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CREDIT, Fashion, SEX
ECONOMIES OF REGARD IN OLD REGIME FRANCE
By CLARE HARU CROWSTON Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5513-7
CHAPTER 1
CREDIT AND OLD REGIME ECONOMIES OF REGARD
Women in the capital enjoy not only the greatest possible freedom, but also the most incredible credit. By secret and specific manoeuvers, they are the invisible spirit of all affairs, they succeed almost without leaving home; they determine the public voice in circumstances when it seemed initially undecided.
—Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris
In the playwright Marivaux's La Double inconstance (1724), Arlequin boasts: "I am in credit, for people do what I want" ("Je suis en crédit, car on fait ce que je veux"). This bold claim nicely summarizes the nonmaterial sense of the term credit that is the focus of this chapter. In Old Regime France fictional characters and real people frequently employed the word credit to signify a crucial form of nonmaterial capital that could take on political, social, and cultural guises. As we will see, texts of this period portray credit as an intangible, often hidden, and yet highly efficacious form of power that operated within and across numerous registers of life: from patronage networks at court and elsewhere to courtship and marriage transactions, intellectual life, missionary work, and trade and economic activity.
To date, historians' attention to nonmaterial usages of the term have focused on patronage politics at the royal court and in particular at Louis XIV's Versailles. This sense of credit referred to the influence and power a courtier accrued from his or her social and political connections as well as from a range of assets like birth, fortune, and individual charisma. While the court was certainly a central forum for the exchange of credit in its political and social manifestations—and thus constitutes a starting point for the chapter—the focus on courtly credit has obscured the importance of the concept as a key explanatory mechanism for the operation of power throughout Old Regime society and culture. As this chapter will show, belief in credit as a hidden but omnipresent lever of power shaped the perceptions of men and women throughout French society, whether at court, in salons, workshops, abbeys and churches, the tavern, the street, or the boudoir.
Scholars have hitherto neglected this central "category of analysis" of Old Regime France in part because there is so little formal writing on nonmaterial forms of credit. This was not because credit was unimportant. Rather, credit was the common sense and realpolitik of the era, the open secret of the operation of power, and the constant low-level current thrumming through their lives. It did not call for philosophical speculation or explanation because "everyone knew" that flows of credit directed events. French writers referred to it constantly but in shorthand and throwaway phrases, precisely because its dynamic was so familiar and so universally accepted and understood. This shorthand—ubiquitous once the eye becomes attuned to it—has also escaped notice because of the distance between the Old Regime understanding of credit and our own. We have (for the most part) lost the notion that credit can be used to procure anything but commodities in the market; they believed it was a much more pervasive force, one that was at work in all aspects of their lives.
Credit could not only be found in many different realms of life, it also provided a common currency for transferring capital from one domain to another. As we will see, credit had putative equivalencies in favor, money, personal connections, and intellectual influence. The exchange rates of this credit system were constantly subject to negotiation that could be friendly or fiercely competitive. A focus on credit thus highlights the inextricability of the economic from the social, cultural, or political in this period. For the writers I analyze below, these domains constantly overlapped and individual and collective strategies for advancement necessarily operated simultaneously across registers. They found credit so useful and pervasive as a form of currency precisely because they could make use of it in so many different transactions.
This chapter guides the reader through distinct milieus in which contemporary sources—ranging from memoirs to letters, plays, sermons, almanacs, and novels—showcase the use of credit as a form of influence and power. Through a series of case studies—of the royal court, of law courts, of the intellectual world, of missionary work, and of marriage and courtship—we examine how contemporaries understood credit in its nonmaterial guises, how they described themselves and others making use of it, and how they imagined credit across political, social, and economic life. To add more concrete depth to this broad overview, we turn to a focus on the multiple and overlapping meanings of credit in the writings of two well-known late seventeenth-century writers, Bussy-Rabutin and Madame de Sévigné. This affords a closer understanding of the way two individuals—elite and educated—experienced interwoven strands of credit running through their own lives. They also underline a central theme of this chapter: women's capacity to wield credit in its multiple forms. Finally, we turn our attention from the elites to the common people. While credit might appear to be the monopoly of the well connected and wealthy, a number of sources suggest that similar dynamics were at work among commoners and that ordinary people were equally familiar with the nonmaterial meanings of credit.
