Noblesse commerçante contre noblesse militaire: une querelle des Lumières (1756–1759). Édition de Cheminade Christian

Abstract

This is a welcome critical edition of the Abbé Coyer’s La Noblesse commerçante, the Chevalier d’Arcq’s La Noblesse militaire (both published in 1756), and Coyer’s last word, the Développement et défense du système de la noblesse commerçante (1757). Although the debate between Coyer and Arcq unleashed much commentary, historians have dismissed it as amusing but inconsequential. Most contemporary commentators sided with the traditionalist argument of Arcq, while Coyer’s reputation as a literary provocateur facilitated readings of the debate as a strange anomaly. Christian Cheminade’s contextualizing Introduction demonstrates the broad importance of the debate. He begins by showing the legal vicissitudes of the concept of dérogeance — the loss of noble status through commercial activity — since the thirteenth century. He shows that nobles, in both the medieval and modern periods, regularly sold the goods produced on their estates, and they sought to retain their tax exemptions despite profiting from trade. Only in the sixteenth century did the crown begin to discourage noble participation in commerce by threatening to remove those tax exemptions. It did so not because of bias against merchants or attachment to noble values. Kings instead protected merchants from unfair competition from tax-exempt nobles. Although Coyer later blamed ‘ces temps barbares du gouvernement féodal’ for having nurtured the nobility’s disdain for merchants (p. 11), the nobility’s insistence on cultural separation from the merchant class was in fact a late-seventeenth-century invention. It reflected the reactionary politics of influential figures such as Henri de Boulainvilliers and François de La Mothe-Fénelon, who sought to reassert noble pre-eminence after a time of alarming social mobility under Louis XIV. Meanwhile, because of imperial competition with the British, by the time Coyer had begun to write in 1755 the crown had reversed its policy of discouraging commercial activity among certain classes. Led by the Intendant de Commerce, Jacques Vincent de Gournay, many agents of the crown pushed for the liberalization of the French economy and urged the widest possible engagement in trade. Cheminade shows that Coyer belonged to Gournay’s circle and worked to advance his agenda. There are reasons to assume that Coyer’s strategy of attacking dérogeance served to disguise the real target of the Gournay group: the privileged corps et communautés that granted the right of commercial exchange in French cities only to their members. Coyer’s aggressive valorization of commercial activity, claiming as he did that commerce was honourable and that merchants were as patriotic as any noble, provided a robust rationale for a state policy encouraging all to engage in commerce. Cheminade reasonably connects Coyer’s trial balloon of commercial nobility with the efforts of reformers in the 1760s to create laissez-passer economic policies. Those efforts failed, in part because of the continued allure of the tripartite social order for which Montesquieu had provided an elegant theory, one that Arcq effectively redeployed. The Coyer–Arcq debate, embedded in Montesquieu’s typologies and reflecting the most advanced economic thinking of the age, was more than a blip on the cultural radar. Its relevance to the economic and fiscal troubles that finally prompted revolution reminds us that failed ideas, too, can reveal much about the promise and limitations that frame moments of cultural ferment.