So, the cake was a lie!
Exactly. Many people forget that a farm is a seasonal enterprise. Imagine you could only go to the supermarket one week a year and had to buy all the food you’d need for the next year during that week.
Sassyfras: It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but Kenneth Stampp’s *The Peculiar Institution *presents evidence that American slaves didn’t eat all that well, a diet high in starch and hog meat, but lacking many fruits and vegetables.
There were all sorts of things that could have been done, even without resorting to blatant tyranny. The government could have abolished tax farming, reformed the tariff system and got rid of trade barriers, raised taxes on the wealthy or the Church, suppressed seigneurial priviliges, cut spending on the Court and the military, supported middle-class civil servants and lawyers against the provincial courts, spent money on famine relief and infrastructure or all of the them at once. The problem was that all of these would likely have made the government’s troubles worse in the short term, generally by adding a whole lot of wealthy and influential people to its list of enemies.
By the time the peasants were revolting, the sans-culottes were rioting in the cities and agitators were openly calling for the overthrow of the system, alienating the nobility (who also made up most of the officer corps), the clergy and/or the bureaucracy was obviously dangerous. Before things got that bad, of course, there was no motivation to do anything that destabilising. The peasants are hungry? They were hungry in my grandfather’s time. The provinces are revolting? My dear, the provinces were always revolting. Relax, have a drink, let’s talk about important things, like hunting, or fashion, or the theatre. It will all blow over, these things always do…
Regimes rarely collapse because the rulers have a clear-cut choice between good and bad policies and go the wrong way. More usually the choice is between a risky change of course with a clear downside in the short term and a possible benefit in the indefinite future, or betting that this straw won’t break the camel’s back.
That was the strategy eventually employed by the revolutionaries–confiscating the estates of the emigres. They could get away with it, because they had mass support.
It wasn’t a viable strategy for Louis XVI. He wasn’t a mass leader and had no clue how to become one. By all accounts he was an atrocious public speaker with few interpersonal skills and not much on the “vision thing”.
The revolt of the Fronde, 140 years (but only two kings) previous, had impressed upon the Bourbons once and for all the dangers of pissing off the nobility. Louis XIV made a devil’s bargain with the nobles–they could keep their estates and tax privileges and good life, as long as they allowed him to run the kingdom.
Any curtailment of those privileges (much less an outright confiscation) risked undoing that bargain. When Louis XVI proposed mild reforms in 1787, the noble-dominated Parlement of Paris refused to register the necessary decrees. Louis eventually jammed them through by royal fiat, but with nobles and populace both seething with revolt, he was forced to call the Estates-General in 1789.
Collectively, yes. But individually, you get the same problem you always do, in that it’s no one person’s problem to solve.
It’s also not a reliable assumption that Louis XVI even knew the true extent of the rottenness of the system. This is, after all, 1789, when news travelled no faster than a horse and Louis was shielded from the facts by any number of levels of sycophants.
Besides, countries were run under a whole different set of assumptions back then. Nobody in the government cared what was happening to the peasants; France didn’t belong to the peasants. France belonged to the aristocracy.
A modern equivalent would be a corporation. The purpose of the corporation is to serve the stockholders not the employees. Peasants starving or employees getting laid off is unfortunate, sure, but it’s not really the organization’s concern.
It was the government trying to do some of that stuff that sparked the Revolution. Necker’s attempts to cut spending and Calone’s attempt to tax the clergy and nobles triggered the whole thing.
Arguably. It’s also arguable that it was Louis’s failure to consistently support reform - and build a consensus for it - that doomed him. Instead he oscillated between high-handedly decreeing changes and backing down when the muttering got too loud. He eventually fired both Necker and Calonne in the face of noble opposition and Necker’s dismissal at least was desperately unpopular with the country at large.
There were plenty of people at court,- even among the high nobility - who recognised that the system had to change. That was one of the reasons the Revolution was able to get off the ground, rather than the revolting peasants simply being shot. But the “something must be done” faction at Versailles never managed to coalesce into a coherent party with a consistent set of policies.
Trying to apply bourgoise modern notions of diet to the 18th century is pretty foolish. It’s true it caused dietary problems for slaves (sometimes including vitamin deficiency), but on the whole the quantity was evidently sufficient to sustain a huge population boom. Poor whites were far more free to get what they wanted, but the basic diet was quite similar among much of the lower-class South. To the extent it was a problem, this at least was a failure of knowledge and not morals.
Anyway, the irony is that poor Louis really did want reform and apparently was a very good man. But he wasn’t a politician, much less a statesman, and unfortunately France at the time was riven by hateful but very anarchic factions. Look at the history of the Revolution - one power group after another killing their perceived enemies, often last week’s allies. I’m not sure anyone could really have solved the problem. Louis simply had too few people who were willing to fix things on his side, and it simply wasn’t clear what could be changed, let alone what needed to change.
When people are starving due to poor crop production, or crippling taxation, why is it that no one ever starts eating the scavenger animals? If the people on Survivor get by catching and eating rats, random birds that are flying by, and other non-traditional ‘game’, why not do the same when these folks are starving? Yes, I’m sure rats were considered ‘dirty’, but birds too? And how quickly would my definition of ‘dirty’ change when I start looking like a human skeleton? It would seem easy enough to fashion some kind of net, scatter an area with some seeds, and catch whatever flew in to eat the seeds. In many cases, these pest animals may be partially responsible for destroying the crops, so it seems logical that you’d conclude by eating them, there would be less of them around to destroy your crops in the future…
Do people at the coast have this same problem? I would think not. No more wheat? Screw it, let’s kill a rat, cut it up as bait, and eat whatever we can catch from the sea, river, etc. Seems like a better idea than starving. If everyone has a bunch of kids running around anyway, what better thing to have them do while you are tilling the fields all day? Little Francois may be too small to work with the horses, but he can sure as Hell spend all day being a kid down at the stream catching my starving ass some dinner in the form of frogs, crayfish, fish, or whatever else happens by…
My guess is that people probably did eat whatever they could find, but there are only so many people that small game subsistence hunting can adequately support. And even if people did go out and catch pigeons or whatnot, they may not have outright starved from a meager diet of small game, but malnourishment probably would still have been an issue. It is malnourishment that leads to a large proportion of famine deaths due to increased susceptibility to diseases that a healthier body would have been able to fight off.
Another issue that tended to worsen famines is that draft animals were usually the first to go as a source for food. This provided a short-term boost to food supply, but would be detrimental to crop production and goods transport later on. Lacking the means to earn a decent livelihood dependent on such animals only drove the peasants deeper into a cycle of malnourishment and privation. Surviving a famine was many times not just an issue of having enough food to eat to keep from starving, but being prepared to ramp up production again when conditions for farming improved.