laws of nature the use of these objects and the agreeable sensations they produce
are neither necessary or useful to life or health, nor necessary for the happiness of
man’.109 If Pluquet was to devote more than 900 pages to developing this theme,
repeatedly disparaging the ideas of Melon, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and
the other ‘panegyrists of luxury’ in the process, Butel-Dumont was content with a
more modest 400 pages designed to prove his argument that the most powerful
102 Ibid. 276.
103 Berry, Idea of Luxury, 137.
104 Rousseau, ‘Last Reply’, 84.
105 Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French
Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006).
106 (1771), 2 vols.
107 (1786), 2 vols.
108 Butel-Dumont, Théorie du luxe, i. 121.
109 Pluquet, Traité philosophique, i. 79.
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peoples and states were those that pursued luxury and that it was far better for states
to reduce their expenditure than to impose ‘inept’ sumptuary laws.
To these texts can be added Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan’s Considérations sur les
richesses et le luxe,110 published on the eve of the Revolution and intended as a
detailed refutation of the ideas put forward by Jacques Necker in his De l’Adminis-
tration des finances de la France.111 Necker’s argument had been that it was a
mistake to attribute luxury uniquely to changes in morals, the nature of govern-
ment, or the acquisition of the New World. Luxury had its origin ‘in the natural
course of things’, and specifically in ‘the advancement of science’ and, at best,
government could temper the taste for it. In response, the greater part of the almost
500 pages of Sénac de Meilhan’s text was devoted to the wholesale castigation of the
political, social, and moral consequences of luxury. Great states preserved them-
selves not because of, but despite, their luxury. ‘The immortal author of Téléma-
que’, he wrote, ‘better understood and made known the problems arising from
luxury than most of those who have explored the subject.’112
Published only three years earlier, Antoine-Prosper Lottin’s Discours contre le
luxe: Il corrompt les moeurs et détruit les Empires,113 began by announcing that
combating luxury was ‘the most important and patriotic of subjects’, and then
proceeded, in addition to pillorying ‘the eternal inconstancy of fashions’ and the
reduction of society to a ‘perpetual ball’, to itemize how luxury destroyed the arts,
the sciences, letters, industry, agriculture, public morals, and manners, before
finally destroying empires themselves. Citing Montesquieu and the example of
the decline of the Spanish Empire, Lottin contended that wealth did not guarantee
the greatness of a state. Rather this lay in a people devoted to agriculture and the
‘useful arts’ and one imbued with a sense of virtue and courage. For these writers, in
summary, the luxury debate was certainly no frivolous and ephemeral matter of
taste and fashion but one of the most important and far-reaching questions of the
age. At issue was nothing less than the fate of the absolute monarchy and the
aristocratic order.
It was, of course, a perpetual refrain in the writings of Rousseau that he alone
had correctly observed the maladies of the age and that he alone was inspired by a
love of humanity that was so strong that he was obliged to speak out. Everyone
else, he believed, spoke only of ‘commerce and money’. As we have seen, this was
not true and Rousseau was by no means alone in his condemnation of luxury.
But, for once perhaps, Rousseau might be excused his rhetorical excesses, for it
was indeed the case that writers in France, and elsewhere in Europe, were
beginning to grapple with issues relating to trade, to finance, and to the market
in a way that they had not done previously.114 Did the advent of the French
110 (1787).
111 Jacques Necker, De l’Administration des Finances de la France (1784). Vol. iii 57–75 is devoted
to ‘Considérations sur le luxe et sur le progrès’.
112 Sénac de Meilhan, Considérations sur les richesses, 174.
113 (1783).
114 See Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France
(Lanham, Md., 2007).
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
139
Revolution and the fall of the Jacobins, we might therefore ask, elicit a change of
attitude towards luxury in particular and towards commerce more generally?
The Abbé Sieyès, principal ideologue and architect of the first stage of the Revolu-
tion, had been fully aware that the distinctive feature of modern society was that it
rested upon the division of labour, an insight which he applied to his understanding
of both politics and economics.115 ‘If ’, he wrote, ‘every individual concerned himself
with all the objects required for his own consumption, all individuals would be the
same, and society would not depart from its state of infancy.’116 This, he contended,
was no longer the case as men now thought about production rather than happiness.
Where Sieyès therefore diverged from the physiocratic school was in his conclusion
that there was no fundamental difference in productive potential between agriculture
and manufacturing and thus that the exclusive focus of the physiocrats upon the
former was misplaced. From this it followed that the privileged position accorded
to the aristocracy through the ownership of land had to be removed and that anti-
commercial prejudices, most obviously associated with extravagance of the court and
the idleness of the nobility, had to be eradicated.
