Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean

• 1. Louis XIV, Marseillais Merchants, and the Problem of Discerning the Public Good
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 20-49
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CHAPTER ONE
Louis XIV, Marseillais Merchants, and the Problem of Discerning the Public Good

Louis XIV’s conquest of their city in 1660 visually and politically introduced Marseillais to the French Crown’s methods of expanding its domestic and international power. Bourbon statecraft became synonymous with commercial expansion under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who decided that France needed to extend its commerce as early as 1651. “Providence has placed France in a situation where its own fertility is useless, expensive, and inconvenient without the benefits of commerce,” he had written as a go-between for Cardinal Mazarin and the king, “Through [commerce], all the things one needs are carried from one province to another and to foreign lands.”¹

The Crown recognized Marseille as a city well suited to serve as a focal point for French international commerce. The city’s trading networks with the Italian city-states and Levant spanned centuries. As early as the Middle Ages, civic leaders had established consulates in Levantine and other Mediterranean ports to stimulate trade. Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1599, was the first French institution of its kind. Colbert, therefore, decided to build on the city’s centuries-long strengths in Levantine commerce, bestowing on it the royal privileges needed “to render this port the most famous in the entire Mediterranean Sea” and “the most important city in the kingdom.” “Marseille,” he wrote to the royal intendant in Aix-en-Provence, “is the city necessary for us to wage continuous economic warfare against all foreign commercial cities, and especially against the English and the Dutch, who have long encroached on all Levantine commerce.”²

By conquering Marseille and creating a merchant échevinage there to manage a royally regulated marketplace, the Crown built on the city’s commercial strengths for purposes of royal aggrandizement. The Crown went along with Marseille’s heritage of relative independence on the condition that the city’s new leaders renounced separatism and identified themselves more closely with the French monarchy. From the royal perspective, the monarchy’s political presence in Marseille offered nothing but benefits for the city, its administrators and merchants: an invigorated market, a monopoly in the Levant trade, and improved defenses against piracy, smuggling, and contagious epidemics arising from foreign trade and travel.

The new Marseillais merchant elites, however, were neither overt royalists nor acquiescent collaborators. The échevins and négociants played a double role: they were instruments of centralization and advocates for municipal interests. The Crown and the merchant-administrators commonly accepted that commerce might benefit the public good, but their assumptions over how to achieve this public good fundamentally conflicted. Moreover, while the Crown hoped the négociants promoted to positions of administrative power would facilitate its expansionist plans, royal ministers and intendants doubted the Marseillais administrators’ capacity to align their own interests with those of the state.

Royal and civic elites agreed that proper governance required the alignment of private with public interests. Two different traditions, however, fed this preoccupation over how to reconcile such interests. As mouthpieces of absolutist ideology, Colbert and his intendants in Provence argued that only the monarchy could recognize the public good and channel diverse interests to serve this good. Applying this logic to the market, they insisted that centralized administration and the monarch’s sovereign gaze were essential to police self-interested merchants. Marseille’s échevins and members of the Chamber of Commerce questioned this. Suspicious of the Crown’s claims to be the sole purveyor of the public good, they deployed their civic vocabulary and argued that the public interest could only be realized if virtuous citizens articulated the will of the community and that Frenchmen who were “foreign” to Marseille had little knowledge of what might be good for the city. They claimed that methods for commercial expansion and regulation developed outside of Marseille’s walls—even by the Crown—threatened to bring financial disaster, moral ruin, and political turmoil.

This chapter elaborates on the deep mistrust between royal administrators—Colbert and his intendants—and Marseille’s échevins and Chamber of Commerce from 1660 to 1683. While they jointly took major strides to expand French trade in the Mediterranean region, their steps toward developing a positive vision of commerce, and of each other, were rather unsteady. The Crown remained skeptical of merchants’ moral and political strength. However, after Colbert’s death, new administrators obscured the tensions between absolutist and civic ideologies. Between 1683 and 1708, the Crown began fostering a more inclusive political atmosphere that allowed local representatives to articulate how their regions’ commercial interests aligned with the good of the state. In the Council of Commerce in Paris, royal and local delegates combined absolutist and civic traditions to deliberate over how to realize the public good. In the end, Louis XIV’s conquest of Marseille did little to stamp out traditional civic formulations of virtuous political and social conduct.

TOWARD THE CONQUEST: A BRIEF BACKGROUND

The city chosen by Louis XIV and Colbert to serve as the center of operations for royally supervised Franco-Levantine commerce was an oligarchy that enjoyed a long tradition of autonomous rule and anti-royalist activity. Founded by Greek seafarers from Phocaea around 600 BCE, Marseille—originally Massilia—accumulated considerable commercial and cultural power in the ancient Mediterranean until Julius Caesar sacked it in punishment for supporting Pompey in the Roman civil wars.³ Its consuls’ attempts to keep Marseille independent of Catalan counts and French kings through the Middle Ages ultimately failed; the city fell to Charles d’Anjou, brother of Saint Louis (King Louis IX of France), upon his seizure of Provence in the thirteenth century.⁴ Though Provence united with France in 1486 during the reign of Louis XI, the primary organizer of the union, the Marseillais Palamède de Forbin did his utmost to preserve the territory’s autonomy, dictating that Provence join “not as an accessory to a principal, but as principal to another principal.”⁵ Louis XI assured Provence “administrative and political autonomy … under the authority of a lieutenant general under the service of the king.”⁶ The French Crown installed a royal governor, lieutenant-general, and intendant in the regional capital, Aix-en-Provence, but it brought the province into its orbit as a pays d’état, distinguished from pays d’élections by its greater independence.⁷ With its heritage of Roman law and administrative and fiscal liberties, Marseille’s status as an aristocratic city-state was virtually unchanged.⁸

From 1486 to 1660, Marseille’s administrative and legal structures remained intact despite modifications necessitated by conflicts among ruling aristocratic and merchant families.⁹ Most notable among the city’s constitutions were the Rules of Cossa (1475) and Saint-Vallier (1492), and the Règlement du sort (1652). The first placed the city in the hands of a chapitre, composed of several magistrates and two councils. Conflicts between the nobles and merchants led to the creation of the Rule of Saint-Vallier, which instituted a municipal council of seventy-two members, who annually rotated in by thirds. Three consuls, a noble, a squire, and a merchant presided as leaders of the city. The Rule was replaced by the Règlement du sort, which established a 300-person council and instituted the ancient tradition of election by lots.

By the mid seventeenth century, however, the monarchy’s interference in Marseillais politics began creating a volatile environment that polarized those loyal to the Crown against those who mounted the political platform brandishing the rhetoric of civic independence. In 1638, Cardinal Richelieu, disregarding decisions made by the royal governor of Provence, appointed to first consulship Antoine de Valbelle, the lieutenant general of Marseille. Years later, in 1657, the governor’s son took his revenge by elevating Valbelle’s opponents to the first and second consulships. Valbelle’s supporters, led by Gaspard de Glandevès-Niozelles, allied against the new consuls under the banner of Marseillais independence. Amid escalating violence, the Crown charged Niozelles with attempting to assassinate the royal viguier. Accused of lèse-majesté, he lost his noble title and privileges. The Crown hoped that Marseille’s elections of 1659 would restore order, but the city council, emboldened by a tide of anti-royalism, elected Niozelles’ friends to consulships. The new consuls defied the royal order to turn in Niozelles, who mysteriously disappeared.

