• Citer

Mirroring Charlemagne: grain market, royal power, and food policy in the age of Louis XIV

par Devroey, Jean-Pierre
Référence Cucina politica. Il linguaggio del cibo tra pratiche sociali e rappresentazioni ideologiche. Food and Politics. The language of food between social practices and ideological representations (7-9 November 2019: Università di Bologna)
Publication Non publié, 2019-11-07

Communication à un colloque

• Accès en ligne
• Détails
• Contenu
• Statistiques

Résumé :

« Mirroring Charlemagne: Grain Market, Royal Power, and Food Policy in the Age of Louis XIV »The edition of Charlemagne's capitulars by Étienne Baluze in 1677 updated the figure of a king capable of "making the best laws and establishing the right order to ensure (the well-being and) the feeding of his subjects". The lecture will analyse, through Nicolas Delamare's Police Treaty, the relevance of Carolingian legislation on subsistence in contemporary debates on security of supply policy in times of famine. Among these market regulation measures, it is undoubtedly the adoption of the maximum price of cereals that has most impressed political observers since the 17th century, and this theme has occupied a prominent place in the debates on " the liberty of grains " that have marked the policies inspired by the Physiocrats in France, and by Adam Smith's works in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. During the great famine of 1709, Delamare was commissioned by the king to examine the relevance of the answers to be given to the shortage: "Wise precautions against evil were taken every day, he wrote, when it was proposed to stop it all of a sudden by the general fixing of the grains". While directly invoking the measures taken by Charlemagne in 794 and 805, he nevertheless adopted an opinion against price fixing, foreshadowing the deregulation measures adopted a generation later by Minister Turgot. As suggested by Steven Kaplan's work, the abandonment of the figure of the feeder king constitutes a turning point that prefigures the end of the "moral economy" and announces the overthrow of the king as "the baker of last resort" as a result of the French revolution.