The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775

by Steven Laurence Kaplan

In preindustrial Europe, dependence on grain shaped every phase of life from economic development to spiritual expression, and the problem of subsistence dominated the everyday order of things in a merciless and unremitting way. Steven Laurence Kaplan’s The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 focuses on the production and distribution of France’s most important commodity in the sprawling urban center of eighteenth-century Paris where provisioning needs were most acutely felt and most difficult to satisfy. Kaplan shows how the relentless demand for bread constructed the pattern of daily life in Paris as decisively and subtly as elaborate protocol governed the social life at Versailles.
Despite the overpowering salience of bread in public and private life, Kaplan’s is the first inquiry into the ways bread exercised its vast and significant empire. Bread framed dreams as well as nightmares. It was the staff of life, the medium of communion, a topic of common discourse, and a mark of tradition as well as transcendence. In his exploration of bread’s materiality and cultural meaning, Kaplan looks at bread’s fashioning of identity and examines the conditions of supply and demand in the marketplace. He also sets forth a complete history of the bakers and their guild, and unmasks the methods used by the authorities in their efforts to regulate trade.
Because the bakers and their bread were central to Parisian daily life, Kaplan’s study is also a comprehensive meditation on an entire society, its government, and its capacity to endure. Long-awaited by French history scholars, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 is a landmark in eighteenth-century historiography, a book that deeply contextualizes, and thus enriches our understanding of one of the most important eras in European history.

1089 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Steven Laurence Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and Visiting Professor of Modern History at the University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin. His many books include a guide to the best bread in Paris, Cherchez le pain: Guide des meilleures boulangeries de Paris, and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1770–1775, also published by Duke University Press. The French government has twice knighted Kaplan for his contributions to the “sustenance and nourishment” of French culture.

Reviews

[John Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thorough books I’ve ever read. Thick description at its finest. The emergence of modernity and civil society as seen through the Bakers. Student of JWW at Princeton.

[David C Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

The central book in Kaplan’s stupendous multi volume studies of bread in the ancien regime. An incredibly detailed excavation of bread making and bread selling as well as the industry’s centrality in the maintenance of public health and social order. Kaplan merges micro/macro economic details with the archival recovery of bakers’ lives as well as considering issues ranging from bread’s symbolic meaning in the body politic (communion) to governmental actions to regulate the trade. At times, the details are overwhelming and it would have been helpful if Kaplan had widened his perspective a little. For instance, the details of bakers’ lives (income, property, marriage etc.) could have used some comparison with other artisans/trades. Kaplan had completed much of his great history of bread in the mid 70s just as the historiographical commitment to total history, spearheaded after WWII by the Annales school, was winding down, replaced by micro studies. One wonders if the end of Total History was because few practitioners had the sustained ambition and drive of a Steve Kaplan, the American who explained French bread.