Category: Class Warfare

• The French "Bread Famine" Plot

  This theory held that aristocrats, grain merchants, ministers, or hidden profiteers deliberately hoarded grain in order to starve the people and break popular political will. Though it had deep eighteenth-century roots in the so-called famine plot or pacte de famine, it remained highly influential in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary political imagination. In its early nineteenth-century form, it was often used to explain bread scarcity as intentional class war rather than mere harvest failure or market instability. The documented record clearly shows that famine-plot beliefs were widespread and recurrent in French political culture. What remains unproven is the claim of one coherent aristocratic grain-hoarding cartel deliberately starving revolutionaries.