Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean

• 2. Between Republic and Monarchy: Debating Commerce and Virtue
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 50-77
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CHAPTER TWO
Between Republic and Monarchy
Debating Commerce and Virtue

From Colbert’s tenure as controller-general through the convocation of the Council of Commerce, methods for overseeing Marseillais merchants drew on the notion that they required royal guidance. Underlying this idea was the assumption that commerce was potentially beneficial to state and society but involved dangers: fluctuations in the market, physical and political threats associated with Ottoman trade, and the merchants’ alleged proclivity for favoring their own interests over the general good.

Discussions over policies, however, also undermined the traditional view of the corruptible merchant and fostered a new notion of merchant civic excellence. This chapter explores, in three parts, this reconciliation of exemplary civic spirit with mercantile activity. First, it demonstrates how supporters of commerce revised definitions of republican virtue and noble honor, blurring the distinctions between the two. It analyzes how royal policy makers like Jacques Savary and ecclesiastics such as André de Colonie argued that négociants practiced the virtues requisite of a citizen in the res publica. They equated merchants with citizens, the market with the public, and trading with civic participation. Expressed in a language that focused on political virtue, participation in public affairs, and citizens’ alignment of personal interests with the public good, this understanding of the merchant-citizen rehabilitated classical republican idioms.

The positive spin on négociants linked virtue with another characteristic not part of the classical republican tradition, honor. Associated with the nobility, the concept of honor became central to the reworked assessment of elite merchants. This conflation of honor with virtue mirrored two social changes in France. First, social differences between négociants and retail merchants became entrenched over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, splitting merchant society into two tiers. As négociants emerged as “an aristocracy of commerce,”¹ attributes of honor traditionally used to characterize the second estate were incorporated into positive evaluations of the elite merchant. Second, the social upgrading of the négociant occurred simultaneously with the “downgrading” of certain members of the nobility, who began participating in commercial opportunities traditionally closed off to the second estate.² Due to this participation, the lines between négociants and nobility were increasingly obscured and the nobles’ concept of honor began to be applied to them.

The valorization of the négociant thus resulted from the adaptation of both the classical republican vocabulary of virtue and the language of noble honor to a new commercial aristocracy. These old languages could also be mobilized to support emerging concepts of universality and inclusion. Ideally, any meritorious citizen might rise to the status of a négociant, viewed as the model citizen in a commercial res publica. This emphasis on merit and virtue as the determinants for inclusion into the market undermined traditional concepts of privilege and blurred social hierarchies. As shown by Amalia Kessler, the concept of honor, once reserved for nobles privileged by birth, was increasingly applied to négociants, who demonstrated their honor not by lineage but by participation in commerce and their utility to the state.

The Crown itself strengthened such concepts of universality and inclusivity through new methods it devised to oversee négociants. By the 1670s, the Crown began departing from its practice of issuing particular laws for different corps, guilds, and merchant institutions. As demonstrated in Colbert’s Code marchand, or Commercial Ordinance (1673), and Jacques Savary’s Le parfait négociant (1675), the monarchy generated reforms that applied to merchant institutions and individuals regardless of affiliation, background, or trade. Introducing universalist laws to govern commerce, the Code marchand and supporting publications underscored the new understanding that le négoce was an activity open to a wide range of meritorious citizens and subjects.

How did Marseille’s nobility respond to these new perceptions of négociants and to the central place that they occupied in civic administration and leadership following the conquest of the city by the French Crown in 1660? The second part of this chapter argues that the Provençal nobility of the robe supported Marseille’s commercial expansion. Having bought into the nobility after accumulating wealth through mercantile activity, these new-blood aristocrats were socially positioned closer to négociants than to the nobility of the sword, who resisted social mobility and participation in commerce. Antiquarians who belonged to the robe nobility vocalized their enthusiasm for “new Marseille” by publishing local histories that credited the monarchy with resurrecting the aristocratic republic of Massilia, classical Marseille. Mobilizing what I term a new kind of “republican historicism,” they rehabilitated the notion of the republic’s cyclical historical trajectory—its perfect founding, the corruption of its mores, and its regeneration—but adapted this narrative to commercial expansion and royal intervention. These writers, however, also used their histories to temper their acceptance of royal centralization with local particularism and Marseillais patriotism. Their narratives of the founding, decline, and resurrection of Massilia disrupted the story of French centralization; they maintained that despite the city’s colonization by Colbertist regulations and French administration, Marseille was fundamentally Greek. Like the merchants who constituted Marseille’s échevinage and Chamber of Commerce, these historians from the robe nobility were accommodators of, not collaborators with, the Crown.

The last segment of this chapter discusses how the Provençal robe nobility’s support of commerce differed dramatically from the “republican historicism” fostered among the French sword nobility. Most famously in the northern Burgundian circle, sword nobles reiterated their exclusive claims to aristocratic honor and civic virtue. The classical republican tradition allowed them to articulate their criticism of absolutism and to resist social mobility and royally driven commerce. Reclaiming noble honor as uniquely characteristic of the second estate, writers like François Fenélon, Henri de Boulainvilliers, and Jean du Pradel argued that only the old nobility could restore to France the virtue destroyed by self-interested rulers, administrators, and merchants. Patriotism, virtue, and honor, they contended, were cultivated only in a society that rejected commerce and royal aggrandizement.

What we find, then, are several contrary developments. By encouraging people across estates to participate in commerce, and by extending universal laws to these participants, the Crown nurtured positive ways of thinking about commerce and merchants. While this process undercut traditional hierarchies, it introduced new forms of social stratification within estates. Négociants emerged as elites distinct from retail merchants; meanwhile, the gulf separating the sword and robe nobilities became fixed. These divisions were not solely based on wealth. Particularly among the nobility, their understanding of commerce, their political assessment of monarchical aggrandizement, their historical visions, and their very definitions of virtue, honor, and utility diverged in profound ways. Moreover, while royal administrators and those who participated in commerce disengaged from long-standing negative portrayals of commerce and merchants, new political and religious arguments against commerce gained force across France. Particularly among the sword nobility, these criticisms became discursive weapons to discredit and disrupt royal aggrandizement and, simultaneously, the demographic mobility that the Crown, in part, supported.

SELLING COMMERCE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMERCIAL CIVIC SPIRIT

Historians have used the term “commercial humanism” to describe the ideology adopted by some supporters of mercantilist expansion under Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Commercial humanism, these argue, developed through two combined processes: the disruption of the Christian philosophy that denigrated the pursuit of worldly goods as sinful, and the adaptation of the secular, civic concept of the general good to a defense of commerce. Writers argued that merchants were citizens dedicated to the public good; merchants practiced the virtues of the vita activa requisite of a citizen in a republic. In short, “the commercial inflection of the humanist movement could view commerce as itself an adequate paradigm for the public sphere.”³ Henry Clark argues that this commercial ideology appeared in the 1500s. His argument builds on studies of how the vocabulary of virtue that developed in Italian city-states during the Renaissance continued to shape debates on the commercial state. Combining J. G. A. Pocock’s analysis of political virtue with Jürgen Habermas’s study of the public sphere, he points to humanist-inspired defenses of commerce in late sixteenth-century France.⁴

This study accepts Clark’s assumption that parts of this commercial ideology as it appeared in Old Regime France picked up on classical republican vocabulary. It did not, however, derive solely from the classical republican tradition. This ideology came together in tandem with state-sponsored reforms in mercantilist activity, and through demographic transformations among the aristocracy and merchant communities. Moreover, I shy away from characterizing it as humanistic. Like the Italian humanists, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Frenchmen looked to classical antiquity for intellectual, political, and moral exemplars. They celebrated elite merchants’ commitment to the public good and extolled their service to the state. Unlike Italian humanists, however, these French supporters of commerce were not motivated by a desire to disengage from Catholic scholasticism or to win the support of secular rulers who patronized the arts and sciences in pursuit of a vita activa.