These disturbances prompted Louis XIV to take control of Marseille. Fresh from his military triumphs on France’s northern frontier, the monarch, who had just engineered the Treaty of the Pyrenees and was preparing to marry María Teresa of Spain, decided to take a detour on the way to his bride.¹⁰ As the royal entourage wove toward the Bidasoa River, where the future queen awaited, they headed southward toward Provence.¹¹ In January 1660, Louis celebrated the rededication of the famed ancient Roman obelisk in Arles, and by March, he had installed himself in the provincial capital of Aix-en-Provence, within striking distance of Marseille. Meanwhile, he sent the royal governor of Provence, the duc de Vendôme, ahead of him with six thousand troops. The wedding procession would march over Marseille’s ruins before proceeding toward the bride.

This conquest, among other events that transpired in 1660, ushered in a new era for Louis XIV. The king was married by June of the same year. Within a few months, Mazarin was dead, and Louis announced that he would assume complete personal control of the French Crown. And in place of a prime minister, a new controller-general, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, worked to fulfill the monarch’s ambitions of royal aggrandizement, commercial expansion, and personal glorification.

COLBERTISM IN MARSEILLE (1660–1683)

Between Louis XIV’s conquest of the city and Colbert’s death in 1683, the controller-general introduced several projects to realize the vision of a Marseille qua “center of Mediterranean commerce,” operating under royal direction. First, Colbert ordered urban expansion. The agrandissement de Marseille in June 1666 transformed the medieval port into a city capable of supporting amplified commercial activity and increased populations of royal naval personnel, galley slaves, and foreign merchants. This expansion was intended to visually impart the message that Marseille was a French city equipped to lead international commerce. On the heels of urban expansion, the Edit sur la franchise du port de Marseille of April 1669 made the city a duty-free port. In order to attract international business and boost domestic sales, Colbert abolished the taxes previously required of foreign merchants entering the city. His five subsequent initiatives were intended to curb corrupt practices in the market and to rein in Marseille’s commercial activity under royal management. These included the creation of mandatory escorts to protect French merchant ships from Barbary corsairs, the regulation of currency exchange, consulate reform, and the negotiation of new capitulations (treaties privileging French subjects) with the Ottoman Empire, and the expansion of Marseille’s Bureau de la santé to protect against merchandise-borne diseases originating in the Levant.

COLBERTISM AND THE CITY:
THE AGRANDISSEMENT OF 1666

Colbert’s earliest project in Marseille, the urbanization project of 1666, triggered heated debates over the correct protocols for realizing commercial expansion. As Béatrice Hénin has shown, urbanization during the Sun King’s reign “imposed the political concept of the national state and its corollary, the absolute monarchy.” Gutting Paris, Sète, Brest, and Rochefort of their medieval traces, the Crown transformed their cityscapes to conform to uniform guidelines. Similar city plans and standardized architectural themes would represent the cohesiveness and breadth of the French state.¹² Colbert’s aspirations for France to emulate imperial Rome found physical expression in urban expansion, in the construction of neoclassical public buildings and in the restoration of antique monuments. He set up new institutions, such as the Académie royale d’architecture (1671), which offered public instruction in architecture, mathematics, mechanics, perspective, and hydraulics and provided students with opportunities to study in Rome.¹³ Roman motifs were integrated into French public buildings, from the Dôme church at Les Invalides (1676) to the Chapelle de Versailles (1689) and St. Sulpice (1736) and later the church of St. Geneviève–Panthéon (1773) in Paris.¹⁴ Striving for equilibrium between Roman antiquity and French modernity, royal architects built a state linked to the splendor of the past.

Louis XIV’s architectural imperialism transformed Marseille as well. Colbert’s letters patent of 10 June 1666 ordered the town to be redesigned as a clean, spacious city to facilitate commerce and accommodate royal administrators. From its founding to 1660, the city perched on the three hills above the Vieux Port faced the Mediterranean, with its back to the eastern marshes. Compact and cramped, the city’s walls, narrow alleys, and squalid apartments, a royal informant observed, made Marseille a hotbed of disease.¹⁵ Colbert decided that the new city would follow a gridline arrangement. A Grand Cours, 300 fathoms (549 meters) long and 14 fathoms (about 25.6 meters) wide, would extend from the main gates down the eastern side of the city. The Cours would intersect with another new boulevard (the present-day Canebière) at the Place Royale. The newly developed southern bank of the port would be the site of the Arsenal of the royal galleys. Conforming to the monumentality and classical symmetry characteristic of baroque urbanism, these renovations would convert Marseille into a French commercial metropolis.

Colbert tapped Nicolas Arnoul, the royal intendant of the galleys in Marseille, to direct the expansion. A commission consisting of Arnoul; Henri de Maynier, baron d’Oppède, premier président of the parlement de Provence and conseiller du Roi; and Dominique Guidy, trésorier général de France, was appointed to design the new city.¹⁶ It focused on three priorities: first, to plan new neighborhoods for naval and other royal personnel; second, to devise methods to lure prominent merchants from the old city to the new; and third, to improve circulation of goods and people by engineering wider boulevards. By June 1666, the Crown had given the developer François Roustan permission to demolish the old walls and to collect taxes to support the project.¹⁷

Marseille’s échevins “completely opposed the entire execution” of the agrandissement, which they saw as an imposition from outside and above.¹⁸ They argued that decisions for urban development had to be deliberated in the city council; the Crown, they maintained, “could not execute [its plans] without hearing the appeal of the supplicants.” The project would not only “greatly inconvenience” the Marseillais but spell their financial and moral ruin. New buildings would devalue older property. Expansion would create a taste for luxury, leading Marseillais to abandon entire quarters for new, “beautiful homes furnished with the furniture and paintings following the century’s trends.” As a result, they would “lose their entire fortunes” and eventually “desert” the city, inviting economic disaster.¹⁹

Marseille in the mid-seventeenth century. Courtesy Archives municipales de la ville de Marseille, 11Fi47.

Nicolas Arnoul’s expansion plan, 1666. Courtesy Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence.

The échevins insisted that the expansion favored those least interested in Marseille; it catered to non-Marseillais. New plans, they claimed, were always “suspicious” and “harmful to the city and its commerce.” The “most suspect” of these “foreign enterprises,” they complained, were new taxes that introduced an “infinite variety” of “contentions” among Marseillais. Motivated only by their own interests, the partisans of expansion “would practice several violations in tax collection.”²⁰ Landlords would face excessive burdens and become entangled in legal processes. As “protectors of the privileges of Marseille” the échevins were “obliged to represent to the Court, the general and particular interests, regarding the subject of the expansion [agrandissement].”²¹

Nicolas Arnoul derided the échevins for their audacity in claiming to represent the “general interest,” depicting them as self-interested, defiant republicans. “Special interests oppose [the expansion],”²² he complained; “the échevins still think they are ancient Roman consuls”;²³ they did “not want to quit their ancient errors,” but rather “behave freely and capriciously without submitting.”²⁴ Climate and geography, Arnoul added, exacerbated the situation; “humidity” and “the heat of the land get the upper hand and reason comes to [Marseillais] too tardily.”²⁵ Tropical conditions made the city’s leaders and inhabitants shortsighted: “they abandon themselves to their work, working for bourgeois who have no other thought than their sole interest without regard to anything else.” Marseille was a city where “the interests of [private individuals] are totally opposed to that of the king.”²⁶

The intendant of the galleys advocated a method of recognizing the public good that was consistent with traditional notions of absolutism. These saw the state as comprised of a multitude of corps, orders, and Estates; the king alone could discern the public good and maintain the state—a collection of disparate corporate bodies—by exercising his justice, reason, and will. As Keith Michael Baker has argued, “it follows from this definition of absolutism that the king, and the king alone, is a public person.”²⁷ As members of diverse bodies held together only through the coordinative powers of royal will and justice, French subjects could only harbor partial interests. While Arnoul and the échevins commonly polarized general and particular interests, the échevins’ claims on behalf of the general good remained, for Arnoul, the expressions of a particular corps.

