The Royal Trump

Abstract

In considering, across the long run, the increasing success eighteenth century society enjoyed in escaping or attenuating the effects of the deadly old-style subsistence crises—an incomplete triumph which we must be careful not to exaggerate—the role played by government in husbanding resources, containing disease, and organizing social services is often overlooked. If Paris was spared a serious “crisis of mortality” and violent sociopolitical disruptions in the late sixties, it was partly due to the efforts the government made—without enthusiasm, it must be noted—to keep the city adequately supplied in the midst of a grave and prolonged dearth. To be sure, it can be, and in fact was, argued that the methods used by authorities were prodigal and inefficient. The king was said to have spent as much as 10,000,000 livres in purchasing grain and flour, the bulk of which served the capital.1 But it remains extremely doubtful, given the harvest failures, the disorganization of the grain trade, the primitive state of communications and the mood of consumers, that the city could have fared so relatively well without massive governmental assistance. In any case, no one, with the exception of a handful of ideologues and optimists, not even the ministers who fathered the radical program of liberalization, was prepared to court the risks that non-intervention implied.