Conclusion Commerce and Its Discontents (bis)
The Histoire’s accounts of monopoly agitated a vast range of readers, as did the work as a whole. As I have shown, the Histoire was widely read, and its reception is now well documented.1 But this did not mean its message was uniformly understood. Nor was its “author,” the abbé Raynal.
Exiled in 1781 when the Histoire was condemned to be “whipped and burned,” the abbé Raynal returned to Paris in 1791. A revolution was in full swing. The Histoire had rendered him a “Defender of Liberty” just as it endeared him to the Jacobins. Yet the author would ultimately disappoint the revolutionaries by delivering an address to the new National Assembly in which he offered a devastating critique of the new constitution and what he viewed to be the anarchic turn the Revolution had taken.2 It took almost no time for irate former supporters to turn against him.3 A colourful anecdote about his speech’s reception reports that, upon hearing about it, the Jacobins of Marseille dragged the bust of Raynal, which had previously adorned their hall, through the streets of Marseille until it fell to pieces.
At the same time that he was being hounded in the metropole, Raynal was cheered in the colonies. Toussaint l’Ouverture (1743–1803), leader of the first, successful 1791 slave revolt in what is now Haiti, cited him at length.4 A famous 1797 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1747–1805), the first deputy for Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) in the French National Assembly, also commemorated Raynal’s role in the denunciation of the trade in slaves, if obliquely. Its painter, Anne-Louis Girodet-Troison (1767–1824), depicted Belley gazing upwards (towards Saint-Domingue perhaps) and leaning on a pedestal from which a severe bald-headed white marble bust glowered in an opposite direction. The inscription beneath read: “G.T.Raynal.” Staring sternly into the distance, the Raynal represented here is the first outspoken critic of the slave trade in France, evoking those passages in the Histoire decrying that “odious commerce.”5 Shortly thereafter, a full copy of the Histoire – the ten volumes of text and two volumes of maps in-8o – accompanied an ambitious Corsican general on his 1798 Egyptian campaign. Napoleon is said to have drawn on the work as a model for planned imperial success.6 From the revolutionary leader of rebellions against colonial masters to the imperialist par excellence, the immediate uses of the Histoire were clearly multiple.
Figure 5. Jean-Baptiste Belley with G.T. Raynal. Portrait of C.(itizen) Jean-Baptiste Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies by Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy-Troison. Dated “Year V” (1797). Oil on canvas, 158 x 111 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Courtesy of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.
This multiplicity of interpretations is not surprising. As I have sought to show, this text, vast both in scope and in reach, was replete with multiple messages, many of them contradictory. Yet the prevailing tension within the Histoire lay between an ideal of doux commerce and recognition of commerce’s odieux potential. The debate over luxury, which was also a debate over commerce, highlighted the ambivalence about commerce in the Histoire and throughout Europe at the time. Any careful reading of this influential text reveals three categories of commerce that were neither civilising nor equalising, neither pacifying nor moralising. These three categories – slavery, piracy, and monopoly – provide the dissonance within the triumphant discourse of commerce in the Histoire, even if they do so in different ways. The trade of humans was deemed immoral by the Histoire, but its condemnation was amplified through an analogy made between feudal slavery, political slavery, and the trade in Africans. The accusation of hypocrisy on the part of European intellectuals who bemoaned their servitude to despots at the same time that they perpetuated the enslavement of Africans was sustained in the Histoire’s account of piracy. The foundations of international jurisprudence rested on the distinction between an individual, the pirate, and an action, piracy, the latter of which was deemed acceptable and redescribed as good seizure when undertaken by colonial powers. This was, according to the Histoire, a most odious form of commerce, because it rested on a double standard that favoured those with power over those without it. So, too, the Histoire’s critique of monopoly, a third form of odious commerce, was structured around the conflation of two otherwise distinct spheres: the international monopolies of the commercial trading companies and the domestic monopolies of the corps, or corporations, of tradesmen.
Each governed by a politics of definition, these categories were combined in the Histoire and beyond it. Far from being independent problems, luxury, slavery, piracy, and monopoly were together embedded within the discourse of commerce. In other words, slavery could not be understood as distinct from commerce, just as commerce could not be understood without its connection to slavery. Eighteenth-century French public intellectuals thus recognised a much denser and more varied discourse of commerce than the doux commerce thesis allows.
To be sure, even Albert Hirschman eventually recognised the coexistence of two distinct attitudes towards commerce.7 He eventually reframed his discussion of commerce as a dialectic and literally mapped out a matrix of the relations between what, for the purposes of his chart, he deemed the doux commerce and self-destruction theses, the latter of which he identified as the “obverse” of the former. The self-destruction thesis maintained that commerce “exhibits a pronounced proclivity toward undermining the moral foundations [of society].”8 To explain the genesis of the self-destruction thesis, Hirschman focused on Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Yet in doing so, he overlooked the eighteenth-century origins of this dynamic which I have sought to uncover in this book, including one of the best-known examples of the thesis. This was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men (1755), also referred to as the Second Discourse, wherein Rousseau famously countered the prevailing notion that “civilisation,” here equated with commercial society, was a positive outcome for humanity.9 For Rousseau, the trappings of civilisation were at best empty glitter. Civilisation, the consequence of societies of commerce, made men slaves to money, foreigners to virtue, and, worst of all for Rousseau, feminized them.10 Less prominent in twenty-first-century undergraduate syllabi but more widely read in the eighteenth century, the Histoire des deux Indes offered an alternative perspective. It combined a triumphant praise of commerce with appalled consternation at its abuses and immoral potential. Both views structured the discourse of commerce in eighteenth-century France.
