Franco-American Trade During the American War for Independence: A False Dawn for Enlightenment...

A False Dawn for EnlightenmentCosmopolitanism? Franco-AmericanTrade during the American War of

Independence

Paul Cheney

THOUGH it may have helped to give birth to the exceptionalnation par excellence, the American War of Independence washardly an exception among eighteenth-century conflicts. Viewed

from Europe, the alliance of France and the United States against GreatBritain in this war exemplified and in a sense epitomized a pattern ofdevelopment in Anglo-French warfare. As Europe moved from the Warof the Spanish Succession to the War of the Austrian Succession andfinally to the Seven Years’ War, armed contests lost their traditionaldynastic character, moved increasingly off the Continent and intoEurope’s colonial periphery, and came to be understood by mostobservers, even outside the ministerial circles that guarded the arcanaimperii, simply as wars of commerce. Beyond the seeming obfuscationsof its title, the 1778 Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commercecould be more clearly defined as an attempt to strip Britain of its NorthAmerican possessions and trade in compensation for French losses in theSeven Years’ War. In short it was only more of the same, expressing thecommercial, colonial character of the Anglo-French rivalry more fullythan previous conflicts. This impression is only strengthened by consult-ing the thoughts of one of the architects of the alliance, France’s minis-ter of foreign affairs, Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, who wasinsensitive, if not downright hostile, to the larger dimension of thisstruggle as the first of the wars of colonial liberation. Far from announc-ing a new political order in the Euro-Atlantic world, the commercial

Paul Cheney is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. Theauthor would like to thank the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Institutnational d’études démographiques (INED) in Paris. Colleagues within and beyondthese institutions offered support and helpful criticism at various stages, and he ishappy to acknowledge them here: Loïc Charles, Cathy Matson, Allan Potofsky,Herb Sloan, Christine Théré, and finally the anonymous readers for the William andMary Quarterly.

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXIII, Number 3, July 2006

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motives for France’s involvement in the American War of Independenceseemed to mark it as yet another expensive episode of colonial-mercantile warfare in the zero-sum game of international trade.1

Viewed from a di f ferent angle , however, the geopol i t ics ofeighteenth-century commerce do not negate the idealism of the Franco-American alliance; rather, its utopian political dimension is intelligibleonly through a consideration of commerce. Literary collaborators andfuture revolutionaries Étienne Clavière and Jacques-Pierre Brissot deWarville, like many others, saw in the American Constitution a “philan-thropic system . . . conforming to the laws of nature,” but this systemwas thought inseparable from the equally philanthropic reign of freetrade. The manner in which the political and economic logic fit togetheris neatly summarized in the prospectus for the Société Gallo-Américainethat Clavière and Brissot appended to their 1787 treatise, De la France etdes États-Unis: “By its arms, France has helped to affirm the indepen-dence of Free America. A treaty of commerce based upon the interest ofboth countries must unite them more and more intimately. The moraland political well-being of the two nations must be the principal objectand result of these commercial liaisons.”2

1 The War of the Spanish Succession lasted from 1701 to 1714, though it is com-monly thought to have ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht; the War of theAustrian Succession lasted from 1740 to 1748; and the Seven Years’ War lasted from1756 to 1763. There was one marginally Continental aspect to the American War ofIndependence: France promised to help Spain recover Gibraltar as part of the priceof its involvement, a promise on which France eventually reneged. See ReginaldHorsman, The Diplomacy of the New Republic, 1776–1815 (Arlington Heights, Ill.,1985). Other early-eighteenth-century uprisings in the French and British Antillescould lay claim to being precursors to this breach. See, for example, JacquesPetitjean Roget, Le Gaoulé: La révolte de la Martinique en 1717 (Fort de France,Martinique, 1966); Stephen Saunders Webb, “An Assassination in Antigua: TheAnglo-American Revolution at Midpassage” (unpublished paper from the Universityof Chicago Early Modern Workshop, Apr. 28, 2003). Jonathan R. Dull argues thatVergennes was not even out for revenge against England so much as to restore theinternational balance of power (Dull, “France and the American Revolution Seen asTragedy,” in Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1778, ed.Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert [Charlottesville, Va., 1981], 80–87). Dull’s argu-ment is considered later in this article. For a foundational analysis of warfare asanother form of commercial competition, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The ModernWorld System, vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York, 1980), chap. 6.

2 Étienne Clavière and J[acques-]P[ierre] Brissot de Warville, De la France et desÉtats-Unis . . . (London, 1787), 292, 340. All translations are by the author unlessotherwise noted. References to many of the printed works used in this article werefound in Durand Echeverria and Everett C. Wilkie Jr., The French Image of America:A Chronological and Subject Bibliography of French Books Printed before 1816 Relatingto the British North American Colonies and the United States, 2 vols. (Metuchen, N.J.,1994). Echeverria uses many of the same sources in an earlier study to which everyscholar of this episode is greatly indebted (Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History

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This logic did not entirely pan out when it was applied to Franco-American relations, but commercial provisions of the 1778 treaty hadreal effects on the course of the war. During the Seven Years’ War, theBritish had easily occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique becausecolonists on these islands, dissatisfied with the commercial restrictionsimposed on them by their metropolitan masters in France, acted with“treason or benevolent neutrality.” Precious military resources werediverted from the French effort in North America to the Antilles, whichcontributed to French defeat. By contrast provisions of the 1778 Treatyof Amity and Commerce liberalized trade between France’s sugarcolonies and the United States, thus cooling long-simmering resent-ments among colonists, who rallied this time to France’s defense againstthe British. Trade liberalization protected the soft underbelly of France’scommercial empire, which helped the French prevail against Britain.3

Commercial cosmopolitanism, in the form of demands for laissez-fairepolicies, decisively affected the balance of European power, to whichmercantilist restriction had formerly been believed to hold the key.

Étienne Clavière and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville’s short-livedSociété Gallo-Américaine (January–April 1787) set itself the task ofstrengthening the commercial and cultural linkages that had failed inthe wake of the American War of Independence to materialize as com-pletely as the most optimistic observers had hoped. These high expecta-tions were not imposed on the alliance retrospectively but were drawnfrom the most forceful currents of enlightened opinion in France andindeed all over Europe.4 Prior to Clavière and Brissot’s intervention,

of the French Image of American Society to 1815 [Princeton, N.J., 1957]). Otherobservers—notably Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet,and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot—whose views will be discussed later in this article,approved of the American Revolution but were skeptical of the AmericanConstitution as well as of French involvement in the conflict.

3 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An OldRegime Business (Madison, Wis., 1979), 31 (quotation). Jean Tarrade speaks of the“easy welcome” the British received in the previous conflict (Tarrade, Le commercecolonial de la France à la fin de l’ancien régime: L’évolution du régime de “l’Exclusif ” de1763 à 1789 [Paris, France, 1972], 1: 468).

4 It seems that the Société Gallo-Américaine was also conceived by Brissot as anorgan (one of many) to raise money for his long-projected sojourn in the UnitedStates. This subject and other aspects of the société are discussed in FernandaMazzanti Pepe, Il nuovo mondo di Brissot: Libertà e istituzioni tra antico regime e rivo-luzione (Turin, Italy, 1996), 200–20; Echeverria, Mirage in the West, chap. 3. For thepan-European dimensions of this phenomenon, see Franco Venturi, The End of theOld Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, vol. 1, The Great States of the West, trans. R. BurrLitchfield (Princeton, N.J., 1991), chap. 1. See also Eugenio Di Rienzo, “Il ‘sognoamericano’ dell’abbé Morellet,” in L’Europa nel XVIIIe secolo: Studi in onore di PaoloAlatri, ed. V. I. Comparato, E. Di Rienzo, and S. Grassi (Naples, Italy, 1991),

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Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal had attempted to wrest thelarger significance of these events from the apparently narrow interestsof Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes and others who pursued the warout of motives of revenge. His writings on the subject, which appearedin the third edition of the Histoire des deux Indes in 1780, quickly foundtheir way into a pirated extract, Révolution de l’Amérique, intended tocash in on widespread interest in the events unfolding across theAtlantic. In narrating the origin of the conflict between colony andmetropole, Raynal described the commercial and political oppression ofthe North Americans as parts of the same complex of tyranny. He foundin America a version of serfdom “worse than that which [one] wouldsuffer under a tyrant,” which emerged wherever one group could imposeits political will on others and “limit their industry and fetter it byprohibitions.”5

Though France stood to benefit commercially and politically from awar intended to give perfidious Albion its comeuppance, Raynal assuredhis readers that as a Frenchman he viewed the matter impartially andcould affirm that the Revolution “responded to the wishes of Europe.”He wrote, “[The American] cause is that of the whole human race . . .We believe that we will shortly be breathing purer air in the knowledge

325–44. Some French observers tended to see the ruin of England as a universal aspi-ration. Playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who helped the Frenchgovernment in its efforts to arm the American insurgents through a phony shippingcompany before 1778, expressed this view perfectly through the title of his 1778pamphlet: Le vœu de toutes les nations, et l’intérêt de toutes les puissances, dans l’abaisse-ment et l’humiliation de la Grande Bretagne [The Desire of All Nations, and theInterest of All the Great Powers, Is the Abasement and Humiliation of GreatBritain] (Paris, France, 1778).

