Chapter Five - “Le superflu, chose très nécessaire”: Physiocracy and Its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Luxury Debate

Summary

If studies of the French Enlightenment have tended to reduce political economy to Physiocracy, they have further tended to reduce Physiocracy to grain. This is not all that surprising. The Physiocrats’ dogmatic insistence on the liberalization of the grain trade, combined with the French crown's efforts to implement that policy in the 1760s and 1770s, triggered fierce debate among men of letters and strident protest by ordinary consumers. And yet, even as one dispute swirled around a quintessential French necessity, bread, another raged around luxury, a highly charged concept in its own right in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Enlightenment debates on consumption burned at both poles of the material world—necessity and luxury—to produce a rich and varied literature of political economy. By shifting attention from necessity to luxury, this chapter not only provides a new perspective on Physiocracy but exposes deep fissures between the ideas of the Physiocrats and those of other Enlightenment economic thinkers, notably the associates of Jacque-Claude-Marie Vincent de Gournay and Adam Smith.

Long before the Physiocrats came on the scene, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville set the basic terms of the eighteenth-century debate on luxury. Tutor to Louis XIV's grandson, the duc de Bourgogne, Archbishop Fénelon prepared his pupil for the moral reform of the French kingdom by penning a work of fiction, Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (1699), which would become one of the most influential texts of the eighteenth century. In the book, Fénelon crystallized classical and Christian critiques of luxury by describing how the consumption of expensive and fashionable goods extinguished virtue, wreaked havoc with the social order and sapped the power of nations. As his preceptor Mentor warns Telemachus, luxury “corrupts manners” by encouraging a vicious culture of material display that renders men “slaves” to false desire as it spreads throughout the social hierarchy. “Even those who are poor will affect to appear wealthy, and spend as if they were so: they will borrow, they will cheat, they will have recourse to a thousand indirect methods” to obtain the trappings of the elite.