Selling Legitimacy

Abstract

In November 1793, the Convention acknowledged that goods passed through multiple hands en route to consumers, and it began to reform the Maximum to include both wholesale and retail prices. This chapter dissects how the Dames, their brokers, and market police compelled the deputies to economically affirm and politically legitimize merchants as useful citizens in their revisions. During the five months it took the state to plan tiered prices, retailers like the Dames remained unable to legally sell at a profit. To protect retailers and the food trade, the Dames and market police urged the deputies to hasten their recalculations. From a pragmatic perspective, they highlighted marketplace practices to illustrate why retailers’ services were necessary for supplying Parisians. From an ideological perspective, they argued that symbiotic trading relationships between merchants and consumers naturally underscored fraternal bonds among cooperative citizens. They also insisted that the municipal government balance commercial relationships by enforcing ceilings on workers’ wages. Due to police reports and merchants’ interventions, the national political economy of the Terror ultimately bent to local realities of les Halles. When the Thermidorians abolished the Maximum in December 1794, crippling inflation created shared interests between previously opposed retailers and wage workers, which encouraged class-based political alliances.