Liberty and the Leviathan: Commerce and Debt in Ancien Régime France

Historians have long acknowledged the importance of debt in the evolution and ultimate destruction of the Ancien Régime. Nor, of course, was the issue of debt and war new even then. On the eve of the Peloponnesian War, Archidamnus, king of Sparta, warned that "war is a matter not so much arms as of money."² Louis XIV would have agreed. France's debt was largely caused by her military ambitions; under the Sun King the annual deficit ballooned from 21 million livres in 1688 to 600 million livres by 1699.² Louis XIV left his ancestors a sobering legacy. Moreover, the debt continued to grow. As Jonathan Dull recently observed, "the War of the Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, and War for American Independence played the major part in the wreck of the monarchy's finances, collectively costing perhaps 3.5 billion livres (perhaps a third of it coming from the Seven Years' War)."³ What did that mean? Well, for one thing, France shifted the burden of debt to future generations. It had other effects as well. Debt precluded French intervention in the United Provinces during the Dutch crisis of 1787 and contributed to the erosion of support for the monarchy.

It is fortuitous that two recent books by intellectual historians focus on the economy, debt, and political reform in 18th-century France. Both books have a particular resonance given the current economic crisis. But neither Henry C. Clark's Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France (Lexington Books, 2007) nor Michael Sonenscher's Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2007) will appeal to the uninitiated. Indeed, even specialists will be daunted. Sonenscher's critique of the "unintelligible jargon" of the Physiocrats could unfortunately be applied to Clark, whose work is often terrifyingly obscure. Sonenscher's analytical insights as well are too often buried in details. The inaccessibility of both is unfortunate because these books raise important questions.

Clark intends to "articulate" the status of commerce in 17th- and 18th-century thought by focusing on certain pivotal figures: Montchrestien, Mon-tesquieu, Turgot, Morellet, and Sieyès. His book raises fundamental questions about the nature of a modern commercial society. He underscores the role of commerce in shaping political and social questions such as statutory privilege. He argues that "liberal economic theory was first developed to address what we would today regard as distinctly non-economic problems." For Clark, 17th- and 18th-century debates about commerce are important because they revolved around problems that "are better seen as moral, social and strategic rather than merely economic in character." Several seminal thinkers, including Montesquieu, linked freedom of commerce with political liberty and asked if commerce could flourish in an absolute state. Others examined the consequences of the authoritarian dirigiste tradition, which did not end with the Ancien Régime.

Clark divides his account into three sections: the long 17th century, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Revolution. In the first, Clark argues that 17th-century French thinkers saw commerce as a vehicle to buttress the social order, enhance the trappings of royal authority, and strengthen France's position on the international scene. The demands of "dynastic commerce," fueled in part by the crown's need to finance war, often clashed with the interests of French merchants. Not surprisingly, political interests trumped economic considerations. In the second section, Clark focuses on how commerce generated a critique of the social and political order and raised the question of whether trade could act as a "powerful solvent of deep-seated legal and institutional sclerosis." In this context Clark analyzes the ideas of Vincent de Gournay, intendant of commerce (1751-1758), and his circle, who were in large part responsible for the explosive growth of works on political economy in the l750s. Gournay coined...