I therefore use the term “commercial civic spirit” to discuss favorable views of merchant public engagement expressed through the combined use of the classical republican idiom of virtue, the noble language of honor, and the new statist vocabulary of utility. This commercial civic spirit materialized in several contexts: at state and local levels, in religious discussions, and among the robe nobility. State officials and local apologists justified commercial expansion, hailing the market as a hotbed of civic and moral virtues and encouraging merchants to participate in the Levant trade.

At the state level, new legal codes intended to monitor the market energized this commercial civic spirit. Most important in this regard was Colbert’s Code marchand, created to “suppress … the abuses committed in trade.”⁵ Universal laws that were applicable to all merchants were a novelty in France. Traditionally, each corporate body or guild had its own privileges, distinct from those of others, but this system was inconsistent with a regime that progressively allowed nobles to make foreign investments and négociants to be wholesale traders without belonging to a mercantile guild.

Two years after the appearance of the Code marchand, its main contributor, Jacques Savary, published the authoritative textbook on commerce for aspiring négociants, Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers. Born in Anjou on 22 September 1622 into the robe nobility, Savary arrived in Paris and cultivated relationships with his uncle Guillaume Savary, “who had made a great fortune in trade,” and his cousin Jean Savary, secrétaire du Roi.⁶ With such connections, Jacques Savary rose to be a procureur au parlement and then notaire au Châtelet. By the time he married Catherine Thomas, daughter of one of Paris’s wealthiest négociants, Savary himself was a successful négociant. He quit the profession at age thirty-six, and between fathering seventeen children and serving as primary advisor for the Code marchand, he penned Le parfait négociant.

Savary made two arguments in the opening chapter of his book. God willed commerce; commerce was useful to king, state, and individuals. God “dispersed his gifts so that men could trade together, and that their mutual need to help one another would sustain friendship among them.” Savary praised Louis XIV for strengthening his state through commercial reform: “[The king] has accorded great privileges to négociants and, to bring to an end the disorders and abuses committed in trade, he made a rule that seeks more than ever to establish good faith, prevent fraudulent transactions, and lead more subjects to engage in commerce.”⁷ Encouraged from on high, monitored by the king, commerce benefited France and its subjects.

The Parfait négociant followed in the spirit of the Code marchand. Ignoring legal distinctions among merchant corps, Savary addressed a general population of merchants who “wanted to instruct themselves and to embrace the mercantile profession.” He intended his text as a guidebook for all potential merchants, regardless of birth, fortune, corps, or guild. Savary’s trader “cut across the corporate and geographic barriers that had long divided merchant entities,” Amalia Kessler observes; he “engaged in no particular type of commerce, residing in no particular community.”⁸

Savary began by addressing the parents of the future merchant, guiding them through the steps necessary to mold a commercially minded adult. He then addressed the child, explaining how to enrich himself and his country:

I take a child leaving his father and mother and begin to instruct him in his apprenticeship, then I lead him through retail sale of merchandise, wholesale, currency exchange, manufacture, and fairs; I lead him through foreign countries and distant places, and in so doing, I make him see all the maxims he must observe, the things he must avoid, and I make him learn … all that concerns whatever sort of commerce or trade that might be, directly or indirectly, down to the most particular circumstances, including the application of the royal ordinances, and above all the ordinance of March 1673, so that he can conduct himself happily in this profession that is so useful and so honorable [emphasis added].⁹

Savary’s merchant-child required two features, an imaginative mind and a strong body, neither of which the author attributed to a particular class or rank. The child required a “natural disposition” for “the arts, manufacture, and negotiation.” The perfect trader also needed “a strong and robust” frame to withstand the hardships associated with travel. Savary urged parents of such children to “encourage the desire for this profession, more by reason than by paternal authority or threats.”¹⁰ Once this child reached the age of eight, he would undergo technical training and moral disciplining. Studies in mathematics, bookkeeping, the Italian, Spanish, German, and French languages and foreign history, travel, and commerce would prepare him for the cosmopolitan life of a négociant. At fifteen, he would begin apprenticeship. Further schooling in Latin, grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, Savary explained, was “useless” and “harmful.” Aristocratic collèges, he argued, only created libertines. Savary, therefore, encouraged apprenticeship that developed the virtues of fidelity, obedience, and camaraderie. “The happiness of négociants proceeds from their perfect knowledge of commerce,” he wrote, “from the great experiences they acquire in serving under other merchants” and by observing “good order … in their books,” “prudence,” “vigilance,” “thrift and economy,” “strength and courage.” The merchant-child required technical training, but above all, he needed virtue.

Savary devoted the remainder of his volume to facts useful in all areas of commerce. He elaborated on different systems of measurements used in France and abroad and currency exchange rates. He suggested methods for receiving assistants, keeping books, selling merchandise, and formulating inventories. He provided examples of fraudulent transactions, including royal arrêts against merchants who contracted them. The second section of the manual focused on foreign commerce, with individual chapters on each specific country, its history, geography, trading regulations, and customs.

Savary’s guidebook, like the ordinance he helped create, addressed all French merchants and négociants as a unified audience. Savary’s parfait négociant was “perfect,” not because of his corporate affiliation or inherited rank, but because of his innate qualities and general virtues, potentially possessed by all.

COMMERCE AND CIVIC VIRTUE: A RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT ON BEHALF OF THE MARKET

While the Crown invented general laws for French merchants and depicted le négoce as an honorable and useful undertaking, local apologists argued on behalf of commerce and merchants, insisting that the market stabilized society by fostering virtue. Commerce strengthened social links; it was a useful activity for exemplary citizens. Such was the argument in the ecclesiastic André de Colonie’s Eclaircissement sur le légitime commerce des intérêts. A treatise that defended commerce on theological and moral grounds, this was one of the most popular texts on the subject and was repeatedly reprinted in the late seventeenth century (1675, 1677, 1682).

De Colonie opened his Eclaircissement with endorsements from Parisian and Marseillais professors of theology who maintained that the author’s contentions “conformed to the Catholic faith … and promoted spiritual health.” Furthermore, he quoted Pope Innocent III’s “moral assurance” that commerce benefited society, understood as the unity of human wills.

The book—a compilation of maxims—demonstrated that commerce was not only “useful and universal” but also “contrary to neither natural law nor divine law.” It taught that “commerce is essential to human life, and society is as natural to man as is reason.” De Colonie argued that merchants who worked for the betterment of society were virtuous citizens. God, he recounted, had given each individual his allotted portion; it followed that “the right to dispose of one’s portion … by handing [it] over to society, in changing, selling, or giving” was “a law of nature and nations,” and “a civic virtue.”