Equating local resistance to the agrandissement with personal interest, Arnoul informed Colbert that it was necessary to impose the royal will in Marseille. “[I have] no other aim than the king’s grandeur and the good of the city,” he wrote to the controller-general, “Marseille will become … a great city that will not be able to defend itself against its master.”²⁸ Arnoul asked the Crown for the power of force to silence the échevins: “the échevins cover their ears when you urge them to give up their old errors … they are accustomed to want the opposite of what they should want. It is necessary to cure these sick people by force.”²⁹

Ultimately, however, the Crown ignored Arnoul. On 6 March 1668, caught in a deadlock with the municipality, Colbert authorized the échevins to lead the expansion. Under their direction, it became a local project rather than one imposed from outside.³⁰ The échevins formed a Bureau de l’agrandissement comprised of the municipal magistracy and six (later twelve) elected directors. They drafted a revised proposal with two local architects, Gaspard Puget and Matthieu Portal, to triple the size of the city from 67 to 195 hectares and to create a new city center at the port by developing the eastern and southern areas beyond the old city walls.

Marseille in the eighteenth century. Courtesy Archives municipales de la ville de Marseille, 11Fi22.

The échevins’ new expansion plan met royal calls for uniformity but integrated local traditions. While conforming to the grandiosity that Colbert imagined for French cities, the project incorporated regional and Italian styles. Gaspard Puget’s brother, Pierre Puget, used his training as a sculptor and builder in Florence, Genoa, and Rome, to recast Marseille in the style of an Italian city-state.³¹ Rejecting Arnoul’s plans for an austere Cours flanked by apartments with identical façades, Puget envisioned a street “as wide as its length,” similar to the Strada Nuova in Genoa. Apartment buildings would be adorned with Ionic and Corinthian columns or with “nymphs, tritons and sea gods celebrating the maritime vocation of the city, while simultaneously evoking the gilded figures on the galleys anchored at the port.”³² The building blocks for the agrandissement came from Genoa, not France. Deliberations of the Bureau de l’agrandissement as late as 1687 show local architects requesting more Italian marble for the pillars along the Cours.³³

The Cours of Marseille. Courtesy Archives municipales de la ville de Marseille, 11Fi26.

The money and time spent on the new expansion suggest that the échevins disagreed with Arnoul and Colbert more over procedure than over the idea of the project itself. Arguments that the expansion would prompt inflation, depopulation, and financial and moral catastrophes tapered off once the Hôtel de Ville received authority to direct the expansion. Ultimately, it seems that the project worked favorably for many local merchants. Marseille’s artisans and small traders found accommodation in the newer neighborhoods, undercutting Arnoul’s plan to “separate the different social classes by creating a residential sector reserved for notables.”³⁴ Echevins, officers of the galleys, and royal commissioners populated the new district, and it was only in the southwestern part of the agrandissement—the Paradis quarter—that Arnoul’s original idea of an exclusive area restricted to imported elites was realized.

Architecturally and socially, the agrandissement played out in a way that privileged local needs and followed the échevins’ methods of discerning the bien public. It mutated from a royal project into a local one. It transformed the city, not into a Paris in the south, but rather, into an Italian republic on French soil. The intendant of the galleys left Marseille before this materialized, but Controller-General Colbert authorized the modifications. However, he billed Marseille’s échevins 100,000 livres for the privilege of directing the expansion.

COLBERT AND MARSEILLE’S CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: THE EDICT OF 1669

Tensions between Colbert and Marseille’s échevinage and Chamber of Commerce reignited, however, when the controller-general unfurled his subsequent plan to restructure commerce under royal control: the edict of April 1669 that established Marseille as a duty-free port with a monopoly over France’s Levantine trade. This edict prompted a century of unprecedented French commercial expansion.³⁵ It abolished all duties on goods landed in Marseille, attracting foreign merchants by the thousands to the city, which emerged as a global node for merchants from the Levant, the North Sea, the German states, Switzerland, Piedmont, the New World, Guinea, and the Indies. By the eighteenth century, vessels left the Vieux Port for Mexico, the Antilles, Martinique, and Peru, via Cape Horn. India, China, Guinea, and Mozambique also became frequent destinations.³⁶ Marseillais négociants accumulated incredible profits over the first decades of the eighteenth century. Jean-Baptiste Bruny, for example, who made a profit of 120,000 livres in 1700, doubled his sales to 200,000 by 1705, half a million by 1710, a million by 1715, and twice that by 1720.³⁷

Historians credit the edict of 1669 with ushering in a period of major commercial success for France and Marseille.³⁸ Why, then, would the échevins and Chamber of Commerce voice opposition to this edict for two decades? If the edict established Marseille’s monopoly in the Levantine trade and secured the city’s position vis-à-vis domestic and international ports in the Mediterranean, why were there objections to it, and how were they expressed?

Two institutions, the échevinage and the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, opposed the promulgation of the edict. For the échevins, this project, like the agrandissement that preceded it, was an initiative imposed from outside. They challenged the liberalization of the port from the moment the idea of the edict became public knowledge. As of 1664, Colbert had not found a single collaborator willing to act as an intermediary in Aix-en-Provence and in Marseille to realize his dreams. Finally, he turned to Arnoul and d’Oppède.

Facing opposition from the échevinage, these royal administrators tried to court the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, hoping that its members would cooperate with the Crown. In 1650, the city council had separated the administration of commerce from that of the city, freeing the chamber from the authority of the Hôtel de Ville, and it thus wielded considerable power in Marseille.³⁹ It controlled its own activities, determined its budget, founded its own archive, and elected its treasurer without interference from the Hôtel de Ville.⁴⁰ The royal administrators hoped to exploit this separation between municipal and commercial administration to royal advantage: “There are two interests in Marseille,” Arnoul wrote. “It is necessary to separate, one from the other, the échevinage and Chamber of Commerce, and treat them differently, discredit the former and authorize the latter.”⁴¹ Arnoul and d’Oppède initiated negotiations with the Chamber, without the participation of the Hôtel de Ville, which could not concern itself directly with commerce.

The Chamber of Commerce decided, however, that the edict did not suit the financial interests of Marseille’s merchant community. Although it recognized in a Mémoire dressé contre le port franc pour envoyer à Sa Majesté that “Your Majesty would like to enrich your subjects,” it asserted that the edict would invite “a contrary development.” The abolition of all duties would be disastrous for the chamber. It would be deprived of the income that it spent to maintain the port, impose quarantines, police smugglers, and pay the stipend of the French ambassador in Constantinople. Commerce would be destroyed, firms would go bankrupt, and “Marseille would become desolate.” Increased foreign traffic would augment the risk of illegal arms feeding into the market. Foreigners would take over real estate. The pressures of increased traffic and lack of funds would undermine the effectiveness of quarantines. Colbert offered to alleviate these pressures by imposing one new tax—the cottimo—but the chamber argued that a single tax would not generate enough revenue to support expenditures. The Crown’s expectation that the chamber reimburse tax farmers whose services would be suspended in a free port added the final “unsupportable” pressure.⁴² Ultimately, the chamber anticipated that these problems in Marseille would harm the kingdom at large.

