ABSTRACT
The Napoleonic era has appeared as an uneventful period in the history of French popular grain disturbances. It was a fortuitous time of relative subsistence calm, coming between the shortages of 1794-1795 and 1816-1817, the latter being dubbed by John Post as the 'last great subsistence crisis in the western world' .1 Nevertheless, the harvests of the Consulate and Empire were not entirely trouble-free. Napoleonic France experienced subsistence crises in 1801-1802 and 1811-1812, and for the government, like its revolutionary and ancien regime predecessors, the problem of subsistence remained a constant pre-occupation. Indeed, on a day-to-day basis it was the prefectoral administration's highest priority. For the problem of subsistence was inextricably linked to maintaining social order.2 The ongoing problem faced by the prefectoral administration was to ensure a bread supply and price that appeased producers, distributors, sellers and consumers. Once this balance was upset, invariably a struggle of self-interest ensured that pitched department against department, town against town, city against country, and urban dwellers against farmers, merchants, bakers and local authorities. The complexity of this problem was nowhere more evident than in the Rouen region.
