The Bread Queue and the Price of Blame
In a city of 210,000 people in 1788, the price of a four-pound loaf has risen from 9 sous to 14 sous over eighteen months. Wages for a journeyman mason have stayed at 20 sous a day, and he works roughly 250 days a year when weather and demand allow. A local official's report from March notes that 'the people murmur against the bakers' but also that crowds have twice gathered outside the tax office rather than the bakery. The crown has financed a foreign war and a recent harvest shortfall has cut grain supply by an estimated 20 per cent. A merchant's pamphlet blames the price on grain hoarders and calls for free trade in grain; a parish priest's letter blames the price on the sins of the nation and calls for processions. A royal minister proposes deregulating the grain trade entirely.
1. Using the figures provided, assess how far subsistence pressure alone can explain the unrest described. What other causal factor do the sources point toward, and how confident can you be?
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Calculating the squeeze. At 20 sous a day and 250 working days, annual income is about 5,000 sous. At 9 sous a loaf a family buying two loaves a day spends about 6,570 sous a year - already beyond one wage, which is why households relied on multiple earners. At 14 sous the same two loaves cost about 10,220 sous, roughly double a single mason's annual wage. The bread share of a household budget therefore jumps from severe to catastrophic. This is strong quantitative support for subsistence pressure as a driver.
But the targets matter. The report says crowds gathered at the tax office, not only the bakery. That directs attention to fiscal grievance and to the legitimacy of royal authority, not merely hunger. The war debt connects taxation to the price crisis: the crown borrowed, taxed, and then faced a harvest failure it could not manage.
Confidence. High that dearth and price are necessary conditions; moderate that they are sufficient. The sources are a single official report, a merchant pamphlet and a priest's letter, each with an interest in a different culprit. I would treat the hoarding claim as contested, not established, and note the 20 per cent supply shortfall as an estimate rather than a measured figure.
2. The three contemporary voices (official, merchant, priest) offer competing explanations. How should a historian weigh them without simply choosing the most 'modern-sounding' one?
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Each source should be read for its position as much as its content. The official reports to superiors and has an incentive to minimise disorder and to localise blame ('the bakers'), protecting the administration. The merchant's free-trade pamphlet aligns with a policy program and benefits from casting hoarders as the villain; his remedy happens to be the minister's proposal. The priest's moral framing is not automatically worthless: processions and sin-language were a real idiom through which communities organised and made claims on authorities.
The trap is presentism - preferring the merchant because economic explanation feels modern. A better method is to ask what each source can testify to. The official can testify to crowd location and official anxiety. The merchant can testify to an active pamphlet debate and elite opinion. The priest can testify to popular religious culture and to how grievances were articulated.
Where all three converge - that bread is central and that someone must be blamed - we can have more confidence. Where they diverge, we have evidence of contestation, which is itself a historical finding about how the crisis was understood at the time.
3. A student argues the minister's grain deregulation proposal proves that ideology, not hunger, caused the revolution. Evaluate this reasoning.
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The inference is too quick. A proposal existing shows that an idea was in circulation among ministers; it does not show the idea caused popular mobilisation. The chronology matters: deregulation was proposed in response to a crisis already underway, so it is better read as a consequence of pressure than as its origin.
A stronger argument would distinguish levels of causation. Structural conditions (war debt, fiscal system, harvest) set the context; conjunctural events (price spike, crowd gatherings) trigger action; ideological debate shapes how elites respond and how grievances are framed. The evidence here supports ideology as a mediating factor - it explains why the crown hesitated and why pamphlet war erupted - but the bread figures and the tax-office crowds keep material grievance central.
A defensible conclusion: ideology and subsistence are not rival explanations but operate at different levels, and the exam rewards showing that relationship rather than picking a winner. The student should also note the proposal's fate is unstated, so its influence is unproven.