The Flour War (Guerre des Farines), 1775

What happened

In the spring of 1775 — fourteen years before the storming of the Bastille — a wave of more than 300 riots swept across the grain-growing regions north, east, and west of Paris, in the Île-de-France, Picardy, Champagne, Normandy, and the Paris Basin. Crowds stopped grain barges on the rivers, broke open bakeries and granaries, and forced the sale of bread and flour at what they considered a just price rather than the market price. The disturbances reached Versailles itself in early May, where a crowd assembled at the gates of the palace, and Paris on 3 May 1775. The episode acquired the name Guerre des Farines — the Flour War.

The immediate trigger was the liberalization of the grain trade. In September 1774, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the reform-minded Controller-General of Finances under the newly crowned Louis XVI, issued an edict removing the old controls on the internal grain trade, allowing prices to float freely as a matter of Physiocratic economic principle. A poor 1774 harvest, the withholding of grain from royal stores in the preceding two years, and rising prices through the winter then collided with the new deregulation. By the time prices spiked in spring 1775, the removal of the customary protections was, in the eyes of the populace, not a neutral market reform but a betrayal.

The food connection

The Flour War is the clearest pre-revolutionary illustration of what the historian E. P. Thompson called the moral economy — the deeply held popular conviction that bread and grain were not ordinary commodities subject to supply and demand, but necessities governed by a customary "just price" that authorities were obligated to enforce. The rioters of 1775 did not simply loot. They frequently practiced what was called taxation populaire: seizing grain or bread and selling it at the traditional fair price, sometimes leaving the money behind for the merchant. This was, in their understanding, not theft but the enforcement of a moral order that the Crown's economists had abandoned. Free trade in grain was, to the Physiocrats, the path to abundance; to the laborer, it was the removal of the only thing standing between his family and hunger.

The human cost

The Flour War itself was not a mass-casualty event by the standards of what followed. The repression, however, was severe and deliberately theatrical. Turgot and Louis XVI restored order by deploying some 25,000 troops across the affected regions, reimposing price controls until the supply recovered, and trying rioters before a special court. Two men — a gauze-worker and a wig-maker's journeyman — were publicly hanged in the Place de Grève in Paris in May 1775 as an example, on a specially erected high gallows. Hundreds more were arrested. The lasting cost was less in bodies than in the demonstration, absorbed by an entire generation, that the price of bread was a matter over which ordinary people would face the gallows.

Political & economic context

The Flour War was a collision between two irreconcilable theories of grain. The Physiocrats — François Quesnay, Turgot, and their circle — held that agriculture was the true source of national wealth and that a free, unregulated grain market would smooth out shortages by drawing supply to where prices were highest. Against this stood centuries of royal administrative practice and popular expectation, in which the monarchy policed grain hoarding, regulated bakers, and intervened to keep bread affordable in the cities, above all in Paris. Turgot's reform was intellectually coherent and politically catastrophic. He was dismissed in 1776. The episode taught the monarchy a lesson it would forget at its peril: that in France, the grain trade could not be treated as an ordinary market without inviting revolt.

Historical legacy

The Flour War is often read, in hindsight, as a rehearsal for 1789 — a "dress rehearsal" for the Revolution, in the phrase used by several historians. It established the template that the Revolution would follow: a harvest failure, a price spike, a perceived betrayal by authority, and crowds — including large numbers of women — taking direct action over bread. It also seeded one of the Revolution's most durable conspiracy theories: the pacte de famine, the belief that the Crown and a cabal of speculators were deliberately engineering scarcity to starve and control the people. The theory was largely false but politically radioactive, and it would resurface with deadly force in 1789.

Food culture legacy

The Flour War cemented bread in French political consciousness as the ultimate test of legitimate government. The slogan reported from the crowds — that the price of bread must come down — became, in effect, a constitutional demand. The episode is a foundational reference point for understanding why, alone among Western nations, France would treat bread as a regulated political right rather than a commodity for nearly two centuries afterward.

Reference notes

• Direct cross-link to: The Bread Crisis of 1788–1789; *The Women's
• March on Versailles*.
• Conceptual cross-link to: moral economy (shared framing with *The
• English Bread Riots and the Corn Laws) and to The Roman Annona* on the
• theme of state responsibility for the grain supply.
• Related cuisine: French. Related ingredient entries: wheat, flour,
• the pain/baguette family.
• Content advisory placement: standard section advisory; no graphic
• content beyond the noted executions.