The Large Market : the food supply of Paris under the Ancien Régime[Le Grand Marché : l'approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l'Ancien Régime]

The place occupied by bread in the diet, the economy and the imagination of the 17th and 18th centuries should not obscure the fact that city dwellers, particularly the wealthiest, consumed a wide variety of edibles: in Paris, a metropolis with a large population and wealthy elites, the food trade was prodigiously diverse. For each major food family, this book examines the organisation of supplies by attempting to answer a few simple questions: Where did the food come from? What routes did they take from their place of production? Who were the people in charge of trading and transferring them? What were the volumes needed for the city's consumption? How did the authorities intervene in the process? The answers offer a lively, often even picturesque reconstruction of what the food supply of Paris was like at the time. Following, from their place of origin, beef, oysters, butter or olive oil - to give just a few examples - allows us to discover the methods used by producers, transporters and merchants. This material history remains inseparable from the political history, for it appears that the monarchy took much greater care of the various branches of supply than was imagined. Far from being concerned only with wheat, it knew how to exercise no less scrupulous vigilance with regard to other commodities. This book finally answers a problem of economic history, by evaluating the role of supply in the economy of the kingdom. It shows that, from the modern era, the supply of food to Paris concerned the whole country, that it provoked a vast financial redistribution to the benefit of the provinces and that it was a powerful engine of specialisation for the agricultural and fishing sectors.