AU BIEN DU COMMERCE : ECONOMIC DISCOURSE AND VISIONS OF SOCIETY IN FRANCE

Between the seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, French political culture transformed from the absolutist politics of privilege and patronage to the politics of the public sphere. This transformation occurred, in large part, within state sponsored institutions. The French Council of Commerce, between 1700 and 1750, established a socially inclusive communication network spread across France in which negociants, merchants, artisans, and guilds discussed and debated specific economic policies. In this governmentally controlled public sphere, French economic actors became politicized as they accustomed themselves to participatory policy-making in which they expected that their views would be considered. Through this network, the French state sought to centralize economic policy-making and nationalize economic policies, yet a tension existed between these political goals and the language in which these debates occurred. Early in the century, the language of ordre and privilege infused these debates, and the concerns of the state served as the basis of discussion. In the process of negotiating economic policies, however, the language of privilege reinforced the local provincialism which the state hoped to diminish. As the half century progressed, two new bases for economic policy-making, the public and the economy, developed in the discourse, and the language of economic liberty separated from the language of political privilege. In the 1750s, the communication network collapsed when new royal administrators, led by de Gournay and Trudaine, adopted a new language of policy-making which emphasized abstract economic liberty. Economic policy-making based upon abstract laws required far less consultation and negotiation in the creation of specific policies, and a politicized public had to seek new venues in which to debate publicly state economic policies. This argument is based upon a database created from the Council of Commerce records and a discursive analysis of the language used in the communication network and in two specific examples: French trade policy towards the Dutch during the War of Spanish Succession and the communicative practices and economic conflicts of the Ni mes hosiery guild