5 Bk. 18, chaps. 38–52, were repr. in this extract. M. L’Abbé [Guillaume-Thomas-François de] Raynal, Révolution de l’Amérique (London, 1781), 41. As CarloBorghero points out, two views of the American Revolution jostle against oneanother in this work: one radical, the other gradualist and reformist. This fact maybe explained by Denis Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique, themultivolume best seller of the eighteenth century, which is generally taken as themore radical of the two authors’ writings. Borghero discusses the publishing historyof Révolution de l’Amérique as well as these other issues in Borghero, “Raynal, Painee la rivoluzione americana,” in La politica della ragione: Studi sull’Illuminismofrancese, ed. Paolo Casini (Bologna, Italy, 1978), 349–81. See also Venturi, End of theOld Regime. Borghero and Venturi share the view adopted here: that since Raynal’swork was published and received as the work of one author, it should be treated inthe same way, internal contradictions notwithstanding. For more on the problems ofauthorship in the Histoire philosophique, see Michèle Duchet, “L’Histoire des deuxIndes: Sources et structure d’un texte polyphonique,” in Lectures de Raynal:L’ Histoire des deux Indes en Europe et en Amérique au XVIIIe siècle: Actes duColloque de Wolfenbüttel, ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz, Studies onVoltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Eng., 1991), 9–15.

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that there is one less tyrant in the universe. Moreover, these great liber-ating revolutions are lessons for despots.”6

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet,picked up on several of these themes in his response to an essay prize com-petition proposed by Raynal himself in 1783. Raynal asked respondents ifthe European discovery of the Americas had been, on balance, beneficialor harmful to humankind. Like Raynal, Condorcet believed that the sig-nificance of the American Revolution lay partly with the example of theevent itself and partly with the people who conducted it; the Americansreaffirmed for the whole world a panoply of rights established historicallyin England at the time of the Glorious Revolution and theoretically some-what earlier in Locke’s Second Treatise (circa 1683). The novelty ofAmerica’s contribution lay in integrating an English “respect for libertyand for property” with a critique of Machiavellian mercantilist traderestrictions and the beggar-thy-neighbor theories that supported them.7

Condorcet and others situated the Revolution within a historicaldialectic, which linked commerce, knowledge, and political freedomthat was, in its various permutations, one of the principal “narratives ofenlightenment” that informed eighteenth-century European historicalconsciousness. In a word the American Revolution announced the tri-umph of what Albert Hirschman has termed the eighteenth century’sdoctrine of doux commerce (gentle or soft commerce). According to thisdoctrine, commerce became irenic where it had been invidious, cos-mopolitan where it had been local or national, and socially levelingwhere it had previously exacerbated inequality. Doux commerce trans-formed the zero-sum game of international trade: one nation’s welfarewas not diminished but rather “increased by the prosperity of othernations.” Within specific nations, progress in the useful arts and specu-lative sciences would lead to more advanced social views, encouragingenlightened peoples all over the world to reject the principles of eco-nomic Machiavellianism and to question the ideas of natural inequalitythat dictated European social relations.8 Earlier writers such as the Abbé

6 Raynal, Révolution de l’Amérique, 133, 163.7 Clavière and Brissot, De la France, xxxv (quotation). For other entries in this

competition—no prize was ever awarded—see Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and AlexandreMussard, Avantages et désavantages de la découverte de l’Amérique, Chastellux, Raynal etle concours de l’Académie de Lyon (Saint-Étienne, France, 1994). Condorcet’s ownresponse was printed first in 1786 and again in 1788. Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas deCaritat, Marquis de Condorcet, “Condorcet’s The Influence of the American Revolutionon Europe,” trans. and ed. Durand Echeverria, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25,no. 1 (January 1968): 107, 98. On mercanti l i sm as a species of economicMachiavellianism, see Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political andSocial Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 246–48.

8 Condorcet, WMQ 25: 90 (quotation), 107. Two works discuss the centrality ofthe concept of the Enlightenment to the eighteenth-century historical imagination:

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Gabriel-François Coyer had echoed the views of many commoner mer-chants in arguing that the practice of certain forms of commerce shouldnot result in the loss of noble status because of commercial activities’utility for the state. Even in Europe, therefore, commerce was forcingthe reexamination of age-old prejudices. According to Condorcet, “Thenoble is beginning to regard a banker or a merchant almost as hisequal.” (“Provided he is extremely rich,” Condorcet added.) Doux com-merce also extended into the domain of the arts and sciences, wherehumankind would profit from “all the advantages which will result fromthe exchange of ideas and knowledge. At the same time, it is obviousthat the progress of each nation will add to the wealth of all and willmake it easier to share this wealth more evenly.” The AmericanRevolution would complete all these virtuous circles: the enlightenmentavai lable to humanity would accumulate twice as rapidly onceAmericans were freed of the “social distinctions . . . [and] beckoningambitions” associated with their mother country.9

Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire toGibbon (Cambridge, 1997); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2,Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999). Though many eighteenth-centurythinkers believed that commerce could be an agent of decadence, even these oppo-nents of commerce granted it a centrality that it would not have attained in the pre-ceding century. On the meaning of doux commerce: “There was much talk, from thelate seventeenth century on, about the douceur of commerce: a word notoriously dif-ficult to translate into other languages (as, for example, in la douce France), it con-veys sweetness, softness, calm, and gentleness and is the antonym of violence”(Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments forCapitalism before Its Triumph, 2d ed. [Princeton, N.J., 1997], 59–63 [quotation, 59]).

9 [Gabriel-François Coyer], La noblesse commerçante (London, 1756). This workwas written at the behest of Jean-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay, the intendantof commerce. See Loïc Charles, “La liberté du commerce des grains et l’économiepolitique française (1750–1770)” (Ph.D. diss., Université Paris 1–Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1999). French merchants were understandably receptive to Coyer’s argu-ments, since the social status of their profession was a long-term concern. See thearchives of the Chamber of Commerce of Nantes, particularly a seventeen-piecedossier titled “Noblesse de Commerce en Gros,” 1669–1780, in serié C, 695, ArchivesDépartementales de la Loire Atlantique, Nantes, France. The Chamber ofCommerce of Guyenne (Bordeaux region) wrote a congratulatory note to Coyer onthe publication of his book (July 16, 1757, serié C, 4263, Archives Départementalesde la Gironde, Bordeaux, France). For Condorcet’s observations, see Echeverria,WMQ 25: 95, 90, 101. Though Condorcet was clearly alluding to the highly debat-able tendency of wealth to equalize within a nation as it becomes more prosperous,he may also have been referring to the tendency of wealth to equalize betweennations, as observed by Hume. On this subject, see Istvan Hont, “The ‘RichCountry-Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy,” in Wealthand Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Hontand Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983), 271–315. For further discussion of theFrench side of the debate, see Hont, “The ‘Rich Country-Poor Country’ DebateRevisited,” in Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind(London, forthcoming).

