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POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE*
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SonenscherMichael, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
ShovlinJohn, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2009
Extract
Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.
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References
1 Debt service in the eighteenth century consumed proportions of state budgets that are unthinkable today. For example, France and Great Britain both paid as much as sixty percent of their tax revenue toward debt service at times in the eighteenth century.
2 On the fiscal–military state see, now classically, Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar.
3 The exception to this statement is the pioneering work of Istvan Hont, which Sonenscher generously acknowledges throughout Before the Deluge. Hont's essays are now collected, with a sweeping new introductory essay, in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
4 The reader who wants a fuller picture of Sieyès's system would do well to supplement Before the Deluge with the critical introduction Sonenscher penned for an edition of Sieyès's political writings he edited a few years ago. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, 2003).
5 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), 18. See Wright, Johnson Kent, “A Rhetoric of Aristocratic Reaction? Nobility in De l'Esprit des lois,” in Smith, Jay M., ed., The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches (University Park, PA, 2006)Google Scholar.
6 Mably appears in the chapter as a coda to Rousseau in large part to highlight Rousseau's deep pessimism. Mably's diagnosis was similar to Rousseau's, but he pointed to natural sociability (which Rousseau rejected) as the way out of the maze.
7 The contributions of Roederer and Say were articulated at the same time as and after Sieyès had developed his system—perhaps part of the reason Sonenscher terms the intellectual context covered in this chapter a “setting.”
8 It should be pointed out that, although the book's subtitle refers to the “intellectual origins of the French Revolution” and the back matter describes it as “a major revisionist account of the French Revolution's intellectual origins,” the phrase “intellectual origins” never appears in the text itself.
9 Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967)Google Scholar; Baker, Keith Michael, “On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution,” in idem, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Furet, François, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Foster, Elborg (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.
11 Sonenscher, Michael, “The Nation's Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789,” History of Political Thought 18 (1997), 64–103, 267–325Google Scholar.
12 Pocock, J. G. A., “Reconstructing the Traditions: Quentin Skinner's Historians’ History of Political Thought,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3 (1979), 95–113Google Scholar.
13 Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 On the broader history of early modern discussion of an agrarian law among intellectuals see Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 I have advanced a divergent interpretation of the political culture of these years in Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, 2008).