Several décades after the fall of Robespierre, the Convention nationale issued a decree reorganizing its committees on 7 fructidor II. The collections in the Hub have at least two sources for this decree, one in the Newberry French Revolution Collection which was printed by the order of the Convention, and the other reproduced in the Baudouin collection of Revolutionary Laws. One of the 16 committees, with a small but significant charge was the Comité d'agriculture et des arts:
This was, of course, nothing new. Previous revolutionary assemblies have organized agriculture committees and commissions (Mellah, 2020) and this committee simply replaced the Convention's Comité d'agriculture. Concerns with agrarian life and subsistence was a pressing issue during the period. A full text search, using the PhiloLogic4 instance, of the Revolutionary Laws collection shows several hundred decrees being introduced with variations on the expression "après avoir entendu le rapport de son comité d'agriculture".
Starting from PhiloLogic search results, one can follow the links to the individual laws containing the phase (example link) and, in many cases, navigate from the law to the legislative session in the Archives Parlementaires by clicking on a date, such as Du 11 Octobre. == 13 du même mois.
The range of activities of the agriculture committees were not simply limited to the production of reports for potential legislative action. Searching for "convention agriculture" in the Hub, returns some 15 titles which reflect the scope of the interests of the Convention's agriculture committee. The committee published manuals for the cultivation, storage and use of various crops such as potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, all of which link back to the long tradition of agricultural writings. Looking at the list of similar documents found for Instruction sur la conservation et les usages des pommes-de-terre, for example, finds a relevant number of Ancien Regime texts, including a chapter on potatoes from the 1772 translation of Arthur Young's The farmer's guide.
Grain and bread were, of course, critically important. In 1794, the committee published Moyens propres a rendre plus économique l'emploi des farines : provenant des grains nouvellement récoltés ; et à augmenter la qualité du pain qu'elles doivent donner (link) which is linked by similarity measures to a variety of earlier texts, including the chapter on grains in Duhamel du Monceau's, Traité de la culture des terres, suivant les principes de M. Tull, Anglois (1753). Examination of the titles most closely related to this text by topic and vocabulary show a mixture of practical as well as more theoretical works.
Given that bread constituted at least half of the average wage earners' expenditures through the 18th century (link), it is no surprise that the conditions of the grain trade and the price of bread was of capital importance and was widely debated in the two weeks leading up to the loi du Maximum of 1793 (RevLaws AP). The first document on the search "convention agriculture" in the Hub is to an anonymous text Mémoire sur la fixation du maximum du prix des grains dans toute la France : remis au Comité d'agriculture de la Convention nationale, l'an premier de la République [1792] found in the Newberry FRC (link). The collections contain two other renditions of this document, which are shown as a the top two most similar documents on reported at the top of link. The first as an annex to the April 25, 1793 session of the Convention found in the Archives Parlementaires and the second in Goldsmiths-Kress collection. The anonymous author opens unequivocally:
Taking on the elder Mirabeau (the friend of man) and the physiocratic tradition of free trade before the Revolution, he writes:
Des philosophes, amis des hommes, avaient cru voir, dans la liberté indéfinie du commerce et même de l'exportation des grains, un principe de fécondité et d'abondance qu'ils regardaient comme le plus sûr préservatif contre la famine. Pendant qu'ils se livraient à ces contemplations, un gouvernement populicide opérait la famine par le commerce et par l'exportation des grains; l'absurdité du système de la liberté indéfinie de l'exportation a été démontrée par le fait, et cette exportation a été prohibée par l'Assemblée constituante. [1]
The list of top 20 most similar documents and the documents most related topics show an interesting mix of opinions for and against free trade in grain, with many echoes back to the earlier debates as far back as the Turgot ministry. Beffroy's Rapport fait au nom de la section des subsistances chargée de combattre les économistes (1792) is equally as pointed
On the other side, Creuzé-Latouche's Sur les subsistances (1793) makes the case that the free trade in grain implemented in the Turgot administration resulted in low and stable prices across the country in spite of poor harvests in those years. Further, he writes, Turgot was defending the liberty and sovereignty of the people:
Mais pour vous faire mieux connoître quel étoit ce ministre Turgot, qui avoit voulu établir la liberté entière du commerce des grains, il faut vous dire qu'il supprima les corvées , qu'il donna , le premier, l'idée des assemblées provinciales, qui dévoient bientôt rappeler la nation a sa souveraineté ; et qu'il se fit chasser de la cour , pour avoir voulu défendre la liberté du peuple, et abolir les fiefs. (link)
As a defense of free trade in general, and Turgot in particular, Sur les subsistances, links back to many earlier discussions of this vexed subject, including Mirabeau's L'Ami des hommes and Philosophie rurale, Young's Arithmétique politique and articles from Ephemerides du Citoyen, ou Bibliotheque Raisonee des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
By integrating heterogenous collections, ranging from Revolutionary laws as enacted, to the debates and publications surrounding these events, to the practical handbooks and theoretical treatises, we can direct attention from the specific recommendations of an important committee to a much broader context. Working with texts in this context opens the reader to multiple crosscurrents of topics and themes that can be unexpected and illuminating.
Returning to where we started, in 1795, the Comité d'agriculture et des arts published Instruction sur l'emploi de la lie de vin, which opens with:
La lie de vin , rejettée dans plusieurs cantons de la France, comme un résidu sans valeur , peut cependant produire une quantité considérable de potasse utile pour les verreries, les savonneries et plusieurs antres arts , particulièrement pour la fabrication du salpêtre , le premier besoin de la liberté contre les efforts de la tyrannie.
Here, the practical, theoretical and the political merge. The twenty most similar documents include discussions of gunpowder, chemistry, manufacturing, and ranging from Lavoisier's ARTICLE XII. De l'usage de la Potasse pour la fabrication du Salpêtre in Instruction sur l'établissement des nitrières et sur la fabrication du saltpêtre (1777) to Dulac's L'agonie de tous les tyrans, ou, Les moyens de fabriquer la foudre qui va les exterminer (1793).