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This complex set of hopes, attached to the Revolution and centeredon commerce, was not cobbled together by enlightened but jingoisticand exclusively French partisans of the American insurgents. Readers ofAdam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth ofNations (1776) understood very clearly the relationship between a cri-tique of economic Machiavellianism and the political aspirations of theformer British colonists. Indeed the first parts of Smith’s work to betranslated into French, in 1778, were the sections that addressed the ori-gins and inevitable emancipation of the American colonies. As is com-monly recognized, however, Smith was not the first to argue for freetrade between European nations and their colonial offshoots and to linkthis polemic to a critique of feudal political institutions. Reflecting onthe development of Europe’s American colonies, Controller-General ofFinance Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot had observed that “colonies arelike fruits that hang on the tree only until they are mature: once theyhave become self-sufficient, they will do what Carthage has done, andwhat America will do one day.” Later, in an oft-quoted 1776 letter to for-eign minister Vergennes, Turgot called for the establishment of “AlliedProvinces . . . no longer subjected to the metropole.” Turgot concluded,“Nothing can stop the course of things which will certainly lead, sooneror later, to the total independence of the English colonies, and, by aninevitable consequence, a complete revolution in the relations betweenEurope and America.”10

Turgot’s bold predictions have often been compared with those ofVictor Riqueti, the Marquis de Mirabeau, the prolific author of L’Amides hommes (1756–60), who later joined the founder of Physiocracy,


10 [Adam Smith], Fragment sur les colonies en général, et sur celles des Anglois enparticulier, [trans. Elie Salomon François Reverdil] (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1778),i–viii. The translator of this fragment, which was given such a politically currenttitle, explicitly denied having undertaken the translation for the benefit of “thosewho are interested in the present controversy [politique du moment],” but he never-theless admitted the timeliness of Smith’s writings when he expressed the hope thatby publishing this particular fragment he would interest readers in the whole work(ibid., vi). For Turgot’s observation, see [Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot], “Seconddiscours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humaine,” in OEuvres de Mr. Turgot,Ministre d’État . . . (Paris, France, 1808), 2: 52–92 (quotation, 66). Though hebelieved American independence was salutary and inevitable, Turgot did not advo-cate French financial support for the American Revolution, believing—correctly, asit happened—that it would imperil France’s financial situation and therefore hobblereform efforts at home. See Turgot, “Mémoire: Sur la manière dont la France etl’Espagne devoient envisager les suites de la querelle entre la Grande-Bretagne et sesColonies,” Apr. 6, 1776, ibid., 8: 460, 436–37 (quotation). See also Anthony Pagden,“Heeding Heraclides: Empire and its Discontents, 1619–1812,” in Spain, Europe andthe Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard L. Kagan andGeoffrey Parker (Cambridge, 1995), 316–33, esp. 331.

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François Quesnay, as disciple and collaborator. Though it was somewhatperipheral to their central concerns, the Physiocrats—or économistes asthey were known at the time—nevertheless developed a withering cri-tique of colonial commerce, believing it fundamentally wasteful becauseit diverted capital from its most productive employment, agriculture, tocommerce, which, though necessary, was economically unproductive.Though the Physiocrats were usually enthusiastic about the civilizingeffects of commerce, the structure and institutions of colonial commercewere thought to pervert the naturally beneficial effects of commerce toutcourt. The high profits accruing from overseas trade were the product of,on the one hand, monopoly pricing power and, on the other, operatingsubsidies (protection costs and public financing) granted by the statesthat were supposed to profit from this trade but in reality did not. Smithbasically concurred with this analysis but did not agree with thePhysiocrats that mercantile restrictions constituted an insurmountableobstacle to national prosperity. The Physiocratic argument, based oneconomic productivity, was joined to a denunciation of the colonialpact, whose advocates believed that colonies should gladly bear the alle-giance, taxes, and economic hardships imposed on them because themetropole founded and continued to protect them. According to thePhysiocrats, commercial restrictions and recurring commercial wars wereeconomically irrational and violated principles of natural justice; politi-cal and economic tutelage of the colonies should give way to equal termsof trade and equal political status between colony and metropole.11

Physiocratic thought was an early example of how the political and eco-nomic ambitions of the colonists and their enlightened supporters wereof a piece.

Given the logic of these arguments, which intimately linked com-mercial prosperity to individual and political liberty, it is little wonderthat many of the most forceful advocates for the American cause, such as

11 On Physiocratic criticisms of colonial commerce, see Henri Sée, “Les écono-mistes et la question coloniale au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de l’histoire des colonies(1929): 381–92. The notion of “natural” versus “unnatural” forms of economic activ-ity is fruitfully developed in Istvan Hont, “The Political Economy of the ‘Unnaturaland Retrograde’ Order: Adam Smith and Natural Liberty,” in FranzösischeRevolution und Politische Ökonomie, ed. Maxine Berg et al. (Trier, Germany, 1989),122–49. For contemporary justifications and explanations of the colonial pact, see[François] V[éron] d[e] F[orbonnais], “Colonie,” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaireraisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers . . . (Paris, France, 1753), 3: 648–51, avail-able on http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/. See alsoMontesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, in Roger Cail lois, ed., OEuvres complètes,Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, France, 1951), 2: 641–45 (bk. 21, chap. 21); AndréLabrouquère, “Les idées coloniales des Physiocrates: (Documents inédits)” (Ph.D.diss., Université de Paris, 1927).

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Brissot, Condorcet, and Raynal (if inconsistently), were also opposed toslavery. In 1771 Scotsman John Millar produced a materialist historicalaccount of the decline of feudal relations of servitude and the rise ofcommerce whose clarity stands out among similar works of the epoch.Through a 1773 French translation of Millar’s Observations Concerningthe Distinction of Ranks in Society, these arguments found their way intoprogressively more radically abolitionist, rather than simply reformist,editions of Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes. Wherever com-merce had developed to a sufficient degree, argued Millar, artisans andpeasants could earn their livelihood independently of those who wouldcoax or otherwise force them into servitude. Free labor was more prof-itable because people working on their own account were more produc-tive and the onerous costs of overseeing unfree labor were avoided: “Theintroduction of personal liberty has therefore an infallible tendency torender the inhabitants of a country more industrious.” Such were themutually reinforcing origins of commercial and political liberty inEurope. The same process rendered slavery economically unprofitable(because unproductive) and morally repugnant. Nevertheless antislaverysentiments were not inevitable, even among those who accepted theinterrelation of commercial prosperity and political liberty. Millar closedhis Observations with a prescient condemnation of the Americancolonists: “It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same peoplewho talk in so high a strain of political liberty, and who consider theprivilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the unalienable rights ofmankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of theinhabitants into circumstances by which they are not only deprived ofproperty, but almost of every right whatsoever.”12

Even those writers who did not go so far as to advance antislaveryarguments or accept the Physiocratic analysis were coming to believethat economic cosmopolitanism, the promise of doux commerce, was theonly cure for the pathologies created by the rise of colonial commerce:war, mounting taxes, and boom-and-bust cycles instead of peace andsteady mutual enrichment. In 1766 Jacques Accarias de Serionne, a keen

12 John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society(Dublin, Ireland, 1771), 233, 240. For other elements of this argument, ibid., 203–28.The history of the translation of Millar is given in Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie ethistoire au siècle des Lumières (1971; repr., Paris, France, 1995), 175n. On Raynal’s ter-giversations on the question of slavery, ibid., 170–75. See also Yves Benot, LaRévolution française et la fin des colonies, 1789–1794 (Paris, France, 2004), 33–34. AsBénot recounts, Condorcet himself proposed a seventy-year transition period forforced labor. Abolitionist sentiment remained moderate until the establishment ofthe Société des Amis des Noirs in 1788. See also Marcel Dorigny and BernardGainot, La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799: Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolitionde l’esclavage (Paris, France, 1998), 17–20.

