Foreign policy and political culture in later eighteenth-century France

Abstract

Amidst the panoply of political-cultural studies of eighteenth-century France published in the past two decades, foreign policy has been relatively neglected. Given the importance of the states-system in furnishing a comparative, competitive context for critical public discussion at the time, this is perhaps surprising, until one recalls how unfashionable foreign policy has been among historians during the past generation. It was never thus among the later eighteenth-century ‘public’. Readers within this self-consciously important community tended to be urban, literate and comfortably off, perhaps employed in one of the professions, in trade, or as royal officials. They were often members of literary salons or reading clubs, whose purchase of legal titles (and promotion of illegal ones) helped to create a ‘buzz’ – that is to say, a ‘public opinion’ – and a potential readership of thousands for all sorts of titles, including those on political economy and diplomacy. The extant correspondence between the premier commis at the foreign ministry, Rayneval, and the head of the bureau de la librairie , Neville, confirms the interest of contemporary writers and publishers, as well as readers, in questions of foreign policy. Though increasingly flexible in what they would sanction – for reasons of commerce as much as common sense – the authorities naturally strived to suppress anything which might be construed as prejudicial comment on the interests or conduct of France and her allies.