Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground by Michael Kwass (review)

Not so long ago, after revisionism had discredited virtually every social interpretation of the French Revolution, commercial capitalism seemed to have had only an indirect bearing on that great event. However, in the last few years, partly because of new interest in the Revolution’s global origins, a growing number of historians have sought to reconnect the commercial and political spheres of eighteenth-century France without resorting to the Marxist models of class conflict common to most prerevisionist interpretations of 1789. But how to do so convincingly has remained elusive, especially given the complex dynamics of state breakdown painstakingly unraveled by revisionist scholars.

In this brilliant, imaginative, and well-researched book, Kwass, building upon his previous excellent work on the politics of taxation, ingeniously argues that it was not so much commercial capitalism that corroded the structures of the Old Regime as its “darker” side, namely, illicit commerce.¹ To be sure, Kwass acknowledges the existence and importance of the “consumer revolution,” to which some historians have pointed as a destabilizing factor and without which his story would not make much sense. Eighteenth-century French consumers were purchasing more goods than ever and, thanks largely to colonial trade, in greater varieties. But as Kwass demonstrates in illuminating detail, this demand was frustrated significantly by the fiscal state’s efforts to regulate commerce, in some cases (for example, Indian calicoes) by banning it altogether to protect domestic textile production, and in other cases (tobacco) by imposing monopolies to fund the state’s increasingly costly operations. The result was the creation of vast networks of illicit commerce, wherein smugglers—like the folk-hero Louis Mandrin—motivated by profit, and consumers, looking for cheaper and more exotic goods, happily collaborated in cheating the state. Thus does Kwass cleverly substitute consumer/state conflict for class conflict as one motor of the Revolution. As illicit commerce grew, and the state responded by imposing increasingly more stringent laws, regulations, bureaucratic controls, and punishments to contain it, the smugglers’ many natural allies among the population came to see in their repression one conspicuous manifestation of the creeping “despotism” against which 1789 was the explosive reaction.

Was the development or the repudiation of such apparently repressive mercantilism a concomitant of the modern state? As Kwass persuasively concludes, both of them were. To be sure, the revolutionaries replaced the burdensome indirect taxes and the hated, heavy-handed apparatus erected to collect them as part of their effort to end despotism and liberalize the economy. Yet, the fiscalization of consumption that had provided nearly half of the revenues received by the Old Regime was so lucrative that the Revolutionaries quickly restored it in a less oppressive form after renouncing it. It is difficult not to draw from this story Tocqueville’s conclusion that the Old Regime persisted in spite of the disruptions of the Revolution.² Indeed, Kwass can readily be considered one of Tocqueville’s worthy successors.