industrial and social economy, and despite the transformative impact of its technological innovation and business practices. Indeed, generally speaking, all remained quiet on the historiographical front of what was called the grain–flour–bread circuit: no wheels turning, stones grinding or dough fermenting.

As far as the market was concerned—as concept, ideology, institution, set of practices—we seemed to have reached the end of historiography, if not of history: no one problematized it; it was what it was supposed to be by those who fully elaborated its code and destiny during the nineteenth century.

The publication of Bread, Politics and Political Economy coincided with the eclipse of the grand doctoral thesis in France, the onerous yet fecund apprenticeship, sometimes extended till midlife or beyond, often marked by a provincial exile (or retour aux sources: it depended on one's frame of mind and ambition), which generated massive works, occasionally as prodigious in their influence and prestige as in their size. In particular, the age of the magnificent regional peasant studies was over. These were the studies most likely to touch directly on agricultural production/productivity. In this domain, they yielded highly disparate results, in part because of differences in the quality and quantity of sources and in methods of analysis and interpretation. And, in any event, they spoke to regional specificities that did not necessarily result in fruitful comparisons or findings that could be extrapolated to a broader scale (as the English are more willing to venture). Scholars such as E. Le Roy Ladurie, P. Goubert, G. Lefebvre, P. de Saint-Jacob, P. Bois, R. Baehrel and others dazzled us with the vivid reconstitution of rural life and the “structures and conjunctures” of the countryside, but did not resolve the question of agricultural output. Nor did the less numerous yet immensely informative theses on the nobility—joining, in extremely variable relations, seigneurs and peasant, both highly diverse—fill this gap.

The synthetic works that followed often took as their framework the “ni-ni” formula that flourished in French politics: neither demographic nor agricultural revolution. It was reassuring to know that there was no demographic revolution, whatever that signified precisely (though we learned rather quickly that population growth was nevertheless quite brisk during the eighteenth century) because it would have proved challenging to explain how the society nourished this (implicitly) huge human surplus. The absence (or, rather, exasperating tardiness) of an agricultural revolution led scholars to focus on the negatives: obstacles, barriers, blockages, bottlenecks, contradictions, and incoherences of a social, psychological, ideological, political, juridical or administrative as well as an economic nature that penalized (or mutilated) the primary sector. Scholars discussed notions of an immobile ecosystem spanning several centuries, of an extremely fragmented agricultural map that revealed a handful of regional champions and a host of dwarves, and of agronomic innovation on the margin (or in the salons and experimental cabinets).