Between the summer of 1789 and 1791 it was in this direction that France
moved and, to that extent, the dominant tendency of the numerous reforms
introduced in this period was broadly favourable to the further development of
commerce and free trade. The ambition was not only to pay off France’s enormous
public debt but also to secure the economic regeneration of the country. To that
end, the feudal regime, with its restrictions upon the free movement of goods and
persons, was abolished. Property rather than privilege was established as the basis of
the new order and came to define a person’s status. The loi Le Chapelier of 1791
made illegal all forms of restrictive trade corporations. But, as events were to show,
this did not mean that concerns about the potentially damaging consequences of
gross inequality and unbridled luxury or about the need to balance wealth and
virtue had been abandoned. Amidst fears of a complete economic breakdown, the
radical demands of the Parisian populace and of the enragés saw to that.
As we already know, the advent of foreign war and internal revolt opened the door
to a revival of the rhetoric of classical republicanism. With this came not only a return
to the notion of the virtuous, frugal citizen-farmer of ancient Greece and Rome but
also a victory for the claims of austerity and simplicity over those of ostentation and
display. Moreover, in the face of food shortages and famine, the reintroduction of
economic controls during 1793–4 amounted to
‘the economy of the Terror’.117
National price ceilings were introduced for grain and flour, and to these were later
115 See William H. Sewell Jr, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the
Third Estate? (Durham, NC, and London, 1994). Sewell writes: ‘Virtually all of Sieyes’s political
thought had an important economic dimension. . . . Sieyes rejected not only Rousseau’s ideas
about representation but the entire classical model of Greek and Roman political virtue on which
it was based; he argued that material well-being, not political virtue, was the proper goal of a
modern European State.’ Ibid. 67.
116 Roberto Zapperi (ed.), Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès: Écrits Politiques (1985), 63.
117 Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France,
1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1999), 155.
140
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
added price controls on all ‘goods of first necessity’ including such products as onions,
soap, and paper. The General Maximum, introduced in September 1793, was,
according to Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, a ‘shibboleth of overt consumer
renunciation’, providing ‘a snapshot of what Revolutionary Government regarded
as prime necessities’.118 Envisaged was an alternative political economy based upon
the satisfaction of needs rather than the production of luxuries. Its guiding spirit was
to be fraternity rather than competition. Yet, by the same token, Jones and Spang
argue, the General Maximun ‘was a shimmeringly indeterminate document’, reveal-
ing that ‘[d]espite their best attempts to look and sound like Athenians and Romans,
the French found it altogether more difficult than their classical forbears to draw a
hard-and-fast line betweens the realms of necessity and luxury’. Denouncing luxury,
in other words, was easy but defining it proved well-nigh impossible, and construct-
ing an economic policy upon the basis of its eradication quickly showed itself to be
both catastrophic and repressive.
Thus, with the fall of the Jacobins, the General Maximum was abolished in
December 1794 and an (often faltering) attempt was made to fashion something
resembling a commercial republic more in tune with the demands and interests of
the emerging industrial and mercantile elites. Yet it would be a mistake to believe
that reflections on the nature of commercial activity were suddenly divested of
moral and political concerns and thus that the question of luxury was now forgotten
altogether.119 Indeed, as Martin Staum has argued, ‘concepts of public virtue
remained indelibly linked to economic theory despite efforts to construct a value-
neutral science based on private interest’.120
This can be shown by referring to the ideas of the best-known French economist
of the time: Jean-Baptiste Say. He has usually been regarded as a classical political
economist who uncritically embraced and popularized the ideas of Adam Smith.
Pierre Manent, for example, states that his Traité d’économie politique, first pub-
lished in 1803, ‘constitutes the first great post-Smithian synthesis of economic
liberalism’.121 A somewhat different story might be told.
In 1800 Say published a curious text entitled Olbie.122 It was an account of a
utopian city recently established upon ‘the ruins of an absolute monarchy’ and was
intended to answer a question that had previously fascinated the writers of the
Enlightenment and that had now become especially pertinent in light of the events
of the previous decade: by what means could morality be established among a
people? The text itself covered a variety of issues. For example, Say argued that
118 Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, ‘Sans-Culottes, Sans Café, Sans Tabac: Shifting Realms of
Necessity and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.),
Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999), 55.