Legal contracts, de Colonie explained, guaranteed virtue in commerce. Contracts bound together vendors and buyers, who were thus “embraced by a common will.” The signing of contracts was an “act of prudence and justice; … it could only be necessary to life, because it was an act of virtue.” The merchant simultaneously advanced his own welfare and contributed to the well-being of his fellow traders. Far from isolating the trader in a vacuum of self-interest, commerce integrated him into society and ensured his utility to others. Understood in this manner, commerce was the building block of society. Commercial links formed society; the more links, the more virtuous the society.¹¹

De Colonie’s defense of commerce based on social utility and moral unity places him as a precursor of more radical eighteenth-century proponents of commercial society such as the abbé Gabriel-François Coyer. De Colonie was far from revolutionary; he dared not think of supporting commerce that did not conform to divine law. He simply showed how social and religious virtues converged. For him, the market fostered the active life idealized by both religious and civic republican authors; virtue and commercial interest did not operate in diametric opposition.

THE NÉGOCIANT: SOME DEFINITIONS

Who, exactly, was the négociant whom Savary and de Colonie described as a virtuous and honorable contributor to society? He was “a new breed of commercial player” dedicated to international business, banking, and wholesaling.¹² Unlike merchants committed to the local retail trade, the négociant did not strictly belong to a mercantile corps. In 1698, the intendant of Provence estimated that “the number of ‘merchants of consideration’ in Marseille was around two hundred.”¹³ By 1710, it exceeded three hundred, and by the mid eighteenth century, the city’s merchant elite numbered close to a thousand.¹⁴ These numbers point to a contradiction. Although authors like Savary argued that any man, regardless of social hierarchy, could become one, négociants became members of a privileged elite, distinct from retailers. While the négociants’ disruptions of traditional corporate limits highlighted unprecedented inclusive trends in commercial regulation and participation, the definition of the négociant as a wealthy wholesaler underscored monumental social inequalities developing among merchant populations. Although anyone could become a négociant, it took a lot of wealth to be considered one.

In his Parfait négociant, Savary observes that wholesale trading (commerce en gros) is “more honorable and extensive” than retail (commerce en detail).¹⁵ The négociant elite, comprising the wealthiest of merchants, spread “to all the provinces of the kingdom and to foreign countries.” Moreover, this class began to include nobles, whose participation in mercantile activity had traditionally been unimaginable. As wholesale and international ventures became profitable for merchants and the state alike, the Crown encouraged nobles’ involvement, assuring them that it would not jeopardize their titles: “The king’s edict … permitted nobles to partake in wholesale commerce … and … still enjoy the privileges accorded to the nobility.”¹⁶

The négociant elite was thus an exclusive group composed of wealthy, socially climbing merchants and of nobles embracing mercantile activity. The involvement of the nobility had a profound effect on the concept of commerce. As early as 1646, the Breton Jean Eon infused commerce with noble values in his Commerce honorable;¹⁷ Eon argued that commerce helped inculcate “virtues normally associated with the noble ethos—such as honor, loyalty, fidelity, courage, boldness, and generosity.”¹⁸ Savary echoed these arguments when he depicted négociant activity in noble terms. Wholesale and international commerce involved “risks” and “dangers in negotiation” and could only be managed by “the noble and honest.”¹⁹ The ideal négociant combined the best traits of an aristocrat and citizen; his character demonstrated nobility and his actions were motivated by virtue.

The terms négociant and marchand were used interchangeably into the eighteenth century, but during Colbert’s tenure, the distinction between the two became pronounced in the world of trade. In Marseille, the uniqueness of the négociant emerged as early as 1660 when Louis XIV constituted the échevinage. Restricting the office of premier échevin to “men of the Loge [the Chamber of Commerce], bankers or négociants,” the monarchy contributed to the growing distinctions among the ranks of the merchant population.²⁰ By the late eighteenth century, the négociant’s elite status clearly distinguished him from retailers. L’encyclopédie méthodique (1782) clarified that “the term négociant can be compared to the négociateur, which [the négociant] can be considered [to be]: like him, he has relations, views, large interests; like him, he has to be acquainted with the spirit of nations, their laws, and their mores, and to know how to identify with their interests to his great advantage.” Négociants were devoted to “external trade, maritime, international, colonial, and global commerce, insofar as this term can be used of the eighteenth century,” Charles Carrière notes.²¹ This emphasis on the négociant’s dedication to global business and dangerous missions reinforced the notion that elite merchants could be honorable; like the military nobility who risked their lives for the king, the négociant undertook hazardous tasks for the state. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) defines négoce as “traffic, trade in merchandise, or in money,” but also specifies that an individual who participates in négoce is “a man who involves himself in something shameful, or dangerous.” The 1762 fourth edition echoes this emphasis on danger: the négociant is “a man who involves himself in an affair that endangers him.” While négoce could be seen as a shameful activity (vilain négoce, un étrange négoce), it could also be understood as a risky one (bon négoce, grand négoce, dangereux négoce) that amplified the honor of the négociant who braved all to benefit king and state.²²

The relationship between danger and merchants was a complicated one in early modern French discussions of commerce. On the one hand, as we saw earlier, Colbert articulated how the dangerous environment of the Mediterranean and Levantine market threatened to hurt French commercial interests; worse, as the following chapter describes, the controller-general feared that French merchants might succumb to the moral, physical, and political sicknesses that early modern Frenchmen associated with the Ottoman Empire. If the Turkish Empire was regarded as morally perverse and corrupt, it was particularly dangerous for merchants, traditionally regarded as morally questionable, self-interested creatures. On the other hand, the language of danger and risk could be marshaled to create a rather positive assessment of négociants; it was precisely the hazardous environment in which they operated that provided elite merchants with opportunities to show themselves to be honorable, brave, noble, useful servants of France.

The cosmopolitan négociant who allegedly risked the perils of international commerce inhabited a marketplace defined not by place but by common interests. He identified himself as “closer to foreigners of his rank than the boutiquier of his own street.” A Marseillais négociant described himself as “a natural inhabitant of all parts of the world where he has his goods and his correspondences.”²³ Elite merchants traveled extensively in the early parts of their career, not only to ports such as Algiers, Alexandria, Istanbul, Salonika, Smyrna (Izmir), and Tunis, along “les échelles du Levant et de Barbarie,” but to the inland cities of Aleppo, Cairo, and Edirne. Living in European communities—often consisting of no more than fifteen négociants, their assistants, doctors, and a consul—they traded with the help of go-betweens who spoke Turkish, Arabic, and European languages. Isolated from neighboring populations in their own areas to avoid the pestilential diseases that were endemic in Ottoman territory, they were governed by treaties ensuring that they “benefited from extraterritoriality.”²⁴

Négociants’ internationalism might seem inconsistent with civic commitment to a “hometown” or fidelity to a monarch. National and civic loyalties, however, were not measured by physical presence in France; négociants did not have to reside exclusively in Marseille to be considered good Marseillais citizens or French subjects. Patriotism as a citizen and subject was measured by utility, not by presence or even by ethnicity. Moreover, upon returning to France, négociants demonstrated their civic commitment by occupying prominent administrative positions. In Marseille, négociants held administrative offices in the échevinage, the Council of Sixty, the Chamber of Commerce (comprised of échevins and twelve négociants), and the Bureau de la santé (comprised of sixteen négociants, of whom two were échevins). Understood by advocates of commercial civic spirit, le négoce remained a useful, honorable, and virtuous activity; and in a commercial entrepôt like Marseille, négociants occupied the echelons of civic governance.

