The Police of Provisioning

Abstract

At every level of administrative life, public officials expended enormous amounts of time, energy and money in dealing with the subsistence question. Virtually everyone who practiced or wrote about public administration, or what was commonly called “police” in the old regime, considered provisioning to be among its paramount concerns. “The abundance of grain,” intoned Colbert, “is the thing to which we must pay the most attention in the police.” A hundred years later his eulogist Necker wrote that “the subsistence of the people is the most essential object which must occupy the administration.” Dupont, physiocracy’s chief merchandiser and a mordant critic of what he believed to be the Colbert-Necker continuum of policy, remarked ironically on the “abundance” of the subsistence subject and deplored the fact that it dominated so much of public business: “nothing can better prove to you that this branch of Administration is truly the first of all [of them] than the multitude of Laws, Regulations, Arrêts of Parlements, Ordonnances of Judges, Ordonnances of Municipalities, Ordonnances of intendants or royal agents which have come into place in all times on the matter of the provisioning of grain.”¹