The Flour War refers to a wave of riots from April to May 1775, in the northern, eastern, and western parts of the Kingdom of France.
Contributing factors to the riots include poor weather and harvests, and the withholding by police of public grain supplies from the royal stores in 1773–1774.
This large-scale revolt subsided following wheat price controls imposed by Turgot, Louis XVI's Controller-General of Finances (before the supply recovered), and the deploying of military troops.
Police held responsibility over many systems in society, even street sweeping; they also exercised a strict control over the food supply.
a royal intervention would have been requested, and without a doubt obtained, to assure the supply of the regions most affected, thus mitigating the most severe effects of the famine.
and, acting with astute business acumen in efforts to corner the market, also tended to buy en masse in areas of good harvests to sell in areas of bad harvests where profits could be greater, causing significant price increases and shortages countrywide (less grain in good-harvest regions led to higher prices there as well) as opposed to being confined to local food disruptions.
Consequently, the food shortages of early 1775 affected more people more quickly, and the king was faced with a national crisis as opposed to several small local disturbances.
For a long time, the theory of a political plot woven against Turgot by various coteries of the Court has been advanced as an explanatory factor, a thesis historian George Rudé has dashed.
[citation needed] Over 17 days, 180 conflicts would be listed from the Paris Basin; Jean Nicolas[9] notes 123 distinct riots.
These demonstrations of the moral economy took three distinct forms: Victims were usually merchants or farmers, but more common, as shown by Cynthia Bouton, they were the direct representatives of power.
On April 27, the movement hit the great cultivated plains, initially West Burgundy then, gradually, Beauvaisis and finally Beauce and Brie.
Order was reestablished by a pair of government actions: Five months were needed to put a definitive end to the trouble, but most of the problems were over by May 11, 1775.