Intellectual History as Global History: Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde and the problem of Enlightened commerce
In recent years the concepts of ‘interconnected’ or ‘global’ history have made significant inroads into several historical disciplines, including amongst others economic, social, and material history, history of science and the history of consumption. They have not yet, however, significantly impacted on the history of ideas, and, with the odd exception, are rarely considered in the realm of political economy.[1] This essayaims to contribute to this project by presenting a case study that proves the crucial importance of India in the later eighteenth-century French evaluation of commerce.
It is a general consensus amongst scholars of French eighteenth-century political economy to posit a caesura around mid-century after which a younger generation of lumières, philosophes, or enlightened men of letters were said to have taken over. Some mark it with the publication of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1748, some with that of Rousseau’s first discourse in 1750, but most depict the period of the 1750s as a transition from a general optimism amongst the Enlightened elite about the beneficial powers of commerce and luxury to greater nuance and scepticism, or from a period of a theoretical defence of trade and consumption, to a more critical interest in its practical implementation.[2]
One very prolific writer however, spans both sides of the divide: Voltaire’s first publications on the subject of commerce date from the 1720s, his last from the mid-1770s. His intervention and the role of India within it, will be our case study.
Together with Melon and the young Montesquieu, Voltaire was one of the first authors to propagate the Whiggish defence of commerce in France. Inspired by his stay in England (1726-28), his contacts there with the merchant community, and his readings of Mandeville and the Spectator, he openly extolled luxury and commerce from the 1730s onwards. Importantly, his optimism about their beneficial impact explicitly included India.
In his increasingly sophisticated defence of luxury and trade Voltaire shared the views of several Enlightenment political economists on both sides of the Channel. These can be broadly classed into four interlinked arguments. Firstly, following Mandeville, almost all defenders of luxury adopted his assertion that there can be no clear and stable definition of what constitutes luxury; that it cannot be clearly differentiated from the necessary and is historically relative.[3] Secondly, they link commerce to man’s original sociability, so that commerce, sociability, and mutual benefit become inseparable from each other.[4] Thirdly commerce is associated with peace, both internally and through international co-operation; prosperity, by giving employment to the masses and banishing idleness; and with greater liberty, both political and personal;as well as with urbanity, softer manners, refinement, taste through the increased influence of women; and with a defence of modernity in general. It is thus opposed to barbarism, violence, bloodshed, and poverty, and has all the connotations Albert O. Hirschman has summarised as the ‘doux commerce’ thesis.[5]Finally, with the advent of the ‘caesura’ or the ‘second generation’, we also see a greater nuance, in the form of a widely-accepted differentiation between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ kind of luxury. This is most familiar to historians from the writings of Hume and in Saint-Lambert’s Encyclopédie article ‘luxe’,[6] but Voltaire also developed this view and, especially in his great histories of the 1750s, the Essai sur les moeurs and the Siècle de Louis XIV, differentiated between a positive, ‘bourgeois’ type of luxury, and a noxious, ‘feudal’ type. The latter was associated with ostentation and a type of society in which the luxury of the few was paid for by the misery of the masses. The modern kind of luxury however, was associated with private bourgeois consumption and based on personal enjoyment and good taste. It retained all the positive connotations of commerce and luxury outlined above. Voltaire’s concept of modern, bourgeois commerce thus became central to his depictions of progress, civilisation, and Enlightenment.[7]
India figures in Voltaire’s defencesof modern commercialism from the very beginning. In the 1734 Lettres philosophiques for instance, Voltaire writes: ‘un négociant […] enrichit son pays, donne de son cabinet des ordres à Surate et au Caire, et contribue au bonheur du monde.’[8]A similarly positive statement occurs in Le Mondain(1736), this time adding the further dimensions of increased union and world peace to the notion of happiness:
Le superflu, chose très nécessaire,
A réuni l’un et l’autre hémisphère
Voyez-vous pas ces agiles vaisseaux
Qui, du Texel, de Londres, de Bordeaux,
S’en vont chercher, par un heureux échange,
De nouveaux biens, nés aux sources du Gange?[9]
In these earlier instances India serves but as a shorthand for the global dimension of the benefits of commerce. It is never more than a signifier and in itself is never central to the argument. In a later text, however, European trade with India is a main preoccupation: the Fragments sur l’Inde et sur le général Lally. Written and published in 1773-1774, they bring together, apparently unlinked, remarks on the European powers in India; an exposé of Indian culture, history, and religions; and a defence of the French general Lally, who, after an unsuccessful campaign in India during the Seven Years War, was brutally executed on trumped-up charges of high treason in 1766. The Lally case was, after the more famous examples of Calas and Sirven, Voltaire’s last great campaign.