While acting independently of each other, the échevinage and Chamber of Commerce presented a similar argument to the Crown. An initiative imposed from outside, it claimed, the edict catered to non-Marseillais interests rather than those of Marseille’s merchant community. It ignored the city’s budgetary needs. It released foreign merchants from the payment of duties needed to maintain the port and consulates in the Mediterranean. It promised foreign merchants the possibility of acquiring the status of French subjects and Marseillais citizens; indeed, Colbert imagined that adopted Frenchmen would play a major role in stabilizing France’s growing market.⁴³ The chamber insisted that a free port would free foreigners from taxes, but the Marseille chamber would be burdened with new expenditures and the problem of confronting potential competitors—naturalized citizens—within the city walls. The chamber and the échevins saw in the edict the same inattention to the Marseillais bien public manifest in Arnoul’s agrandissement.

Colbert reacted by stating that Marseillais merchants could not discern the general good: “there is,” he insisted, “no greater enemy of general commerce and good order … than the merchants of Marseille.” He reminded his intendants in Provence to “work hard for the particular good of this city and the general good of the kingdom,” both which depended on the liberalization of Marseille’s port. He warned that “the small-minded merchants of Marseille have no notion of any other trade than that between their shops … they ignore business in general for the sake of quick, small individual profits, which ruins them later.”⁴⁴

It would seem that the Crown defeated the échevinage and chamber when the parlement of Aix registered the edict in April 1669. Colbert wrote to d’Oppède in May 1669 describing how the positive effects of this edict would prove “most public” and “universal.”⁴⁵ His ideas regarding the edict’s universal application and publicmindedness, as well as his understanding of the Crown’s exclusive authority to crush merchant self-interestedness, were echoed in the edict’s language. It began by defining commerce as the glue that united people and states, and that would secure France’s international power: “Commerce is the most proper means to reconcile different nations and entertain the most opposed spirits in great mutual correspondence,”⁴⁶ it asserted. “We oblige our subjects to apply themselves and carry [commerce] to the most distant nations to gather the fruit … to establish, in peace as in war, the reputation of the French name.” Commerce, it continued, was good for all individual subjects: “it brings and spreads abundance by the most innocent of means, it renders subjects happy.” The edict portrayed the Crown as the liberating force arrived in Marseille to crush personal interests manifest in the vexing tariffs that the city’s administrators had levied: “The best and most profitable establishments for the public became degenerate and enfeebled, … and we found this city overburdened with import and export duties more than any other [place] in the kingdom, although ours [i.e., the Crown’s] were not established there.”⁴⁷ The edict reproached the Marseillais who had profited through superfluous duties and contrasted the Crown’s public-minded, universalist position with the particularistic, self-interested one of local merchants.

The edict of 1669 abolished all duties previously levied by Marseille—the ½ percent tax used to pay the expenses of the French ambassador in Constantinople; another ½ percent tax, the gabelle du port, used to maintain the port; the table de la mer; the duty of 50 sous per ton on foreign ships; taxes on spices and medicine, oil, honey, and alum, a salted-fish tax, and many others. Foreigners could no longer be charged export duties.⁴⁸ The Crown imposed one new tax—the cottimo— on ships entering and leaving Marseille. The Chamber of Commerce would use the cottimo to compensate for what its former duties had paid: the ambassador’s salary, the 25,000 livres required for the upkeep of the port, a new quarantine center, and the liquidation of debts to tax farmers.⁴⁹

Colbert optimistically calculated that the edict and the liberalization of Marseille’s port would generate profits that would quickly render the cottimo unnecessary. He projected that the chamber would be able to cover its expenditures from the surplus in revenue pumped into the city through increased trade. He insisted that the quick abolition of the cottimo was imperative to make Marseille a truly free port.⁵⁰ The Crown therefore reduced the cottimo three times in the first year of its imposition.⁵¹ Meanwhile, royal intendants in Aix-en-Provence pressured the Chamber of Commerce to pay its debts punctually so that the cottimo could be eliminated.⁵² The chamber protested against such developments, pleading that it was near impossible for one tax to cover all its expenditures. Besides paying 16,000 livres to the ambassador and 25,000 livres for port maintenance, the chamber was hounded by tax farmers asking for the liquidation of debts topping 211,508 livres.⁵³ The chamber also used the cottimo for emergencies; in 1682, for example, the French ambassador to Constantinople promised the sultan 250,000 livres in reparation for the French bombardment of an Ottoman city, and Colbert ordered the chamber to pay this sum.⁵⁴ The chamber found Colbert to be out of touch with the financial realities of Marseille.

The suppression of the cottimo was as impractical as it was impossible. Following Colbert’s death, the chamber borrowed 250,000 livres from the Crown in 1685 to cover its outstanding balance; the Crown responded by introducing a “double cottimo” to help pay this loan back.⁵⁵ The cottimo was not abolished until 1766.

COLBERT’S DEFIANT MERCHANTS: ARGUMENTS ABOUT SAILING ESCORTS

Although Colbert’s assumption that creating a duty-free port at Marseille would benefit the fisc suggests an optimistic faith in royally regulated commercial expansion, his other initiatives with regard to the city signal an underlying pessimism about merchants. Following the edict, he introduced a series of regulations to reform French commerce in the Mediterranean and to bring it under royal control. Over two decades, Colbert consistently stressed two points. First, he maintained that merchants, and Marseille’s in particular, placed their financial interests over the public good. Second, he insisted that given such merchant egotism, unregulated trade in Marseille would endanger the state. Colbert believed that commerce required the guiding hand of the Crown to ensure that trade contributed to the public good.

Such assumptions prompted Colbert to require Marseillais trading ships to sail the Mediterranean in convoy under royal naval escort. This decision was provoked by France’s ongoing conflicts with the Barbary Coast states, as a result of which pirates frequently attacked French merchant vessels.⁵⁶ In 1662, Colbert informed his intendant in Aix that His Majesty would maintain twelve galleys and other warships in the Mediterranean to escort merchant ships during peak summer trading seasons.⁵⁷ He ordered Nicolas Arnoul to build more galleys, which were to be equipped with cannon and carry infantry.⁵⁸

The Marseillais merchants refused this royal protection, insisting that delays involved in waiting for escorts and leaving at designated times would put them out of synch with fluctuations in the market dictated by supply and demand.⁵⁹ Colbert criticized the merchants for placing their financial interests over those of trade in general. He warned his intendant: “every time you speak with the merchants of Marseille about these affairs, guard yourself against their arguments, which are all false and will lead to the destruction of commerce.”⁶⁰ He noted that the Marseillais merchants’ objections were consistent with their desire “to preserve for themselves complete liberty in their commerce.”⁶¹ From Colbert’s perspective, a duty-free port would attract merchants who would benefit France, but also pirates, bandits, and smugglers who disrupted trade and attacked French subjects. The liberty of a duty-free port was contingent on it being royally regulated. The Marseillais négociants, however, understood commercial liberty as the absence of royal interference.

