Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France

William H. Sewell Jr.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226770468, 9780226770321
• eBook ISBN: 9780226770635
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

There is little doubt that the French Revolution of 1789 changed the course of Western history. But why did the idea of civic equality—a distinctive signature of that revolution—find such fertile ground in France? How might changing economic and social realities have affected political opinions?
 
William H. Sewell Jr. argues that the flourishing of commercial capitalism in eighteenth-century France introduced a new independence, flexibility, and anonymity to French social life. By entering the interstices of this otherwise rigidly hierarchical society, expanded commodity exchange colored everyday experience in ways that made civic equality thinkable, possible, even desirable, when the crisis of the French Revolution arrived. Sewell ties together masterful analyses of a multitude of interrelated topics: the rise of commerce, the emergence of urban publics, the careers of the philosophes, commercial publishing, patronage, political economy, trade, and state finance. Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France offers an original interpretation of one of history's pivotal moments.

• 1 •

Old Regime State and Society

I have stated that prerevolutionary French society was “hierarchical.” In this chapter, I sketch out how this hierarchy worked, both in theory and in practice, in the century or so preceding the Revolution. The old regime state and society were highly complex—an avowedly “absolutist” monarchical state with an elaborate administrative and judicial apparatus that oversaw a society marked by entrenched privileges and much de facto local control of social, economic, and even political life. Meanwhile, France was a great power engaged in frequent international warfare that strained the country’s productive capacity and resulted in a permanently rising royal debt. All this was leavened during the eighteenth century by an increasingly prosperous national economy that created new circuits of wealth based not on principles of hierarchy and privilege but on market exchange and commercial intermediation.

An Old Regime Theory of the Social Order

I begin with a classical statement of the old regime’s hierarchical assumptions. Charles Loyseau was a jurist whose treatises, composed in the early seventeenth century, remained authoritative down to the end of the old regime. His three great treatises—on seigneuries (lordships), offices, and orders and dignities—were published in the first decade of the seventeenth century and republished repeatedly between then and 1701 (Loyseau 1608, 1610a, 1610b).1 It is the Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (Treatise on Orders and Simple Dignities) that most directly addresses the question of social hierarchy.2 This treatise sets forth many of the political, legal, and metaphysical assumptions that were taken for granted as the basis of the old regime’s social life.

The term order in the seventeenth or eighteenth century implied at once hierarchical rank and proper arrangement. Loyseau saw order as the fundamental principle of human society but also as a defining characteristic of the universe, one that flowed necessarily from God’s design. He begins his treatise with this statement:

It is necessary that there be order in all things, for their well-being and for their direction. . . . Inanimate creatures are all placed according to their high or low degree of perfection. . . . As for animate creatures, the celestial intelligences have their hierarchical orders, which are immutable. And in regard to men, who are ordered by God so that they may command the other animate creatures of this world here below, although their order is changeable and subject to vicissitude, on account of the particular liberty that God has given them for good and for evil, they nevertheless cannot exist without order. Because we cannot live together in equality of condition, it is necessary that some command and others obey. (13–14)

In a world otherwise governed by divinely ordered necessity, Loyseau tells us, mankind alone has been granted free will. But this freedom must be subjected to a worldly order in which “some command and others obey” because, as Loyseau assumes, without feeling a need to argue the point, “we cannot live together in equality of condition.”

The worldly governor or sovereign is, of course, the king, “who is the living image of God.” “August” and “full of majesty,” like God himself, the king exercises a “lieutenancy of God on Earth” and an “absolute power over men” (27).3 He serves as a link between heaven and earth and as a guarantor of order among humans. He is a semipriestly figure, a status that was signified by rituals performed at his coronation, where his body was anointed with holy oil from an ampul whose contents had been miraculously renewed ever since the coronation of Clovis, the first French king, in the fifth century. And immediately after he was crowned, the king took communion in both kinds—that is, both the wafer and the wine—an act that otherwise was restricted to priests and that endowed the king with a kind of sacerdotal authority.4

The subjects ruled by the king, according to Loyseau, make up “a body with several heads . . . the three orders or Estates General of France: the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate.” The clergy, the First Estate, is dedicated to the highest occupation, “the service of God”; the nobility, or Second Estate, is dedicated to “protecting the state by its arms”; and the Third Estate, the commoners, is dedicated to the lowly task of “nourishing and maintaining” the state “through peaceful occupations.” Each of these three estates “is again subdivided into . . . subordinate orders, following the example of the celestial hierarchy,” thus replicating at a lower level the system’s hierarchical logic (14–15).