In the text Voltaire still depicts commerce as a central and crucial force for change. ‘Ce sont des marchands,’ he writes, ‘qui ont changé la face du monde.’[10]But the work also represents a complete rejection of all of the assertions about commerce outlined before, which for decades had been central to Voltaire’s concepts of Enlightenment and civilisation.
Whereas before Voltaire saw commerce as promoting peace, prosperity and happiness, as well as liberty and thus human dignity, he now linked it to war, carnage and misery. The work opens with the following remarkable passage:
Dès que l'Inde fut un peu connue des barbares de l'Occident et du Nord, elle fut l'objet de leur cupidité; et le fut encore davantage, quand ces barbares, devenus policés et industrieux, se firent de nouveaux besoins. [...] Les Albuquerques et leurs successeurs ne purent parvenir à fournir du poivre et des toiles en Europe que par le carnage. Nos peuples européens ne découvrirent l'Amérique que pour la dévaster, et pour l'arroser de sang; moyennant quoi ils eurent du cacao, de l'indigo, du sucre.[11]
The condemnation seems an echo of that expressed by the mutilated Negro slave in Candide, who pays the price for the Europeans' enjoyment of sugar. As with sugar, the objects in question are typical of the international luxury trade at the time. They link the fate of India and the East Indies to that of America and the West Indies in one sweep: at this time most of the cocoa and sugar consumed in Europe came from Central and South America and the West Indies, whilst indigo, spices, pepper in particular, as well as fine fabrics, silks and calicoes(high-quality printed cottons) were imported from India and the East Indies.[12] What links all these places is that they suffer so that Europe can enjoy. The stress is not laid on the pleasures and sophistication resulting from luxury, but instead on the pain it causes, on greed and violence. Luxury objects are not gained by commerce but by war, the produce in question is 'bought' by devastation and bloodshed. Trade is no longer a ‘heureux échange’ as in the Mondain, it is no longer based on sociable mutuality and mutually beneficial. The injustice is exacerbated by the fact that these are 'nouveaux besoins', they are not necessary for survival, only sought out of greed. Human life and happiness are 'traded in' for trivial consumer goods, the barbarity of which is underlined by the contrast of blood and devastation with sugar and cocoa. The divide between civilization and barbarism, so crucial to the defence of luxury and commerce, has completely collapsed.
For Voltaire, the blame for this does not lie with the few 'Albuquerques' of this world, but squarely with those who benefit from luxury, either through the profits from selling it, or through desiring and enjoying it: 'Presque tous ces vastes domaines, ces établissements dispendieux, toutes ces guerres entreprises pour les maintenir, ont été le fruit de la mollesse de nos villes et de l'avidité des marchands, encore plus que de l'ambition des souverains' (p. 60). The condemnation falls on the same bourgeois luxury with its traditional links to urbanity, 'mollesse', and merchants, that Voltaire had previously extolled. In what seems a complete volte face from Voltaire's earlier position, the merchant no longer 'contribue au bonheur du monde' as he had done in the Lettres philosophiques but to global misery, to war, devastation and enslavement:
Les successeurs des bracmanes, de ces inventeurs de tant d'arts, de ces amateurs et de ces arbitres de la paix, sont devenus nos facteurs, nos négociateurs mercenaires. Nous avons désolé leur pays, nous l'avons engraissé de notre sang. [...] Nos nations d'Europe se sont détruites réciproquement dans cette même terre où nous n'allons chercher que de l'argent, et où les premiers Grecs ne voyageaient que pour s'instruire.’ (Ibid., p. 62).
