John Shovlin

The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France

This article argues for a reconsideration of the relationship between economic transformation during the final decades of the Old Regime and the origins of the French Revolution. Changes in consumption during the eighteenth century, compounded by a sensationalist philosophy that problematized issues of representation, destabilized the practice of using pomp to constitute social status. The ensuing crisis transformed the category luxury. Long used to denounce the usurping consumption of the lowborn, the term came to be employed in the decades after 1750 to denounce all uses of pomp to constitute political authority and social rank. While the older language of luxury defended a traditional conception of the social order, the luxury critique that developed in the second half of the eighteenth century articulated a radically different vision of society and directed a corrosive attack at the “aristocratic” social order of the Old Regime. This new social critique became a staple of radical discourse in the 1780s.

Toward a Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Antinobilism: The Political Economy of Honor in the Old Regime*

That the French Revolution set itself implacably against the institution of hereditary nobility is a truism. But exactly why the revolutionaries were so hostile to nobility has been the subject of controversy. Under the Marxist synthesis dominant in the 1960s, revolutionary antinobilism was regarded as the natural and obvious animus of a class-conscious revolutionary bourgeoisie. For Marxist scholars, the Revolution was a struggle for control of the state between a bourgeoisie, borne on the rising tide of capitalism, and a hidebound, “feudal” aristocracy that sought to defend its political and fiscal privileges. The meaning of revolutionary antipathy to the nobility was self-evident. But the “revisionist” interpretation of the Revolution, which has largely displaced this Marxist paradigm in the last two decades, rejects the view that the Revolution can fruitfully be understood as a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. From such a perspective, the antinobilism of the revolutionaries is no longer axiomatic. In the wake of the Marxist interpretation’s decline, a considerable consensus has emerged around the idea that revolutionary hostility to the nobility was a product of the political crisis of 1788. The thesis is most elegantly expressed by Colin Lucas, who suggests that the antinobilism of the revolutionaries was an expression of anger and frustration on the part of nonnoble elements of the elite at the sudden loss of status they suffered with the convocation of the Estates General. Lucas contends that the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie had merged with the nobility over the course of the eighteenth century to form an elite united in its possession of seigneurial property and fiscal privilege. No real cleavage arose to divide this eighteenth-century elite until the Paris parlement’s call for the convocation of the Estates General suddenly and arbi-

EMULATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ECONOMIC THOUGHT

It has been twenty-five years since the appearance of Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, a seminal analysis of the Enlightenment social and economic imaginary.1 Hirschman argued that moralists who believed the passions might be kept in check by using one passion to restrain another came to the conclusion in the eighteenth century that the role of “balancing” passion could best be played by interest—the passion for wealth. Interest was suitable for this role, Hirschman suggested, because it was regarded as a calm and regular passion, one that, if not exactly laudable, was at least rational and predictable. Construed as a check on humankind’s more destructive urges, he claimed, interest began a slow transition that transformed it from a vice into a quasi-virtuous disposition, a transition signaled in his view by the emergence of representations that cast trade as a gentle, civilizing force—le doux commerce. With acquisitive drives represented in such a positive light, Hirschman argued, the way was open to imagining a social order based on exchange relations that would be conjunctive rather than disjunctive. The remaking of interest as a check on the passions was central to the development of a moral language that would legitimate an emerging commercial society.

The Society of Brittany and the Irish Economic Model: International Competition and the Politics of Provincial Development

Economic societies flourished in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, propagating in three distinct waoes between the late 1750s and the latter part of the 1790s.1 The first such organisation established, and the model for the later associations, was the Society of Agriculture, Commerce and the Arts (Societe d’agriculture, du commerce et des arts), established in Brittany in February 1757.2 The society had nine sections (bureaux), one in each diocese of the prooince, including a central corresponding bureau in Rennes, the prooincial capital. The number of associates ranged from six to eighteen per section, with the membership recruited from local merchants, clerics, and noble landowners.3 The society’s mission was to foster the deoelopment of farming, manufactures, and trade in Brittany by gathering and diffusing useful knowledge, by offering encouragement for practical schemes of economic improoement, and by adoising the prooincial Estates

Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769

Shovlin explores the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century French Compagnie des Indes, which was a site of innovative political economic thinking beginning with its founder, John Law, who outlined a strategy for peaceful French aggrandizement through the adoption of modernized techniques of public credit. This line of thinking was later developed by Jean-Francois Melon and Isaac Panchaud, both closely associated with the company. Other company officials emphasized that international stability and avoidance of territorial expansion in India best served the corporation’s interests. These perspectives reflect a deep ambivalence about empire, and were rooted in a broader discourse emphasizing that an age of commerce was displacing an age of conquest and territoriality.

Securing Asian Trade: Treaty Negotiations between the French and English East India Companies, 1753–1755

In the mid-1750s the French Compagnie des Indes and the English East India Company negotiated to end the military conflicts between them associated with the bellicose French Governor General, Joseph-Francois Dupleix. The companies deliberated over proposals to neutralize their trade in case of future wars in Europe, and to establish a security cartel to free them from the pressures of Indian politics. Though no permanent accord was reached before the outbreak of the Seven Years War, the negotiations illuminate rich traditions of political and geopolitical thought inside both companies, as directors, shareholders, and like-minded public officials worked to create a pacified space in which global trade could flourish, while safeguarding the peace of Europe from conflicts over Asian commerce.

Jealousy of Credit: John Law’s “System” and the Geopolitics of Financial Revolution*

Two great watersheds divided the history of modern geopolitics, John Law told the French Regent, Philippe d’Orléans: “the discovery of the Indies” and the “introduction of credit.” Both developments unsettled the balance of power. Before the conquest of America, noted the monetary theorist, silver had been rare in Europe. While the subsequent expansion of trade enlarged the money supply of all countries, “the commercial states benefited more than the rest, and by this means significantly augmented their power.” The second great upheaval, “not less considerable than the first,” was the adoption of modern institutions of public credit in Great Britain—what historians call the financial revolution. Credit catapulted Britain into the first rank of European states. It enhanced British ability to pay for armies in the field and to keep fleets at sea during the protracted conflicts of the age, the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13). Indeed, public credit had aggrandized the English more, Law declared, than if they had conquered Spanish America.