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observer of the economies of Holland, England, and France, wrote thatthe true spirit of commerce, not commercial enmity and warfare, shouldfix the balance of power between nations: “If the spirit of commerce everspreads everywhere, wars will become less frequent in Europe.” Serionnehoped that free trade between nations would not only put an end toepisodic European wars but also civilize the inhabitants of these nations.Refuting Rousseauists and reactionary nobles who polarized eighteenth-century debates over luxury and commerce from both sides of the politi-cal spectrum, Accarias de Serionne observed that without commerce “wewould be savage wandering people, without laws and without religion.”Beyond these commonly enumerated fruits of civilization, commercepromised other benefits consonant with the “esprit philosophique”:peace and solidarity between peoples of the world. Accarias de Serionneexemplifies how commercial cosmopolitanism fit within the broaderpolitical evolution of Europe precisely because he was a respected but inno way extraordinary author. He cited contemporary authorities, hisheavily empirical works were reprinted and repackaged, and he was citedin turn by the most important economic journals of the day. Heexpressed a growing consensus among economically liberal progressives(those with the “esprit philosophique”) that found its way, a decadelater, into attitudes toward the American Revolution.13

Indeed Vergennes, initially presented here as a narrow-minded,antiphilosophic reactionary, also saw the Anglo-American conflictthrough a lens shaped by cosmopolitan progressives who believed thatcommerce, not dynastic warfare, should determine Europe’s balance ofpower. Accarias de Serionne and Vergennes feared a universal Englishmonarchy based on commerce, but the latter sought to punish Englandby supporting America. Despite his taste for revenge, Vergennes was notinsensible to the charms of doux commerce in setting France’s long-termpolicy toward the Anglo-American world. After seeking to reduceEngland by warfare, the same Vergennes oversaw the signing of the 1786Eden Treaty, which liberalized trade between France and its formerenemy. Vergennes hoped to revitalize French industry, to be sure, but anequally pressing goal was to restabilize the European balance of powerby defusing the conflict between France and England through expandedcommerce.14 Perhaps Vergennes recognized that the liberalization of

13 [Jacques Accarias de Serionne], Les intérêts des nations de l’Europe, dévélopésrelativement au commerce (Leiden, Netherlands, 1766), 1: 5. Significantly, Accarias deSerionne cites Montesquieu, a principal theorist of doux commerce, in support of thisobservation (ibid., 1: i, 367–68, 371). Important contemporary journals includedÉphémérides du Citoyen and Journal d’agriculture, du commerce des arts et des finances.Serionne was himself the editor of the short-lived Journal de Commerce (1759–62).

14 Dull, “France and the American Revolution,” 85.

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commercial relations with France’s own colonies saved him grief duringthe American conflict.

Many historians have rightly observed that French public enthusi-asm over the American Revolution was a sublimated form of nationallyspecific dissatisfaction and reformist impulses. Nevertheless France’sambitions during this war were inscribed within a broader philosophicalhistory of commerce; countries as different as France, England, and theinfant United States could be comprehended within a unitary historicalprocess that was transforming Machiavellian competition into doux com-merce. Reformers and exponents of doux commerce took as a given, or atleast as a regulative ideal, that under the influence of commerce thepolities of the Atlantic world were developing a new form of civil societythat rendered the old distinctions between monarchical and republicanstates less relevant. According to David Hume, the rise of commerce hadengendered political and legal reforms that made “civilized monarchies”increasingly similar to “republics” such as England: “They are a govern-ment of Laws, not of Men.” In 1748 Montesquieu adumbrated thesehopes further: “Commerce has ensured that the knowledge of the mœursof every nation has penetrated everywhere: they have been compared toone another, and this has resulted in great benefits.” Montesquieubelieved, for instance, that the rise of commerce was undermining thebasis of monarchical despotism because capital fled uncertainty andpolitical repression, whereas “l’esprit de commerce” unified nations andled to peace.15

Even as he described the broad secular changes that were transform-ing a l l c iv i l ized societ ies under the heading of doux commerce ,Montesquieu, who was regarded by his contemporaries as the “father ofthe science of commerce,” analyzed the rise of modern commerce interms of the differences among monarchies, aristocracies, and republics.When Montesquieu wrote that “commerce stands in relation [rapport]with the constitution” and then examined this rapport in some of thelengthiest sections of De l’esprit des lois, he formalized his contempo-raries’ common sense into an explicit set of relationships that could

15 David Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed.Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind., 1985), 94. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois,2: 584–86 (bk. 20, chaps. 1–2). Mœurs designates habits, customs, or even morals. Abroader, more contemporary translation may be culture, but I have left the termuntranslated throughout the text. On the political hopes attached by Europeans toAmerica, see Echeverria, Mirage in the West; Venturi, End of the Old Regime; R. R.Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe andAmerica, 1760–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 1: 253–62; Di Rienzo, “Il ‘sogno ameri-cano’ dell’abbé Morellet.”


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serve as a template for the rise of commerce among variously constitutedEuropean states. A guiding question of this science of commerce waswhether monarchies, especially France, could hope to rise to the samelevels of prosperity and commercial power as their republican neighborswho possessed, from a commercial point of view, superior constitutions.All European states were becoming more commercial and therefore lessdespotic, but this broad historical pattern left plenty of room for explor-ing the nature and limits of these changes. By dint of the different insti-tutions, mœurs, and laws—in sum, constitutions—proper to them,republics were thought better suited to commerce than monarchies.Beyond this broad distinction, Montesquieu discussed what type ofcommerce was still available to monarchies despite the social inequali-ties, underdeveloped financial institutions, and disdain for bourgeoisthrift and industry that supposedly characterized these societies.Whereas republics were said to excel in the carrying trade (commerced’économie), Montesquieu suggested that monarchies could find a placein the luxury trade (commerce de luxe), which fed off the aristocraticmœurs of monarchical societies. Aristocratic taste, or at least widespreadimitation of the aristocracy, assured France a competitive advantage inthe design and manufacture of luxury goods, and high rates of profit inthe luxury sector created a buffer against supposed aristocratic insou-ciance in matters of business.16 Doux commerce was a civilizing and anti-despotic force wherever it was found, but the international division oflabor and patterns of global trade spoke volumes, politically and socially,about the players and their respective roles in this trade.

An examination of French diplomatic correspondence before andafter the 1778 Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce shows

16 “De l’esprit des loix, premier extrait,” Journal de Commerce (April 1759): 85–86;Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, 2: 587–88 (quotation, 587), 592 (bk. 20, chap. 4,chap. 10). This sense of British superiority was a widespread eighteenth-centuryjudgment that must be greeted with skepticism, given what historians now knowabout the enormous growth of commerce in eighteenth-century France. GuillaumeDaudin’s assessment of the issue, added to extant research by François Crouzet andPaul Butel, further strengthens the impression that France’s international trade grewat a quicker pace than that of England throughout the eighteenth century (Daudin,Commerce et prospérité: La France au XVIIIe siècle [Paris, France, 2005], 217). OnFrance’s unique potential in the luxury trade, see, for example, [H. Lacombe dePrezel], Les progrès du commerce ([Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1760]), 328–30. In thedomain of luxury production, Michael Sonenscher emphasizes the continuitiesbetween Paris and London, though French thinkers nevertheless believed that thelogic of distinction on which aristocratic society thrived could help create “competi-tive advantage [in international markets] which fashion supplied” (Sonenscher,“Fashion’s Empire: Trade and Power in Early 18th-Century France,” in LuxuryTrades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris: Studies in the History of the SkilledWorkforce, ed. Robert Fox and Anthony Turner [Aldershot, Eng., 1998], 242).

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just how influential Montesquieu’s thinking about the economyremained. Throwing into relief the economic and political differencesbetween France and the new American Republic, Montesquieu’s thesisunderlined the fragility of the cosmopolitan hopes that were attached tothe Revolution and associated with the most liberal contemporary doc-trines of political economy.17 Indeed the views of France’s consuls in theUnited States and their detailed comparisons of French and Americansociety supplied little basis for the illusion of a happy commercialalliance in the first place. France and America continued to trade withone another, but underlying and enduring differences between themaltered the geographical patterns of this trade, diminished its overall vol-ume, and transformed its political significance out of all recognition incomparison with the cosmopolitan hopes attached to the alliance. Thedownward arc of France’s trade figures with the United States corre-sponded to a deflation of enlightened optimism about the reform ofFrance’s society and political economy.

As its principal ally and financial supporter during the Revolution,France enjoyed increased trade with the United States, whose commer-cial ties with England were curtailed during the conflict. A tighter liai-son with the United States not only afforded an outlet for high-valuemanufactured goods such as textiles from the metropole but alsopromised an expanded market for the produce of France’s sugar islands.Sensing the tenuousness of France’s commercial advantage in the longterm, the French government worked through its consuls to formulate acommercial strategy for the Americas that would parlay temporary gainsinto something more permanent “before the peace, that is to say beforecompetition is opened up indiscriminately to every nation, or beforepreference can be given to England.” Indeed the question of a resurgentAmerican preference for the English loomed large. An anonymous mer-chant advised his local consul: “Let us not flatter ourselves, they seemattached to us now because they have need of us; [but] they do not likeus any more than do the English.”18 Even before the Treaty of Amity


17 On these illusions and their steady evaporation during the revolutionarydecade, see Horsman, Diplomacy of the New Republic; Jacques Godechot, “Les rela-tions économiques entre la France et les États-Unis de 1778 à 1789,” French HistoricalStudies 1, no. 1 (1958): 26–39. Peter P. Hill analyzes Franco-American relations bymeans of the same consular correspondence used as the source for this section, buthis study treats a later period and he is not interested in economic doctrine (Hill,French Perceptions of the Early American Republic, 1783–1793 [Philadelphia, 1988]).

