Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism

Asian Textiles in France 1680-1760

Kenneth A. Loparo, Felicia Gottmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349684717, 9781137444875
• eBook ISBN: 9781137444882
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Imported from India, China, the Levant, and Persia and appreciated for their diversity, designs, fast bright colours and fine weave, Asian textiles became so popular in France that in 1686 the state banned their import, consumption and imitation. A fateful decision. This book tells the story of smuggling on a vast scale, savvy retailers and rebellious consumers. It also reveals how reformers in the French administration itself sponsored a global effort to acquire the technological know-how necessary to produce such textiles and how the vitriolic debates surrounding the eventual abolition of the ban were one of the decisive moments in the development of Enlightenment economic liberalism.

Part I

Global Textiles

Prologue Three French Women and Their Troublesome Textiles

On 27 February 1756 at around five in the afternoon, Madame Chanelle, widow of the late Sieur Chanelle, was returning, mounted on a brown horse, from the town of Trévoux, then capital of the Dombes, now a suburb of Lyon. She had done some shopping and was returning to the local parish in which her uncle, with whom she lived, was the curate, when she was stopped by the local tax and customs officials, who wished to inspect her saddle bags. Madame Chanelle, they found to their chagrin, was a determined woman and she was having none of it. She tried to escape, but when that proved futile she took her riding crop to one of the men. Finding that this did not much help either, she changed tack, took out her purse – made, as the officials duly noted, from real silk – and offered them money in exchange for her freedom. However, either she did not quite offer them enough, or she had met with some rather conscientious fellows, who may not have quite appreciated the liberal application of her whip. The men proceeded to open her suitcases and immediately found what she had been trying to conceal from them. Not only was she carrying gun powder (which, she claimed, she had bought only so that her and her uncle’s servants could use it to rid themselves of rats), but, worse perhaps, she had also acquired three pieces of indienne, printed or painted Indian or Indian-style textiles, whose import, retail, and usage had been forbidden in France for, by then, exactly 70 years. Of grey and white background with tendrils and small sprigs of flowers in different colours, the pieces came to a total of 20 metres of fabric. They may of course, as Madame Chanelle claimed, have been destined for the personal use of herself and her daughter, but then she may also have intended to retail them, an even worse offence than usage of such fabrics. In either case, the officials took this seriously and decided to seize her saddlebags, her horse, and her person and to escort them to their nearest post, in Villefranche-sur-Saone, in the wine region of Beaujolais, 25 km north of Lyon, to draw up their official report, the procès-verbal, that would serve as evidence in her prosecution.¹

Madame Chanelle had clearly been unsurprised that her textiles might lead her into trouble with the officers of the Fermes, the private tax farms who were officials in charge of policing the ban on Asian and Asian-style fabrics. One who certainly did not expect to be inconvenienced by such lowly officials was a member of the French nobility, the marquise de Chiffreville of the Normandy Chiffrevilles. Unfortunately for her, however, the authorities were under pressure from the Controller General, Orry, to set an example and also to arrest the upper-class leaders of fashion. And thus one day, as the marquise ventured out in Paris clad in a white skirt decorated with purple flowers, she was indeed made an example of and called to appear before the magistrates on 30 June 1738. Not, of course that she deigned to appear in the presence of the 16 other accused summoned that day, who included a female beer seller, a wine seller and a vinegar maker, the wives of a coppersmith and a cooper, and a married couple, wine sellers both – all, one would think, much beneath the notice of a marquise and most of whom, it should be said, did not appear in person either. Found guilty together with all the others, the marquise was sentenced in absentia to pay a fine of 300 livres and to hand over her offending garment. The confiscated textiles would be sent to the French Indies Company to be sold for export, while two thirds of the fine was to go to the tax officials who made the arrest and the informers who helped them. Whether anybody indeed managed to force the marquise to pay or hand over her skirt is of course quite another question.²

The middling and upper classes were not, however, the only ones to make use of such forbidden textiles. Rose Barbosse was a Provençale from the town of Tarascon, 20 km south-west of Avignon, whose proud castle still overlooks the Rhône river today. Rose was poor. So poor indeed that when in July 1744 fermes officials spotted her wearing a calico skirt, and a very worn one at that, the Intendant of the Provence proposed to the Controller General that her fine be lowered from the officially required exorbitant figure of 3,000 livres, or indeed the more usually imposed amount of 300 livres, to a mere 3 livres – a sum she would still struggle to pay.³

It seems surprising that three women from different French regions and of such different social status and financial means would wear the same kind of textile, when there would have been so very little else in their lives that they had in common. The following chapters will therefore examine such Asian and Asian-style textiles more closely to understand what they were, where they came from, and how they could appeal to such a wide range of the French population.