Since the early twentieth century, this position of simultaneous love and hatred has been labelled “ambivalence.” The origins of this category are of course psychoanalytic. But the founder of psychoanalysis also offers an alternative perspective on the social promise of commerce. In the spirit of finding political economy where it has not traditionally been observed, I close with reflections on Sigmund Freud’s essay Civilization and Its Discontents.11 By the twentieth century, the promise of civilisation had become equivalent to the promise of doux commerce. If civilisation had formerly been understood as the set of social conditions characterised by “polish, gentleness, and softness,” Freud offered an explanation of how this very promise of douceur, of sweetness and gentleness, in fact generated aggression and conflict. He explained that civilisation thus comprised both sweetness and odiousness. We are faced with a situation of simultaneous desire and rejection of civilisation. We are thus ambivalent about civilisation.
Freud’s essay offers a paradigm through which to understand how the triumphant narrative of commerce could coexist with a deep sense of its hazards in eighteenth-century France. A sense of the sweet and gentle potential of commerce met with an understanding of its violent “discontents.” Writing for the Histoire, Denis Diderot remarked at one point that commerce was the “soul of the moral world.”12 If this was true, then, as we have seen, the soul of the moral world was conflicted indeed.
1 See and , eds., Lectures de Raynal(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), and , and , eds., L’Histoire des deux Indes: Réécriture et polygraphie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995).
2 Adresse de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Remise par lui-même à M. le Président, le 31 mai 1791, et lue à l’Assemblée le même jour. Imprimée sur le manuscrit de l’auteur. A Paris, Chez Gattey, libraire, au Palais-royal, nos 13 et 14.
3 G.T. Raynal démasqué, ou Lettres sur la vie et les ouvrages de cet écrivain (n.p., 1791).
4 Raynal’s posterity was fostered in Anglophone historiography by C. L. R. James’s classic work, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938, 1963). Rev. 2nd edition. (New York: Vintage, 1989). An efflorescence of scholarly attention has since continued the trend, parallel with the renewed interest in the Haitian Revolution sparked by the works of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Laurent Dubois, Jeremy Popkin, and Doris Garraway, to name but a few.
5 Helen D. Weston’s nuanced reading of the portrait – first listed as “Portrait denègre” at the Exposition d’Elysée in 1797 – invites us to understand the two figures in it as equals (due to their levelled heads), but also as “contrasts of the man of intellect with his exaggerated cranium and the man of nature with his exaggerated genitalia; as contrasts of freedom of thought and liberty of conscience in the academic field and freedom of the person and civil liberties fought for on the battlefield and in the political arena.” Helen D. Weston, “Representing the Right to Represent: The ‘Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies’ by A.-L. Girodet,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. 26 (Reference Weston1994): 88, 99. Susan Ross kindly brought this article to my attention. Mary C. Bellhouse also notes the many “competing signifiers” on the canvas (765), proposing that with the painting’s title indicating that Belley is a citizen, his “uniform of an officer in the French army” and his “sash of a representative,” Girodet’s portrait “is an image of a new kind of French manliness: the Republican citizen-soldier.” See “Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers: Representing Black Men in Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (Reference Bellhouse2006): 764.
6 A letter dated 28 mars 1798 to “Citoyen J-B Say” outlines the books Napoleon wanted assembled in a “bibliothèque portative.” He allocated ten thousand francs for the purchase of over 300 volumes. Included among those books (divided into “Sciences and Arts,” “Geography and Travels,” “Histories,” “Poetry,” “Novels,” and “Morals and Politics”) were twelve volumes of the “Histoire Philosophique des Indes” [sic]. Cf. Alexandre Keller, Correspondance, bulletins et ordres du jour de Napoléon. 4 vols. (Paris: A. Méricant, Reference Keller1909–12), vol. 4, and Napoléon, Correspondance de Napoléon 1er. I am indebted to Wayne Hanley for sharing these details with me.
7 Albert O. Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature20, no. 4 (Reference Hirschman1982): 1463–84.
8 Ibid., 1466.
9 Cf. Rousseau, Origines de l’inégalité.
10 See Dena Goodman’s analysis of Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert on this account in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 53–56.
11 The phrase “Civilization and Its Discontents” is a famously unsatisfactory translation of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. The essay’s original title was Das Unglück in der Kultur, or “Unhappiness in Civilization,” but it was later altered to Unbehagen, a word for which it was difficult to choose an English equivalent, though the French malaise is close. Freud apparently suggested “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization” in a letter to his translator, Mrs. Riviere, but it was ultimately she who found the phrase that was finally adopted. See Peter Gay’s introduction to Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” 1930. The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, trans. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, Reference Freud, Strachey and Gay1989), 59–61. To be sure, this translation shifts the subject from “Man” to “Civilization,” a move replicated in this book.
12 HDI (1780), book 19, 243. Cf. Michèle Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire des deux Indes ou l’Écriture Fragmentaire (Paris: A. G. Nizet, Reference Duchet1978), 166.
