Flour war

The so-called flour war ( French guerre des farines ) was an uprising in France in April and May 1775 against flour and bread prices that were perceived as too high.

At that time, a large part of the French rural population lived in abject poverty and had to fight for their “daily bread”. Two thirds of the peasant population could not live from the produce of their own fields alone and was dependent on additional, dependent work to survive; a third could hardly survive even with it.

Bad harvests in 1774 led to a rise in the price of grain , flour and bread . In the spring of 1775 the situation deteriorated more and more, stocks were gradually running out, but the new harvest had not yet arrived. The weekly increase in prices raised the fear of famine among the rural poor .

On April 27, 1775, an angry crowd demanded fair grain prices at the grain market in Beaumont-sur-Oise (in the Oise valley ) and eventually plundered the market. The unrest quickly spread to the surrounding area and into the suburbs of Paris .

On the one hand, the rebels blamed the grain traders, large farmers and speculators for the price increases that they considered unsustainable, but above all the liberalization of the grain trade ( Liberalization des grains ), which had only recently been implemented by Minister Turgot . The flour war finally led to King Louis XVI. had to withdraw liberalization and have the grain trade regulated by the state again.

Otherwise the flour war was suppressed with great severity and with the help of 25,000 soldiers, two "leaders" were sentenced to death (and later pardoned; one received the galley penalty instead , the other was exiled ).

The flour war is often seen as a forerunner of the French Revolution , as excessively high bread prices continued to cause displeasure among the common population and ultimately contributed to the revolution in 1789.

literature

• GEO Epoch No. 22: French Revolution, pp. 28–33