Paris has risen, once again, like the Ocean-tide; is flowing toward the Tuileries, for Bread and a Constitution.
—Thomas Carlyle1
Queen Marie Antoinette, the notorious wife of Louis XVI, is best remembered for an expression she never uttered. According to legend, when Marie Antoinette was told that the people of France had no more bread to eat, she replied, “Let them eat cake!” In the French version of this tale, she actually instructs them to eat brioche, a very buttery and sweet loaf. In truth, there is no evidence that she ever said anything remotely like this, but it became a useful shorthand for the apparent callousness and ignorance of the French monarchs.
Kings and emperors have long understood the danger of ignoring the public’s need for their daily bread. Roman emperor Augustus famously bribed the masses into quiescence with free grain and bloody spectacles, later cynically dubbed “bread and circuses.” The French monarchy itself had previously tried to regulate the supply of grain through stockpiling and sales restrictions. So the idea that the queen either did not understand the importance of bread, or did not care, was a particularly effective bit of character assassination.
It helped that Marie Antoinette was deeply unpopular to begin with. She had married the future Louis XVI in 1770, at the age of fourteen, and was described as a very charming but frivolous young woman. Her union with Louis began unhappily, and it took eight years for their first child to be born. She was Austrian, at a time when France had only recently allied with its historic enemy. And her obvious preference for luxurious clothes, fine jewelry, and expensive food and furnishings, at a time when France was already sinking into debt thanks to poor governance and ruinous wars, made her an obvious target for public anger.
Marie Antoinette was known to have a sweet tooth, even baking cakes and pastries herself. One of her specialties was a lovely light meringue. She also liked fresh vegetables and had built for herself a small idealized peasant village on the grounds of Versailles. It was a place where she could pretend to be a shepherdess and experience the “rustic life.” But it was also a working farm that supplied the kitchens of Versailles.
Her rustic village did not endear her with the masses, who saw it as another waste of money by a monarchy who did not appreciate their problems. This smoldering resentment intensified in 1788–89, when the price of bread rose due to bad weather and poor harvests. Bread was typically the cheapest way for people to fill their bellies; for the poorest classes, bread (or gruel made from the same grains) might furnish up to 95 percent of daily caloric intake, with people eating one to three pounds of whole-grain bread per day.2 More than half the average household budget was spent on it. So when the price of bread doubled, things became quite desperate for a large part of the population, and this eventually helped fuel the motor of revolution.
Marie Antoinette received much of the blame for the food shortage; the king was still seen as a sort of decent but doltish buffoon, in thrall to his arrogant and decadent wife. So when Paris experienced a complete lack of bread in October 1789, three months after the fall of the Bastille, a crowd of perhaps ten thousand women walked from Paris to Versailles, determined to obtain bread for their families and bring the king back to the capital. Away from the bubble of Versailles, forced to confront the poverty and hunger in Paris, Louis would hopefully sympathize with his subjects and make sure bread was available. The marchers arrived at Versailles peacefully enough, and the king promised to provide grain, but overnight the crowd turned violent and invaded the palace. The queen nearly lost her life, only narrowly escaping the furious mob who attacked her chambers. Calm was restored when the royal family agreed to return to Paris, alongside fifty wagonloads of wheat and flour. The women accompanied them all the way, shouting, “We won’t lack bread anymore: we’ve brought back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy.” The royal family took up residence in the Palais des Tuileries, essentially hostages to the goodwill of the revolutionary Assembly and the Parisian mob.
Thousands of women escort the royal family—“the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy”—back to Paris in the hopes of ensuring a daily supply of bread. From the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Unattributed. Epoque du 6 octobre 1789, l’après diné, à Versailles les héroines françaises ramènent le roi dans Paris, pour y faire sa principale résidence (1789).
This became an increasingly fraught prospect, as the Assembly issued ever more radical decrees. All noble titles and ranks were abolished, and local parlements (courts) disbanded. The Catholic Church in France was subordinated to the state and no longer allowed to collect the tithe; monasteries were shut down and all Church property confiscated and sold to pay down the national debt. France’s patchwork of idiosyncratic regions was replaced by a new system of eighty-three départements, with uniform administrative structures, enabling greater centralization of political authority. Guilds, trade monopolies, and internal tariffs were abolished in order to liberalize commerce and expand economic opportunities.