18 “Considérations sur le Commerce de la France avec les Etats-Unis,” 1778, inAffaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441, Centre historique des Archives nationales,Paris, France (“before the peace”). Two other problems were solved by an expansionof Franco-American trade: the islands received needed wood and provisions more

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and Commerce, it was unclear that prolonged contact through com-merce had bred anything but misunderstanding and dislike. Long beforeÉtienne Clavière and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville contended withsome of the same apprehensions in proposing their Société Gallo-Américaine in 1787, the French government recognized these potentialdifficulties and worked to address them.

The author of a 1778 memorandum pushing for the establishmentof a network of consuls in the United States framed the problem interms of knowledge versus ignorance. The French needed a detailedunderstanding of the United States’ economy in the broadest sense,“their population, their productions, their industry [and] all the necessary,useful and agreeable objects of their consumption.” Such an undertakingwould help them “to understand, appreciate, extend and solidify” theiradvantages, but France needed more than a source of state-sponsored mar-ket research to accomplish this task. Consuls placed in the United Stateswould also “carefully observe its inhabitants; their characters, their desires,their mœurs and uncover everything of interest there . . . for the consuls ofFrance and for their policies.” Wittingly or not one candidate for the jobof consul invoked the authority of Montesquieu when he described thetask of drawing comparisons between the productions, manners, andpolitical systems of the thirteen states as contributing to “the science ofevery commercial rapport.”19 Concretely, this call to science meant that

cheaply, and the turnaround time for merchants’ capital was reduced by sendinggoods to the United States, which increased overall profits. See “Fragment sur leCommerce intérieur des Isles Françaises et sur leur Commerce extérieur avec laFrance et les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique,” 1778, ibid. Fear of eventual open competi-tion was rife. See also “Considérations Politiques sur le Commerce de la France avecles Etats-Unis de l’Amérique,” in série Mémoires et Documents, Etats-Unis, 2: 53r,Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Paris, France. July 24, 1777, inMémoires et Documents, Etats-Unis, 2: 44r, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quaid’Orsay (“not flatter ourselves”). For an introduction to the organization of the twomain repositories holding Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents pertaining to theUnited States, see Abraham P. Nasatir and Gary Elwyn Monell, French Consuls inthe United States: A Calendar of Their Correspondence in the Archives Nationales(Washington, D.C., 1967); Waldo G. Leland, John J. Meng, and Abel Doysié, Guideto Materials for American History in the Libraries and Archives of Paris, vol. 2, Archivesof the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Washington, D.C., 1943).

19 “Considérations sur le Commerce de la France avec les Etats-Unis,” 1778, inAffaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441, Centre historique des Archives nationales(“carefully observe”); “Mémoire: Etablissement d’un Consul Général dans les Etats-Unis d’Amérique,” 1783, ibid. (“every commercial rapport”). “Market research” doesnot diminish the importance of this sort of information, which was crucial to anyuseful understanding of France’s present or future competitive position. A call fordetailed research can be found in “Mémoire sur les Etats-Unis de l’AmériqueSeptentrionale, le Commerce qui s’y fait, et celui qu’on y peut faire,” 1778, inAffaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441, Centre historique des Archives nationales,which discusses the different qualities of French and English cloths and the uses to

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France’s commercial strategy should be formulated with reference to thebroadest sociological context. The Americans were forging novel formsof society and government in the New World that implied specific pat-terns of consumption and production; what remained to be seen washow the unique rapports of French civilization could be linked to thesenew American forms through trade.

Observing the character, passions, and manners of the Americans aswell as the political context in which they operated also meant exploringthe ways in which French behavior generated friction in the putativelyrepublican milieu of North America. One writer compared the problemto that faced by social climbers, “whose entry into society depends ontheir reputation” and whose need for success left little room for error.Because success in any society entailed emulation, French merchantsabroad should model their behavior after the “virtuous character ofAmerica.” But there was ample reason to believe that French merchantswere far from virtuous, particularly in their business practices towardAmericans. They notoriously exploited their temporary advantage toovercharge for cheaply made commodities and gouged Americans oninsurance and freight charges. Concluding pessimistically that “the grati-tude that the Americans owe us will not form an indissoluble bond,” theauthor called for heavy surveillance of French merchants. Unless Frenchconsuls kept these merchants on a short leash, their abuses might throwthe Americans back into the arms of their original oppressors, who were“tyrants, but who share[d] religion, language, habits, mœurs and mannerof dress with them.” Since these sympathies were considered more per-manent than the ideology of Franco-American fraternity that prevailedduring the war, another consul, perhaps Philippe André Létombe,thought it desirable and necessary to “extinguish liaisons of affinity,blood, religion, laws, mœurs, and language” with the English that hin-dered new bonds with France.20

which they could be put in different regions of the United States. The duties of theconsuls included ensuring that treaties were obeyed, attempting to enforce standardsof honesty among French merchants, arranging for the provisioning of naval vessels,and policing sailors on shore. Because of their protracted contact with the locals, theviews of the consuls were often highly respected, even above those of diplomats onmissions from the Minister of Foreign Affairs (see Hill, French Perceptions, 13–19).

20 On the comparison between French merchants and social climbers and onslippery French trade practices, see “Second Mémoire: Etablissement d’un ConsulGénéral dans les Etats-Unis d’Amérique,” 1783, in Affaires Etrangères Sous-série BIII, 441, Centre historique des Archives nationales. Such exploitative practices bymerchants were criticized everywhere in this group of documents. See “TroisièmeMémoire: Etablissement d’un Consul Général dans les Etats-Unis d’Amérique,”1783, ibid.; Hill, French Perceptions, 66; Godechot, French Historical Studies 1: 29–30.On the need to terminate relations with the English, see “Considérations Politiques

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Because Anglo-Americans were cut from the same cloth, the prosper-ity of the new United States could easily be seen as a threat rather than an“unprecedented growth in human population and felicity.” One Frenchmerchant, who emphasized at each turn Americans’ hatred for the French,believed that the “necessary consequence” of American independence andprosperity would be an attempt to take over France’s sugar colonies. “Aswe wait on their plans for conquest,” he continued, “we must at leastexpect that they will hurt our trade by means of the trade which they clan-destinely conduct with our colonies.” Americans were much more “ambi-tious” and “tricky” than even the English, he concluded, and therefore“the insurgents do not deserve our trust any more than the English: theyhave the same mœurs, maxims, opinions and leanings.”21

The need for close analysis of France’s commercial prospects in theUnited States led diplomats to think in terms of cultural differences andelective affinities. Perhaps inevitably, such an approach laid bare differ-ences between the French and Anglo-American worlds that clashed withthe irenic theories of doux commerce. But this conflict was not a simplecase of Enlightenment hedgehogs against realpolitische foxes in the diplo-matic corps. As previously discussed these consuls drew on another richand equally enlightened vein of comparative economic thought—that ofMontesquieu—about the relationship between the constitution (socialstructure, governmental form, customs) and the economy. Indeed thiscomparative approach had been applied as early as 1755 by Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont to the thirteen North American colonies. Likemany economic writers of the period, Butel-Dumont viewed Englishprosperity and commercial expansion as an effect of its free and moder-ate government. Drawing on Montesquieu, Butel-Dumont proposed toexamine the “spirit of the laws” that governed these colonies and relate itto their respective levels of prosperity. Moving beyond the abstract andill-informed praise that French authors often heaped on English institu-tions, Butel-Dumont compared the constitution, climate, history, geog-raphy, population, and mœurs of the different colonies of North Americato ascer ta in which inst i tut ions led to commercia l growth andprosperity.22 In later years François de Barbé-Marbois used the same

sur le commerce,” in série Mémoires et Documents, Etats-Unis, 2: 53v, Ministère desAffaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay.

21 “Mémoire,” 1776, in série Mémoires et Documents, Etats-Unis, 4: 8r,Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay; July 24, 1777, ibid., 2: 43v.