1

Global Fabrics: The French Trade in Asian and Asian-Style Textiles

The very finest of the banned Asian textiles, the type that a marquise might wear, were imported directly from India and China via the East India Companies. Both China and India had been famous for their textiles for many centuries before the first European ship ever rounded the Cape of Good Hope: India for its cottons and China as the fabled home of silk. White Indian muslins had already been appreciated by ancient Greeks and Romans for their lightness and sheer weave. In the modern period both plain and printed or painted cottons as well as cotton and silk mixes were traded to China, South Asia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Mediterranean market in particular was thriving and some cottons would have reached Europe through the trade of the Italian merchant states, but the real influx began after the Europeans, starting with the Portuguese, established a seaborne direct trade to and from India in the sixteenth century.¹

India’s cottons and cotton and silk mixes came in a vast range of types and qualities. The top end included the finest and sheerest muslins, sometimes woven with gold and silver thread, as well as hand-painted chintzes, which in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe were made into dresses, skirts, housecoats, or furnishings for the upper and middle classes, as seen in Plates 1.1 to 1.4. However, Indian weavers and dyers had for centuries also been producing and exporting coarser cottons and cotton mixes. Chequered, dyed in single colours, block printed, resist-dyed to produce simple patterns, or left undyed, these sold to the lower and lowest end of the market. In the later early modern period, such cottons were used by Europeans to clothe African slaves, but earlier examples of such simpler ranges also survive, as that depicted in Plate 1.5, a resist-dyed Indian cotton fragment found during excavations of late medieval Egypt.²

Whether simple block prints, intricate painted patterns or combinations of the two, Indian chintzes and calicoes shared an advantage over anything Europeans could produce until the late eighteenth century: their exceptionally bright and beautiful colours did not fade either with washing or sunlight and lasted as long as the fabrics themselves. This was due to Indian technical skills that Europeans still had to master: resist-dyeing, mordanting, and linked to this, the proper use of indigo and of madder dyes. Resist dyeing consisted in the application, by painting, printing, or a combination of both, of wax or resin to areas that would be reserved on the textile which would subsequently be soaked in vats of indigo dye. Once dried and the resist removed the result would be a colourfast blue textile with white spaces – or with motifs in different colours which had been preserved from the blue dye. This required familiarity with the use of indigo as dyestuff as well as the use of cold vats, since waxes or resins would melt at higher temperatures. Mastery of this was something which Europeans, who had traditionally used woad for blue dyes, were only slowly acquiring by the eighteenth century. The same was true of familiarity with the fermentation and dissolution of indigo and indigo crystals required to be able to use it as a brush-applied dye for textile painting. For colourfast red and red-based dyes, on the other hand, the textile would need to be prepared with a mordant before being immersed in a madder dye-bath. The mordant served to fix the colours, so that after washing and bleaching untreated areas would again become white. The challenge here lay not only in the composition of the metallic mordants, but also in their thickening so that they could be applied by brush or, more cheaply, via printing blocks. The combination of these techniques would result in colourful calicoes and chintzes: cheaper block-printed ones in one or more colours, but also those that used a combination of block printing and hand painting, and the very finest, entirely hand-painted ones, which could involve up to a dozen separate dye transfers to the fabric.³

The popularity of Indian cottons and their advantage over European imitations lay not only in their designs, however. The weave of Asian cottons was equally important. Whether printed, painted, dyed, or bleached, the weave of the higher quality Indian cottons was finer, lighter, and more even than that of any of the cotton textiles produced in Europe, especially since until well into the eighteenth century most European ‘cottons’ were in fact cotton mixes. European producers struggled to use cotton as warp and instead resorted to the more familiar and sturdier silk or linen as warp yarns, resulting in heavier cotton–linen mixes.⁴

India was not the only region to have mastered cotton technology: by the beginning of our period its know-how had spread widely, including to China, Persia, and the Levant. Thus, while India was the main source of the French East India Companies’ textile imports, China was also a supplier of cottons, of the so-called nankeens in particular, but more importantly provided silks, both plain and figured, such as the man’s dressing gown depicted in Plate 1.6 or the painted silk fragment (Plate 1.7).