When pirate attacks continued, Colbert blamed the Marseillais merchants, rather than the corsairs: “[I am] not surprised that … kidnappings and … other parallel inconveniences befall those of Marseille who continue their commerce sans escorte and who choose not to profit from the powerful protection that His Majesty offers.”⁶² Over a decade later, when he observed that Marseillais merchants continued to be “kidnapped by the Barbary pirates,” he ridiculed them for “never want[ing] to put in the least amount of effort or diligence to get themselves out of this mess.”⁶³ Colbert could not comprehend how Marseille’s merchants could refuse the Crown’s protection, when their practices upset not only France’s “general commerce” but, more obviously, their own.

COLBERT AND COINAGE: CONTROLLING CURRENCY IN MARSEILLE

Most galling for Colbert was Marseille’s merchants’ practice of depleting the kingdom of currency. “The source of all the abuses that are committed in regards to money in the whole kingdom is Marseille,” he claimed, “because the merchants do not want to find a means to send French merchandise to the Levant, and they find it easier to send money in cash [out of the country].”⁶⁴ Colbert calculated that they exported two million coins annually.⁶⁵ He doubted the merchants’ argument that the superior quality of Levantine textiles left them no choice but to pay cash for them. The British and Dutch, he claimed, had no problems trading with “absolutely no money.”⁶⁶ The use of currency benefited foreign markets at France’s expense and disrupted Colbert’s plans to increase exports. He accused Marseillais merchants of trading in counterfeit coin at inflated rates: “The greatest disorder concerning monies consists of the 3 sous coin exchanged in Marseille … the Marseillais merchants in particular … introduce false coins in the Levant.”⁶⁷

Colbert depicted these activities as financial “crimes” of self-interest that violated the Crown’s “universal” laws: “The Marseillais merchants, who care for nothing but the little profit that they can make, and who abuse the liberty that they have been given up to now to ship money as they like to the Levant, do so against … the universal and fundamental law of all states, which prohibits the transport of gold and currency on pain of death.” He ordered the royal navy to randomly check Marseillais ships, confiscate money, and punish noncompliant merchants. Initially limited to four annual searches, seizures escalated to several per month.⁶⁸

The conflicts between the controller-general and Marseille’s échevins, Chamber of Commerce, and merchant elite suggest a consistent problem for Colbert: business was good, but merchants tended to be bad. They pursued their financial interests and disregarded the good of the state. This negative view of merchants was a remnant of traditional perceptions of commerce as a “public hazard” and of its practitioners as the antithesis of virtuous citizens, Amalia Kessler argues.⁶⁹ Notwithstanding Colbert’s new vision of commerce as the foundation of society, his understanding of it was thus distinctly old-fashioned. He insisted that the Crown alone could contain Marseillais merchants’ egotistical impulses, if not through regulatory systems, then by force.

TRANSPARENCY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: COLBERTISM BEYOND MARSEILLE

Colbert’s plans to oversee merchant activity were not limited to Marseille. If the edict of 1669 brought Levantine goods and merchants to Marseille, it also released Marseillais merchants in greater numbers to the Levant. Policing commerce required the cooperation of ambassadors, consuls, and merchants around the Mediterranean who would serve as Colbert’s eyes and arms. Three projects were central to his endeavors: reforming consulates, educating new interpreters, and modifying French treaties with the Ottoman Empire.

That Colbert’s reform of the consulates coincided with the edict of 1669 was no coincidence. The month the edict was finalized, Colbert wrote to French consuls abroad, stating that the king had named him secretary of state, and that henceforth all consulates fell under his control. He ordered them to supply him with information on their country of residence, including the form of government, merchandise, manufacturers, the quantity of caravans, European ships and merchandise entering and leaving port, the status of the army and navy, and running prices and currencies of other nations.⁷⁰ He requested an inventory of French five-sous coins so that he could curb counterfeit trading and the depletion of currency from France.⁷¹ According to Colbert, such policing was essential to protect confidence in and the value of French currency in the global market.

Colbert stressed the need for paper trails to bring the consulates into the orbit of centralized governance. He ordered strict delivery of deliberation minutes from “assemblies of the nation” abroad. These were councils composed of merchants, captains, and shipowners, who convened regularly to debate over resolutions to be executed by the consuls. Traditionally, Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce requested copies of these minutes, but, as Colbert noted, such copies were “neither signed by all the participating merchants nor registered in time.”⁷² He issued an arrêt du Roi demanding prompt delivery of the minutes of deliberations to Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce.⁷³

Colbert’s reforms also involved transforming the practice of hiring interpreters, or drogmans, for the consulates. Until 1670, these drogmans were Ottoman subjects—often Jews and Greeks. Strained relationships with their French employers generated “frequent complaints by French merchants residing in Levantine ports [échelles du Levant] concerning the functions of these drogmans”; Colbert therefore decided that merchant assemblies would elect French nationals as interpreters.⁷⁴ Given the scarcity of multilingual Frenchmen in the Levant, he ordered “that every three years, six young Marseillais boys be sent to the convent of the Capuchins of Constantinople and Smyrna to be instructed in our religion and the knowledge of Levantine languages.” In the interim, he sent boys annually to supply consulates with immediate linguistic support.⁷⁵ Known as enfans de langue— children of language—these students served “the king and the public in their capacity as interpreters for which they have been called.” Under Colbert, the former job of Ottoman personnel was transformed into an exalted occupation for “king and public.”⁷⁶

Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce reluctantly paid—with the cottimo—the cost of educating these boys. It objected to the annual 300 livres requisite for each student and to the monastic education, which seemed inappropriate for boys destined for careers in commerce. The Capuchins in Constantinople complained to Colbert that the chamber refused to pay its installments or sent them tardily.⁷⁷ It was only after 1681, when the effects of such education were finally felt that the chamber’s protests abated.

THE CAPITULATION OF 1673

The new commercial treaty concluded between the Ottoman sultan and French king on 5 June 1673 was Colbert’s crowning achievement with respect to France’s Mediterranean trade. The odds were against such an agreement being reached. In 1669, reports from merchant deputies in Marseille and Lyon regarding Franco-Ottoman relations were overwhelmingly negative. Word that Sultan Mehmet IV had arrested French ambassador, Denis de la Haye, sieur de Vantalet, and imprisoned him in the Castle of the Seven Towers—the Yedikule fortress—at Constantinople had brought France and Turkey to the brink of war. Such reports, Colbert worried, would cause “disorders and bankruptcies in commerce, and … the most considerable loss to commerce that there has been in Europe for the subjects of His Majesty.” He planned to divert warships to the Levant to “reestablish the reputation of Your Majesty’s armies.”⁷⁸ He suggested to the chevalier Antoine de Valbelle, chef d’escadre de galères, that he reinforce his supply of gun-powder and grenades. At the end of 1669, right after the promulgation of an edict to bolster Levantine commerce, France was poised for war with the Ottoman Empire.

War was, however, averted. Louis XIV recalled his ambassador and dispatched Charles François Olier, marquis de Nointel, conseiller du Roi in the parlement de Paris, as new ambassador in August 1670.⁷⁹ Nointel’s first impressions of Constantinople did little to ease the Crown’s anxieties, but Colbert shied away from war. News circulated among Constantinople, Smyrna, and Paris that the French were the most abused foreigners in the Turkish capital. The Ottoman court treated the French ambassador “without regard for the dignity of the king,” and, against rules laid out in former capitulations, prosecuted and executed a French national in front of Nointel.⁸⁰ The grand vizier, Ahmet Cuperly, agreed to the renewal of ineffective old treaties, but refused to sign a new agreement. While such news led Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce to encourage war, the controller-general stalled. France could not afford to open another front when it had just ended the War of Devolution against Spain (1667–68) and was poised for the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78). A war of words ensued, with Colbert threatening to recall his ambassador and to suspend trade. Verbal threats worked; the sultan agreed to a new capitulation, formalized on 5 June 1673.

