Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France by Claire Haru Crowston (review)

In 2008, when Jérôme Kerviel’s high-risk bets on derivatives nearly brought down Société Générale, French commentators invoked the speculative frenzy spearheaded by John Law three centuries earlier. Indeed, aspects of the affaire Kerviel seem redolent of an eighteenth-century novel, the sort that gripped a readership navigating the transition from a premarket to a modern commercial world. Claire Haru Crowston has written a fascinating, ambitious, and wide-ranging account of the practices and perceptions of credit that marked this transition. A rare English-language contribution to the historiography of credit in eighteenth-century France, Crowston’s book makes a compelling case for the centrality to all aspects of early modern existence of the concept of credit — a term whose associations with the vagaries of reputation, power, and influence predated and accompanied its economic meaning. Thus one of the first French dictionaries, dating from 1606, defines credit foremost as the ‘belief and esteem that one has for another’ (p. 3). This inseparability of credit’s material and immaterial aspects furnishes Crowston with a powerful justification for producing a study that, rather than focusing on questions of commerce and political economy, aims for the widest possible coverage of the ways in which contemporaries understood credit. Credit, she argues, ‘intimately connected’ the political and the social, the cultural and the economic, and to understand its role is to come to terms with ‘our own perception of distinct realms of human existence’ as ‘a historical concept born of the disavowal of the credit regime’ her book describes (p. 3). Accordingly, Crowston, who accrued her data by conducting word searches in numerous databases of online published sources, surveys the treatment of credit in such diverse arenas as novels, discourses on sex and marriage, and critiques of court culture, before turning her attention to the fashion industry. The intricate relationship of credit and fashion, and the cycles of desire and fear it spawned, lies at the heart of Crowston’s study. As exemplified in the relationship between Marie Antoinette and Rose Bertin, credit — and the need to sustain it — created complex ties of mutual dependence between nobles anxious to display the latest fashions and merchants whose access to an elite clientele promoted their credibility. Detailing the mechanisms of the fashion trade as well as its importance to the French economy further permits Crowston to underscore the importance of women as both crucial engines of credit and as perceived embodiments of its waywardness and unpredictability. Women’s prominence in the overlapping realms of credit and fashion—whether as consumers of or as traders in luxury goods — fuelled anxieties about the value of an industry that, however lucrative, rested on ephemeral trends. In other words, it raised the prospect of a credit-permeated world not unlike the one we have inherited: one characterized less and less by durable wealth than by the dangerously seductive appearance of it.