In Europe, such textiles proved very fashionable indeed. Used first as furnishings, by the mid- to late seventeenth century they became very much à la mode for high-end clothing, too, especially once Indian printers, painters, and dyers adapted their export goods for the European market, adopting specific flower motifs, measurements, and especially changing the dark background colour of chintzes for the Asian market to suit the Western taste for light backgrounds.⁵ In any discussion of the popularity of Asian textiles in early modern France, inevitably there will be a reference to Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme of 1670, in which the eponymous hero, Monsieur Jourdain, proudly shows off his new dressing gown in indienne, having been informed by his tailor that ‘all people of quality wore this in the mornings’.⁶ While the reference is perhaps tiresome, M. Jourdain is, as it turns out, quite correct. Over the course of the last three decades of the seventeenth century, the Mercure galant, France’s first and foremost journal on courtly life, worldly affairs, the arts, sciences, etiquette, luxury goods, and fashion, regularly featured these and other East Asian fabrics in their fashion news and reported on the arrival of the French East India Company’s ships. In the 1670s it found that one couldn’t see anything but Indian and Chinese printed or painted fabrics in the streets of the capital, and that, while chintz dresses and dressing gowns continued to be highly fashionable, one could by now also find skirts of the same material. Chinese silk taffetas, which previously had been a favourite material for bed furnishing, were now also becoming fashionable as a fabric for skirts, while in 1677 finely striped sheer muslins were the preferred material for overlaying the latest gentlemen’s coats.⁷ In the 1690s still, Asian fabrics made it onto the journal’s coveted fashion plates, as a stylish bonnet decorated with muslin, or as a whole outfit for ‘a lady of quality’, whose luxurious Indian fabrics embroidered with silk and gold were held together with a diamond brooch and a belt with a large diamond buckle in the latest fashion.⁸ Wealthy men and women continued to wear and use such textiles over the century to come, but, as the example of Madame Chanelle and Rose Barbosse shows, this high-end consumption was not the only market segment that the Indies Companies’ textile trade catered to. The first part of this chapter will therefore outline the contours and mechanisms of this trade focusing on the great diversity of the textiles in question to explain how such textiles could appeal to consumers right across the French social spectrum. The chapter’s second part then complicates the picture by explaining the global, rather than bilateral, nature of this textile trade and by introducing the mechanisms and characteristics of France’s second source of Asian-style fabrics, the Levant trade. All in all this chapter thus explains both why this book consistently refers to ‘Asian and Asian-style’ fabrics, rather than just ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’ textiles, how these made their way to France, and why they managed to gain such popularity there.

The French East India Company Trade

The first French Company, the Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales, was founded in 1664 under Louis XIV by Colbert and modelled on the already existing Dutch Company. Like the former it was a shareholder monopoly company that had an exclusive right to equip ships to trade in the Indian Ocean, which meant that none but Company ships were allowed to bring goods back from anywhere east of the Cape of Good Hope to their home country. The French Company’s administrative seat was in Paris, and after first using various other Atlantic ports, it gained its own base in Lorient, Brittany, which over time acquired all the important facilities needed for staffing, building, and repairing the Company’s ships, for loading and unloading as well as storing and selling the merchandise.⁹ Unlike in the British or Dutch case, the royal government, not merchants, held sway over the French company. It remained the majority shareholder of the French India Companies in all their guises, which included the original Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales of 1664 and the Law Company of 1719–21, a merger between the Company of the West Indies (Compagnie d’Occident) and the East India Company, which gave the newly created company not only the monopoly over al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Global Textiles
• Part II Smuggling
• Part III The Making of Economic Liberalism
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index