The Capitulation of 1673 strengthened French commerce in the Levant by establishing physical security for French nationals, commercial privileges that topped those of the British and Dutch, and consular sovereignty over French nationals. In flamboyant rhetoric, its preamble announced the friendship between “the emperor of emperors and distributors of crowns … protector and governor of … the largest parts of Asia and Africa … Mehmet IV” and Louis XIV, “the greatest monarch of the land of those who believe in Jesus, chosen among the glorious princes of the religion of Christ, the conqueror of Christian nations, seigneur of majesty and honor, patron of glory, emperor of France.”⁸¹ Its clauses guaranteed ambassadors, consuls, merchants, pilgrims, and French nationals in general protection in the Ottoman Empire. French ships and nationals could not be seized by Ottoman pirates; those taken prisoner had to be released, and the Crown could legally punish pirates by destroying their ports. Churches could not be vandalized, and previously burned Capuchin convents were allowed to be rebuilt.

The capitulation extended the definition of French nationals to include subjects of “nations that do not have their own ambassador in [Ottoman ports] and therefore trade under the banner of France,” including Portuguese, Sicilians, Castilians, and Messinians.⁸² Any European lacking protection of an ambassador could enter Ottoman territory as a Frenchman. European traders who did not speak French and had never set foot in France could thus trade as French nationals to benefit French commerce.

Beyond physical security, the capitulation established commercial advantages and the French Crown’s extraterritorial authority. French merchants secured the privilege of trading whatever goods they pleased in the empire. French nationals were exempted from Ottoman taxes; the currency they brought with them from France could not be confiscated “under the pretext of converting it to Ottoman money.” Import and export duties were reduced from 5 percent to 3 percent. The last category of clauses established French sovereignty over French nationals: Ottoman courts could not try, prosecute, or execute French nationals. French laws trumped Ottoman ones within French “nations” abroad.

The most important clause for Franco-Ottoman relations and for a pro-French international balance of power in the Levant was clause 19 of the 1673 agreement:

The emperor of France is among all Christian kings and princes, the most noble of the highest family, and the perfect friend that our sultans have acquired among the kings and princes of the believers in Jesus … we command that his ambassador who resides in our happy Porte have precedence over all the ambassadors of other kings and princes, whether at our public divan [council of state] or in other places that they may find themselves.⁸³

Like the edict of 1669, the 1673 capitulation introduced a framework whereby the Crown could maximize its authority over its merchants while enhancing French commercial activity. Underlying Colbert’s commitment to centralized control of commerce were the assumptions that it was beneficial to state power, but that in the physically dangerous and financially volatile market world, the merchant needed to be protected, guided, and even punished by the king, who was the sole guarantor of the public good.

The many kinds of royal interventions that Colbert introduced—from capitulations, edicts, and arrêts to regulations regarding escorts, interpreters, and embassies—were intended to supplant traditional local trading arrangements. Louis XIV and Colbert’s form of state-building was predicated on the understanding that statist authority would override and replace local forms. Paradoxically, however, it increased communication between royal and local administrators and provided a space where regional voices were amplified. Unwilling to sacrifice participatory methods of determining what was good for the public, the échevins, members of the Chamber of Commerce, and elite Marseillais merchants insisted on retaining their freedom to trade. Depending on context, this freedom meant many things: the échevinage’s power to convoke its own urbanization bureau; the Chamber of Commerce’s freedom to decide on commercial edicts, regulations, and duties; merchants’ ability to determine independently when to set sail with their merchandise and currency. Traditional civic definitions of liberty butted heads with statist, monarchical ones.

These meanings, however, were open to change. Following Colbert’s death, some Marseillais elites began seeing him as a champion of liberty. Revisionist views of Colbertism offered by Marseille’s new generation of merchants praised the controller-general’s dedication to commercial freedom and the city’s monopoly in the Mediterranean. “Commerce is the child of liberty … [which] alone can render [it] powerful and profitable,” wrote Auguste Chambon, a Marseillais tax farmer (receveur des fermes), “the great Colbert, whose patriotic vision enriched France, saw how Marseille’s situation could be profitable to domestic and foreign commerce, once he cleared the city of the troubles and hindrances that suffocated it.”⁸⁴ Chambon celebrated Colbert’s accomplishments for freedom of trade, while associating Marseillais merchants’ activities prior to 1669 with the “abuse of liberty,” and “too much liberty.” Patriotism and civic excellence, in Chambon’s view, required a form of liberty, such as Colbert’s, that trumped older, local forms of liberty, which generated anarchy. A contemporary Marseillais remarked that resistance to the controller-general was indicative of “personal interests prevailing” over the general good, while the controller-general “disentangled the general interest from particular interests and placed the latter in service of the former, for the establishment of the Levant trade.”⁸⁵ This is not to say that resistance to Colbertism went underground; throughout the eighteenth century, many Marseillais administrators and merchants continued to try to get rid of the regulations the controller-general had imposed on the city. It is telling, however, that between 1700 and 1703, the Marseille Chamber of Commerce and its deputies in the royal Council of Commerce strove to restore Marseille as a duty-free port, and protect Colbert’s reforms, which the previous generation of échevins had nearly refused. Had Colbert still been alive, nothing would have made him happier.

TOWARD RECONCILIATION: PONTCHARTRAIN, CHAMILLART, AND A NEW ERA OF MERCANTILISM

Colbert died on 6 September 1683, at a time when Europe was again plunged into the throes of war. A week after his passing, King Jan III Sobieski of Poland broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna, initiating the eventual Turkish withdrawal from much of southeastern Europe. Louis XIV took advantage of the Wars of the Holy League and staged French advances into Luxembourg and Strasbourg. His rivalry with the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs led to the wars of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) and the Spanish Succession (1701–13). Meanwhile, though his military engineer, Marechal Sébastien le Prestre, marquis de Vauban, warned that war and religious intolerance undermined the army, navy, and commerce, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, triggering the exodus of nearly 300,000 Protestants from France.

Against this backdrop, new characters took center-stage as Colbert’s successors. In contrast to his one-man show, this ensemble led by successive controllers-general, Michel-Robert le Peletier, comte de Saint Fargeau (1683–89), Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain (1689–99), and Michel Chamillart (1699–1708) divided the management of commerce and the navy. They shared commercial administration with state officials and former intendants promoted to the offices of directors-general of commerce. The expanded scope of war, commerce, naval activities, and colonization made one-man control impossible. These successors, whether for lack of Colbert’s dedication or for the sake of practicality, brought his level of multitasking and micromanaging to an end.⁸⁶ Under Pontchartrain, who became chancellor in 1699, naval affairs passed to his son, Jérôme Phélypeaux, while the administration of commerce was divided between his cousin, the conseiller d’état Henri-François Daguesseau, former intendant of Languedoc, and his nephew, the conseiller d’état Michel-Jean Amelot, marquis de Gournay. With these men, the Marseille échevinage and Chamber of Commerce succeeded in developing more conciliatory relationships with Versailles.

