At ease with the canonical division of labor, historians of economic thought do not characteristically toil to articulate ideas with social and political actuality: ideas have their logic, their genealogy, and their inherent prestige, without requiring some sort of reality check. To the extent that social historians in particular have frequently reduced texts (and the modes of cultural production) to mere illustrations or reflections of a deeper, structuring phenomenology, it may have seemed not merely convenient, but vital, for intellectual historians to take refuge in an idealist citadel, where ideas could be appreciated for their intrinsic interest. This general historiographical and epistemological question concerning the linkages between representation and lived experience, as well as their respective legitimacy and accessibility, sometimes cast into hyperbolic relief, if not outright caricature, during the post modern moment and the linguistic turn, takes on a particularly knotty complexity in the great debates over the grain question that roiled France, and other countries, during the long eighteenth century.

For while numerous participants, as Voltaire puckishly suggested, could not tell wheat apart from the “lesser” grains, and tilled the soil arduously in their elegant cabinets, others actually speculated in the grain trade even as they wrote about it. The list includes the international shipper, slave trader and businessman Jean-Gabriel Montaudouin de la Touche, from Gournay's circle; Guillaume François Le Trosne, magistrate on the présidial court of Orléans, from Quesnay's chapel; Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin, while he was attached to the bureau of the General Farm in Saint-Quentin, an early and virulent critic of Physiocracy; Jacques Necker, the Genevan banker, who started his career in a firm that had a long involvement in grain importing and speculating. Some of these figures and others interceded on another plane, making difficult and grave decisions concerning the subsistence and survival of the consumer-people even as they wrote—analytically, albeit also speculatively—about grain: like Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, lieutenant of the bailliage of Rouen, who dealt with the “horrors” of the “famine” of 1693–94;