Fearful of what might come next, the royal family tried to flee Paris in June 1791. But the escape was badly executed and they were caught in Varennes, well short of their intended destination of Metz. There are a number of legends around this escape: one holds that the gluttonous king fatefully delayed his flight by stopping at the town of Sainte-Menehould to try its famous pigs’ trotters, while another claims he tarried to enjoy some Brie de Meaux. These are probably just embellishments, but it is true that the royals journeyed through the countryside at a glacial pace, which made their recapture inevitable.
The king was returned to Paris, and shortly afterward the Assembly approved the first French constitution. It empowered a new Legislative Assembly with sweeping political powers, while the king retained a veto. But this epic achievement was met with severe economic crisis and growing social unrest. Peasants, defrocked clergy, and émigré nobles fomented rebellion, and other European monarchs grew increasingly hostile. Finally, the king and the revolutionaries could agree on something: the best recourse for France was war (the king thought this was his best chance to restore the absolute monarchy, while the revolutionaries believed victory would entrench and spread the revolution). In April 1792, France declared war on Austria.
The war went badly. Austrian and Prussian forces menaced Paris, which only inflamed the situation further. In August, a mob attacked the Palais des Tuileries, and the royal family fled to the Legislative Assembly for protection—but the Assembly caved to popular pressure and voted to arrest the king. It also decided to hold new elections, with universal suffrage, for what would now be called the National Convention. In September, the Convention ended the constitutional monarchy and proclaimed France a republic, and French armies began winning victories in the field. The revolution had been saved.
Louis and Marie Antoinette, however, were doomed. Imprisoned in the towering Temple fortress with their two children, in conditions that left them ill and weak, they clung to scant hopes of rescue from faithful friends or foreign armies. Instead, the king was put on trial and sent to the guillotine in January 1793. Marie Antoinette followed him that October. Their young son died in the Temple prison two years later; only their daughter survived.
The killing of the king marked an irrevocable moment for the revolution. After regicide, there was no going back. All efforts were directed at building and sustaining the republic, which was threatened by foreign armies, counterrevolutionary uprisings, and social and economic unrest. More than twenty thousand people died in the cruel repression known as la Terreur, or the Reign of Terror (1793–94), but the revolutionary government also understood the need to provide for its citizens, both to contain opposition and to reform society according to republican ideals. Robespierre himself wrote, in 1793, “When, then, will the people be educated? When they have enough bread to eat . . .”3 Price controls were instituted on a range of basic foodstuffs, including bread.
Another decree stated: “Because wealth and poverty shall disappear in the new egalitarian regime, there shall no longer be made a bread of fine flour for the rich and a bread of bran for the poor. All bakers shall, on the penalty of imprisonment, make only one good type of bread, the bread of equality.”4 This pain d’égalité was a very dense and unappealing bread, three-quarters wheat and one-quarter rye, and a great disappointment to a populace who had hoped social equality would mean aristocratic white bread for everyone. The real reason for the decree was a severe grain shortage, as price controls led French farmers to grow less grain and war with Britain impeded grain imports, but it was a nice bit of revolutionary rhetoric. Policies such as these make Robespierre a controversial historical figure: the embodiment of pure evil to conservatives, perhaps of necessary evil to some liberals, but altogether admirable to some Marxists.
Bread is still an essential and emblematic food for the French, but it is consumed far less than during the revolutionary era. Today, the average French person consumes about 120 grams of bread daily, which is four to ten times less than during the eighteenth century.5 This does not mean that bread has become unpopular—virtually every French person eats bread—but it is a sign that food habits are evolving and diversifying. Still, the importance of bread can be seen in the countless small villages of France, where the last independent business to survive is usually the bakery; even towns without a post office or supermarket will manage to keep a bakery afloat.
In short, there is a reason that the French believe the “holy trinity of the table” includes not only wine and cheese but bread.6 Had the royal heads of France only recognized this simple truth, the history of France, and indeed of liberal democracy, might look very different indeed.