MASSILIA RISING: HISTORY AND KINGS IN SERVICE OF THE COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC

How did Marseille’s nobility respond to the perception that commerce and négociants formed the crux of Marseille’s body politic? Given that the municipal regime that Louis XIV installed in 1660 excluded the possibility of noble participation in politics, it would seem that the aristocracy would view the city’s commercial makeover and administrative elite with contempt. While sword nobles did utter grievances against the composition of the new civic regime in the decades following the conquest, their appeals fell on deaf ears until well into the eighteenth century.²⁵ Meanwhile, Marseille’s robe nobility was favorable to the new regime. The overwhelming consensus among texts penned by the robe nobility following the conquest was that the Crown injected political, moral, and economic vitality into the Mediterranean port. Materializing most often in historical accounts of Marseille’s ancient and recent pasts was, curiously, a narrative steeped in republican language that celebrated royal intervention, commercial expansion, and commercial civic spirit. These local histories written by Marseillais and Provençal robe nobility set the tone for a historical understanding of the events that transpired from 1660 to 1683 (corresponding to Colbert’s tenure as controller-general) that later became the dominant Enlightenment reading of Marseillais history.

Nowhere is this historical narrative more clearly captured than in the Enlightenment manifesto L’encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, which included an article on Marseille. Classified under geography and listed with Massilia, Marseille is described as “an ancient and strong maritime city, the wealthiest, most commercial and populated in Provence, France.” The encyclopedist then devoted half of the article to the history of the rise, fall, and revitalization of Massilia, a republic of Greek origin. “This city founded five centuries before Jesus Christ by the Phocaeans of Ionia was from its origins the most visited in the West,” he began, “Born of the best Greeks, who dared to risk long voyages and whose ships took routes through the Adriatic gulf and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Marseillais naturally turned to commerce.” Governed as a republic, Massilia flourished, respected by the Roman Republic for its commerce, laws, virtuous citizens, and their sciences and arts. Massilia was “as urbane as though she were situated in the middle of Greece, which is why the Romans raised their children there.”²⁶ Massilia thrived for six centuries.

Republics, however, corrupted, and Massilia fell to Julius Caesar. The Massilians “renounced their virtues and frugality, and they abandoned themselves to pleasure until their mores passed into the proverbs.” Renamed Marseille, a republic was established in 1226, but the city’s glory faded. It took French kings—Louis XIV and Louis XV—to raise it from its ashes. The Sun King “subjugated the Marseillais, deprived them of their rights and liberties,” but revived their commerce, providing “exclusive privileges to the Levant,” and installing royal galleys. Accompanying commercial expansion, intellectual and cultural vitality helped recover Marseille’s classical reputation. In 1726, Louis XV authorized the rededication of Marseille’s Academy of Letters. Committed to Eloquence, Poetry, History, Physics, and Mathematics, the Academy chose for its emblem a phoenix rising from the ashes, before a dazzling Bourbon sun. Massilia owed its resurrection to the French Crown.

That the conquest of 1660 signaled commercial growth is uncontestable. Why, however, did the Marseillais robe nobility and, later, encyclopedists depict this growth in terms of republican revival? What allowed them to imagine a “liberating conquest?” How did positive depictions of commerce and merchants factor into this narrative? What purpose did such a narrative serve for its aristocratic authors?

A steadily popularized narrative, the story of Massilia rising from its millennium-long sleep was developed in the late seventeenth century by local historians, mostly hailing from the robe nobility, who sought to make sense of royal interference in their city’s political life. As waves of political crises shook Marseille between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, local intellectuals imagined a glorious past to help their city reclaim lost status. Faced with monarchical intervention, historians invoked Massilia and spoke of the French monarch in service of the Greek city-state. They represented the conquest of Marseille in a way that obscured the city’s vulnerability in face of absolutist state-building. Their republican historical revisionism stabilized the conquest of 1660 by depicting it in a manner palatable to Marseillais patriots.²⁷ If the perfect republic had declined through the Middle Ages, historians saw both the benevolent and brutal moments of royal involvement in civic politics as a series of attempts to resuscitate Massilia. This “prism of antiquity” allowed them to extol a conquering monarch as liberator while providing “symbolic compensation” for a defeated republic.²⁸ Republican historicism sustained a fantasy of liberation and allowed Marseillais elites to obscure the conquest. While the physical residue of a republic, manifest in the crumbled walls of Porte Reale demolished by Louis XIV, could be swept away, the linguistic traces of the republic could not be scrapped easily. As Reinhart Koselleck has argued, “language changes more slowly”²⁹ than events, and in Marseille, this deferral allowed its historians to rewrite unsavory events. By the end of the century, what had been a conquest was no more. Marseille’s robe aristocracy played an integral part in this mnemonic erasure.

The French Crown reacted positively to this case of Marseillais amnesia.³⁰ If Marseille’s aristocrats underscored their region’s links to classical antiquity, French kings could use this to their advantage. The more prestigious the republic being resurrected, the more commanding the monarchical ally and liberator appeared: both king and republic emerged triumphant. Republican and imperial traditions from classical antiquity could be marshaled to strengthen local and statist claims to power, and their relationship with one another. Marseille’s Greco-Roman past and its aristocratic intellectuals’ “republican historicism” could support a new French empire reminiscent of classical Rome.

The French monarchy, therefore, extended its powers by building upon Marseille’s long-standing commercial identity, and by exploiting the ambiguities of Marseillais republicanism. Downplaying the lost political freedoms that once signified the republic, it focused on the commerce that also formed the city’s republican identity. Even while conquest brought political autonomy to an end and new projects stamped royal presence in Marseille, the Sun King did not destroy all vestiges of the old republic. De-emphasizing political rupture, highlighting economic expansion, and encouraging the myth of republican liberation, the Crown extended its control by creating a new political assembly, the échevinage and Council of Sixty, that it draped in metaphorical togas, and a city that it swathed in its Greek past.

By 1660, Marseille and the French monarchy were familiar with the theatrics of liberation. The Crown had repeatedly exercised its influence and military strength to reestablish order in Marseille; each time, the king emerged as the savior who rescued the city from factional divisions. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century precedents, including Henry IV’s victory over the Marseillais despot Casaulx and Louis XIII’s involvement in establishing the Règlement du sort, made the casting of Louis XIV’s conquest as liberation more convincing.

Besides repeated spectacles of political restabilization, the ambiguity of the terms république and républicain allowed Marseillais historians to imagine alliances between republics and monarchs. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1698) provided an assortment of contradictory definitions. République was “a state governed by many,” such as “the Roman republic, the Athenian republic, the republics of Venice, Genoa, Holland.” The term also meant “all sorts of States,” synonymous with “government.” Républicain could mean “one who lives in a Republic,” “one who loves the government of Republics,” and finally “one … who is mutinous, seditious, who has sentiments opposed to the monarchical State in which he lives.”³¹

Eric Gojosso has recently charted the transformations in the definitions of the term république over the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, apologists for absolutism still described monarchy as a republic or spoke of the ideal marriage of republics to monarchies. Jean Bodin spoke of monarchy as the republic par excellence. Barthélémy de Chasseneuz invoked Cicero to emphasize the “mystic marriage of the king and the république.” The latter maintained that “the prince is in the republic and the republic is in the prince … as the man is the head of the wife, the wife the body of the man … so is the prince the head of the republic and the republic his body.”³² In the seventeenth century, however, the term état became more closely associated with “the notion of sovereignty,” while the term république became “confined to the definition of a political regime.”³³ Religious wars and the Fronde saw the monarchy using the term républicain to implicate heretics and rebels; the royal chancellor d’Aguesseau accused Protestants and Jansenists of “republican radicalism,” and Cardinal de Bernis asserted: “Parlements tend toward republican principles.³⁴ The monarchy divorced itself from the term république, opting for état.