It should be noted at the outset that my analysis does not consider any of the documents it addresses, even those purporting to be true reports of daily events (such as letters or memoirs), as transparent depictions of an empirically existing entity called "credit." Instead, I am interested in how contemporaries conceived of a range of forms of influence and power they subsumed under the category of "credit" and their descriptions of behaviors and attitudes they explained as being motivated by struggles to obtain and manage it. I am also not able, in covering such a broad terrain, to accord full attention to the complexity of each text or its place in the author's overall oeuvre or the genre and period to which it belongs. It is thus not the empirical truth of credit that I seek to reconstruct, or its contextualization within a close reading of a text or set of texts, but the beliefs and behaviors that the authors, mostly elite, of these texts found to be credibly associated with this concept, whether in texts written in the guise of factual accounts, those openly declaring themselves as fictions, or those (perhaps the most common category) that straddled the line between what we now recognize as fiction and nonfiction.
Credit and Court Patronage
The secondary literature on noneconomic forms of credit focuses primarily on the court and noble patronage. Scholars such as Arlette Jouanna, Sharon Kettering, Jay Smith, and Jonathan Dewald have all noted aristocrats' use of the term "credit" to describe the exchange of influence and power within the patronage system. These historians tend to agree that the reign of Louis XIV marked a turning point within this system. Arlette Jouanna, for example, argues that as Louis XIV claimed ever-greater control of the distribution of resources he also seized the reins of social credit, displacing the local connections that had formed the basis of noble credibility. For their part, Jonathan Dewald and Jay Smith emphasize the growing monetization of French society from Louis XIV onward. Jonathan Dewald claims that Louis's intensified fiscality—the engine of both state making and dynastic war—contributed significantly to the rise of a money economy and a concomitant expansion of economic credit. These changes did not, however, lead to a sharp break with traditional values. Instead, the monarchy harnessed money as another tool of control: "Money was as likely to be an element of political power and social deference as of economic exchange.... It functioned less as a challenge to established patterns of power and subordination than as a newly effective implement for their exercise." It is these circumstances, Dewald suggests, that made credit "a central metaphor of seventeenth-century public life."
Smith makes a similar case, arguing that the term credit usefully highlights the intertwining of "interest" and "values" in seventeenth-century noble worldviews and thus provides a solution for historiographical debates on the sincerity of the flowery language of patronage. For Smith, nobles' frequent use of the word underlines the mixture of economic and moral calculation in their everyday lives: "Debts were moral as much as they were monetary; obligations found expression through proofs of selflessness; rewards took the form of coin but also of honors, status, and other markers of respect; credit stood for all of the moral and financial resources one's reputation could command." Based on changing dictionary definitions of the word, Smith argues that over the course of the eighteenth century the financial sense of the term "credit" gradually eclipsed its nonmaterial ones, serving as testimony—he argues—of the growing autonomy of the economic sphere.
A numerical count of the frequency of the word crédit (per ten thousand words of text) by fifty-year periods on the database of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) confirms these historians' sense that the importance of credit as a conceptual category peaked in the Old Regime. The top five chronological periods for usage in order were: 1700–1749 (0.81), 1550–1599 (0.75) (mostly in the works of Montaigne and Jean Bodin), 1600–1649 (0.56), 1750–1799 (0.56), and 1650–1699 (0.44). The top ten users of the word (per ten thousand words of text), two of whom were women, were also situated in the Old Regime. They were, in order: Jean-Claude Fernier, Pierre Berthelot (d. 1615), Jean Rotrou (1609–1650), Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, the marquis d'Argenson (1694–1757), the Abbé de Vertot (1655–1735), Madame de Villedieu (d. 1683), Guy Patin (1601–1672), and Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653). The contexts in which these and other authors used the word crédit varied a great deal, as we see below, but references to the financial sense of the term constituted a minority of cases.
These results (which draw on a sample of about three thousand canonical French publications) suggest that the period from 1550 to 1800 represented a high point in the cultural saliency of credit, particularly with regard to nonmaterial uses of the word. It was thus not the reign of Louis XIV itself that gave rise to the category of credit as a form of power and influence. This periodization suggests instead that the political instability of the Wars of Religion, followed by the slow rise in royal power (with the significant, disruptive interlude of the Fronde), raised new questions about how authority was generated and power was exercised, while at the same time the expansion of financial credit in public and private life provided new ways of framing and expressing bonds of obligation and reciprocity. It would not do, however, to place too much emphasis on the chronological origins of the nonmaterial usage of the term as the relatively few sources in the ARTFL database prior to 1600 exclude the possibility of definite conclusions about origins. The fact that the single thirteenth-century source in the database, by the trouvère Rutebeuf, contains ten references to credit in its nonmaterial form suggests that this was a trope of long-standing in French culture. This chapter accordingly focuses on a synchronic, rather than a diachronic, reading of credit, leaving chapter 2 to address the issue of change from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries.
