Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution * Sans-culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution

Abstract

Together, Michael Sonenscher’s two books constitute a monumentally erudite history of social, moral, political, and theological thought in the French eighteenth century. As signalled by their similarly designed, yet differently coloured covers (blue for Before the Deluge, red for Sans-culottes), they can be read as complements of each other. Both set their theme by placing a phrase or word in historical context. In Before the Deluge, the phrase is Madame de Pompadour’s infamously insouciant remark, ‘Après moi, le Déluge’; and in Sans-culottes, the word that forms the main title refers less to the familiar revolutionaries, than to the unexpected salon-dwelling ancestors that Sonenscher reveals them to have had in the eighteenth century. A major political thinker also hovers over each book. In Sans-culottes, it is Rousseau, and in Before the Deluge, Montesquieu—although Sieyès too is central, appearing in both works as a thinker whose merits have been under-recognised. Each book examines the thought of its major thinker’s predecessors, of his successors, of those who converged with him, of his admirers and critics, or of those who simply discussed similar subject matter. Adopting a long-standing Cambridge approach, Sonenscher shifts attention and imparts significance to minor authors. He discusses hundreds of writers, from the great philosophers of antiquity to the anonymous pamphleteers of the revolutionary decade. The result is a thick description of eighteenth-century intellectual history that creates a new context for the forms of political thought—and especially of republicanism—that rose to the fore during the French Revolution. Read in this way, Before the Deluge emerges as the background of Sieyès’ theory of representative government; while Sans-culottes becomes a prehistory of Jacobin thought. Cogently, the first book examines principally thinkers who reflected on how to reorganise political society fiscally and institutionally—a project consonant with the Montesquieuian tradition—while Sans-culottes concentrates on authors who projected to refashion human faculties and needs—a major preoccupation of Rousseau. Debt and commerce, though, continue to preoccupy Sonenscher in this last volume: indeed in both books he insists – and this is crucial to his contribution—that eighteenth-century political thought, whether monarchical or republican, cannot be understood apart from the economic considerations that animated it. Hence the symbolic primacy he lends to Pompadour’s prophecy.