22 [Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont], preface to Histoire et commerce des coloniesangloises dans l’Amerique septentrionale: Où l’on trouve l’état actuel de leur population,et des détails curieux sur la constitution de leur gouvernement, principalement sur celui dela Nouvelle-Angleterre, de la Pensilvanie, de la Caroline, et de la Géorgie (London,1755); Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction, and Political

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comparative technique in his inquiry into the thirteen American states,this time to find a niche for French luxury goods in the context ofFranco-American alliance turned mésalliance.

Barbé-Marbois, best known for arranging the sale of Louisiana tothe United States for Napoleon, first arrived in North America in 1779as the secretary to the French Legation in Philadelphia under CésarHenri, Count de La Luzerne. It is a testament to Barbé-Marbois’ politi-cal and bureaucratic acumen that he was later appointed intendant ofSaint Domingue, France’s most important colony. Though Barbé-Marbois’ complete works ultimately amounted to some fifteen volumes,two volumes of which included a narrative of his deportation to theFrench penal colony in Guiana, his most lasting contribution to theworld of letters may have been the impetus he gave to ThomasJefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s work on the Notesbegan as a response to a 1780 questionnaire sent by Barbé-Marbois, inhis capacity as secretary, to learned men and dignitaries in each of thethirteen colonies, asking about the geography, climate, fauna, peoples,manufactures, commerce, and finances.23 Though Barbé-Marbois’ biog-rapher speculates that his questionnaire was intended as spadework for ahistory of the thirteen colonies, his position as secretary to the FrenchLegation when he made this request and the use he eventually made ofthe information suggest that his questionnaire fit into the larger projectof calibrating France’s commercial strategy in the United States.

It evidently did not take much penetration to see that this newcountry, by virtue of its superior natural resources, would eventually

Discourse (Geneva, Switzerland, 1985). The “spirit of the laws” is evoked in the pref-ace to another work, Butel-Dumont, Histoire et commerce des Antilles Angloises . . .(Paris, France, 1757), vii.

23 On Saint Domingue’s importance, see James E. McClellan III, Colonialismand Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore, 1992), introd. and chap.4. Barbé-Marbois served as intendant of Saint Domingue from 1784 to 1789. He wassent to French Guiana in 1797 by radical elements in the Directory and returnedfrom exile in 1799. These biographical details were gleaned from Eugene ParkerChase, introduction to Our Revolutionary Forefathers: The Letters of François, Marquisde Barbé-Marbois during his Residence in the United States as Secretary of the FrenchLegation, 1779–1785 (Freeport, N.Y., 1969), 3–36; [J Fr] Michaud and [Louis Gabriel]Michaud, Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Moderne . . . (Paris, France, 1843), 3:45–53. More novelistically, see Jean Deviosse, L’homme qui vendit la Louisiane (n.p.,1989). What little is known about the relation between Barbé-Marbois and Jeffersoncan be found in Frank Shuffelton, introduction to Notes on the State of Virginia, byThomas Jefferson (London, 1999), vii–xxxiii; Dorothy Medlin, “Thomas Jefferson,André Morellet, and the French Version of Notes on the State of Virginia,” WMQ 35,no. 1 (January 1978): 85–99. Documents and correspondence between Jefferson andBarbé-Marbois (but unfortunately not the initial exchanges between the two men)can be found in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vols. 5–6(Princeton, N.J., 1952).

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dictate the terms of trade and much else to the nations of theContinent; many writers across the Atlantic were able to see America’sunderlying strengths during this period, and consuls in the UnitedStates also expressed an enthusiasm for the Americans and their politi-cal system. As François-Antoine Matignon de Valnais, the French con-sul in Boston, wrote, “Civilization, liberty, the fertility of their soil, thebeauty of their climate seem to call here all the unfortunate peoples ofthe universe.” These views were reminiscent of the enthusiasm thatinformed utopian writings by thinkers such as Condorcet and Brissot.Despite the long-term prospect of American dominance, Barbé-Marboisand others saw expanding opportunities for the trading nations ofEurope in the interim. Because of its geography and social structure,the United States could not be expected to develop a self-sufficientindustrial base for some time. Wide-open spaces, reasoned Valnais,ensured that a class of yeoman farmers would predominate, makingindustrial labor scarce and expensive: “Even the artisan, who has expa-triated himself to come here to exercise his profession, soon abandons itto devote himself entirely to agriculture.” Barbé-Marbois explained thatin the republican United States, whose residents harbored a particularlove of freedom, artisans and laborers were considered little better thandomestic servants, a circumstance that augured well for European man-ufactures.24 Though the habit of freedom in the United States createdopportunities for Europe as a whole vis-à-vis the United States, Barbé-Marbois pointed specifically to France’s place in this new internationaldivision of labor.

What Barbé-Marbois found in the results of these questionnaires isnoteworthy because of the invidious distinctions he drew, intentionallyor not, between France and the United States and between regions in thenew Republic. Like some of the more utopian commentators on theAmerican Revolution in the Republic of Letters, Barbé-Marbois believedthat the United States was the newest theater of human progress in itspursuit of equality and political and commercial freedom; nevertheless,he understood that marked differences between regions and states per-sisted. In particular social and political inequalities became more pro-nounced in the South, and it was in these states, which more closelyresembled France in their mœurs, that merchants could expect to sell

24 François-Antoine Matignon de Valnais, “Mémoire sur le Commerce entre laFrance et les Etats-Unis,” 1782, in série Correspondance Commerciale et Consulaire,Philadelphie, 53: 8v, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Nantes, France (“unfortunatepeoples”); Valnais, “Mémoire sur les Etats de New-Hampshire, Massachusetts-Bayet Rhode-Island,” 1781, in Affaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441, Centre his-torique des Archives nationales (“even the artisan”); François de Barbé-Marbois,“Mémoire” [Les Anglois commercoient avec les treize Etats . . . ], 1782, in AffairesEtrangères Sous-série B III, 441: 7v, ibid.

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French luxury goods. New Englanders guarded their liberty more jeal-ously than residents of the South; indeed, independent of formal consti-tutional arrangements, which varied considerably, citizens enjoyed morede facto equality in the egalitarian North than in the neofeudal South.Such cultural differences obviously had political consequences, but theramifications were also economic: “In the North [there is] more publicprosperity, more individual felicity, a pleasant equality [médiocrité], anda greater population.” This sense of equality stemmed from the ferocityof the Protestant sects that dominated New England. Barbé-Marboisregarded Presbyterians as a group of fanatics, but he appreciated theircompensating virtue of detesting “arbitrary government” even more thantheir British counterparts, a judgment echoed by his colleague Valnais.This detestation, which reinforced a set of “severe mœurs,” contributed,perhaps paradoxically, to a “pleasant equality” in the polity by unitingcitizens around “an attitude that proscribes excess.” New Englandersworked, saved, and invested to exploit their vast natural resources.Barbé-Marbois concluded that France would have little commerce withthese people, except in the unlikely event that corruption and luxuryovertook them.25

In the South the situation was considerably different. In addition tofinding more planters of French origin (many in South Carolina, aHuguenot asylum after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes),Barbé-Marbois discerned there a social structure and local character thatgenerally resembled France and its institutions, leading him to concludethat “luxury and inequality of wealth in these states favors our com-merce.” Since the institution of slavery was symptomatic of larger pat-terns of inequality and backwardness, France was likely to benefit fromits persistence in these states. French traders could compete more easilyin an environment where inequality bred lassitude: “Liberty has ani-mated everybody in the North, where everything belongs to those whowork. In the South, slavery fetters the activity of the half of mankind.”Indeed in the South, as one consul observed, freemen would not bestirthemselves to clear agricultural land but depended instead on slavelabor. Even where goodwill and motivation were not lacking, “excessiveinequality of fortunes” made it impossible for the poor to launch any sort

25 The names of the respondents to this questionnaire are scribbled in the mar-gins of Barbé-Marbois’ document. For Barbé-Marbois’ views on American religiousand political culture, see Barbé-Marbois, “Mémoire” [Les Anglois commercoientavec les treize Etats . . . ], 1782, in Affaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441: 7v, 9r(quotations), Centre historique des Archives nationales. His colleague Valnais’reflections can be found in Valnais, “Mémoire sur le Commerce,” 1782, in sérieCorrespondance Commerciale et Consulaire, Philadelphie, 53: 9v, Ministère desAffaires Etrangères, Nantes.