But what precisely is an “order”? According to Loyseau, order may be defined as a “dignity with aptitude for public power.” Order is “a species of dignity, or honorable quality.” It gives a person a stable “rank,” which confers “a particular aptitude and capacity to attain either offices or seigneuries (lordships).” Thus, for example, a man can be a member of the order of priests without holding a benefice or a member of the order of nobles without possessing a seigneurie. But a man must be a member of the order of priests to exercise the office of curé (priest) of a parish or be a member of the noble order to become the seigneur of a village with the right to dispense justice. One’s order determines his rank and formal capacities in society; it is, as Loyseau puts it, “the dignity and the quality which is the most stable and the most inseparable from a man.” This is why, he adds, the French also call one’s order one’s “estate” (15). The order to which one belongs, it could be said, is one’s state of being. “Forming the estate of a person and imprinting upon the individual a perpetual character,” order is something more fundamental than the offices, powers, or occupations in which one may at any moment be engaged (16). The system of distinct orders was the foundation of the old regime’s social hierarchy.

The most perfect orders, not surprisingly, were those of the Catholic Church, which form for Loyseau the ideal model for orders of all descriptions. Passing from a lower to a higher order within the church hierarchy required a period of training and a test of capabilities and was marked by a solemn ceremony. When a man rises to a new clerical order, he receives a distinctive mark—the stole for the deacon, the chasuble for the priest, the miter and staff for the bishop, and so on. These ranks are also strictly observed—and thus made visible—in sitting or marching on ceremonial occasions. Loyseau observes that like the orders of the church, nonclerical orders commonly have solemn ceremonies of initiation; this is true, for example, of orders of knighthood, of licentiates and doctorates for men of letters, and even of initiation into masterships in trades. Although Loyseau fails to mention the fact, these initiations nearly always contained religious elements and frequently included a special mass to consecrate those raised to a new dignity. Likewise, different orders proudly displayed specific marks of membership upon their persons, at least on ceremonial occasions: rings, gowns, hats, spurs, swords, coats of arms, and the like (16–17).

The great exception to the prevalence of initiation ceremonies was the nobility. Although in practical terms, the distinction between nobles and commoners was the most salient distinction in French society, the nobility doesn’t quite fit Loyseau’s general schema. “There are,” Loyseau remarks, “no ceremonies to make princes and gentlemen.” This is because the orders of the nobility are what he terms “irregular orders, since they come from birth and not from any particular grant” (16; italics added). Loyseau was clearly uncomfortable about the passing on of order by birth, which was, of course, the standard defining characteristic of nobles not only in France but elsewhere in Europe and was precisely the nobles’ greatest source of pride. Loyseau’s misgivings on this point were metaphysical. He remarks that although the qualities of plants and beasts are “retained infallibly from their generation” because “their vegetative or sensitive soul proceeds absolutely from a physical source,” this is not true of humans: “The rational soul of men, which comes directly from God who creates it when he sends it into the human body, does not have any natural participation in the qualities of the generative semen of the body to which it is joined.” Yet as a practical jurist, Loyseau accepts the fact that “those who have issued from good blood have been esteemed above others” and have “been constituted as a separate order and been given a degree of honor which sets them apart from the great majority of the people” (21). Here the seemingly pagan concept that traditionally imparted distinctions to the nobility fails to fit Loyseau’s very Catholic philosophical scruples. As Loyseau resisted admitting, the social order of the old regime was in fact an amalgam of quite different principles of hierarchy, principles not reducible to his fundamentally theological schema. In fact, the principles of superiority of birth penetrated to the core of the religious field itself: In the eighteenth century, it was virtually impossible for a commoner to rise to the dignity of bishop. The pinnacle of the religious hierarchy was open only to nobles, and many of the resentments felt by commoners toward nobles were also felt by ordinary clerics toward the episcopate.