The subjects treated by the top ten authors reveal that the court was but one arena for the exchange of credit. The court of Louis XIV at Versailles nonetheless provides an apt starting place for this chapter not only because of the existing historiography on courtly credit but also because the author in the ARTFL database who used the word the most was Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon and other commentators on court culture provide a number of insights into how observers and participants understood the circulation of credit. In their writings the court is a forum for ostentatious, competitive display, a small and centralized milieu in which displaying and witnessing functioned as modes for assessing value and transmitting judgments. The sources also show that individuals at court—including women—lavishly praised their superiors' credit and candidly discussed their own and others' credit standing. Credit may have been informal, but it was not illicit or secret. The myriad forms of royal payout described by Dewald generated tremendous financial credit; they also fostered the accumulation of cultural credit (in the form of a lavish lifestyle, fashionable clothing, courtly poise, and so on) and social credit (in the form of dowries for good marriages, hosting important personages, and so forth) that could be transformed, through careful maneuvering, into political credit. Because credit traversed these domains, a very broad—if highly unequal—array of materials was available to individuals, families, and coteries seeking to increase their credit. These consisted of, most importantly, social rank, offices, kin networks, social connections, property, and wealth in addition to honorary positions, individual talent, experience and skill, ostentatious consumption, and possession of valued information. Some of these possessions could be transmitted over generations, but many were contingent on external circumstances and individual aptitudes.
A young courtier would have found an invaluable, if embittered, guide in the duc de Saint-Simon. His aristocratic pride and his opposition to Louis's political innovations led him to keep close track of the fluctuations in the privilege and power of others, and his cynicism attributed many types of exchange to trafficking in credit. For example, he explained that the Secretary of State for War François-Michel Le Tellier's advocacy of the Dutch War in 1673 was an attempt to undo Jean-Baptiste Colbert's influence by a decisive victory over Protestants inside and outside of France. As he states, "Le Tellier and his son Louvois, who had the Department of War, trembled at the success and credit of Colbert and had no difficulty putting a new war into the king's head." According to Saint-Simon, the ministers and their entourages explicitly used the word credit to describe their power. He recounts, for example, that an intimate friend once asked Le Tellier to solicit a favor from the king on a matter that would be decided in his private meetings with the monarch. In response, Le Tellier told him simply that he would try his best. The friend took offense at this modest reply and told him "frankly that, with the place and credit [Le Tellier] had," he expected more from him.
For Saint-Simon, the only rival to the ministers' credit was Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and, from 1683, secret wife. According to Saint-Simon, "for three quarters of the favors and the choices, and a further three quarters of the fourth quarter of what passed through the ministers' work in her quarters, it was she who disposed of them.... It was almost the same for accentuating or diminishing offences, making good on letters and services, or letting them go, and thus preparing a fall or a fortune." Both mistress and ministers owed their influence to their personal ties to the king; their common interest in controlling Louis led them, according to the duke, to form a secret conspiracy to direct his decisions. Before their working meetings with the king, he tells us, Madame de Maintenon would summon ministers to a private meeting in which she indicated her choices for the benefices to be discussed with Louis. They would then enact an elaborate charade to maintain the illusion that the king was making his own choices. Saint-Simon resentfully concluded that "among them [was] a circle of reciprocal needs and services, which the king never suspected at all."
Failure to please the royal consort, Saint-Simon claimed, could result in disaster, even for the highly placed. Her power over the lives of more humble individuals was even greater: "If the ministers, and the most accredited, were in this situation with Madame de Maintenon, one can judge what she was capable of with regard to all other sorts of people who were much less able to defend themselves. Many people thus had their necks broken without being able to imagine the cause and gave themselves a great deal of trouble to discover and remedy it, and without effect." Thus, even while participating in mutually beneficial exchanges of credit with favored ministers, she also used her superior credit to crush those beneath her. The only branch of government that escaped her control, according to Saint-Simon, was foreign affairs, which were discussed in Council of State meetings that she did not attend.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CREDIT, Fashion, SEX by CLARE HARU CROWSTON. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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