At ease with the canonical division of labor, historians of economic thought do not characteristically toil to articulate ideas with social and political actuality: ideas have their logic, their genealogy, and their inherent prestige, without requiring some sort of reality check. To the extent that social historians in particular have frequently reduced texts (and the modes of cultural production) to mere illustrations or reflections of a deeper, structuring phenomenology, it may have seemed not merely convenient, but vital, for intellectual historians to take refuge in an idealist citadel, where ideas could be appreciated for their intrinsic interest. This general historiographical and epistemological question concerning the linkages between representation and lived experience, as well as their respective legitimacy and accessibility, sometimes cast into hyperbolic relief, if not outright caricature, during the post modern moment and the linguistic turn, takes on a particularly knotty complexity in the great debates over the grain question that roiled France, and other countries, during the long eighteenth century.

For while numerous participants, as Voltaire puckishly suggested, could not tell wheat apart from the “lesser” grains, and tilled the soil arduously in their elegant cabinets, others actually speculated in the grain trade even as they wrote about it. The list includes the international shipper, slave trader and businessman Jean-Gabriel Montaudouin de la Touche, from Gournay's circle; Guillaume François Le Trosne, magistrate on the présidial court of Orléans, from Quesnay's chapel; Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin, while he was attached to the bureau of the General Farm in Saint-Quentin, an early and virulent critic of Physiocracy; Jacques Necker, the Genevan banker, who started his career in a firm that had a long involvement in grain importing and speculating. Some of these figures and others interceded on another plane, making difficult and grave decisions concerning the subsistence and survival of the consumer-people even as they wrote—analytically, albeit also speculatively—about grain: like Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, lieutenant of the bailliage of Rouen, who dealt with the “horrors” of the “famine” of 1693–94;

This essay stems from a colloquium devoted to “Antiphysiocracy”: this very notion pays grudging homage to the intellectual notoriety and the manifest influence of a group of determined thinkers who forged a doctrine, founded on putatively scientific premises, which advocated urgent and profound changes necessary to right the course of a nation-kingdom utterly adrift. The Physiocratic conception derived from a study of the “natural order” apprehended largely through a deductive epistemological lever called “évidence,” a certitude so clear and manifest that no mind could spurn it. This examination revealed that the “imprescriptible,” “inviolable,” and “holy” right of property and the concomitant faculty to dispose of it with “total” and “absolute” liberty were the formative principles, anterior to all manner of social and political life, from which all relations, activities and institutions developed. “Évidence” demonstrated that everything in the “moral” sphere flowed from the “physical” world that was nature's peculiar domain. Physiocracy's integral, dynamic analysis of economic mechanisms showed that the land was the unique source of national wealth. The discovery of nature's laws showed men the range of their options—what they could do through positive law—and the scope of their errors—what they must undo in to make the best use of their lives, individually and collectively. As a result of their study, the économistes—the title to which the Physiocrats loftily claimed a monopoly—proposed ideas for deep changes in economic practices, financial administration, modes of political governance, education and the structure of society. Virtually all of the major threads of their thinking converged on the question of grain, the overwhelmingly dominant sector of the old-regime economy.

Friendship alone could not explain Denis Diderot's decision to intervene in the clash between two abbés, Ferdinando Galiani and André Morellet, and thus between two visions of governance, especially of the articulation of the political, the economic, and the social: it constituted, however, its personal and quasi-institutional framework. Having actively encouraged the Italian abbé to draw up his critique of Physiocracy and its specific application in 1763–64, having then undertaken to correct, perhaps to improve the text, and to place it with a publisher, to reread the proofs, and prepare the terrain for the Dialogues’ appearance, Diderot had clearly chosen his camp intellectually. Humanly also, no doubt, even if he did not know at the beginning of this adventure that his comrade Morellet would agree to take down their close common friend, Galiani.

A triangular, asymmetrical relationship

In any event, this triangular relationship had never been symmetrical. Galiani remained fond of Morellet and grateful to him for having sponsored his Parisian socialization from the moment he arrived. The Frenchman, who made a point of remaining on close terms with all the influential men and women of the Republic of Letters, no doubt overestimated Diderot's attachment to him, perhaps because he was a member of the Encylopedia team; he believed in it even after the printing of his book against Galiani. Even before the clash between the two abbés, the head Encyclopedist felt closer to the Neapolitan. His irritations at Morellet increased in number and virulence in the wake of the latter's polemical—and commissioned—text against the Compagnie des Indes. Indignantly rejecting the suggestion that he was seeking to please the government in the interest of his constant quest for income and protection, both to support him and to realize his ambitious projects, Morellet had justified himself intellectually by the coherence of his actions in the direct line of his promotion of freedom of trade (a pamphlet in favor of painted or printed cloths (“indiennes”) in 1758, a memoir for overhaul of the customs system in 1761, various texts pleading for freedom of the grain trade in 1763 and 1764). The philosophe was greatly displeased by the memoir against the “monopoly” of the Compagnie des Indes and never missed an opportunity to lecture the abbé and challenge his position.