Unlike in the earlier defences of commerce, in which Voltaire depicted it as fostering peace, liberty, and the arts and sciences, it is now divorced from all three, indeed directly opposed to them: Luxury and trade, here in the guise of money, are explicitly contrasted to the arts and sciences or progress towards enlightenment, here summarised in the reference to ‘s’instruire’. The successors of the bracmanes have to give up the arts and love of peace to accept a position of servitude in commerce, and engaging in trade destroys their independence and liberty, indeed alienates them from themselves: they become ‘nos facteurs’, ‘nos négociateurs’. The engagement in commerce which Voltaire had advocated as a certain way to personal independence and development during his English years, had turned into the very opposite.
The anti-luxury argument is made most strongly in the following section:
C'est pour fournir aux tables des bourgeois de Paris, de Londres et des autres grandes villes, plus d'épiceries qu'on n'en consommait autrefois aux tables des princes: c'est pour charger des simples citoyennes de plus de diamants que les reines n'en portaient à leur sacre: c'est pour infecter continuellement ses narines d'une poudre dégoûtante, pour s'abreuver, par fantaisie, de certaines liqueurs inutiles, inconnues à nos pères, qu'il s'est fait un commerce immense toujours désavantageux aux trois quarts de l'Europe; et c'est pour soutenir ce commerce que les puissances se sont fait des guerres, [...] nous n'avons jamais réfléchi que le plus grand et le plus rude des impôts est celui que nous imposons sur nous-mêmes par nos nouvelles délicatesses qui sont devenues des besoins, et qui sont en effet un luxe ruineux, quoiqu'on ne leur ait point donné le nom de luxe. (p. 61)
Voltaire had given luxury and commerce critical connotations before, in the Essai sur les moeurs for instance, but previously that was always because they were the wrong type of luxury, the noxious, feudal kind, not the beneficial, bourgeois luxury of enjoyment which spread universal opulence. This is not the case here. For the first time Voltaire attacked the very type of bourgeois, progressive luxury which he had extolled for over four decades: the kind that had passed from the exclusive domain of 'princes' and 'reines' to the 'bourgeois' and 'citoyennes', a development outlined in the Essai sur les moeurs and the Siècle de Louis XIV. Even though some the above examples, such as jewellery, is perhaps ostentatious luxury, some is clearly the luxury of comfort and enjoyment: condiments, tobacco, and the new drinks of tea and coffee, the type that is 'superflu', or as it is put here 'inutile', but which engenders both sensual pleasure and immense commercial activity; just what Voltaire had applauded in the Mondain.
Indian commerce is thus highly problematic. Colonial trade, involving slavery and forced labour could be seen not to constitute ‘true’, i.e. mutual commerce, and thus, whilst to be strongly condemned, it did not necessarily threaten Voltaire’s thought on commerce as civilisation. India however, as an ancient civilisation, a sovereign power which had traded internationally for centuries, ought to have been an illustration of the benefits of commerce as pointed to in the Mondain and the Lettres philosophiques. Instead, the Fragments nullify all four arguments that had marked the optimistic thought on commerce: Luxury now exists as its own category and is to be condemned; this condemnation is comprehensive: there is no longer any differentiation between an advantageous and a noxious kind of luxury; commerce is now divorced from mutuality, sociability, peace and liberty; and instead of promoting civilisation and Enlightenment it is now a force for their opposite, violence and barbarity.
