The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France

This article argues for a reconsideration of the relationship between economic transformation during the final decades of the Old Regime and the origins of the French Revolution. Changes in consumption during the eighteenth century, compounded by a sensationalist philosophy that problematized issues of representation, destabilized the practice of using pomp to constitute social status. The ensuing crisis transformed the category luxury. Long used to denounce the usurping consumption of the lowborn, the term came to be employed in the decades after 1750 to denounce all uses of pomp to constitute political authority and social rank. While the older language of luxury defended a traditional conception of the social order, the luxury critique that developed in the second half of the eighteenth century articulated a radically different vision of society and directed a corrosive attack at the “aristocratic” social order of the Old Regime. This new social critique became a staple of radical discourse in the 1780s.