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of enterprise. Instead surpluses fell into the hands of the rich, whose tastesgravitated toward the goods fashioned for France’s own parasitic classes:handsome furniture, porcelain, and fine cloths of every description.26

A comparison of Barbé-Marbois’ analysis of the American stateswith Butel-Dumont’s earlier treatment in his Histoire et commerce descolonies angloises reveals the underlying pessimism that informed theconsular appraisals of the situation in America. Butel-Dumont’s historyof the English colonies of North America was written in the mid-1750sas part of a general efflorescence of economic writing in France, much ofwhich was inspired by Jean-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay, France’sintendant of commerce. Gournay published nothing of his own, but hecultivated and organized the efforts of an energetic group of economist-administrators who elaborated the theoretical basis for French economicreforms in print while shepherding them through the broad administra-tive domains they controlled. Many of the authors in the Gournay circledrew their inspiration from England’s example and were thereforedeeply critical of some of Old Regime France’s social and political insti-tutions. They emphasized the enlightened reform of the monarchy andof an economy that had made great gains, particularly in foreign trade,in the early part of the century.27 When Butel-Dumont comparedEngland’s various North American colonies with an eye toward the“spirit of their laws,” he meant to draw attention to the superior consti-tutions, manners, and institutions of some American colonies, particu-larly those in New England. These comparisons certainly involved an

26 “Observations sur Les Etats Unis de L’Amerique,” in série Mémoires etDocuments, Etats-Unis, 10: 4v, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay;Barbé-Marbois, “Mémoire” [Les Anglois commercoient avec les treize Etats . . . ],1782, in Affaires Etrangères Sous-série B III, 441: 7v, Centre historique des Archivesnationales. The idea of a North-South distinction that could be commerciallyexploited by France is echoed in many of the consular letters and memoranda. See,for example, “Observations [sur le commerce] entre la France, ou ses Colonies et lesEtats-Unis,” in série Mémoires et Documents, Etats-Unis, 4: 32r–34v, Ministère desAffa i res Etrangères , Quai d ’Orsay ; “Observat ions sur Les Etats -Unis deL’Amerique,” ibid., 10: 4r–6v, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay.

27 Contemporary attestations of this phenomenon abound, but a modern statis-tical survey can be found in Christine Théré, “Economic Publishing and Authors,1566–1789,” in Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin toWalras, ed. Gilbert Faccarello, Routledge Studies in the History of Economics(London, 1998), 1–56. On Butel-Dumont’s role in the Gournay circle, see Charles,“La liberté du commerce des grains,” 129, 39–41. For a more general discussion ofthe Gournay circle, see Simone Meyssonnier, La balance et l’horloge: La genèse de lapensée libérale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, France, 1989), 168–209. See also theessays in Eric Brian, Loïc Charles, and Christine Théré, eds., Commerce, populationet société autour de Vincent de Gournay (1748–1758) (Paris, France, forthcoming). Fordiscussion of France’s gains in foreign trade, see Paul Butel, L’économie française auXVIIIe siècle (Paris, France, 1993), 80–87.

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implicit criticism of the French monarchy, but Butel-Dumont’s inten-tion, and the intention of Gournay, who encouraged such studies, wasto supply models for reform.

Like Butel-Dumont, Barbé-Marbois and his consular colleagues sawin the American South (particularly Georgia and the Carolinas) back-ward, even repellent societies whose neofeudal character condemnedthem to economic stagnation and inequality. But Butel-Dumont tookthe American South as an atavism and a negative example for France,whereas Barbé-Marbois saw in these states France’s commercial future.Barbé-Marbois and his colleagues’ diagnosis proceeded from a new the-ory of international trade contradictory to the earlier belief, dominantsince Hugo Grotius’s time, that divinely ordained cultural and geo-graphic differences necessitated trade between people with differentneeds, habits, and productive capacities.28 Eighteenth-century observerswere increasingly finding that the more nations resembled one another,the more likely they were to trade with each other. On this basis Frenchtrade prospects with the American South were considered the result ofcultural affinity. However unintended, this statement about France’s cul-ture and institutions was deeply pessimistic and syncopated oddly, to saythe least, to the drumbeat of universalist, cosmopolitan views attachedto the Franco-American alliance. Were commerce and enlightenmentreally drawing the nations of the Euro-Atlantic world into a commoncivilization?

One might object that hardheaded diplomatic assessments with lim-ited aims and no eye toward public opinion were bound to conflict withteleological historical narratives written by philosophes eager to fit NewWorld developments into a rational and politically appealing schema.One of the most optimistic philosophical accounts, however, containsthe same tension between the ostensible historical significance of theRevolution and the Franco-American alliance and the realities that tradebetween the two nations had to accommodate. Like Barbé-Marbois andothers, Clavière and Brissot believed that a strengthening of trade rela-tions between France and America would require a concerted Frenchstudy of America’s climate, resources, government, and mœurs.29 Theyalso shared the apprehension that the philosophical alliance and

28 [Hugo Grotius], Mare liberum, de la liberté des mers, trans. Antoine deCourtin (1703; repr., Caen, France, 1990), chap. 1. Originally published in 1609,Grotius’s work was translated and read in eighteenth-century France, but a moresustained source for this line of thought was Samuel Pufendorf’s On the Laws ofNature and of Nations, originally published in 1672, which went through severaleighteenth-century editions (see Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, ou systèmegeneral des principes les plus importans de la morale, de la jurisprudence, et de la poli-tique, trans. Jean Barbeyrac [Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1712], bk. 4, chap. 4).

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consequent benefits to French trade could easily be trumped by the com-monalities of Anglo-American culture and the superior competitivenessof English manufacturers and commercial practices; indeed, English cul-ture and competitiveness were regarded as intimately related phenomena.

Clavière and Brissot’s proposed solution emphasized the differencesbetween “Free America” (their term for the United States, in anticipa-tion of further uprisings) and the societies of Old Europe, which Franceepitomized. Barbé-Marbois and his colleagues predicted that among thewidely varied regions of the United States, France would fortify its trad-ing relations with the backward southern states it resembled most.Clavière and Brissot, by contrast, believed that France would increase itstrade with the United States by dint of the broadest differences betweenthese two nations. In either instance France’s perceived point of com-mercial leverage with the United States was hardly flattering to the for-mer. Adopting an explicitly Rousseauian language of luxury, refinement,and decline, Clavière and Brissot argued that, because Americans weretransplanted Europeans, they must have brought with them some tastefor luxury goods. Nothing could wholly eliminate these tastes, particu-larly among Americans living in large cities. Americans, however, couldhope to safely preserve themselves at the ideal midpoint between sav-agery and overrefinement of the sort described by Rousseau in hisDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality by consuming French manufactures:“At the least in slowing the growth of manufactures within their borders,the United States will slow the decadence of mœurs and public spirit.”30

29 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism andReligion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999).For a polemical survey of the historiographical culture of the Enlightenment, seeChantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie: Étude sur la connaissance his-torique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris, France, 1993). Clavière and Brissot’s understandingof the significance of the Revolution, which France had so powerfully aided, sharedthe philosophical scope of Condorcet and Raynal: “The first and the greatest advan-tage of this revolution, at least in the eyes of the philosophe, is its salutary influenceupon human understanding, and on the reform of social prejudices. For this war hasgiven rise to the discussion of several issues of importance to public happiness, thediscussion of the social contract, of civil liberty . . . Enlightened by this revolution,the governments of Europe will be forced to gradually reform their ambitions andreduce their burdens” (Clavière and Brissot, De la France, xxx–xxxi). On philosophi-cal or progressive history in the Enlightenment, ibid., v.

30 Clavière and Brissot, De la France, 50–52. On Brissot’s Rousseauism, seeMazzanti Pepe, Il nuovo mondo di Brissot, 26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours surl’origine, et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, ed. Jean Starobinski, inBernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, eds., OEeuvres complètes (Paris, France,1964), 3: 171. In connection with humans’ passage from the state of nature, Rousseaudescribes a “just milieu between the indolence of our primitive state and the restlessactivity of our self-love,” which “must have been the happiest epoch” (Clavière andBrissot, De la France, 61 [quotation]).

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Manufacturing was better left to France, since its aristocratic culturepossessed a special genius for the production of refined novelties and ithad already been deformed by the effects of large-scale manufactures.

