Raisonner sur les blés: essais sur les Lumières économiques by Steven L. Kaplan (review)

Historians have long known that the lifting of controls over the sale of grain in France between 1763 and 1770 marked an extraordinary departure for a state with little experience of how to manage freelance economic activity in the food-supply sector. Whether the switch in policy came close to breaking the mould of Bourbon absolutism, as Kaplan maintains, however, is another matter. In this book, Kaplan returns to a subject that he has made his own, urging us to treat the grain-trade debate as the key episode of the Lumières économiques—that is, the preoccupation of writers and the educated public from around the mid-century point with the principles and practices of political economy.

Kaplan dissects the literary jousts that the dismantling of institutional controls and the freeing up of the grain market in 1763/4 occasioned, examining the writings of Ferdinando Galiani, André Morellet, Denis Diderot, the abbé Pierre J.-A. Roubaud, Pierre-Paul Lemercier de La Riviere, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Guillaume-François Le Trosne, and Jacques Necker. Employing the techniques of textual analysis, Kaplan carefully situates each contributor to the debate according to his support for, or hostility toward, physiocracy. He then focuses his discussion on the themes that linked these contenders—“property,” “liberty,” “nature,” the “social contract,” the “people,” and so on.

The result is a long book that is sometimes hard-going but satisfying. Kaplan has little in common with the school of intellectual historians who suppose that ideas possess an inner logic. Rather, he offers an extended sociopolitical history of economic knowledge during the critical phase of its gestation during the 1750s and 1760s, scrupulously contextualizing each writer in terms of the grain-trade experiment and the reactions of the wider Republic of Letters. Although the book’s chapters are supposed to be free-standing enquiries, such is not necessarily the case.

The first five chapters are geared to Galiani’s provocative polemic Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, which was written in 1769 and published the following year, just as several inadequate harvests culminated to undermine the political credibility of the économistes. Chapters six and seven about Turgot, by contrast, are more forensic in approach and subject matter (as is the final essay about Necker). However, all the chapters display Kaplan’s unrivaled grasp of the institutional and political implications of the grain liberalization policy, as well as his command of the ideological debate. Turgot, particularly, emerges from historiographical neglect. Kaplan portrays him as an anguished figure trying to reconcile libertarian sympathies with the needs of a population of bread consumers on the brink of starvation in the Limousin region, where he was the central government’s chief enforcement officer.

The stakes could scarcely have been higher. As Kaplan notes, the version of absolute monarchy that had developed in ancien-régime France was predicated on a duty of providing care to consumers. This implied social contract meant that the food supply could never be treated solely as a commercial arrangement subject to market forces. Tied as it was to the threat of public disorder, bread fell within the administrative domain of the “police.” France’s budding economists or physiocrats were not unaware of the weight of history in this regard, but they chose to repudiate it. Sustained by an uncompromising, quasi-religious vision of the the laws of nature and the sanctity of property rights, they were allergic to social reality. Reality lay rather in adherence to principle; actual facts were simply epi-phenomena. The establishment of a market economy in the people’s subsistence, albeit briefly, was therefore an “earth-quake” moment (603)—more arguably, one from which the monarchy never fully recovered. When hungry crowds escorted the king and the royal family from the chateau of Versailles to Paris in October 1789, they shouted, “Nous ramenons le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron” (We bring back the...