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....