Luxury and Revolution: Selling High-Status Garments in Revolutionary France

Abstract

This chapter is part of a larger study of the evolution of semi-luxury and luxury markets during the French Revolution: my purpose is to investigate how they evolved from the eve of the French Revolution to the Empire and the Restoration period, from a royal court to an imperial court. According to French historiography, this period is a transitional one, between the pre-modern and modern eras.1 There is a lot more to investigate from an economic viewpoint, even if major works and a number of current projects already exist.2 For the moment, they mainly deal with agrarian questions, the crucial problem of subsistence, economy and trade in wartime, or the future of urban and peasant people. Luxury has been studied through intellectual history and moral economy, rather than through economic history or the material history of civilisation. How policy, political economy, revolution and luxury are connected has been analysed using literary sources, including speeches, reports (memoirs) and correspondence. A privileged debate dealt with how luxury evolved throughout the eighteenth century.3 Fashion has been approached first as discursive practice; conceptualising, as Kate Haulman wrote, material culture as a site of power struggles and contested meanings; fashion is used as a set of symbols.4 Therefore, luxury and semi-luxury markets during the Revolution, in their most practical meaning, have yet to be explored: where were markets located? which goods were traded? and who were the various actors — including traders, manufacturers or other entrepreneurs, and consumers?5