Historians have been divided over the direction mercantilism took following Colbert’s death. Some have downplayed the changes introduced by Colbert’s successors arguing that “the machinery that Colbert had created … was continued and enlarged”; others have shown that pragmatic concerns led Pontchartrain and Chamillart to shrink royal interference in the administration of commerce and colonial enterprises.⁸⁷ Meanwhile, recent studies have shed light on transformations in the positioning of local leaders, go-betweens, and patrons.⁸⁸ A focus on the linguistic practices of the local and royal elites—particularly the new Council of Commerce’s modified expressions of how to govern diverse commercial interests—can offer insight into how this era of mercantilism was characterized by change and continuity. While royal and local administrators deployed traditional expressions to articulate their ambivalence about merchant self-interest, they also adopted new conceptual approaches to understanding commerce. These practices obscured the tensions between absolutist and civic ideologies. Municipal representatives to the Crown in the Council of Commerce oscillated between their uses of absolutist and civic idioms, while combining new utilitarian principles that valorized commercial activity with ideals of political virtue stemming from the city. The remainder of this chapter will focus on two things: how these representatives imagined themselves as participants of royal administration, while maintaining their local affiliations, and how, through them, the Crown adapted civic idioms for royal use.

JOSEPH FABRE AND THE COUNCIL OF COMMERCE

The Council of Commerce (1700) was instrumental in repairing the relationship between the Marseille Chamber of Commerce and royal representatives. Several negative developments, however, preceded its founding. Wars and changing royal administrative personnel initially damaged the Marseille chamber’s relations with Versailles. Pressured to fund its skyrocketing war expenditures, Versailles revoked the tax-exempt status that Colbert had granted Marseille; from 1686, it issued and raised new duties on cotton, sugar, and coffee. By century’s end, Marseille was a duty-free port in name only. The imposition of new taxes strained Marseille’s Levantine trade and its relationship with other French cities. Foreign traders diverted their business to other cities in France, Holland, Italy, and England, endangering Marseille’s monopoly. While this benefited other French cities, it generated tension among them as they sought to discontinue Marseille’s duty-free status permanently and achieve duty-free status for themselves.

Amid these developments, Colbert posthumously became a champion for Marseille’s freedom of trade. Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce appealed to the Crown to reinstate the edict of 1669, nudging royal delegates with gifts. The royal intendant Thomas Morant became a favorite of the chamber, which paid him 6,000 livres annually to serve as inspector of Marseille’s Levantine commerce. The chamber also offered gifts to Controller-General Pontchartrain.⁸⁹ Royal agents at Versailles proved inconsistent patrons, however. Initially, Colbert’s son Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Colbert, the marquis de Seignelay, secretary of the navy, and Jean-Baptiste de Lagny, director-general of commerce, urged Pontchartrain to “defend the cause since … the interest of Marseille is united to that of the state.”⁹⁰ Lagny’s support floundered, however. For reasons that remain mysterious, he supported French cities whose administrators wished to discontinue Marseille’s monopoly. Lagny resurrected Colbert’s vilification of Marseillais merchants’ self-interested behavior: “It seems to the inhabitants that the freedom of the port gives them permission to do anything to the detriment of the state,” he charged; “few want to reduce this freedom within limits fitting the bien public.” The Marseillais screamed for liberty, he continued, but did not govern themselves in “the spirit that had prompted the king to privilege them,” ruining their own trade, expending financial resources, and “introducing goods whose sale is ruinous to the public.”⁹¹

Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce faced a tough challenge: to get the edict of 1669 reinstated, it had to convince Versailles and representatives of other French cities that what was good for Marseille was good for the country as a whole. It had to prove that Marseille’s merchants were motivated not by self-interest but by the desire to benefit France.

The opportunity to make such claims materialized when Pontchartrain and Daguesseau created the Council of Commerce on 29 June 1700,⁹² stating that “protecting the commerce of [Louis XIV’s] subjects inside and outside of the kingdom,” was “most important for the good of the state.”⁹³ The council included six royal officers (commissaires), and thirteen merchant deputies—négociants elected by municipal officers—from leading French cities.⁹⁴ Because Marseille had a Chamber of Commerce, it elected its deputy to Paris. The Council of Commerce was responsible for advising the controller-general on French domestic and international commerce. The ministers of state forwarded petitions regarding commerce received from intendants and manufacturers. The commissaires reviewed the dossiers; the deputies convened at the home of Henri Daguesseau to deliberate the council’s decisions.

Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce asked the council to restore two privileges: Marseille’s free-port status, and its monopoly in the Levantine trade. Meanwhile, it nominated Joseph Fabre (1634–1717), son of the Marseille négociant Jourdan Fabre, as its delegate to the council.⁹⁵ Joseph Fabre had served as consul, was a banker, manufacturer, diplomatic agent to the prince of Savoy, naval treasurer in Marseille, director of the Compagnie de la Méditerranée, and director of French consulates in the Mediterranean.⁹⁶ He was favored by the current controller-general, Chamillart.⁹⁷ The sixty-six-year-old Fabre arrived at the capital in January 1701 and presented himself at Versailles, his valet and horses wearing the colors of Marseille and his carriage blazoned with the city’s coat of arms. He communicated to Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce that “diverse deputies have made propositions that are not suitable to our commerce,” and promised to fight them “for the good of the patrie and satisfaction of our commerce.”⁹⁸

Thomas Schaeper has applauded Joseph Fabre for leading “the most successful and resourceful lobbying campaigns in early modern French history.”⁹⁹ Dismantling the claims of deputies who wished to reduce Marseille’s commercial privileges, and rendering fruitless their alliances with councilors of state and farmers-general, Fabre persuaded the Crown to issue the arrêt of 1703 that reaffirmed his city’s privileges. He accomplished this by maneuvering between two identities. First, by portraying himself and the other delegates of the council as vital components of centralized power, Fabre claimed, in effect, to be part of the royal government. The council was more collaborative in nature than similar institutions founded by Colbert; the delegates were advisors to the controller-general rather than mere administrative subordinates. Mastering this function, Fabre insisted on the role of the delegates as impartial protectors of France’s commercial interests: “[We must] know the commerce of each province, their problems, their remedies, and [we must] protect them. And we must not change or measure the practice of one province against the other.”¹⁰⁰ He downplayed his local ties and stressed that he was interested in the universal welfare of French commerce. Inclusion in the council gave him, as a local representative, an opportunity to buy explicitly into the king’s rhetoric of the public good. Fabre maintained that the delegates to the Council of Commerce served as the eyes the Crown, which alone could discern the bien public.

Founding arrêt for the Council of Commerce, 1700. Courtesy Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence.

At the same time, however, Fabre was a representative of Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce. He studied its 445-page memo that requested the following: the suppression of bureaus established in Marseille by tax farmers; the transfer of these bureaus to locations outside the city, at the “entry to the kingdom”; freedom of transit—toll-free passage—for merchants carrying goods from Marseille to Geneva; restriction of direct Levantine trade to Marseille.¹⁰¹ Fabre justified these requests to the council by mobilizing a civic idiom. Marseille’s merchants, he insisted, exhibited the best model of citizenship, harmonizing their personal interests with the public well-being of France. Marseillais commerce was an invaluable asset to the kingdom: its fair prices encouraged trading, its bread and oil market fed the kingdom, and its duty-free market encouraged consumption.¹⁰² Fabre produced calculations to dispel the argument that Marseillais merchants’ custom of paying foreign manufacturers with gold and silver (the écu d’or or the pistolle d’Espagne) depleted France’s funds. He maintained that such money was used to buy bread and oil from the Levant, “indispensable necessities for the kingdom.”¹⁰³ Marseillais merchants provided the state with money, food, and service. They were not merely self-interested.