Although it was normal for nobility to be passed down in the blood from father to son, the king, “who is ordained by God to distribute the substantial honors of this world,” has the quasi-miraculous power to transform commoners into nobles. This he may do “by means of a letter written expressly to this end.” But also, and in fact much more frequently, he may appoint commoners to certain “offices and seigneuries that carry nobility with them.” In either case, “this ennoblement purges the blood and the posterity of the ennobled of all stain of commonness, raising him to the same quality and dignity as if his race had always been noble.” Yet as Loyseau notes, the ennobled are in fact “less esteemed than nobles by blood.” Loyseau seems to share this opinion, declaring that the purging of the blood from the stain of commonness “is only effacing a mark that remains” and therefore “seems more a fiction than a truth.” Here he cites a philosophical principle: the prince “cannot reduce being to non-being” (23). What Loyseau fails to mention in his treatise is that these ennobling offices were, with rare exceptions, sold to wealthy commoners as a means of raising funds for the royal treasury. Much of the disdain felt by the old nobility, generally known as the “sword nobles,” toward these “robe nobles,” who had gained nobility by purchasing state offices, arose from disapproval of the pecuniary means by which the nobility had been obtained, not from philosophical scruples about the king’s power to purge the blood of commonness.

Whether of ancient lineage or newly minted, the noble order enjoyed very great advantages. They alone were eligible for most of the highest offices in the state, including those of the king’s household. They made up the vast majority of the military officers and in principle had the exclusive right to hold fiefs and seigneuries. They also enjoyed great pecuniary privileges, especially exemption from the taille, the most onerous of all taxes, which meant that the nobles, generally the wealthiest of all the king’s subjects, paid far lower tax rates than the simple peasants over whom they held their seigneurial jurisdictions. Nobles also had the exclusive right to hunt game, a privilege much resented by commoners. Moreover, “when they commit a crime, they are not punished as rigorously as the common people”—“they are never flogged or hanged, as common people are,” but “have the privilege of being decapitated in cases of capital crimes” (24–25). The divide between nobles and commoners was indeed sharp. The very occupations that commoners were expected to perform were actually forbidden to nobles. Any noble who worked at “activities . . . performed for profit”—for example, as a merchant—could be stripped of his noble status on the grounds that he had “derogated” his nobility (28).

The Third Estate was essentially the residual order, one made up of persons lacking distinction. As Loyseau puts it, the Third Estate was “not properly an order” at all—because order is, by definition, “a species of dignity,” and few members of the Third Estate were “in dignity.” The Third Estate could be considered an order only to the extent that “order” signifies merely “a condition or occupation, or a distinct kind of person.” Nevertheless, Loyseau remarks that the Third Estate counts for something in the state. It “enjoys much greater power and authority in our time than it did formerly, because nearly all of the officeholders of justice and finance belong to it, the nobility having scorned letters and embraced idleness.” Here Loyseau, himself a member of the Third Estate and a highly lettered and influential legal theorist, insinuates a certain criticism, even a certain scorn, for the idle and sometimes unlettered nobility’s claims to generalized superiority (27–28).

Loyseau divides the Third Estate into eight ranks: men of letters, financiers, legal professions, merchants, husbandmen, lower officers of the courts, artisans, and laborers. He makes clear that this ranking is his opinion, not something established by law. Thus he says, “For the honor which is due to knowledge, I have put men of letters in the first rank”; “In my opinion, financiers must rank after men of letters”; and “Husbandmen must, in my opinion, follow merchants” (29–30; italics added). Unlike the ranks among the nobility or the clergy, the superiority or inferiority of the various occupations of the Third Estate is not established by clear and enforceable legal distinctions. Yet Loyseau is certainly right that in this society, where questions of rank and precedence were so charged among the clergy and nobility at the summit of the social hierarchy, commoners took their somewhat vaguer claims to superiority very seriously. These claims could not be sorted out on any single dimension but had a rather ad hoc character. It might be said that this is what we should expect about distinctions within an order that, defined by its lack of dignity, was not truly an order at all.

Men of letters, Loyseau states, are “divided into four principal faculties or branches of knowledge: theology, jurisprudence . . . medicine, and the arts.” These four lettered occupations were unique in the Third Estate because they each had clearly distinct internal ranks of bachelor, licentiate, and doctor, of which the latter two gave them access to offices as teachers or practitioners. These ranks were awarded in solemn ceremonies after years of study and the passing of examinations. In this respect, they were closely modeled on the orders of the church—not surprisingly, since the universities that awarded the degrees derived from clerical foundations. Financiers, by contrast, had no clear internal ranks or structures—they rated highly because they were wealthy and handled the king’s business. Loyseau ranks next those legal professionals who wear “the long robe”—that is, judges, clerks of the court, notaries, and attorneys. Here we see again the arbitrariness of ranking within the Third Estate, since both judges and attorneys would seem already to have been ranked as men of letters—they had to have at least a licentiate in law. The legal professionals are followed by merchants, whose rank Loyseau justifies by their utility and their “usual opulence.” Merchants are followed by “husbandmen,” even though the peasants are generally regarded as “vile persons.” Loyseau ranks them above both minor legal officers and artisans because “rural life is the ordinary occupation of the nobility,” and “there is no life more innocent, no gain more in accord with nature than that of tilling the soil, which philosophers have preferred to all other vocations.” Husbandmen are followed by legal officers “of the short robe, namely sergeants, trumpeters, appraisers, and vendors” (29–30).

