Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 3/4/1999
EAN 9780521621298, ISBN10: 0521621291
Hardcover, 356 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.
List of figures and tables
Abbreviations
Old Regime weights and measures for wheat
Acknowledgements
Introduction - two crises
1709 and 1853
Part I. The Market of the Enlightenment, 1720–1789
1. The structure of mill and market
2. Simulated sales
shaping supply and demand in the Old Regime marketplace
3. Scripting 'free' trade
4. Narrowing the focus
bakers and bread, 1760–1789
Part II. Maximum
Feeding France in Revolution and War
5. 1789
municipal revolutions and the origins of radicalism
6. Unity and interests
7. Recreating the market
Thermidor and the directory
Part III. The State Learns, 1800–1860
8. The last maximum
1812
9. The routines of the restoration
10. Relinquishing control
bakers and the end of the Paris reserve
11. The market mastered
Archival sources
Selected bibliography
Index.