Mastering the Market: the State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700-1860

Jean Meuvret and Steven L. Kaplan have both written extensively on the grain question in the Old Regime. In Mastering the Market, Judith Miller adds to their work in two ways. First, she wants to show how “free trade in grain was not the result of the market but of the state’s intervention” (300). Her vision is not one of an increasingly liberal and efficient grain trade but one of increasing competence and authority of the administration in the management of that trade (2-3, 5, 23). Secondly, she innovates in bringing together the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are generally treated separately in works based on detailed archival research such as this one (Meuvret concentrated on the seventeenth century, Kaplan on the eighteenth).

The first part of Mastering the Market deals with the pre-revolutionary period. After presenting the whos, wheres and hows of the police des grains in the early eighteenth century, Miller brings up the issue of transparent versus concealed government intervention in the years up to 1774. Through the tactic of what she calls “simulated sales,” the administration managed to shape the market by acting on supply and—even more importantly—on supplier’s perceptions. “Simulated sales” were sales by apparently independent merchants, acting under official instructions, selling at less than the going price, thus bringing a halt to price increases (56-57). Officials developed skill at dosing quantities and timing of such sales so as to achieve their anti-inflationary goals. Thus, through this use of concealed rather than overt intervention, at least the appearance of liberty was preserved. From 1763 to 1776, a return to transparency in the form of grain liberalization reforms reduced but did not entirely eliminate officials’ room for maneuver. While officials heeded Turgot’s order not to force a price on suppliers, they did intervene as mediators between sellers and buyers and thus often managed to preserve civil peace as well as the (apparent) freedom of price. Chapter 4 makes the interesting point that while there was a determined effort at grain liberalism, there was no real bread liberalism—officials never attempted to do without tarifs, i.e., detailed bread price tables (see 37 for an illustration of a tarif). Not only were the tarifs not abandoned, but they were revised downward despite grain market price increases, a victory then for bread buyers and a defeat for the suppliers (101). After Turgot’s attempts at transparency failed, a return to dissimulation (i.e., simulated sales) occurred, albeit with somewhat less success due perhaps to the experience lost over the 1763-1776 period (110). One other arresting aspect of administration mentioned is the relation of troops to the grain trade: Just as under the regime of simulated sales a peaceful market presupposed a deft sense of timing and deployment of grain resources, officials had to be adept at deploying their limited military resources. Soldiers were not unlike the simulated sacks: Using them at the right time and in the proper form of display could help stabilize prices (112).

Part 2 deals with the Revolution. According to Miller, the beginning of the French Revolution amounts to a sweeping away of the Old Regime’s nuanced provisioning policies (117) as the experienced administrative authorities were replaced by inexperienced revolutionary ones (119). She shows that while the National Assembly continued to try to implement liberal policies, local officials in Rouen were unable to get the assistance they desired from the Assembly and were ultimately forced to defy the Assembly and prevent the libre circulation of grain. Another attempt in 1792 at legislating libre circulation led to unrest and non-enforcement of the law. The Old Regime’s grain pragmatism was no longer a recourse: There were no troops available to frame suppliers and buyers; any mention of Old Regime policies was deemed anti-revolutionary (148-9). In the end, grain liberalism had to be abandoned. Yet the grain Maximum of 4 May 1793 proved to be unsuccessful, as it led to a price war among regions. With the breakdown of the Old Regime policies, the best way to supplies seems to have been a good army, which is what Paris used (162). After 1794, the inability to increase local supply (inefficacy of requisitioning) or to access foreign supply (the assignat problem) led to severe provisioning problems.

Part 3 of Mastering the Market covers the post-revolutionary period up to 1860. The Empire did not feature much improvement. The system of a régie for a Paris Reserve, organized around Vanlerberghe, had to be recast on several occasions until it was brought under direct state control (212). Exports in 1809 and 1810 contributed to the difficulties of 1812 which forced Naploeon to revert to a Revolution-like Maximum. This proved such a disaster that it “convinced administrators never again to try solving provisioning crises with extreme measures” (227). The time for “covert but workable” intervention had returned (235). Chapter 9 explains how the covert but workable intervention materialized first in a système mixte: The price of bread was to follow that of grain and the Réserve would be used for bread, sold using ration cards, for the poor (241). Intervention also occurred in two other ways: Entry to and exit from the baking profession was controlled (274); bakers were forced by the state to maintain backup supplies (276). The crisis of 1853-1855 witnessed a further form of intervention in the creation of the Caisse de service de la boulangerie, a credit institution allowing bakers to buy at market prices (287). In these ways, by the end of the Second Empire, the administration had succeeded in mastering the market.

Mastering the Market is a fine example of socio-economic history and as such constitutes a valuable reference tool for graduate students and professors of French history (the footnotes are copious, the bibliography is exhaustive). The book does prompt two questions however. The first, a question of commission, concerns Miller’s thesis. Put radically, the thesis is that liberalism was not up to the provisioning task. One argument a liberal might make is to bring up the fact (which Miller mentions but does not address at length) that by maintaining strong import restrictions, the French state after the Napoleonic Empire did not give liberalism a real chance. That liberal might argue that while libre circulation and exportation were tried and failed, the same cannot be said for importation after 1815. The second question, one of omission, concerns the history of economic thought: Miller does not discuss how economic theory reflected or inflected the various grain market policies. Perhaps length considerations prevented her from bringing all the descendants of the Physiocrats (e.g., Say, Ganilh, Garnier) into the picture. Hopefully, she, or one of her graduate students, will begin to fill out the picture of nineteenth century economic thought as it relates to the grain trade.