In Marseille, however, writers kept alive the old uses of république and républicain. They invoked Marseille’s ancient history to imagine the republic as an autonomous municipal body politic ruled by virtuous citizens. They also cast their city’s mergers with France, under Louis XI and Louis XIV, as the beginning of marital bliss between a republic and monarchy. While the Sun King might have conquered Marseille to punish its seditious “republican” nobles, Marseillais writers insisted that their restored république was that same king’s grateful ally.

ANTOINE AND LOUIS-ANTOINE DE RUFFI:
HISTORIANS OF MARSEILLE

Who were these aristocratic seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Provençal historians of commercial Marseille, and to what notions of republicanism did they subscribe? Some were antiquarians.³⁵ The renowned Aixois parlementaire Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, for example, was one of several Provençal nobles who collected Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiques, not only to showcase wealth, but to comprehend the region’s connections to the classical past.³⁶

Marseille’s most famous seventeenth-century historians, Antoine de Ruffi, and his son, Louis-Antoine, provide emblematic examples of how linguistic ambiguity and commercial development could be marshaled to shape a narrative of republican regeneration. Born in 1607, Antoine de Ruffi hailed from a noble family who served for generations in Marseille’s administration.³⁷ His grandfather, Robert Ruffi (1542–1634) was secretary to Marseille’s “dictator,” Charles de Casaulx; his father, Pierre de Ruffi, a captain of the corps-de-ville, arranged the royal arrival of the duc de Guise into Marseille in 1618 and served a term as Marseille’s consul. Antoine de Ruffi himself became a member of Marseille’s sénéchaussee in 1631, helped prepare the royally patented civic constitution, the Règlement du sort, in 1652, and became conseiller d’etat in 1654. Meanwhile, he dedicated himself to a literary career: the first edition of his Histoire de la ville de Marseille appeared in 1642, followed in 1654 by the Règlement du sort, contenant la forme et la manière de procéder à l’élection des officiers de la ville de Marseille. Ruffi’s Histoire des comtes de Provence depuis 934 jusqu’en 1480, and a biography of Gaspard de Semiane, chevalier of Lacoste, were published the following year. Ruffi died in 1689, having begun a second edition of his Histoire de Marseille, which his son Louis Antoine completed in 1696.

Both the elder and the younger Ruffi legitimated the monarchy’s presence in Marseille and extended the symbolic life of their republic. The Ruffis offered stories of continuity, not political rupture. They insisted that the monarchy did not conquer, but rather resuscitated, the republic. For the elder Ruffi, the republic restored was a political one; for his son, it was commercial.

The first edition of the Histoire de Marseille was intended, according to the author, “to inform posterity” of Marseille’s greatness.³⁸ It covered the city’s history from its founding to “the year 1596 when [the city] was reduced in obedience to the King.”³⁹ Ruffi began with Massilia’s mythical founding by seafaring Phocaeans, following the marriage of their leader Protis to the Ligurian princess Gyptis, whose father ruled the territory. The Massilians “vanquished the Carthaginians, helped the Romans, civilized the ancient Gauls, taught good letters to Italy, and enjoyed the happiness of being the first in France to receive the Christian Religion.” Massilia became a model republic, with “the most beautiful and advantageous port for navigation and commerce.” The Massilians established colonies along the coast to extend their commerce: Monoikos (Monaco), Olbia (Hyères), Athenopolis (St. Tropez), Antipolis (Antibes), and Nikaia (Nice).⁴⁰

Massilia, in Ruffi’s description, was a “perfect aristocratic republic, where the small group of the most virtuous citizens commanded all the general followers.” Virtue, reason, and liberty sustained the republic for six centuries. The timouchos, an aristocratic council of six hundred led by three presidents, rivaled the consuls of Rome. Commerce bred neither luxury nor corruption; the inhabitants remained frugal.⁴¹ The Massilian Academy, the Athenopolis Mabiliorum, was esteemed through Greece, Rome and Italy.⁴² Massilia’s reputation earned the respect of the Romans, who “exempted the Massilians of all charges and subsidies, giving them first rank among the Senators in the theaters and public festivals, and made an alliance with all equal conditions.” In Ruffi’s imagination, the Romans, like French kings a millennium later, honored Marseille’s autonomy. Expanding empires did not crush republics. They allowed them their liberties.

Fortuna, however, disrupted Massilia’s perfect politics, commerce, citizens, and alliances: “All things are subject to the reversal of fortune; … the same tempest that ruined the Roman Republic caused the decadence of this flourishing city.” Famine, plague, and Caesar laid siege to the city. Marseillais leaders and citizens tried to recover the city’s ancient reputation. Local elites invoked the city’s Greek and Roman heritage to reestablish a republic. Before submitting to the counts of Provence in the Middle Ages, they formed the Podestat, a government modeled on Italian republics.⁴³ Marseille’s consuls, so-named in the Roman tradition, continued wearing the ermine, symbol of their republican heritage. Nonetheless, Marseille fell prey to its megalomaniacal tyrants.

Marseille finally recovered when republican freedom fighters allied with the French monarchy, Ruffi recounted. In one famous alliance, Henry IV forged a pact with the Marseillais patriot Pierre de Libertat, a captain of Porte Réale and “a brave and solid Citizen of great probity,”⁴⁴ to topple the Marseillais dictator, Casaulx. While the duc de Guise and his army arrived in Provence in February 1596, Libertat lured Casaulx to Porte Réale and assassinated him to secure the “Liberty of the Patrie.” The duc de Guise, meanwhile, “entered Marseille through Porte Réale, where he found Libertat who took the oath for the conservation of the Privileges of Marseille.” When Guise marched through Marseille “with Libertat at his side, the people who accompanied them [wept] tears of joy, crying Vive le Roi, Monsieur de Guise, vive Libertat.” Marseillais patriots and French king together restored the republic.

Written two decades before Louis XIV’s conquest, Ruffi’s text introduced two themes that would resurface after 1660. First, the falling republic: virtuous republics fell prey to contingency, and attempts at restoring ancient perfection brought further turmoil and tyranny. Second, monarchical intervention: the king restored liberty to Marseille. Extending the life of the republic by having monarchy resuscitate it, Ruffi proved a son of Marseille; it was not so much the liberator he focused on as the liberated. Glorifying the monarch was a means to restore and glorify Marseille. With Henry IV’s and Libertat’s victory, the story of decline came full circle, back to the free republic.

This theme of republican resurrection reemerged in Ruffi’s Le Règlement du sort, contenant la forme et la manière de procéder à l’élection des officiers de la ville de Marseille (1654). Ruffi wrote this text having witnessed monarchical involvement in Marseillais politics. As in 1596, the king appeared, though without force, to heal a fractured community by patenting a new constitution, the Règlement du sort (1652). This new order instituted the casting of lots for municipal offices to quell the divisions splintering Marseillais politics. When the king ordered this rule that hearkened back to ancient traditions, Ruffisaw monarchy allied with republic. His own personal gains must have contributed to his growing monarchist leanings. In 1654, he was rewarded for his participation in crafting the Règlement du sort; he was appointed conseiller d’etat.

