The Great Famine
Records from Beauvais in France from 1693–94 document the significant rise in the prices of grain and other foodstuffs, the subsequent starvation, and the misery of the poor. The starving population resorted to eating cats and various animal remnants discarded by butchers (such as heads, entrails, offal, and blood). Others cooked roots and grasses at home, while some dug up beans and grains sown earlier in the spring. These desperate measures led to various diseases.
Similar accounts have been preserved from almost all parts of France, except Brittany and the southern provinces. In many settlements, the number of deaths rose to two, three, or even four times the usual rate. According to a priest in Vivarais, people were found dead in the fields, having perished while chewing on grass. Within a few months, a tenth of the French population ended up in cemeteries. Meanwhile, the number of births fell to half the usual rate, and infant mortality was high. Church bells were rarely rung to celebrate weddings.
Two contemporary economists, Boisguillebert and Vauban, identified the causes. Adverse weather conditions resulted in a mediocre harvest in 1691, a poor one in 1692, and a catastrophic one in 1693, producing only half or a third of the usual yields. Prices skyrocketed; for instance, the price of rye in Provins increased by 8.6 times between 1688 and 1694. Contributing factors included speculative buying, military procurement, and overseas exports. Panic led to riots in markets, with commercial shipments being attacked and looted.
Hunger and deprivation were essentially a result of high prices. Flour and bread were available, but not everyone could afford them. Hunger became a societal catastrophe. In some regions, three-quarters of peasant households could not sustain their families and were forced into day labor. If previously half their income was spent on bread, their situation became hopeless when bread prices quadrupled, and they lost their income. They could only rely on their savings and charity, which were minimal in cities and nonexistent in rural areas.
Most people had no reserves, leading to severe famine. Wars, taxes, military raids, and unstable currency drained household finances. This burden fell on the generation born between 1648 and 1663, who had to care for both their children and the elderly. The king attempted to intervene with measures to mitigate the crisis and unrest, but these existed only on paper. The general decline also affected the state, forcing reductions in taxes and war expenditures during the war. Officials could not even pay for the deceased, necessitating peace negotiations.
The domestic political consequence was the emergence of internal opposition, which demanded the end of conquests, internal reconstruction, and the prevention of further impoverishment of the nobility. The accumulated difficulties also called for stability: high prices, rural poverty, stagnant trade, financial exhaustion, economic fragility, population decline, military desertion, the failure of Gallicanism, and, finally, the devastating famine.
Pierre Goubert "Le grande famine" in Louis XIV. et vingt millons de Francais, Fayard, 1966, ford. Kis Nagy Gábor