As we have seen, the economic turn deeply transformed the European world, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Scandinavian tundra, from the Andes to the Urals. It spawned a new consciousness, a kind of “economizing” of minds and practices. It was powerful enough even to inflect the Enlightenment, which too became increasingly economic. Rather than a passing or circumstantial swerve, the economic turn was in many ways irrevocable. The French Revolution grappled with its implications, the industrial revolution later embodied the finest and most worrisome of its promises. One of the lasting contributions of the economic turn was its didactic capacity and inspirational vocation: it stirred men to think and write about almost everything that mattered to people in society. The agenda was staggering in range and richness, and even Diderot marveled at the ways in which his own Encyclopedia had to adjust. Among the leading voices in the mapping out of the Economic Enlightenment were the well organized and extremely influential group of thinkers who appropriated the title of “économistes,” or Physiocrats, and a much looser constellation of economic writers, administrators and merchants—the alter-economists—who contested both the symbolic hegemony of the Physiocrats and their doctrine.

The great debates opposing Physiocrats and alter-economists during the economic turn posed some of the deepest and most abiding questions of the social and human sciences. Perhaps the inaugural question concerns the nature of society itself. This issue matters enormously to all the alter-economists. If they do not necessarily articulate a passage from the state of nature to society, their notion of transition bears a strong Hobbesian whiff that never vanishes. For if the resulting social order is less overtly turbulent than the state of nature, it remains obstinately fragile. This vulnerability, this brittleness is perhaps the major (de-)structuring force in their conception of the social.

The state of nature narrative is less telling for the Physiocrats, for whom the decisive idea is that only nature can found and sustain society. They focus on the solidity rather than the fragility of society: anterior to any form of social or political organization, natural law, if fully respected, must issue in the first of the many equilibria that mark Physiocratic equations of life.

André Morellet (1727–1829) was one of the remarkable cohort of Enlightenment abbés whose thought and action left a considerable mark on the eighteenth century and the Revolution. The eldest of 14 children born into the petty bourgeoisie in Lyon, he studied with the Jesuits and briefly considered joining them, but ended up following the intentions of his father, a paper merchant, who sent him to Paris, first to a collège, then (thanks to a well-to-do uncle) to the Sorbonne, “society and house.” There he frequented certain of the great political and intellectual figures of his time and discovered Locke, Bayle, Spinoza, Buffon and Voltaire in the margins of his theological studies. Supporting himself would always be a concern for him, at times a veritable obsession. Rejecting the priesthood, he became a preceptor in high society, which allowed him to travel as well as eat properly; then he began to write, a profession that would never offer him real independence, but would open doors, notably government doors, where he obtained subventions to assist him in a grand project, a monumental Dictionary of Commerce, an enterprise that he would never be able to complete.

Thanks to his remarkable longevity, he lived several successive lives. Educated in theology, he nevertheless signaled his good intentions to the Voltairians in an acerbic pamphlet against the treatment of Protestants. He spent six weeks in the Bastille for another pamphlet excoriating Palissot, one of the “anti-philosophes” whom he made it a specialty to combat. His causticity made him most effective in man-to-man combat; Voltaire christened him “Mords-les” (“bite them”). As translator-commentator he brought to light an inquisition manual that detailed the horrors of that system of thought-control, heaped praise on Beccaria in a robust rendering of Dei delitti e delle pene (“On crimes and punishments”), translated Pope, Jefferson and William Robertson into French; a translation of Wealth of Nations was never to appear. Turgot introduced him to Gournay and the Trudaines, who provided him with an initiation in political economy; one of his first writings in this domain, an appeal for the freedom to make and trade printed textiles [toiles peintes], was commissioned by the elder Trudaine (Daniel-Charles), a high “economic” state official, in charge of trade, manufacturing, bridges and roads, and certain sectors of the treasury. Not much involved

