Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (review)

This is a book about speculation, both intellectual and economic, and what happens when they combine in relation to the politics of eighteenth-century France. Superbly researched and thoroughly referenced, the originality of Michael Sonenscher’s study lies in illuminating the very real political problems faced by French Revolutionary regimes in the 1790s through an examination of the fraught relationship between public credit and social inequality as debated in contemporary political thought. If Montesquieu and Sieyès are the key reference points here, the range of complementary reading is amazing, elucidating the thinking on these subjects of d’Argenson, abbé de Saint-Pierre, Melon, Forbonnais, Rousseau, Mirabeau père, Quesnay, Mably, Helvétius, Chastellux, Turgot, Necker, Say, Roederer, as well as lesser lights such as Joseph Fouchet and Gudin de la Brenellerie. In this respect, the work succeeds as a fascinating reconstruction of the sophisticated, contradictory dynamics of eighteenth-century French political thought, even if the structure of the study is occasionally compromised in its clarity by the very comprehensiveness of its scope. Where Sonnenscher is excellent is in teasing out the comparisons and contrasts between very different writers and thinkers, a skill that revises and refreshes, e.g. Montesquieu’s notions of dual, as opposed to unitary, sovereignty or casts new light on the divergent views of Rousseau and Helvétius on the division of labour. The freshness comes from a persistent focus on public credit, which is presented here as profoundly Janus-faced. Thus, it is seen, on the one hand, as promoting capital circulation and wealth redistribution, and so is linked to prosperity and domestic economic growth; on the other hand, it is accused of exacerbating inequalities in society and hastening social collapse (the metaphorical ‘deluge’ of the title), linked specifically in this respect to ever-increasing war finance. Contemporary political and economic theorists are haunted, in Sonenscher’s reading, by the recognition that constitutional government may well secure public credit, but public credit does not secure constitutional government, and in exceptional circumstances may work precisely to undermine and destroy it. Moreover, the question is raised: what happens when the constitutional legality of paying national debts conflicts with the political morality of reducing social inequality, especially in the shape of tax reform? This, in turn, brings into question the very nature of sovereign power and political representation—in other words, who makes this decision and on whose authority? If any paradigm at all emerges here among so many disparate, sophisticated schools of thought, it is that of systems ‘defaulting’ (a favourite term), whether this be the fear of monarchy defaulting into despotism or governments defaulting on national debt; implicit or explicit, the danger of an involuntary or forced slippage into the very opposite of one’s proposed system looms large. If Sonenscher’s study is sometimes dense and difficult, this is because, like its subject, it operates between a number of countervailing political and economic forces that admit no easy compromise. Yet, it remains an original, compelling reinterpretation of socio-economic theories that shaped the Revolution and much beyond.