I would say that bakers, bakeries, farmers, and millers do not get NEARLY enough airtime in discussions about the Revolution, so I'm really glad you asked this question.

While the political aspects of the French Revolution are naturally the 'thread' we follow, and we therefore focus on those men who held political power, it isn't really too much of an oversimplification to say that for the class that proved to be the 'body' of the Revolution, they cared about one thing: bread.

A bit of a background on bread in France:

France was a country of ~25 million people before the Revolution, and was overwhelmingly rural. Argiculture was the staple of their economy, and their staple food crop was wheat. This wheat would be grown and harvested by farmers. The wheat, once harvested, needed to be ground by watermills; these mills were owned by local lords, who in most instances had a right to compell the peasants in their village to use their watermill. Once ground, the grain then had to be transported to where it was needed-- an incredibly complex task, made even more difficult by the fact that France was anything but a unified nation before the Revolution. In many instances, the similarities held by different peasants would be that they shared a King-- that's it. Different languages, different cusotms, different traditions, different rights & responsibilities to the crown, all served to make 'France' an incredibly heterogeneous kingdom (something the Revolutiontionaries would seek to remedy). Thus, we have a very complex system, relying upon many layers of events to "go right" in order to provide food to the masses. If one of these variables changed, the price of bread changed, often with dire consequences.

To tell a "History of Bread" and the Revolution, let's walk it back to the 1770s. Bread prices normally ate up around 40% of a wage-earner's income; however if there was a shortage, or disturbance in the complex chain of distribution, that could climb up to 60-70% of income-- for those at the very bottom of the chain this could mean starvation.

In France, there was a common idea of the King as a father-protector. He, as the father, wanted what was best for his subjects, and he also provided for him. When bread became scarse, and prices sky-rocketed, there was a pervasive idea that the king wasn't to blame, but that bad ministers were deceiving him, lying to him, or preventing him from knowing the truth (this will be crucial to understanding bread-based events like the journee of Oct. 5th).

The first major bread-based event of the pre-Revolution was the Flour War. Louis XVI's controller general, Turgot, was a bit of a philosophe, and was known as a Physiocrat. As such, he believed that the wealth of a country is rooted in its land, and that a well-administered agricultural economy would provide a financial boon to France. What he believed was holding back France's economy were the bevy of internal customs and taxes that existed between all of the different points of production, and on the 'borders' of different provinces. What Turgot envisioned was a lassiez-faire style grain trade: let supply and demand determine price. Louis XVI, who agreed with Turgot's plan, gave his assent, and Turgot's policies were put into action. The problem came when, due to shortages of grain, prices began to climb.... and climb... and climb, until riots began to break out across France. Louis XVI cancelled the policies and eventually canned Turgot, but the message was clear: we want affordable bread, and we do not care how you do it.

In the lead-up to the Revolution (1780s), we begin to see more directed violence towards the bakers themselves. Since the King was not at fault, others had to be blamed for the shortage of bread. The bakers were an obvious target for the peoples's ire: they were the ones most directly involved in the changes ("Why are you now selling me a loaf that was yesterday 12 sous for 15 sous today?!"). During the decade before the Revolution, riots and other disturbances often happened in line waiting for bread; if they were lucky, the baker might escape, however we have many reported instances in Paris of bakers being lynched on the lampposts that lined the streets. Some bakers were likely just trying to not be ruined, by adjusting the costs of their bread to what they were forced to pay for wheat; others courted danger a bit more. In the late 1780s a baker at Versailles was attacked for selling good quality loaves to the rich for 15 sous, while selling moldy, inedible loaves to the poor for 12 sous.

As riots became more commonplace in the capital due to increasing bread prices from 1787-1789, military units began to be stationed inside bakeries, or outside of breadlines, to try to quell disturbances-- perhaps nothing else better demonstrates the direct link between insurrections and bread as the placement of these soldiers. Their presence-- and the agitation of the populace-- was directly linked to the price of bread. As soon as bread crept over around 50% of a laborer's income, unrest began to grown.