ABSTRACT
In 1963, Peter Amann wrote in the pages of The American Historical Review that "For over a century the French Revolution of 1848 has proved a source of embarrassment for historians". The general crisis of the French economy was actually a sequence of several interrelated crises. The crise de subsistance, as Ernest Labroussee called it, ended with an abundant harvest in 1847. Grain became cheap once again and bread rioting stopped. Labrousse and his colleagues noted that it extended into 1848, but it was the economic historian T. J. Markovitch who later identified the severity of the final phase, which was a crisis of production. Marchandage comes from the word marchand, one "whose profession is to buy and sell", a marchandeur being one who buys and sells the work of others. The principal reason that contractors found marchandage so advantageous around 1840 was that Paris was in the midst of a building boom.
