Food Riots and Peasant Uprisings

Population growth, inflation, and the extension of the market system put added pressure on the already beleaguered poor. In the last half of the eighteenth century, the food supply became the focus of political and social conflict. Poor people in Europe’s villages and towns believed that it was the government’s responsibility to ensure they had enough food, and many governments did stockpile grain to make up for the occasional bad harvest. At the same time, in keeping with Adam Smith’s and the French physiocrats’ free-market proposals, governments wanted to allow grain prices to rise with market demand because higher profits would motivate producers to increase the overall supply of food.

Free trade in grain meant selling to the highest bidder, even if that bidder was a foreign merchant. In the short run, in times of scarcity, big landowners and farmers could make huge profits by selling grain outside their hometowns. This practice enraged poor farmers, agricultural workers, and urban wageworkers, who could not afford the higher prices. Lacking the political means to affect policy, the poor could enforce their desire for old-fashioned price regulation only by rioting. Most did not pillage or steal grain but rather forced the sale of grain or flour at a “just” price and blocked the shipment of grain out of their villages to other markets. Women often led these “popular price fixings,” as they were called in France, in desperate attempts to protect the food supply for their children.

Such food riots occurred regularly in Britain and France in the last half of the eighteenth century. One of the most turbulent was the so-called Flour War in France in 1775. Turgot’s deregulation of the grain trade in 1774 caused prices to rise in several provincial cities. Rioting spread from there to the Paris region, where villagers attacked grain convoys heading to the capital city. Local officials often ordered merchants and bakers to sell at the price the rioters demanded, only to find themselves arrested by the central government for overriding free trade. The government brought in troops to restore order and introduced the death penalty for rioting.

Frustrations with serfdom and hopes for a miraculous transformation provoked the Pugachev rebellion in Russia beginning in 1773. An army deserter from the southeast frontier region, Emelian Pugachev (1742–1775) claimed to be Tsar Peter III, the dead husband of Catherine the Great. Pugachev’s appearance seemed to confirm peasant hopes for a “redeemer tsar” who would save the people from oppression. He rallied around him Cossacks like himself who resented the loss of their old tribal independence. Nearly three million people eventually participated, making this the largest single rebellion in the history of tsarist Russia. When Pugachev urged the peasants to attack the nobility and seize their estates, hundreds of noble families perished. Finally, the army captured the rebel leader and brought him in an iron cage to Moscow, where he was tortured and executed. In the aftermath, Catherine tightened the nobles’ control over their serfs with the Charter of the Nobility and harshly punished those who dared to criticize serfdom.