This utterly destroyed decades of Voltaire’s own arguments about commerce which had made it absolutely central to his view of society, civilisation, and ultimately of ‘Enlightenment’. So the obvious question is why? Why did he threaten his entire edifice of Enlightenment social thought?
Strategic rhetoric can provide part of the answer: the Fragments were, after all, at least partly intended to exculpate Lally; and if it could be shown that his hand was forced by a criminally unjust system for which the entirety of French society bore responsibility, Lally would have to be absolved since he could not be judged by a society that was party to the offence. This cannot, however, account for the absoluteness of Voltaire’s about-turn: he could, for instance, easily have made the same argument by invoking noxious luxury and thus could have left his defence of bourgeois commerce and luxury intact.
Instead I would suggest that the solution to this puzzle is twofold. It lies on the one hand in Voltaire’s acute awareness of the state of, and shifts in, public opinion and debate, and on the other in a specific aspect of his own Enlightenment project: in its focus not only on political economy but also on a genuine cosmopolitanism, or, to put it into contemporary slang, in its ‘globalism’. Thus, to begin to solve the puzzle, the Fragments need to be seen in their historical context. They are published at a moment of intense debate in France, both about the nature and future of France’s economy in general and the French East India Company in particular, and of commerce, consumption, and commercial society as such.
Recent scholarship has dwelt at length on the burgeoning interest in political economy and the increasing hostility towards commerce in public debate in France from the 1750s onwards, which is generally explained by the public perception of a need for fundamental reform after France’s dismal performance in the wars of the 1740s and 50s. Michael Sonenscher has analysed the various attempts by eighteenth-century French intellectuals to reconfigure the French and European economies in order to solve the war-debt nexus. John Shovlin found that the increasing preoccupation with patriotism and agrarianism went hand in hand with a rejection of luxury-based commerce; and in his neo-Tocquevillian account, Henry Clark also narrates how a more positive view of the British-inspired model of commercial society endorsed by Melon, Voltaire, and the Gournay circle amongst others, came, by the end of the Seven Years War, to be rejected in favour of a more agrarian-based solution to the nation’s need for reform, as advocated by the physiocratic movement amongst others.[13]
Voltaire, attuned to public opinion and able to manipulate it like no other, was certainly aware of this shift or caesura, and both endorsed and encouraged it. Not only was he amongst the first to differentiate between different kinds of commerce, a good bourgeois and a noxious feudal kind, he also took a more agrarian stance himself. His appropriation of the figure of the patriarch of Ferney, which he linked to the agrarian overtones of his associated, Candidian motto ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ and expressed in media as varied as his poetry(theEpître à Madame DenisSur l’agriculture (1761) and the Epître à Horace (1772) amongst others), his letters, and the entries ‘Economie’, ‘Blé’, and ‘Agriculture’, in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770-72), represent a clear attempt to associate himself with this shift. Taking a more agrarian position, which, more often than not, was in the discourse of the time associated with a rejection of luxury, could, eventually, facilitate a critique of commerce. However, whilst it would permit such a move, it does not explain it. For this, we need to take into account another contemporary debate: that on French-Indian trade.
The French East India Company had become nearly extinct after the Seven Years War and the government considered abolishing its monopoly. To justify this, the then controller general, Maynon d’Inveau, asked the philosophe and economist André Morellet to write a treatise against the monopoly in 1769, which he duly did. The Mémoire sur la situation actuelle de la Compagnie des Indes was written in the tradition of the economically liberal Gournay circle to which Morellet belonged, and even contained an essay by Gournay himself as an annexe.It provoked myriad responsesand contributed to the abolition of the Company’s monopoly in the same year, revealing widespread dissatisfaction with the Company. When Morellet’s intervention came under fire, the physiocrat Dupont de Nemours wrote to support the pro-abolition stance. His Du Commerce et de la Compagnie des Indeswhich was also published in 1769 argues for France to cease all direct trade with India.