The Neapolitan string virtuosi who moved to Paris were among the protagonists of the early private and public concert series. The editorial success of Michele Mascitti – nephew and student of Pietro Marchitelli – is paradigmatic of the growing influence of the “public sphere”: revenues from his nine collections of sonatas allowed Mascitti to live for many years as a freelance musician while having a crucial part in the formation of a modern public. Together with Mascitti, Giovanni Antonio Guido, a student of Cailò in Naples, participated to the weekly soirées organized at the residence of the Crozat brothers in Paris. Guido’s presence at these splendid gatherings of the finest intellectuals and artists is attested by his portrait sketched by Antoine Watteau, also a protegé of the Crozat family, during one of these events. The aesthetic approach and performance practice imported in France by the Neapolitan string virtuosi became à la mode in the 1720s. The mixture of the Italian virtuosic approach with the French instrumental tradition that is found in the later sonatas by Mascitti and Guido was typical of the so-called goûts réunis, the “reunited tastes” of French and Italian music that would end up dominating the European scene in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

No powerful legal imagining accompanied the colonial ventures of the French old regime, with exploitation of New World resources initiated and controlled by state officials. But operations were badly resourced and conducted by private adventurers and representatives of noble families interested in influence back home. Profits from colonial expansion were to be shared between Paris and powerful interests in the French maritime provinces. Although the Atlantic settlements were legally imagined as overseas parts of the realm, governed by the customs of Paris, in practice, metropolitan control remained weak. Profits from the most lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, were received from chattel slavery legally organised under the Code noir (1685). Few French lawyers or intellectuals discussed slavery; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) remained silent about it. The slave revolution of 1791 was largely autonomous, eventually pushing the National Assembly to issue an emancipation decree. After the failure of Napoleon’s effort to recapture the island, Haiti declared independence in 1804. But the first decolonised state remained an international pariah.