119 For a discussion of attempts to formulate a new republican political economy during Thermidor
see James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
120 See Martin S. Staum, Minerva’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal and Kingston,
1996), 192. See also Cheryl B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Idéologues and the Transformation of
Liberalism (New York, 1984), 70–96.
121 Pierre Manent, Les Libéraux (1986), ii. 182.
122 Jean-Baptiste Say, Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de réformer les Moeurs d’une Nation (1800).
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
141
lotteries should be banned because they not only encouraged ‘avarice’ and ‘laziness’
but also reinforced the belief that wealth depended upon chance rather than
‘industrie’.123 But, in essence, what Say described was a society characterized
by ‘modest comfort’ rather than ‘the excesses of wealth and of indigence’. ‘The
Olbiens’, Say wrote, ‘knew that the love of gain was a snare as dangerous as idleness.
When this passion is very strong it becomes as exclusive as all the others; it
extinguishes a mass of noble and disinterested sentiments which must be a part
of the perfect human soul. It is thus that amongst certain peoples, or even amongst
the habitants of certain towns, who are too much involved with commerce any idea,
other than that of enriching oneself, is regarded as folly.’124 Accordingly, in Say’s
account, the leaders of the Olbiens declared their opposition to displays of luxury,
themselves adopting a ‘system of simplicity’ and forbidding their servants and
soldiers from showing a ‘stupid deference for luxurious livery’. As the taste for
luxury diminished, the Olbiens came to consume nothing beyond what was
necessary for their utility and comfort. Happiness grew at the same time as morals
were reformed.125
In a note to this part of the text, Say clarified what he took to be the import of his
argument. ‘In criticizing luxury’, he wrote, ‘I would not insist on the foolish
pretension of returning man to a savage state where there are no utensils but fingers
and teeth.’ The use of everything that was conducive to well-being in ‘rich and
industrious nations’ should be allowed but, he continued, ‘I do not hesitate to
pronounce that luxury is harmful to states, large and small, and that the country
where there is least would be the richest and the most happy.’126 For that reason
Say denied two of the main claims made in defence of luxury. The production of
luxury did not provide jobs. There were, he countered, ‘never fewer unemployed
hands than in regions where morals are simple and where, by consequence, few
luxuries are produced’.127 Nor did luxury keep people alive. It was, Say argued,
‘only in a country where there is no luxury, or very little, that one sees everyone
well-dressed, well-housed, well-nourished, and content’.128 It was in line with this
argument that copious praise was heaped upon Lycurgus and the institutions of
Sparta, whilst the fates of Carthage, Venice, and the Dutch Republic were cited as
examples of the dire consequences which followed from the exclusive concentration
upon the pursuit of wealth.
Conven
tional wisdom has had it that the transition from Olbie to the Traité
d’économie politique, published only three years later, represented a shift from a
republican political economy to a laissez-faire liberalism based on the inviolability of
private property and minimum state activity. This account has been contested by
Richard Whatmore.129 While Whatmore has not wished to deny that innovations
occurred in Say’s thinking––Say, for example, no longer believed that a republican
123 Ibid. 34–5.
124 Ibid. 29.
125 Ibid. 42–4.
126 Ibid. 123.
127 Ibid. 125–6.
128 Ibid. 126.
129 See Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual Biography of
Jean-Baptiste Say (Oxford, 2000). See also Evelyn L. Forget, The Social Economics of Jean-Baptiste Say
(London, 1999). Forget’s text includes a tr. of Say’s Olbie: see pp. 196–241.
142
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constitution was necessary for the inculcation of industrious manners nor did he
retain his faith in legislation as a form of moral catechism––he nevertheless holds to
the view that Say remained deeply concerned about the deleterious consequences
of commerce as described by Adam Smith––not least what he took to be the
impoverishment of the general population which would follow from the overzeal-
ous introduction of the division of labour––and for all his emphasis upon the
importance of productive capital as the source of a nation’s wealth he continued to
disparage the unbridled pursuit of needless luxury.
Specifically, we should note that in his lengthy Discours Préliminaire (an aston-
ishing text which not only proclaimed the autonomy of economic science but also
reviewed all previous economic doctrines) Say dismissed the maxim that ‘a state is
enriched by luxury’, further contending that its application in the France of the
1720s had led to bankruptcy. ‘Moderation and economy’, he commented, ‘became
terms of ridicule.’130 This anti-luxury theme was then developed in the main body
of the text. In line with his preference for frugality over excess and avarice, Say
began by arguing that ‘[t]hose who say that money is only good to be spent and that
products are only made to be consumed are badly mistaken if by this they mean
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