In a short article on “Bled ou Blé” (grain) in the wide-ranging 1770–1774 Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, Voltaire famously explained that

The citation is characteristically witty, but does it reveal something about the world of the Patriarch of Ferney, not just about the author? While he relished irony, indulged gladly in frivolity on occasion, and swore no oath of ethnographic accuracy, here he seems to be pointing to a multifaceted phenomenon that enjoyed real traction in French society, with analogies and extensions elsewhere. Grain must not only be understood as the massively present, palpable object that was a crucial everyday concern for the state and the vast majority of the population, but also as the privileged and powerful metaphor for the plethora of issues of policy and theory that increasingly came to be called political economy. In his essay, Voltaire hinted as well that what had once been a rather recondite matter now reached beyond the confines of the intellectual or specialist microcosms and mobilized the attention of a much more substantial audience, composed largely of elites of one sort or another, but quite diversely situated, including certain kinds of artisans and farmers along with seigneurs and affluent merchants (and their wives who could not distinguish between wheat and rye).

We believe that Voltaire was pointing to what we call the “economic turn,” a prodigious set of changes that did not happen all at once: far from it. Rather than a sudden swerve, the economic turn was a gradual, cumulative process that touched much of Europe, with variable degrees of intensity and significant time lags from place to place, and burst forth in different domains of activity, sensibility and mindfulness at different moments. It involved primordially the economic sphere, as our locution suggests, but not just, for we construe the “economic” as simultaneously material and symbolic, as relating to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, but also to their organization and regulation, to the discourses that generate or are generated by these practices, and to the conflicts that are inseparable from them.

Like many parts of the Third World today, old-regime France was obsessed with subsistence—and for good reasons. Dependent for the most part on a single foodstuff whose production and distribution were hostage to a host of uncertainties, it is no wonder that the people of this society agonized over their material life. They had no sense of control over their environment—either the sociojuridical structure around which their lives were organized or the economic and physical circumstances in which they lived. Nor could the Enlightenment provide a dose of confidence and courage powerful enough to reach the bulk of the population. Not all the philosophical tracts on man's earthly potential, nor all the manuals on the application of vetch or the use of sainfoin, nor all the inoculations practiced on the children of princes could convince the “little people” of the eighteenth century that they lived in a world on the verge of mastering, or at least reaching an accord with, nature. Subsistence, of course, was not the whole story of man's predicament, but preoccupation with it was sufficiently universal and relentless to remind men every day of the precariousness of their situation and of their relative helplessness to change it.

Even as the marketplace, like the cemetery, was at the center of popular life in the Old Regime, so subsistence was always at the center of public concern. In the crudest terms, it can be said that fear of the people commanded attention to the people's fears. Subsistence uncertainty and anxiety impelled government to give the highest priority to provisioning. But government intervened in the first instance not so much to reassure the people as to reassure itself. From top to bottom, officials believed that the social and political structures could not passively bear the strain or tolerate the risks of scarcity. Subsistence was the precondition to social order. Their assumptions about the psychology of human motivation, the nature of commerce, and the habits of cultivators and suppliers convinced authorities that grain distribution could not safely be left entirely to private initiative and the arbitration of free market forces.

What nourished this ideology of fear and mistrust, what made the governors, like the governed, timid and conservative, what made intervention necessary and inevitable, was above all the nature of preindustrial society itself.

In the modern scholarly view of the sixties, which has brought considerable order and sophistication to the study of eighteenth-century France, the dominant motif is constitutional, the lingering crisis is the Brittany affair, and the denouement is the stunning coup engineered by Maupeou. I have viewed the decade from a different vantage point. I have suggested that another issue preoccupied Frenchmen in the sixties and in many ways cut more deeply and touched more people than the well-known political confrontation. I have focused upon a social and political crisis concerning subsistence, which set the stage for the outburst of absolutism in 1770–71 by producing widespread economic disruption and recession.

