A new edition of Kaplan’s landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan’s classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. The study focuses on the radical legal changes “freeing” the grain trade in the 1760s, and the ensuing subsistence crisis that violently buffeted the realm and profoundly impacted French life. In the course of the analysis, Kaplan offers crucial insight into the liberal movement, the reform impulse within the government, the character of parliamentary politics, the operation of local administration, the collective attitudes and behaviour of consumers, the famine plot persuasion, the organization of the grain and flour trades, and the management of royal victualing enterprises.



Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, “The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy’ Forty Years Later.”

Foreword by: Sophus A. Reinert