Moreover, as these authors suggested, the social structures appropri-ate to the production, not just the consumption, of luxury goods rein-forced inequality. Clavière and Brissot therefore concluded that wineproduction, to name just one example, should be left to the French,since vineyards necessitated large capital outlays that required and rein-forced social inequality. On the other end of the social spectrum, luxurymanufacture condemned the lower orders to “vegetate miserably in thecities or in the surrounding areas, turning perpetually in the same circleof mechanical and routine labor.” These were activities fit for Europeansbut not for American citizens and yeoman farmers “far from this degra-dation.”31 France would benefit from trade with America by remaining arepository of political and social evils that the American Revolutionshould have eliminated on the other side of the Atlantic, by taking up asort of Frenchman’s burden on behalf of the Americas.

Subsequent to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the most nega-tive presentiments of François de Barbé-Marbois and other observers inmatters of Franco-American trade were realized. French exports toAmerica averaged 11,480,000 livres per year from 1781 to 1783 anddeclined to a yearly average of 3,217,000 livres from 1786 to 1789. Britishexports, by contrast, rebounded from a nadir of 816,000 livres in 1778 to20,848,000 livres in 1781; during the war, therefore, the Americans fellback into the arms of their enemies, doing almost twice as much busi-ness with the British as with their allies. After the war these ties onlystrengthened. Anglo-American trade increased well beyond preconflictlevels, foreshadowing larger crises in Franco-American relations thatloomed just beyond the horizon: the American debt to France, the JayTreaty, and the XYZ affair, just to name a few. In fact French disap-pointment over trade with the United States could be regarded not justas a harbinger of later misunderstandings between France and Americabut as a cause of those misunderstandings, given the recurring charges of

31 Many Americans also believed in the moral superiority of independent farm-ing and in the corrupting influence of manufactures. See Drew R. McCoy, TheElusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980),chap. 4, esp. 109–10, on connections to Clavière and Brissot. Clavière and Brissot,De la France, 117–18. Clavière and Brissot were not the first to observe the alienationthat attended the expansion of factory labor. See the prescient comments of AdamFerguson and Adam Smith: Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767,ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1966), esp. pts. 4, 6; Smith, An Inquiryinto the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; repr.,Chicago, 1976), 2: 282–309.


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ingratitude subsequently leveled against the Americans. As PhilippeRoger has pointed out, however, the discourse of Franco-Americanantipathy is many-sided and the notion of origins is hazardous whenspeaking of phenomena re la t ing to a nat ion’s deep pol i t ica lunconscious.32 More significant in this episode are some of the para-doxes that attached, in the French case, to one of the master concepts ofthe Enlightenment: commerce. Though commerce was believed to playa central role in the spread of the Enlightenment and its values, Franceitself seemed excluded, because of its mœurs and social structure, fromgreat ly expanded commerce with the newest f lower of theEnlightenment, the United States. This situation was ironic, sinceFrance was widely considered the central province in the Republic ofLetters.33 When France was considered to have a role to play in thistrade, it was for reasons that utopian thinkers such as Condorcet wouldhave regarded as unworthy of an enlightened nation. What explains thisshift from cosmopolitan optimism to pessimistic, or at least urbane, res-ignation to France’s national shortcomings? Many eighteenth-centurytheories of doux commerce that predicted the development of a commu-nity of free, civilized peoples under the influence of commerce also ana-lyzed Euro-American political economy within the framework of

32 For the figures on Franco-American and Anglo-American trade as well as fig-ures on Great Britain, see Godechot, French Historical Studies 1. For the figures onFrance, see Le Cn [M.] Arnould, De la balance du commerce et des relations commer-ciales extérieures de la France, dans toutes les parties du globe, particulièrement à la findu règne de Louis XIV, et au moment de la Révolution, 2d ed. (Paris, France, [1795]), 3:table 4. Jacques Godechot cites Arnould as a source for his figures on France, butthere are some inconsistencies in Godechot’s usage. On the reliability of Arnould’sstatistics for this epoch, see Daudin, Commerce et prospérité. Peter Hill uses consularcorrespondence and memoirs to expertly chronicle the travails between the countriesin the period subsequent to that addressed in this article (Hill, French Perceptions).Allan Potofsky takes up the most immediate sequel to this article in “The PoliticalEconomy of the French-American Debt Debate: The Ideological Uses of AtlanticCommerce, 1787 to 1800,” WMQ 63, no. 3 (July 2006): 489–516. Except for the dis-aster of the 1794 Jay Treaty, which is not examined in much detail, Philippe Roger’swork offers the broadest account, reaching into the twentieth century (Roger,L’ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français [Paris, France, 2002],esp. introd. for cautions on Franco-American antipathy).

33 Even authors such as Rousseau, who were wary of commercial prosperity andopposed the dominant values of the Enlightenment, accepted this relationshipbetween material and intellectual progress. Indeed Rousseau’s First and SecondDiscourses were largely devoted to spelling out the historical and conceptual tiesbetween material and intellectual advances. Both, he thought, had their origin inamour propre (self-love), which was inimical to civic virtue but not to Enlightenmentas such. For the nationalism of the Enlightenment enterprise par excellence, seeRobert Morrissey, “The Encyclopédie: Monument for a Nation,” in Using theEncyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, ed. Daniel Brewer and Julie CandlerHayes, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Eng., 2002), 143–61.

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constitutional differences that would nonetheless persist betweennations. The conceptual tension between doux commerce and persistentconstitutional differences was no sign of intellectual weakness or contra-diction; rather, it demonstrates how well suited eighteenth-centuryFrench political economy was to an age characterized by commercialexpansion and halting political reform. The experiences of French con-suls in America led them to emphasize the differences, and hence poten-tial difficulties, between France and America, even when they clearlybelieved in the promises of doux commerce.

In 1774 Louis XVI was crowned king of France. In the same year, heappointed Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, commercial cosmopolitan,friend to the Physiocrats, and the very model of the enlightened admin-istrator, to the key post of controller general of finances. This appoint-ment, in combination with Louis XVI’s conciliatory gesture of callingback the French parlements from the exile imposed on them by hisgrandfather Louis XV in 1771, signaled the depth and seriousness of theking’s reforming intentions. In conformity with the nature of his officeand with his preoccupations as an economist, Turgot sought to revivecommerce through radical changes to the institutions that underlayFrance’s stagnating political economy. These changes included the liber-ation of the grain trade, the elimination of the corvée (forced labor forroad building and other public works), and the abolition of France’srestrictive labor guilds in a single stroke. Louis XVI and Turgot’s reform-ing spirit, together with the onset of the American Revolution, createdthe frisson of hope and excitement in France that helped to cement thekinship among Enlightenment, reform, and revolution in both coun-tries. By May 1776 Turgot had been dismissed in disgrace: grain riots,labor market anarchy, and staunch resistance by France’s elites (the sameparlements recalled by Louis XVI) all took their toll, and the curtainwent down on enlightened reform of France’s economy and on muchelse. As the preeminent historian of this episode has commented, thefailure of Turgot’s program was not the result of chance or political mis-calculation; it demonstrated the difficulty of thoroughgoing reform in acontext where the intimate rapports between political and economic lifereinforced Old Regime institutions.34 Given these events and the hopes

34 Alexis de Tocqueville underlines the earnestness of Louis XVI’s reforming inten-tions and the radicalism of Turgot’s proposals, known collectively as the Six Edicts. SeeTocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, in François Furet and Françoise Mélonio,eds., OEuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ([Paris, France], 2004), 3: 196–215 (bk. 3, chaps.4–6). Steven Laurence Kaplan supplies a critical account of Turgot’s guild edict but alsoconveys a vivid sense of the chaos it unleashed (Kaplan, “Social Classification andRepresentation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth-Century France: Turgot’s


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attached to them, could the contrast have been any starker between twonations bound by the hazards of war and a Treaty of Amity andCommerce?

‘Carnival,’” in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice,ed. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp [Ithaca, N.Y., 1985], 176–228). On the decline ofreform after Turgot’s Six Edicts, see Venturi, End of the Old Regime, 325; FrançoisFuret, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, Eng., 1992),26; Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, 1: 450–53. On the grain riots or FlourWar of 1775, see Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Communityin Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park, Pa., 1993), chap. 3. For a judg-ment on the incompatibility of France’s social structure with Turgot’s reform pro-gram and the inevitability of his failure, see Edgar Faure, La disgrâce de Turgot: 12mai 1776, Trente journées qui ont fait la France ([Paris, France], 1961), 1–4, 523–25.

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