Wheat riots Causes and stages of violence related to wheat production During the period before the spring harvest of 1775, the cereal reserves were exhausted while the new harvest had not yet arrived. In spring 1775, famine arose in this new context: before Turgot's edict, every region faced its own shortages, so that some would have suffered a genuine famine while others would have been totally spared and supplied through stable prices; a royal intervention would have been requested, and without a doubt obtained, to assure the supply of the regions most affected. With liberalization, grains could leave spared regions to go the worst affected areas, causing significant price increases and shortages all over affecting more people more quickly. The price of grain and of bread rose suddenly and became a desperate burden on the poorest populations. There ensued major popular unrest at markets and other flour distribution locations. Rumors spread against the "power-grabbers" and "monopolizers". This type of popular reaction against the merchants was a constant in times of famine, but it took on an unusual depth. For a long time, the theory of a political plot woven against Turgot by various coteries of the Court has been advanced as an explanatory factor, a thesis historian
George Rudé has dashed.
Main stages of an Ancien Régime riot, from obstruction to looting Over 17 days, 180 conflicts would be listed from the
Paris Basin; Jean Nicolas notes 123 distinct riots. Cynthia Bouton turns up 313 occurrences, sometimes interpreted as "anarchic movements", sometimes as the anticipation of rural revolts. These demonstrations of the moral economy took three distinct forms: • in exporting regions, one notices spontaneous working-class taxation, and more or less organized looting. The rioters denounce speculation, forcing large farmers and land-owners to sell their stocks on the market at a "fair price", eventually looting bakeries and warehouses, while claiming to restore the principles of economic morality. • in the cities, warehouse and bakery attacks are organized in a similar fashion. • finally, erect obstacles to channels of communication, on rivers and roads, in areas of large cultivation. More by basic survival instinct than by malicious intent, the rioters hinder transport of a particular agricultural province's wheat to other provinces with higher purchasing power. Victims were usually merchants or farmers, but more common, as shown by Cynthia Bouton, they were the direct representatives of power. The riots were often directed against the profiteer millers or against counselors of parliament, as they were that day, April 18, in
Dijon. On April 27, the movement hit the great cultivated plains, initially West
Burgundy then, gradually,
Beauvaisis and finally
Beauce and
Brie. The rebels were in front of
Versailles on May 2 and 3; the mob plundered the bakeries of Paris.
Louis XVI appeared anxious, because some slogans and lampoons implicated his court. The destruction was in reality very limited; the main targets were the boats carrying the wheat, which were sunk.
Return to order Order was reestablished by a pair of government actions: • Repression, by the intervention of 25,000 soldiers, 162 arrests, and the hanging of two rioters (a 28-year-old wigmaker and his 16-year-old companion who were executed as examples in
Place de Grève). • Assistance to the population by the organization of food supplies to provinces in need as well as obligations placed on supply owners to sell their product at a fixed price. The king sent an increased number of messages to the peasant masses, in particular through the preaching of the clergy. Five months were needed to put a definitive end to the trouble, but most of the problems were over by May 11, 1775.
Political and social critique • The fear of famine became an ever-present dread for the lower strata of the
Third Estate, and rumors of the "
Pacte de Famine" to starve the poor were still rampant and readily believed. Mere rumors of food shortage led to the
Réveillon riots in April 1789. Rumors of a plot aiming to destroy wheat crops in order to starve the population provoked the
Great Fear in the summer of 1789. The hunger and despair of the Parisian women was also the original impetus for the
Women's March on Versailles in October 1789. They wanted not just one meal but the assurance that bread would once again be plentiful and cheap. • In the realm of politics, the outcome provoked fundamental modifications to the government and a change in royal policies. Turgot called for and obtains, on behalf of Louis XVI, the resignation of the Lieutenant General of Police,
Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir. • A few libelous statements, very localized in origin, blamed the king himself: one would find attacks against "the
Bourbon blood", but these writings were the doing of a cultivated population and of learned pens. For Kaplan, the event marked the growing disenchantment of the people toward the king, a step toward the rupture of the sacred bond between the king and his subjects. • However, the rioters showed a paradoxical nature, evincing the characteristics of economic morality brought to light by the historians E.P. Thompson and Charles Tilly: on the one hand, a request to return to royal paternalism, and at the same time, a critique of governmental policy. Two opposing logics: one that obeys the laws of property, and one that obeys morality. The rioters challenged public authority and requested the restoration of fair pricing. Lacking a response, set up a practice of rules of internal order: regulatory power. • Finally, these rioters were a sign of a desire for
food justice and redistribution, based upon a strong demand for regulation and supervision. The bread rioters could further be compared to jacqueries, in the sense where they were not trained against political authority, they were not doing it to usurp power, but they were obeying a communal discipline. Grain access and fair pricing of bread emerged as universal rights. • On the social level, sources witnessed an increase in social tensions and social polarization: a small group of elite rich farmers were opposed to the masses of increasingly poor farmers. The peasants, described by certain sources as insurgents, were accompanied by village officials (who were sometimes forced) and by parish priests, like in Normandy. The rioters' targets were therefore those individuals who were free of communal discipline: farmers and owners of large farms in the Paris Basin; to a lesser extent, the bourgeoisie of the cities; occasionally, noble landholders or clerics and farmers who had status in the feudal system, such as Jacques-Pierre de Hericourt, farmer of
Cagny, in Brie, lord of Chesany. • The issues around wheat and the social issues demonstrated the structural weakness of the kingdom's economy, but they also heralded the emergence of a new anti-establishment rhetoric. == In culture ==