A bread famine

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 16

A bread famine

By the 1700 s people had been planting fiwheat "and making bread for a long time. All that time the peasants had been planting wheat without nourishing the ground in which it grew. The earth grew poorer, and poorer, and the crops began to fail. The peasants were starving because bread was one of their staple foods. By 1715 about six million French peasants, one-third of the population, died of starvation.'France was one of the

richest nations in the world at the time. A Frenchman named Parmentier, who had studied people’s diets, found that the health of a country depended on the quality of the flour produced. He tried to persuade the French people to use potatoes as a food instead of the bread made from the poor flour. The peasants thought that potatoes were poisonous and would not eat them. The bread famine was one

of the causes of the French Revolution. The peasants believed that their king! Louis XVI was involved in a plot to raise the price of bread. They called him the Baker, and his wife Marie Antionette, the Bakers Wife. They marched on the King's Palace at Versailles where they thought he had supplies of grain hidden. There were no hidden stores of grain however, and when Marie Antoinette heard the peasants had no bread she said “Let them eat cake."