In his preface, Ruffi described the electoral process in the Venetian republic, then ruled by the Doge, a consiglio grande, a consiglio de’ pregati, and a collegio. Ruffi lauded the Venetian aristocratic republic and its system of election by lot. Venetian magistrates, Ruffi explained, were chosen “by fate” and “by the large concurrence of citizens.” Ruffi saw the Marseille Règlement as an imitation of Venetian republicanism: “We have borrowed the wisdom of the Venetians in our recent Règlement du sort.”⁴⁵ Through it, “the Inhabitants of this flourishing City have entirely sacrificed their passions and their interests.” Marseille was no longer a “true republic,” but casting lots allowed the citizens to sacrifice personal interests for the common good.⁴⁶

Following his Preface, Ruffi included municipal deliberations leading to the institution of the Règlement du sort and the king’s letters patent. The municipal deliberations fostered reconciliation “by forgetting things past.”⁴⁷ Exhausted by factionalism, the consuls convoked a general assembly that voted unanimously to reinstitute election by lot, “as was practiced in ancient times in this city.”⁴⁸ The Règlement, Ruffi described, created a government modeled on the ancient republic: united, virtuous, and free. Meanwhile, the king’s letters patent told a different story. Unlike the municipal deliberations that underscored Marseille’s glorious past, the royal letters patent invoked the past to demonstrate Marseille’s dependence on the throne: “the subjects of our city of Marseille, who have been several times divided, but who have always rested in obedience to us, unite in agreement.” This, the king recalled, evoked similar “disorders and confusions that appeared in our city in the year 1585,” when Henry III “diverted the dangers of cabals and emotions” by ordering the city’s consuls to create a new constitution. Marseillais citizens, the royal letters patent made clear, tended toward “usurpations” and “frauds”; only “the certain science and plain power of Royal authority” could restore fractured municipalities.

Despite divergent historical perceptions and narratives, the Crown and municipality pieced together a new civic constitution to bolster their respective powers. Municipal elites and the king established what appeared to be a mix between a democratic and aristocratic republic. The Règlement instituted “a perpetual council of three hundred men.”⁴⁹ Lots determined the selection of its members. The council was open to all citizens who were Catholic, “native and original citizens or married to a daughter of the city,” aged at least thirty.⁵⁰ Selection by lot and alphabetical roll calls underscored political equality.⁵¹ Nonetheless, the Règlement also instituted aristocratic elements. The offices of viguier, consul, captain of the Corps de ville, and the captain of the artillery were restricted to gentlemen who met financial requirements. Lots chose all three consuls from among aristocrats possessing 30,000, 20,000 and 10,000 livres.⁵² The captain of the Corps de ville, the city’s magistrates, secretaries, and treasurers were not chosen by lot; five approvers chose from a pool of men nominated by a committee. Finally, the consuls nominated nine “gentlemen possessing fiefs, original inhabitants of the Province,” selected by lot, for the position of viguier.⁵³

Ruffi concluded by listing French kings and local patriots who had reestablished Marseille’s autonomy throughout the city’s history. Claiming that royal statutes “contributed to the lives of [Marseille’s] principal citizens, the advantages for the King, and to the glory of France,” Ruffi imagined royal power restoring citizenship and liberty to Marseille. Both Marseillais and monarchist, Ruffi provided a history of the Règlement that accommodated ancient republican glory, decay and revival, and monarchical heroism. The monarchy resuscitated republican liberty; this message, he reminded, was etched on Marseille’s gates, in “the remarkable inscription under the Porte Royale, under the statue of the king: SUB CVIUS IMPERIO SUMMA LIBERTAS.”⁵⁴

The younger Ruffi’s Histoire de Marseille (1696) told a similar story of republican revival. While his father’s edition was a story of the virtuous political republic, this second edition paid homage to Marseille as a commercial republic. The younger Ruffi, moreover, proved more royalist than his father. Published after Louis XIV’s conquest, this edition began with a letter from the échevins to the Crown that began, “Dear Sire, the History of Marseille composed by one of our most dignified citizens, can only be dedicated to its August Master, and by those whom Your Majesty has agreed to be its magistrates.” They described a “heroic representation of Your Sacred Person” in their Hôtel de Ville, where “the figure of the City of Marseille prostrates at Your feet to render homage.” An illustration of the aldermen on bended knee before the monarch accompanied the letter. Local patriotism, however, tempered deference. The échevins described, “this most glorious city that has submitted to your laws, has been the sister of Rome, and has partaken with her all the respects of the universe.”⁵⁵

Descriptions of commercial and royal grandeur filled the pages of the book from beginning to end. “This port that Mela named Halycidon … was the most secure of the Mediterranean Sea: the premier port of the world,” Ruffi began; he then compared this ancient hub to his contemporary Marseille, where “forty-two well-equipped galleys attest to the glory and magnificence of our invincible monarch LOUIS LE GRAND.”⁵⁶ He described the urban expansion projects along the port, quays, and citadels.

The younger Ruffi used commerce as the signifier of Marseille’s republican identity and shifted the city’s position vis-à-vis the monarchy. Like his father, Louis-Antoine began with Massilia. He closed his history, however, lengthened by four chapters, with Louis XIV’s birth in 1638. The narrative’s center of gravity shifted from the city to the monarchy. The story of French grandeur eclipsed that of the independent republic. The author attributed his city’s magnificence not to its political republican history, but to French commercial expansion.⁵⁷ Commercial Massilia had crumbled; the Sun King prompted its rebirth. A robust commerce and a royal governor who “gave evidence of his zeal and his sage conduct in all occasions that presented themselves for the service of the king and for the good of his patrie,” restored Marseille’s magnificence. Ruffi ended with an homage to the viguier Alphonse de Fortia, chevalier de l’Ordre militaire du Roi, lieutenant en Provence and chef d’escadre des galères de France. With de Pilles, he wrote, “Marseille has, like ancient Rome, men who are capable of governing and defending her.” Such a man exuded “all faithfulness as subjects should to their sovereign, and all the love that citizens should have for the patrie.”⁵⁸ Imagining the royal governor as model subject and citizen, Louis-Antoine de Ruffi believed that the monarchy restored the commercial republic.

The Ruffis’ arguments for the rise, fall and resurrection of the Marseillais republic reverberated over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Joseph Haitze’s Dissertations sur divers Points de l’histoire de Provence (1704), the abbé Aillaud’s De l’ancienneté de Marseille, and a Monsieur Ricaud’s Conformité des moeurs et des lois avec les anciennes described the resurrection of the Marseillais republic.⁵⁹ The Provençal parlementaire Jean-François de Gaufridi’s Histoire de Provence (1694)⁶⁰ focused on Marseille’s “natural” inclination toward republicanism; its “grandeur of birth, establishment of great laws and mores, the introduction of the arts and sciences among the Gauls” easily “animated … the memory of her first government.” Like the Ruffis, he discussed how the French Crown helped Marseillais elites remember their republicanism and described how the republic’s heroes knelt at the feet of the royal liberator. These works indicate a crescendo of royalist tones in the eighteenth century; this did not, however, materialize at the expense of Marseillais republican historicism. Monarchy and republic were not inversely related. The more idealized the ancient republic, the more generous the monarchy appeared. The narrative of republican renewal was elastic enough to reserve for kings a leading role in resurrecting ancient Massilia.

