The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France

Abstract

since the seventeenth century can be most meaningfully explained not in a simple economic formula of food shortage/hunger/riot, but within a political context of changing governmental policy and in terms of secular economic change in marketing arrangements of grain. Food riots had several forms which show a definite change and development over time. The market riot, an urban version, was usually aimed at bakers whose prices were too high or whose loaves were too few, at city residents who were suspected of hoarding supplies of grain in their houses, and at government officials who failed to act swiftly to ease a food shortage.I The entrave was the rural form of grain riot, in which wagons or barges loaded with grain were forcibly prevented from leaving a locality. In isolated examples, at least, it can be traced to the early seventeenth century. The market riot and the entrave were polar opposites. The market riot was a sign that not enough grain was available in a local urban marketplace. The entrave tried to restrict the local grain supply to local consumption, and at reasonable prices. Taxation populaire, a form which emerged at the end of the seventeenth century, could occur at several levels, as described by Rose. His first category is essentially what I have already labeled as the market riot; the second concerns a conscious political action against the authorities to secure the same end directly; and the third was 'taxation populaire' itself... a disciplined measure implying an ordered sale and the handing of proceeds to the proprietor.2 The crowd would seize the grain or flour, set a price recognized as the just price for the commodity (and usually far below the current market price, sometimes remarkably uniform from one riot to the next within a region),3 sell the food, and Louise A. Tilly is working on A Social and Demographic History of the Working Class of Milan, I880-1914. I The market riot was traced back to the classical world by Nicolas Delamare in his Traite de la Police (Paris, I729; 3rd ed.), 4v. He was one of the grain commissioners who served with the Paris police lieutenants at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. His Traite was first published I705-I9, 3v. but citations for this essay are from the 3rd ed. 2 R. B. Rose, Eighteenth Century Price Riots, the French Revolution and the Jacobin Maximum, International Review of Social History, IV (I959), 435, 438. 3 George Rude, La taxation populaire de mai 1775 a Paris et dans la region parisienne, Annales historiques de la Re'volutionfranfaise, XXVIII (1956), I77.

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