Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/119

Rh of M. Mourlot, embodying documents from the records of the municipalities of the district of Alençon, deal with all economic problems, including the general maximum. The characteristic difficulties in the enforcement of the maximum laws in Paris and in its neighborhood are made vividly apparent in the reports of the "Observers" Grivel and Siret, which M. Caron has printed at length in the Commission's Bulletin of 1907.

The most satisfactory studies of price-making in France deal with local situations: for example, that of M. Babeau, in his history of Troyes during the Revolution. The Commission's Bulletin of 1907 contains an enlightening account by M. Lefebvre of the way the maximum worked in the district of Bergues. The same writer has also described the experience of a particular commune of that district. The more comprehensive accounts are open to the charge of fragmentariness or prejudice. Even that of M. Levasseur, in the revised edition of his Histoire des Classes Ouvrières en France, is meagre and not free from confusion. He makes no clear statement of the modifications introduced by the law of the 11th Brumaire, nor does he give an adequate notion of the enormous difficulties which the government had to overcome before it issued its schedules of prices. The principal weakness in his treatment, however, is its failure to consider the influence of a war which arrayed against France nearly every European power. He apparently regarded the argument for complete economic freedom as unaffected by such a circumstance. Taine's long chapter on the subject equally disregards this fact. His main interest appears to have been to illustrate Jacobin violence and administrative incapacity. The most instructive of the older treatments is in Biollay's Les Prix en 1790, although his description of the price legislation of 1793 is only incidental.

The French experiment with maximum prices was confessedly a failure; at least such was the declared opinion of the Convention in December, 1794, when the maximum laws, were repealed. The question is, Was the failure real?—and, if so, What was the reason? A recent writer on the food dictatorship in Germany alleges the greed of the farmer as the cause of the supposed failure