Commercial expansion and the alteration of memory made conquest imaginable as liberation and helped reinforce Marseille’s distinct Greco-Roman identity. Marseillais historians’ representations of their distant past and their depictions of contemporary events tamed a long series of disruptive events and created a rather seamless story of republican renewal. They deleted memories of Louis XIV’s troops entering Marseille and the confrontations between royal and municipal administrators. The conquest was rarely discussed without mention of Marseille’s commercial recovery and grandeur. The myth and reality of commercial expansion fed and were fed by the remembrance of things long past and the forgetting of things recent. “Republican historicism” stabilized the political regime and commercial society brought into existence in 1660. Greek Massilia administratively metamorphosed into French Marseille, but in literature French Marseille continued to metamorphose into Greek Massilia.

THE ITALIAN GAZE: PROVENÇAL RELICS AND THE GRECO-ROMAN PAST

Intellectual elites used more than Marseille’s Hellenic founding and history to establish their city’s links to the classical past. Greco-Roman relics preserved in Marseille and Provence also authenticated the region’s record in antiquity and bolstered “republican historicism” by offering tangible proof of it. Provence, imperial Rome’s first provincia, in the words of Pliny, had been “another Italy.”⁶¹ Following the discoveries of Herculaneum (1709) and Pompey (1738), travelers went to Italy to visit them, but the French could find relics of Julius Caesar and his successors in ancient Roman cities in their own kingdom such as Arles, Nîmes, St. Rémy, and Marseille. Both Ruffis devoted entire chapters to tombs, urns, plates, lamps, medals, and “all sorts of antiques”⁶² unearthed in Marseille dating to Greek, Roman, and medieval periods. Ruins were rich resources for monarch and provincial administrators; archeological treasures were concrete links between antiquity and the present, between the grandeur of Rome and that of France. Monarchs and regional elites scrambled to claim ownership of them.

The connection with antiquity benefited both the state and the patrie, an antiquarian wrote in the eighteenth century.⁶³ Provence and Marseille were privileged to own what many other provinces in France did not: a wealth of tangible pieces of the ancient world. Their intimate connection with Rome, evidenced in their relics, was a historical privilege unique to the area. But as Louis XIV and his intendants restored these remains, they claimed them as state possessions. Antiques unearthed in Provence held a dual identity: as Provençal treasures, they called attention to a particular region, while as royal property, they forged the Crown’s links to Roman grandeur. Antiquities served as a prism that cast light on local claims and royal ones.

Nowhere is the tension between national and regional claims to artifacts more visible than in the reconstruction of Arles’ Roman obelisk. On his way to subdue Marseille in 1660, Louis XIV discovered two separated parts of a ruined obelisk on the outskirts of Arles and remarked that they were “the most beautiful gems in my kingdom.” Municipal leaders subsequently reerected the ancient monument “in honor of the king.” The obelisk was hauled to the Hôtel de Ville on 20 March 1676. The dedication of the obelisk involved pageantry broadcasting Louis XIV’s glory. Spectators watched as the renovated obelisk was revealed to the sound of trumpets, tambours, announcements by the city’s consuls, and cries of “Vive le roy!” Adorned with symbols of absolutism, a terrestrial globe and sun, the obelisk testified to the absolute power of Louis XIV.⁶⁴

Arles Obelisk, Hôtel de Ville back right. Photo by author.

Or did it? Arlesian administrative elites, like those in Marseille, looked for opportunities to showcase how their city, likewise a former republic, had been the “Rome of Gaul” allegedly founded by Hercules. The monument’s new home in front of the Hôtel de Ville offered a story that conflicted with the Crown’s narrative. Claiming that the obelisk was a priceless “ornament of the city,” the consuls had four lions, ancient symbols of “the city, its power, and its courage,” erected at its foot. The monument’s placement in front of the ancient city hall, home to the city’s “autonomous political body,” emphasized Arlesian independence and connection to a Roman past. The panegyric to the city read under the obelisk eulogized how Provence and Arles had been autonomous entities in the Roman provincia.

Arles Obelisk, close-up. Photo by author.

The restoration of antiques bolstered regional patriotism while contributing to the myth that monarchs resurrected republics. The spectacle of Marseille’s agrandissement, the dedication of Marseille’s Academy, the restoration of Arles’ first-century obelisk, and the Crown’s other restoration projects of Roman columns, pillars, arches, temples, and aqueducts around Nîmes, St. Rémy and Avignon lent credence to the idea that monarchs allied themselves with ancient republics.⁶⁵ Though overseen by royal administrators, these projects that depended on municipal cooperation and a workforce empowered échevins, consuls, local assemblies, and communities. This empowerment could be understood as local “resurrection.”

VIRTUE, MYSTICAL PIETY, AND DESPOTISM: PERSISTING DILEMMAS OF COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

Marseille’s aristocratic antiquarians mobilized a republican historical vision in the context of Bourbon state-building and commercial expansion to speak of their city’s revival, rather than decline. In so doing, these writers gave value to the idea of commerce. Departing from Christian and classical republican traditions that condemned the marketplace as the source of self-interest, they adopted the notion that commerce was ideal for individuals, former republics, and growing states. Those who adopted the vocabulary of commercial civic spirit saw merchants as ideal upholders of civic ethos (de Colonie), equated le négoce and négociants with honor and nobility (Eon and Savary), and offered a revised republican myth that understood commerce as the engine propelling France forward and Marseille back to glory (Ruffi).

Such ideas of virtuous and honorable merchant-citizens dedicated to republics and states did not, however, go unchallenged in France. In particular, the sword nobility recovered the classical republican vocabulary of virtue to warn that republics were prone to decline; they offered a dramatically different assessment of commerce and royal expansion. If royal intervention and state-supported commerce jump-started citizenship and republican grandeur, according to some Marseillais writers, there were also aristocrats who saw them as corrupters of cities and states.

As Jay Smith and John Shovlin have analyzed, such ideas were particularly prominent in northern France, among the Burgundy circle, where “displeasure over the spread of venality of office and the rise of the noblesse de robe had led various spokesmen of the old nobility to decry the declining fortunes of the second estate.”⁶⁶ Blaming the aristocracy’s political and social decline on luxury, royal aggrandizement, and commerce, noble writers contrasted the ideal of virtue against the specter of despotism. Seeing virtue through classical republican lenses, they wrote that whereas the ancients had aligned their personal interests with the public good and expressed “love of the patrie,” in their own age, Colbertism and Louis XIV’s warmongering extinguished that virtue. In Traité contre le luxe des hommes et des femmes, et contre le luxe avec lequel on élève les enfans de l’un et de l’autre sexe, Jean du Pradel argued that luxury needed to be abolished to restore virtue in France; Henri de Boullainvilliers’ Essai sur la noblesse de France, contenans une dissertation sur son origine charged French kings with having softened mores, introduced luxury, and destroyed noble virtues. In their view, the sword nobility, not négociants, were the state’s patriotic, morally sound, virtuous leaders.

