The breadth, vigor, and sheer scale of economic debate in the old regime hasattracted surprisingly little notice. Most historians, when they attend to politi-cal economy in eighteenth-century France, think only of the Physiocrats, a smallcoterie of writers notorious for claiming that commerce and manufactures pro-duce no real wealth. As Catherine Larrère observes, Physiocracy is often con-flated with eighteenth-century French political economy tout court.11 This schoolof political economy was the focal point of most research on eighteenth-centuryFrench economic thought until recent decades, and it still attracts a great deal ofscholarly attention. Physiocracy enjoys a privileged status in modern scholarshipbecause, in their own day, the self-styled économistes were such indefatigable self-promoters (no eighteenth-century doctrine enjoyed such single-minded advo-cacy) and also because, in the teleological history-of-economic-theory approach,influential in much twentieth-century scholarship, Physiocracy figured as the mostadvanced eighteenth-century French political economy and therefore as the onedeserving of most consideration.12 But the Physiocrats were only one voice inthe din of public debate on economic questions in eighteenth-century France.

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zlib/Society, Politics & Philosophy/Government & Politics/John Shovlin/The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution_30322496.pdf

CD8303. 001-012

Shovlin, John(Author)

PD

Comstock Publishing Associates

United States, United States of America

Ithaca, N.Y., Bristol, 2007

September 28, 2006

Ithaca, 2006

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Macintosh

Political economy, John Shovlin asserts, can illuminate the social and economic contexts out of which a revolutionary impulse developed in France. Beyond the role of political economy in political life, massive public engagement with problems of economic order mediated an enduring cultural transformation. Economic activity was reimagined as a patriotic pursuit, and economic agentsfarmers, merchants, and manufacturerscame to be viewed as potential citizens. Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. In their view, France's moral, political, and economic power depended not simply on expanding the national wealth but also on reviving civic spirit. The "political economy of virtue" held that luxury was the cause of the nation's economic and moral degeneration. When the monarchy failed to reform its political economic structures in the 1760s and 1770s, mid-level elites sought to eliminate the stranglehold of the plutocracy. Shovlin argues that the Revolution grew out of a debate on how to establish a commercial society capable of fostering both wealth and virtue, and the revolutionaries sought to create such a society by destroying the institutions that channeled modern wealth into the hands of courtiers and financiers.

Contents 7
Illustrations 9
Acknowledgments 11
Introduction: Political Economy and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century France 15
Commerce, Finance, and the Luxury Debate 27
Constructing a Patriot Political Economy 63
Regenerating the Patrie: Agronomists, Tax Reformers, and Physiocrats 94
Patriotic Commerce and Aristocratic Luxury 132
Political Economy and the Prerevolutionary Crisis 165
The Agrarian Law and the Republican Farmer 196
Conclusion: The Political Economy of the Notables 227
Bibliography 235
Index 271

"Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline."--Jacket

2024-06-28