Luxury: The Function of Wealth

Translator’s Introduction

Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (b. Saumur, 1843–d. Paris, 1916) was a scion of an old Norman family who had initially styled themselves “Le Roy, sieurs de Beaulieu.” His father, Pierre, and grandfather, François, had both been mayors of Lisieux and served as conservative/monarchist deputies for the département of Calvados through stormy, revolutionary times. While Paul’s father appears to have died peacefully, his grandfather had been assassinated by Republican troops in 1799 at his manor house in the Norman village of Saint-Martin-de-Fresnay. Under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, Paul’s father, Pierre, was deputy for Calvados between February 1852 and September 1857, being defeated only when the government decided to drop him as its official candidate on account of his Orleanist sympathies.

Paul’s elder brother, Anatole, was a prolific writer on political and economic questions. In 1881 he was elected professor of contemporary history and Eastern affairs at the École libre des sciences politiques, the forerunner of the present-day Institut d’études politiques de Paris (more commonly known as “Sciences po”). In 1906, he succeeded Albert Sorel as director of that institution.

Paul himself was educated at the lycée imperial Bonaparte (now lycée Condorcet) and the École de Droit in Paris, before going on to further study at Bonn and Berlin. He made a reputation as a prize-winning essayist and a regular contributor to such publications as Le Temps, La Revue nationale, and La Revue contemporaine and in 1872 was appointed the first professor of finance at the aforementioned École libre des sciences politiques. A year later, he assumed the editorship of the weekly magazine L’Économiste français. In 1880, he succeeded to the chair of political economy at the prestigious Collège de France,¹ and the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) describes him as “the leading representative in France of orthodox political economy, and the most pronounced opponent of protectionist and collectivist doctrines.”²

The text translated here, the full title of which is “Luxury, The Function of Wealth. Part I: The Character and Variety of Wealth, Its Economic Role,” is the fifth and final section (94–100) of the first part of a study of luxury published in La Revue des deux mondes (The Review of the Two [“Old” and “New”] Worlds).³ While this particular section requires little in the way of exegesis, it may perhaps be useful to summarize briefly the general argument of Leroy-Beaulieu’s article.

He begins by noting that the question of luxury has largely been monopolized by moralists: “The question of luxury cannot … be abandoned solely to the professors of moral science. Economists must maintain their interest in it” (72). Luxury is not, he contends, a matter “solely of precepts and rules for the edifying conduct of life” but one that concerns the production and distribution of wealth. Without directly charging Henri Baudrillart (the late professor of economic history at the Collège de France) with such moralism, it is noteworthy that Leroy-Beaulieu chooses this point to allude to his former colleague’s four-volume study of the history of luxury.⁴

Having established the right of economists to rule on the subject, Leroy-Beaulieu essays a definition of luxury. In his view, it “consists in that part of the superfluous which exceeds what the broad mass of a country’s population considers essential, not only for the needs of existence but for the decency and agreeableness of life” (73). He stresses the relativity of the concept, arguing, in particular, that today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s “decencies,” adopting the English loanword specifically to emphasize the significance of an accepted social minimum that is pitched above the level of mere necessity (79). There is a form of trickle-down theory here: restricted luxury items are merely harbingers of a more general future prosperity; they are tokens of an economic progress that has not yet spread itself to the mass of the population but will inevitably do so.

Allied to this argument is a contention (to...