In the late seventeenth century, the most ardent aristocratic critics of commercial luxury and war-centered state-building began courting Louis XIV’s grandson, the duc de Bourgogne, to offer a unique notion of virtue that combined republican notions of citizenship with a mystical understanding of spiritual piety. This circle included conservative French Jesuits; Louis XIV’s advisor the duc de Chevreuse; the duc de Beauvilliers, head of the Royal Council of Finance; and, most notably, the archbishop of Cambrai, François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, who was Bourgogne’s tutor, and spiritual advisor to Madame de Maintenon.⁶⁷

When the death of Bourgogne’s father made him immediate heir to the French throne, Fénelon penned his epic Télémaque in an effort to teach the future king better methods of rule that would curtail the excesses of Louis Quatorzian absolutism. The epic tells of the experiences of Telemachus, the son of the Ithacan hero Ulysses, as he traveled the Aegean and Mediterranean with his tutor, Mentor. Mentor used their encounters with different governments and societies to teach the prince how to be a wise ruler. Fénelon’s story did not endorse a ban on commerce; as his disquisition on the commercial city of Tyre demonstrated, commerce could strengthen society. “The Tyrians are industrious, patient, laborious, clean, sober, and frugal,” Fénelon wrote; “they have a well-regulated administration; there is no discord among them; never was there a people more firm and steady, more candid, more loyal, more trusty, or more kind to strangers.” Commerce, however, could produce the conditions that generated luxury: “Should discord and jealousy once prevail among them; should luxury and laziness get a footing; should the first men in the nation begin to despise labor and frugality … you will soon see this power, that now is so much the object of admiration, dwindle away to nothing.”⁶⁸ Luxury created the “contagious” and “moral poison” of “effeminate pleasure,” the “abuse of power,” and “idle ambition” that established despotism.⁶⁹

Urging his charge, Bourgogne, to reconcile “monarchical rule with republican virtues,” Fénelon advocated a political system that prioritized the moral qualities of “disinterestedness.”⁷⁰ He used the model of a Christian’s disinterested love for God over the self to formulate his ideas regarding a citizen’s disinterested love for the (re)public. The archbishop argued how French subjects could emulate the civic virtue of the ancients, and elevate it to a higher level with their religious knowledge of God, to produce the kind of disinterestedness requisite for a renewed agriculturally based state.⁷¹ For Fénelon, republican and religious morality went hand in hand. Disinterested love, in other words, served as the foundation for relationships between man and God, man and man, and man and the body politic; in the first case, it manifested itself as “charity,” in the second, as friendship, in the last, as civic virtue.⁷² Such ideas were repeated in Fénelon’s more overtly theological writings, such as the Explications des maximes des saints (1697) and his writings on education, most notably the Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687). He called upon his readers to emulate the simplicity of the ancient Romans, while practicing the “truths of Christianity,” “sincerity,” “modesty,” “disinterestedness,” “fidelity … and above all, piety.”⁷³

Fénelon’s emphasis on mystical disinterestedness, and on the assumption that life was a passage extending from sin and concupiscence to “pure love,” whether of God, fellow man, or the body politic, may appear to have much in common with the Jansenist variant of Augustinian theology. Fénelon, however, remained highly critical of Jansenism, emphasizing that man’s spiritual and secular journeys toward disinterested love rested on free will, something that the Jansenists denied. Ultimately, it was not the charge of Jansenist heresy that landed Fénelon in trouble; rather, it was his support of Madame de Maintenon’s religiously unorthodox acquaintance Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte, Madame Guyon, which led to accusations that he accepted Molinism and Quietism. Fénelon, Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet and the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche charged, promoted a heretical understanding of disinterested love that excused the “elect” from morality and denied any hope of salvation or divine punishment.⁷⁴ As a result, Louis XIV banished the archbishop from court in 1697; the papacy followed suit by placing Télémaque on the Index of banned books in 1699. Meanwhile, the exiled Fénelon continued to try putting his ideas for political and spiritual reform into practice; he drew up his Tables de Chaulnes (1711), endorsing a program that proposed to restore the nobility to positions of power at court and in the provinces, abolish the intendancy, and eliminate universalized taxes like the capitation.⁷⁵ The duc de Bourgogne died in 1712, extinguishing Fénelon’s dreams of a reformed monarchy and French state, and he himself died in January 1715, but Télémaque would become the most widely read book in the kingdom in the eighteenth century. Aside from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762), it was to be the most important political text in pre-revolutionary France.

From Fénelon to Boulainvilliers, noble and religious critics of luxury and absolutist aggrandizement shared several points in common with the robe nobility who adhered to the new commercial civic spirit. Like the robe nobles of Marseille, these sword aristocrats located models for virtue in the classical Greek and Roman republics. Like them, they also blurred the lines between “honor” and virtue”; Fénelon’s aristocrat and Savary’s négociant both practiced the honor worthy of an aristocrat and the virtue requisite of a citizen. However, for critics of luxury, commerce was fundamentally connected to social mobility, the confusion of social hierarchies, and royal despotism.⁷⁶

Debates over despotism, understood as the nonexistence of liberty, had initially emerged in the sixteenth century, most notably with Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic. Sword nobles became increasingly preoccupied with the issue of royal despotism in the seventeenth century as they saw Bourbon state-building during Louis XIV’s reign involving too many illegitimate extensions of royal sovereignty. This discussion of Bourbon despotism did not resonate in a commercial port experiencing a long-awaited economic revival like Marseille. There was, however, one discussion concerning despotism that did take root among some observers in Marseille during this period: that of “oriental despotism.” As debates over despotism strengthened, some royal critics deployed the concept of “oriental despotism” to compare the unlawful extension of French royal authority to non-Western forms of arbitrary rule that many European observers associated with the Ottoman Empire. This comparison between “oriental” and French despotism gained currency in part due to intensified diplomatic contacts between France and the Ottoman Empire, first between François I and Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century and later between Louis XIV and Colbert and Mehmet IV in the seventeenth (evidenced in the Capitulations of 1673).

The vocabulary of “oriental despotism” functioned to define the limits of absolutism.⁷⁷ Many royal critics feared that the allegedly tyrannical, corrupt, slavish, and perverse politics of the Ottoman Empire could infect France as French monarchs allied with the Ottomans to fight their common Hapsburg enemies. The king, these worried, was becoming a sultan, and the monarchy was becoming “oriental.” Such arguments registered among many observers in Marseille, due to the city’s geographical location and commercial identity, which rendered it open and vulnerable to non-French, and particularly Ottoman, Armenian, and Jewish merchants and migrants. Even while Marseillais elites and robe nobility praised the French négociant for the virtuous, honorable activities he pursued in the market, they remained ambivalent about the foreign merchants who increasingly served as business associates, and often, competitors in Marseillais and French commerce. Louis XIV and Colbert’s commercial initiatives opened Marseille to more foreign traders, merchandise, and immigrants from the Levant. French commercial expansion resurrected the Massilian phoenix out of the ashes, but, according to many observers in Marseille and beyond, it could trap the city in a graveyard of foreign vices and disease. Virtues would be lost, citizens would forget their civic duties, Marseille would become an “Ottoman,” “Armenian,” or “Jewish” city on French soil.

The political and commercial alliances that the French monarchy forged with the Ottoman Empire to amplify royal power, strengthen the state, and bolster the French market threatened to undermine the tenuous faith that controllers-general, royal intendants, historians, and local elites developed in commerce and négociants. Could the foreign merchant serve as reliable business partner for French and Marseillais merchants? Could Levantine Jews and Armenians become Marseillais citizens, or would they threaten the moral and political fiber—the virtue and honor—of native Marseillais merchants and their families? Chapter 3 turns to these questions and to the persisting mistrust of commerce and merchants.