After the minor legal officers, Loyseau places artisans, “those who exercise the mechanical arts . . . so named to distinguish them from the liberal arts.” These trades, he notes, “were formerly practiced by serfs and slaves, and indeed we commonly call mechanical anything that is vile and abject.” The mechanical arts were, however, highly differentiated, including a vast range of different urban trades whose practice, Loyseau notes, requires “considerable skill.” Thus skilled artisans of all kinds stood above day laborers, whose work was deemed to be without skill and purely bodily in nature. Artisans, Loyseau assures us, “are properly mechanics and reputed to be vile persons,” yet “there are certain trades in which manufacture and commerce are combined,” which makes them more honorable—he mentions apothecaries, goldsmiths, jewelers, mercers, wholesalers, and drapers. Other trades “reside more in bodily strength than in the practice of commerce or in mental subtlety, and these are the most vile.” In practice, it should be said, these differences in honor (or relative lack of dishonor) were hotly contested among the trades, all of which claimed distinction based on the subtlety and difficulty of their crafts. The mechanical arts, like the clergy and like the liberal arts practiced by the men of letters, had internal ranks—in this case, apprentices, journeymen, and masters. A tradesman had to pass through the stages of apprentice and journeyman to attain a mastership; passage to the rank of master required the making of a chef d’oeuvre (masterpiece) that demonstrated mastery of the necessary skills (33–34).

Although Loyseau does not make the point, it is clear that the artisan trades were patterned after the orders of the church. Passage from one stage to the next was marked by solemn ceremonies, often including a mass in the church where the guild maintained a chapel for the patron saint of the trade. Each trade, moreover, was strictly organized by a guild, led by syndics empowered to enforce quality standards on the goods fashioned by the trade. This secular guild was also doubled by a religious confraternity, which organized observances of the trade’s saint’s day and provided proper funerals for deceased masters. Thus if the mechanical arts were disdained as vile by members of the higher orders of society, the tradespeople responded by forming elaborate organizations patterned on the most perfect orders—those of the church. And they emphasized the importance of their skill or craft, something they insisted took intelligence and finesse and required extended training. By these means, they demonstrated that they too deserved a respected place in the old regime’s social hierarchy. It is significant that an artisan’s trade was colloquially known as his état (estate). This distinguished artisans from mere day laborers, who were regarded as sans état (without estate). The trade guilds were in fact distinct corporate bodies, recognized by royal and municipal governments and possessing written statutes ratified by the king. And they were the proud possessors of privileges, particularly the exclusive privilege of engaging in and governing the manufacture and sale of a specified range of goods within a city.5

Loyseau’s Treatise on Orders and Simple Dignities was one man’s attempt to set forth the main themes and the complexities of social hierarchy in old regime society. But his towering prestige as a jurist makes his treatise an eminently useful starting point for understanding this era’s social assumptions. Read carefully, it reveals many of the principal categories, distinctions, and concepts governing old regime social life, such as the division of society into the three estates of clergy, nobility, and commoners; the theoretically absolute and God-given powers of the king; the tremendous resonance of the practices and social forms developed by the church; and the ubiquity of formal orders and distinctions into which persons were arrayed at all levels of the social hierarchy. But despite Loyseau’s effort to reduce this complex of orders to a rational system, his treatise also reveals some of the key tensions of old regime society, such as the fundamentally contradictory principles of the prior...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• introduction: The French Revolution and the Shock of Civic Equality
• 1. Old Regime State and Society
• 2. The Eighteenth-Century Economy: Commerce and Capitalism
• I. The Emergence of an Urban Public
• II. The Philosophes and the Career Open to Talent
• III. Royal Administration and the Promise of Political Economy
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index
• Footnotes