Commerce, Sociability, and the Public Sphere: Morellet vs. Pluquet on Luxury

As a genre, the treatise on luxury was a sturdy staple of eighteenth-century thought; dozens if not hundreds of works devote all or a large part of their attention to the subject. ¹ They do not concern themselves for the most part with the restricted world of court and courtiers, as had often been the case in the previous century. For the first time, as recent research has shown, a consumer culture emerged that included more than merely the ruling élite, ² and “luxury” was among other things a convenient topos for rethinking the boundaries between private morality, social obligation, and public interest to take account of this development. Especially striking is the variety of domains in which the role of luxury came to be debated—including its effects on religious belief, social relations, economic progress, moral integrity, and political stability. ³ Indeed, the entire Enlightenment project came to be implicated under a single time-honored rubric.

The last full-scale defense of luxury in the Old Regime, as it happens, was almost certainly one that was never published. It was between 1786 and 1789 that abbé André Morellet (1727–1819), responding to a two-volume attack on luxury by abbé François-André-Adrien Pluquet (1716–90), composed a number of sections of notes Sur le luxe that he clearly intended for ultimate publication and that are now housed with the Morellet papers in Lyon. The Sur le luxe manuscript is not unknown to specialists, but it has not previously been subjected to careful study. ⁴ It totals over 160 pages and is divided into eighteen different sous-cahiers, each with its own subtitle; though there is a rough and unfinished quality to their organization, the individual ideas within them are clear enough.

In revisionist historiography of French Enlightenment social thought, Morellet has recently acquired a prominent place. While his status as a loyal foot soldier in the army of the philosophes has been appreciated in general terms for some time, ⁵ a combination of new information and new theoretical perspectives has now made of him a more central figure. As to the former: a modern edition of his Mémoires, publication of his manuscript treatise on property and of other manuscripts, and a three-volume edition of his correspondence have all made it easier to assess the significance of one of those rare philosophes whose career lasted through the entire Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. ⁶

At the theoretical level, Morellet’s rediscovery owes much to the renewed attempt to consider the French eighteenth century on its own terms rather than as a mere harbinger of the Revolution. To Robert Darnton, Morellet is a case study in the social history of ideas, exemplifying how a man of humble means could in that era parley wit, intellect, and ambition into a successful career of letters. His Mémoires, Darnton argues, focus so obsessively on the author’s rise to prominence that they may be read as “a naïve treatise on the sociology of culture.” ⁷ Submissive to the demands of patronage, responsive to the variety of voices necessary to negotiate Church, state, and salons, Morellet was able to surmount the uncertainties that dogged him throughout a long career, finally acquiring both status (election to the Académie Française in 1785) and security (possession of a lucrative priory in 1788) shortly before the Revolution that would largely undo them both.

To Dena Goodman, Morellet reflects the ambiguities of salon cultural politics. Though generally able to abide by the rules of politesse governing the “republic of letters,” his commitment to free trade was so fervent as to lead him into ad hominem polemic when economic questions arose—as happened in the dispute over Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (1770), when Morellet’s vehemence in attacking this anti-free trade satire “violated the norms of epistolary exchange” and thereby threatened “the autonomy of the Republic of Letters.” ⁸

To Daniel Gordon, Morellet’s polemical engagements promote both the primacy of “public opinion” and the centrality of sociability in defining that...