Meanwhile, Fabre highlighted the moral bankruptcy of delegates and merchants from cities other than Marseille, accusing tax farmers, contraband dealers, and deputies from other regions of placing their own interests over France’s general good. Fabre’s primary adversaries were tax farmers who infringed on Colbert’s edict by setting up entrepôts in Marseille to collect duties on coffee, tobacco, and sugar. Fabre’s Paris lawyer and secret agents provided evidence to show that these tax farmers encouraged contraband trading that benefited foreign markets.¹⁰⁴ Sellers wanting to evade taxes used illegal means to smuggle goods out of the city, while buyers turned to foreign markets rather than pay taxes. Contraband smuggled in from quarantined ships in Marseille amplified the risk of contagious disease. Vilifying tax farmers and contraband dealers for making “the public suffer for their particular interests,”¹⁰⁵ Fabre insisted that such self-interested acts of “disorderly” conduct and “tyranny” be punished for the “good of the state.”¹⁰⁶

Fabre also disparaged the deputies who wished to discontinue Marseille’s monopoly in the Levant trade. These deputies, who understood liberté du commerce as opening duty-free Levantine trade to all French ports, maintained that prices for Levantine goods in Marseille were 33 percent higher than prices in English and Dutch markets; they called for the suspension of the 20 percent duty on Levantine goods acquired from ports other than Marseille.¹⁰⁷ Against those who maintained that “[we] are not assembled here for Marseille alone, but rather to consider the general good of the state,”¹⁰⁸ Fabre responded that such men craved a “good market for their own merchandise, advantageous for their own manufacturers.”¹⁰⁹ Fabre argued that universal direct trade with the Levant would lead to an oversupply of Levantine goods and generate large trade deficits.¹¹⁰ Deputies who wished to enhance profits in particular cities at the expense of general freedom of trade were “devils” and “imposters,” he fulminated.¹¹¹

Both Fabre and his adversaries climbed a slippery slope. Wearing their royalist hats, the deputies maintained that they were there to protect “the general state of commerce”¹¹² and to help the Crown impartially regulate French trade. They concurred that strengthening French commerce required the liberté du commerce, liberté générale, and entière liberté of the market. Each deputy, however, understood “liberty” to mean the maintenance of local privileges, often at the expense of other municipalities.¹¹³ Fabre expressed his commitment to restoring Marseille’s free-port privilege by arguing against universal laws. Against motions for uniformity, Fabre called for the preservation of particular privileges: “we shall fail if we want to render all the provinces uniform. The difference of situations creates differences in commerce.”¹¹⁴ Fabre argued for “general interest” and “universal liberties,” but he did not want general laws. The Crown had established the Council of Commerce to cut through the labyrinth of privileges and to introduce universal laws to govern French commerce. The council’s deputies, however, did not wish to see that happen.

The difficulty for the deputies lay in the fact that they could not argue for their privileges as privileges. Each utterance on behalf of privileges placed the speaker at risk of being implicated for harboring self-interest. Fabre described this challenge to Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce, explaining that arguments for privileges—by definition particular laws for corporate bodies—had to be couched in terms of the “general interest of the state.” “I have some difficulty regarding things that pertain … to policy and the general interest of the state,” Fabre wrote. “I must not ask for things contrary to politics or to the interests of the state that the king, the minister, and the council will never grant.”¹¹⁵ One consistent argument worked in his favor: what happened to be good for his city was good also for France: “the kingdom’s most useful commercial establishment is the free port [of Marseille.]”¹¹⁶ Fabre used the utility of Marseille’s free port to negate the fact that it was a privilege; defending Marseille’s free-port privilege against encroachments from privileged trading companies, his brother, Matthieu Fabre, went so far as to maintain that “all privileges are contrary to the public good … the liberty of the port [of Marseille] is opposed to all exclusive privileges; it is necessary to leave a free port entirely free.”¹¹⁷

The strategy of arguing for a privilege by denying privileges, combined with massive amounts of gift-giving, produced results for Fabre and Marseille.¹¹⁸ The Crown reinstated Colbert’s edict of 1669 on 10 July 1703.¹¹⁹ The arrêt redesignated Marseille as a completely free port; no other French port could receive goods directly from the Levant. It reimposed the 20 percent duty on Levantine goods purchased outside of Marseille. It ordered tax farmers out of the city’s limits; all duties imposed on coffee, sugars, and tobacco were withdrawn. It reestablished free transit to Geneva.

Fabre’s victory came at a price, however. Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce complained that royal officers in Paris and Versailles had influenced him for the worse; he was now too invested in “the general interest” and the “public good.” These men, the chamber insisted, made Fabre “too republican.”¹²⁰

What does this comment suggest? Fabre had become, in a sense, bilingual. He mastered the royal rhetoric of the public good to legitimate himself as an impartial deputy to the council, while mobilizing the civic idiom of public good to legitimate Marseillais commerce. His depiction of himself as part of a monarchical institution that would regulate the commercial interests of French subjects was rooted in the absolutist ideology of the sovereign gaze; his characterizations of Marseillais merchants as citizens harmonizing their private interests for the public, and his vilification of his enemies as morally decrepit abusers of the public, were founded on civic conceptions of the body politic. Both traditions, royal and civic, posited a tension between public and private interest. Both valorized individuals—in the first case, the king; in the latter, the citizen—who channeled private interests in service of the public. The chamber failed to distinguish when Fabre slipped between his use of absolutist and civic idioms.

More important, this confusion suggests that new opportunities for participation in discerning the public good had emerged since the discussions among Colbert, Arnoul, and Marseille’s merchant elite in 1660. Arnoul and Colbert distrusted the Marseillais’ administrators and merchants’ aptitude for recognizing their own interests, let alone those of the state; as Henry Clark has shown, Louis XIV “operated on a radical distrust of the ability of ordinary people to understand their own interest [while] counter[ing] this deformity with a supreme confidence in the sovereign’s ability to discern and understand all the interest of all his people.”¹²¹ Clouds of mistrust of merchants still hovered over the Council of Commerce, but its discussions reveal a very different dynamic. Local delegates and royal counselors fluctuated between their uses of the traditional concepts of royal authority and civic spirit and the more modern idiom of utility. This utilitarian argument was a powerful tool for local and royal proponents of commercial expansion; as historians have shown, “a traditional conception of commerce as a public hazard that had to be carefully regulated increasingly … gave way to a modern conception of commerce as free private exchange naturally redounding to the social good.”¹²² At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Council of Commerce still subscribed to the idea that merchants were a threat to the state. It deemed government regulation crucial for commercial and political stability; its deputies, meanwhile, accused one another of self-interestedness. Its members also, however, began using utilitarian arguments to valorize cities, subjects, and merchants useful to French commerce.

These new ideas that defended commerce and merchants as useful to the state could be bridged with absolutist and civic traditions. Merged with absolutist language, it held that through regulated commerce, the Crown would create social conditions whereby merchants’ personal gains generated wealth for the royal coffer. Combined with local idioms of civic excellence, this utilitarian argument formed the basis of the emergent commercial civic spirit. Advocates of commercial civic spirit viewed commerce contributing to the public good because participation in commercial activity allowed merchants to duplicate and practice the kind of virtues that citizens cultivated in the political res publica: “commerce was a synecdoche for ‘the public sphere.’”¹²³ Such arguments presented an alternative to the traditional concept of the merchant as a morally suspect, self-interested threat to republics and kingdoms. From this perspective, commerce stabilized society.