1709 - Food Availability

Food Availability

Famine ravages Europe as frost kills crops, fruit trees, and domestic fowl as far south as the Mediterranean Coast. France has food riots; officials set up grain depots in an effort to make distribution more equitable, but they continue to export grain reserves. Restrictions on internal trade strangle shipments of food stores, keep food prices high, and contribute to the starvation.

"The fear of having no bread has agitated the people to the point of fury," writes French controller general of finances Nicolas Des Marets, 61, seigneur de Maillebois. "They have taken up arms for the purpose of seizing grain by force; there have been riots at Rouen, at Paris, and in nearly all the provinces; they are carrying on a kind of war that never ceases except when they are occupied with the harvest."

"The winter was terrible," writes the duc de Saint-Simon Louis de Rouvroy, 34, in his journal: "The memory of man could find no parallel to it. The frost came suddenly on Twelfth Night, and lasted nearly two months, beyond all recollection. In four days the Seine and all the other rivers were frozen, and what had never been seen before, the sea froze all along the coasts, so as to bear carts, even heavily laden, upon it [see environment [England], 1684]. The violence of the cold was such that the strongest liquors broke their bottles in cupboards of rooms with fires in them. There were no walnut trees, no olive trees, no apple trees, no vines left. The other trees died in great numbers; the gardens perished, and all the grain in the earth. It is impossible to imagine the desolation of this general ruin."

Britain's Mediterranean fleet intercepts French grain supplies from North Africa, and market women from Paris march on Versailles to complain about the lack of bread. Mme. de Maintenon, now 73, is falsely accused of having bought up all the grain available (she has, in fact, made a point of eating only black bread to set an example).