Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700-1860 (review)

Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700-1860. By Judith A. Miller (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 334 pp. $49.95

A case could be made that three loosely related assertions underlying Miller's case study of the French state's regulation of the grain trade in upper Normandy and Paris have gradually become underlying assumptions of most recent work in French history. First, the French Revolution produced a model of bad government; its violent, coercive, and ineffectual acts were a disaster for the French people. Second, the rise of French capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not unduly hampered by a "mercantilist" state; the motives and policies of French administrators and politicians were, in their own French way, "liberal," and their generally intelligent and well-intentioned attempts to regulate the market were intended to stimulate the growth of market forces and thus obviate the need for regulation in the long run. Third, historians in general have become much more respectful of the power of "market forces" and, with reservations, more friendly toward their efforts; any move to thwart or even channel supply and demand is seen as likely to be ineffective at best and disastrous at worst.

Since I have asserted or implied each of these positions in my recent work on French canal policy, I am in sympathy with the ideological framework of Miller's monograph. Moreover, I agree with Miller, her administrators, and a host of earlier historians (notably Kaplan in his three massive works on the Old Regime's subsistence trades) that "the food supply was too important to be left to individuals," that is, the market (1). ¹ The first responsibility of any state was to assure townspeople (and especially Parisians) a sufficient supply of affordable bread because the alternative was bread riots that might lead to revolutions.

But Miller goes much further. She claims that "market officials, subdelegates, mayors, and police lieutenants" learned over time how to regulate the grain trades with, rather than against, market forces and that "increasingly skillful state intervention" "created and shored up the links between producers [farmers], merchant-millers, bakers, and consumers," thus creating a more powerful and effective state and market (5, 3, 295). Her administrators learned from experience--from the mistakes of their predecessors--and they learned to nudge rather than coerce. In the "crisis of 1709," those responsible for the grain trades had set rigid price maxima, forced holders of grain to sell rather than hold ("hoard") their stocks, and required all transactions to take place publicly at specified times and in officially designated "marketplaces." They handled the "crisis of 1853" by essentially subsidizing town bakers.

Miller's thesis is that the changes in regulatory policy from 1709 to 1853 were the product of ever-growing state competence or, as she puts it in her concluding sentence, "Free trade in grain was not the result of the market, but of the state's intervention" (300). Like Miller, I have read my thousands of pages of bureaucratic memos, reports, precis, orders, etc., and yield to no one in my admiration for the intelligence and general public mindedness of French administrators. But her submersion in her sources leads her to elevate the words and actions of her subjects to primary causes rather than secondary effects. Surely she has got the cart before the horse. Changes in the market allowed administrators to alter their responses to crises. As the seriousness of crises dwindled with the growth of the market, administrators could follow their liberal instincts and move toward "free trade" in provisioning the towns.

Miller's causal confusion shows up in three different ways. First, she often has to admit that her sources do not explicitly cite their dependence on past experience. She often interprets changed behavior as learned when reinvention of the wheel...