From this perspective, the main themes of parlementary action eddy against the prevailing current. What is striking are not the claims of parlementary union and indivisibility, but the deep divisions among the sovereign courts; not the political pretensions of the parlements, but their vitally important administrative and regulatory responsibilities; not the obscurantist attitudes and obstructionist tactics for which they are famous, but their critique of government mismanagement and royal abuse, which had much in common with what we conventionally call “enlightened”; not their adamantine hostility to change and their persecution of truth, but their inability to decide amongst themselves what changes were best and what opinions were true; not their egotistical defense of privilege, but their discussion of the nature of la chose publique; not their desire to curtail royal authority, but their debate on the responsibilities of kingship. The parlements of the grain crisis were the same parlements which thwarted Bertin's intelligent reforms, burned LaBarre, and mercilessly harassed the king. But the view of France from the marketplace differed sharply from the scene perceived from La Chalotais’ prison or the fauteuil in which Louis presided over lits de justice, even as it differed from vantage points in Rouen, Toulouse, Grenoble, and Paris. The issues raised by the grain crisis differed from the problems posed by the constitutional quarrel and elicited different responses from parlements for whom politics was a very complex and subtle business. The constitutional question, as important as it was, must not obscure the existence of other matters of urgent public concern and other dimensions of parlementary behavior.

The government's inability to stem the generalization and deepening of the crisis at the very end of the decade doomed liberalization. The new Controller-General, Terray, metaphorically portrayed the liberal experience as “the flood” and imagined his responsibility, in part, as channeling the waters back into their natural reservoirs and building dikes capable of withstanding future inundations of any sort. But he did not take a nostalgically antediluvian approach to the task—at least he tried not to. The problem was that de-liberalization did not bring instant recovery. Terray enjoyed virtually no respite from subsistence troubles during his four-year tenure and the subsistence troubles generated other political and economic problems which compounded the difficulty for him.

The discussion of his administration is divided into three parts which mark the boundaries of this and the following two chapters. The first concerns the return to a police regime, a transition not easily effected, and the nature of Terray's short- and long-term goals. The second examines the Controller-General's efforts to apply his subsistence policy throughout the kingdom during the years 1771–74 and the reactions of a broad spectrum of opinion to it. The third explores Terray's use of the king's grain, a vital instrument in his attempt to parry the ongoing dearth, and the political costs of government intervention on the supply side.

I

The abbé Joseph Marie Terray, “the best mind in the parlement,” a fifty-five year old clerical counselor from a modest bourgeois family which ascended slowly into the Robe during the last part of the reign of Louis XIV, became the new Controller-General. The departure of Maynon, a friend of the physiocrats and a stout defender of the liberal reforms, did not signify a determination within the royal council to change the grain policy. It was motivated by the financial imbroglio, not the subsistence crisis, two problems whose relationship at this point in time the king's advisers did not clearly perceive. Although Terray had expressed serious doubts about the May Declaration at the time of registration, he had asked his colleagues to give it a fair chance. He had not taken an active role in the parlementary campaign against liberalization.

The government responded to the burgeoning unrest—popular revolts and police resistance—with a hard and determined line, starkly re-affirming its commitment to liberalization and to high prices as an express policy of state. Laverdy correctly believed that traditional attitudes toward subsistence constituted the single greatest barrier to change. But, like many self-consciously enlightened ministers and reformers, he neither understood nor sympathized with the workings of popular psychology, nor did he know how to deal with it. Diffusing light, to be sure, was no easy matter; since all men were not equally equipped to seize the truth, often it was necessary to force them to accept it. To re-educate the public, Laverdy saw no alternative to brutal and relentless reconditioning.

Impetuously, the people believed that their right to subsist took precedence over all the rights prescribed by natural law as the basis of social organization. They assumed that it was the solemn duty of the state to intervene when necessary to guarantee their subsistence without regard for so-called natural rights. Such views, in Laverdy's estimation, were erroneous and pernicious; they misconceived the role of the government and its relation to the citizenry and did violence to the soundest principles of political economy. In a word, they were irrational; the Controller-General refused a dialogue with unreason. “The people,” he lamented, “hardly used their reason in matters of subsistence.” Surely the bulk of police officials who dealt with these problems day to day would have found it singularly fatuous to rebuke the people for being unreasonable when they were hungry, impoverished, or simply anxious. It was the job of the authorities to be reasonable about provisioning; for the public, especially in time of stress, it was virtually impossible to avoid subsistence terror. Insofar as popular fears were often imaginary—a fact which had little bearing upon the clinical state of fright or its consequences—and popular solutions were illegal and myopic, Laverdy would not acknowledge them either as manifestations of a legitimate problem or even as authentic symptoms of a congenital psychosomatic disorder.

To combat and discredit this mentality, Laverdy chose to belittle and insult it with all the sophistry of progressive thinking. It consisted of nothing more than a crazy quilt of “prejudices.” “Prejudice” was one of the harshest epithets in the political vocabulary of the Enlightenment; it acquired added force when accompanied by Laverdy's favorite metaphors, light and sight.