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).

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.