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The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knm306

1468-2931

Richard Whatmore,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

The Grand Mandarin of every Chinese province annually selected and then passed on the name of the most able farmer in his area to the Emperor, who then greatly honoured the individual in question. On a particular day of each year, the Emperor further signalled his support for agriculture by ploughing a field. The original source of this information in the West was probably J.-B. du Halde's Description de l'empire de la Chine (1735). It was taken up by Montesquieu in De l'Esprit (1748), Diderot in the Encyclopédie (1751), and more generally by the burgeoning and often inter-connected physiocratic and agronomist movements across France in the second half of the eighteenth century. For the following generations, images of magistrates, monarchs and emperors ploughing fields became commonplace, with particularly prominent examples to be found in Boizot's 1769 depiction of Louis XVI and Loeillot's Napoleon of around 1823 — both in full regalia. Such fascinating and significant facts can be found throughout John Shovlin's book on political economy in France from the 1740s to the 1810s. Shovlin appears to have read every secondary work on the subject published since the Second World War, his prose is lucid, and the evidence marshalled comes from the history of ideas, fashion, art and what used to be called social and economic history. The result is a compendium which adds greatly to our knowledge of debates about luxury, rusticism, the role of nobility in a commercial society, and the relationship between financiers, trade and public credit in France. Shovlin's work is neither Paris- nor Versailles-centric, but is particularly illuminating about the role of political economists in court circles from Pompadour to Antoinette. As the title implies, the central aim of the book is to show that virtue-based argument remained singularly powerful in political economy before the Revolution. Furthermore, it contributed to that great event by generating a critique of an idle and rentier nobility: as Shovlin writes, ‘middling nobles had lost control of the anti-luxury critique, for they, too, with growing frequency, were represented as vectors of luxe’. Whatever ‘vectors’ is intended to mean, Shovlin provides a detailed argument that convinces in this respect, and also in the claim that as the financier nobility became entwined with the court they became less capable of operating as a countervailing power to monarchy. The result is a Revolution fostered by middle-class critics of the Old Regime. Such an argument is not, of course, original, and Shovlin never states that this is the case. One problem with it is that the political economy articulated by the patriots of the anti-noble movement does not comes across as sufficiently convincing as an alternative to absolutism. Founding their ideas upon ‘virtue’ was surely to weaken their case; Shovlin himself shows the power of the honour-based alternative to virtue inspired by Montesquieu, in which notions of emulation played a key role. Shovlin's claims would have more weight if comparative arguments about nobility elsewhere in Europe had been taken into account, and especially in Britain. The international dimension of political economy is also largely absent. This is problematic given that recent work, such as Michael Sonenscher's Before the Deluge or Istvan Hont's Jealousy of Trade, reveals the extent to which political economy was defined by reference to economic competition in global markets and the prospect of international peace. Such points aside, Shovlin's The Political Economy of Virtue is a major contribution to the subject area.