Something rather odd happened at the beginning of the reign of King Louis XVI of France.
The event puzzled both the King and his finance minister, Turgot, who was convinced the incident had been rigged by his enemies.
On May 2, 1775 a crowd bearing sticks and moldy barley bread arrived at Versailles demanding that the price of bread be lowered to 2 sous a pound.
The market price was 3.5 sous, considerably lower than it had been under the previous King, Louis XV.
In the early 1700s, bread had been nearly 10 sous a pound; in the 1740s, it had been 5 sous. So there was no reason to complain about prices now.
That the people carried barley loaves was puzzling as well. No baker in Paris made bread out of anything other than wheat.
Any other grain was, at least to the Parisians if not the rest of France, entirely unfit for human consumption. Bakers contended it was absolutely impossible to make a good bread out of rye or barley or any other grain.
So unless a baker wanted his customers to beat him to death or carry complaints about him to the police, he wouldn’t offer anything other than wheat bread for sale.
According to Steve Kaplan, a historian who’s conducted extensive research on bread and its significance in France, this fear-mongering around bread, its prices and its supply, or lack thereof, and the increasingly belligerent riots that occurred as a result first emerged shortly after the death of the Sun King.
Rumor-mongering was so extensive and so pervasive that it didn’t matter what the government did.
Whether there was a free trade in grain coupled by government granaries to store and supply wheat in times of a shortfall or strictly controlled prices of grain, there was a growing and pervasive belief that the government was not to be trusted, was intent on starving the people, and was either encouraging bakers to do the same or turning a blind eye to the bakers’ criminal efforts.
There’s no evidence that the government was doing any such thing. Quite the contrary, in fact. Yet the rumors and the fears persisted. And at various intervals throughout the century, as prices fluctuated, rumor-mongering and public outrage grew to a fever-pitch.
A woman in 1720s Paris, for instance, exhorted the city to rise up and revolt. They should’ve risen up two months ago, she declared, saying: “At Lyon, we would not have waited so long. . . it is very clear the Government is hoarding grain in order to squeeze the people dry.”
Wall posters would appear, threatening violence to those perceived to be responsible for the crisis. In the 1740s, one threatened to burn the city of Paris if bread prices weren’t lowered by the end of the month.
King Louis XV encountered crowds shouting: “Misery! Famine! Give us bread!”
Bread prices depended upon the availability of wheat, and this ultimately depended upon the weather and the harvest, over which neither the King nor his ministers nor Parlement had any control.
All that could be done was to mitigate the effects of a poor harvest by importing grain, instituting subsidies, and during times of plenty, storing all excess grain. Yet these efforts aroused suspicion and ire, often culminating in threats to ravage Paris and its bakeries and to assassinate the King.
And the people remained convinced that any dearth was manufactured by the King and his ministers.
In every decade of the 1700s, the same rumors appeared, the same suspicions, and the same fears every time bread prices rose. The panic likely caused further disruptions in both supply and price.
It seems clear that there was a concerted effort to overthrow the monarchy—an effort that finally took fruit in 1789 and in the years of the Revolution.
Furthermore, bread prices, inflation, and unemployment worsened during the Revolution when living conditions became truly appalling. Ordinary people of the third estate—peasants, farmers, tradesmen, and the like—were brutally killed or summarily arrested for being anti-Revolution.
Complaints and riots were swiftly put down. Robespierre went to the extent of chiding the people for thinking of their stomachs instead of supporting the Revolution.
Had it been about bread alone, surely conditions would have improved.
We’ve been trained to believe that it was Marie Antoinette and her excesses that caused the people to rise up.
But Kaplan’s research and that of Robert Darnton, who’s looked at the circulation of books and pamphlets in the pre-Revolutionary period, suggest otherwise.
The people were being carefully primed to revolt.
To be precise, the people in Paris were being primed to rise up. Elsewhere in France, people weren’t as anti-monarch as we’ve been led to believe.
To some extent, it was the Sun King himself who was responsible for what happened in 1789. Forced to leave Paris as a child because of a civil conflict called the Fronde, Louis XIV returned to Paris determined to establish himself as an absolute authority and to gut any power the nobility had.
That led to the endless rules of etiquette that Marie Antoinette so despised and to the removal of court from Paris to Versailles. The Sun King also favored the nobles of the robe—lawyers and other professionals who were elevated to the rank of aristocrat and who retained their status as long as they were loyal to the King.
In what looks like an inversion of the Church’s teaching—that the Church is the body of Christ—the Sun King claimed that France, the state, resided in the person of the King. The monarch not only represented France. He was France.
What was good for the King was good for the entire kingdom.
(And, unwilling to accept the authority of Rome and suspicious of Italian Popes exerting an undue influence on France, French bishops and Parlement tended to encourage this view.)
Is it any wonder the people of France—or at least of Paris—came to expect the individual at the helm—whether it was a Regent or the King himself—to work miracles, to provide food and sustenance?
After all Christ in the Eucharist provides food for His body, the Church.
The Sun King was quite adept at curbing challenges to his authority. His descendants unfortunately were not. And King Louis XVI, intent on being a popular King, always hesitated to impose his authority on the people.
Nevertheless, the Kingdom might have been saved. How, you ask?
The King was a fairly devout Catholic, becoming more so in his later years under the influence of his second wife, Madame Maintenon.
In 1689—note the date, exactly a hundred years before Louis XVI’s reign unraveled—a humble nun, Sr. Margaret Mary Alacoque (now St. Margaret Mary Alacoque) traveled all the way to Versailles with an urgent message for the King.
St. Margaret Mary received countless communications from Christ and it was at His behest that she gave us the devotion to His Sacred Heart. Now she had a message from Christ himself for the King.
She had tried sending it in a letter but received no reply. So she went in person to Versailles.
France was at the height of its glory, ushered into that position by the King himself. What exactly did the King of the Universe require the King of France, “the eldest son of [His] Sacred Heart,” to do?
The request was simple: consecrate the entire nation of France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and build a chapel where the Sacred Heart could be adored.
If this request were heeded France would be glorified even more. The enemies of the Church would fall at the feet of the Sun King.
But what, asked the King’s advisors, if that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t he be making a fool of himself and the faith if after such a public declaration France were to suffer some ignominious defeat?
The King agreed. Who was this humble nun? Was it even true that Christ had appeared to her?
He disregarded the message.
And exactly a hundred years later, his descendant paid the price.
But if the start of the Revolution is surprise, the fact that it came to a shuddering halt shortly after 1794 is even more startling.
What caused the Terror to cease?
Imprisoned by their enemies and close to being guillotined, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette finally consecrated themselves to the Sacred Heart.
It was too late for them to be saved from a brutal beheading. Nevertheless, I’m convinced it was this that caused the Terror to peter out. Although, judging by current events, stability has never been restored.
France is in a shambles. Nevertheless, there’s cause for hope.
But that’s a story for a later date.