Provincializing Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, 1680-1830 0300237162, 9780300237160

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: Small Changes: Credit, Debt, and Money in the Languedoc
CHATPER TWO: Local Ideas and Global Networks
CHATPER THREE: The Natural Province of Reason: Agronomy, Botany, and Subaltern Science
CHAPTER FOUR: The Swing Plow as an Eighteenth-Century Universal Machine
CHAPTER FIVE: Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution
Conclusion
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
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Citation preview

P ROV I N C I A L I Z I N G G L O BA L H I ST O RY

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P ROV INCIAL I ZI NG G L OBAL HISTORY MONEY, IDEAS, AND THINGS IN THE LANGUEDOC, 1680–1830

James Livesey

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Copyright © 2020 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Baskerville type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941073 ISBN 978-0-300-23716-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Joanna

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CON TEN TS

Acknowledgments, ix Introduction, 1 chapter one Small Changes: Credit, Debt, and Money in the Languedoc, 17 c ha pt er t wo Local Ideas and Global Networks, 52 chapter thr ee The Natural Province of Reason: Agronomy, Botany, and Subaltern Science, 85

CONTENTS

c ha pt er f our The Swing Plow as an Eighteenth-Century Universal Machine, 116 chapter f ive Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution, 146

Conclusion, 163 Notes, 169 Index, 209

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ACK NOW LEDG MEN TS

My daughters, Bea and Frankie, have no memory of a time before I began to work on this book, so I am relieved it is leaving home before they do. Joanna opened roads and doors and helped me see everywhere and everything in new ways. They have all three been enormously supportive and patient as we skipped across countries and continents. I hope it has been mostly fun; nothing would be possible for me without them. An enormous number of people have helped me to develop my thinking on a difficult subject. They are all acknowledged in the best way that I know, throughout the text in argument and footnote. There are always a few people who leave a mark on a work that goes beyond the argument, sit outside the text, and form part of the interior world from which the work emerges. I would like to thank Lois Beckett, Nandini Bhattacharaya, Hannah Callaway, Vinita Damodaran, Abby Fradkin, Felicia Gottmann, Patrice Higonnet, Finbarr Livesey, Kevin O’Rourke, Steve Pincus, Nathaniel Rosenblum, Noah Rosenblum, Mindy Roseman, Pierre Serna, and Mark Somos for their generosity of spirit and intellect. And yes, I know I am wrong about everything. I would also like to thank

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

colleagues who contributed enormously to my thinking at seminars and colloquia at Ohio State, Heidelberg, Queen Mary, Helsinki, Warwick, St. Andrews, Yale, University College London, Cambridge, Oxford, and Ulster universities and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Some material in the book has appeared in “Les réseaux de crédit en Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle et les origines sociales de la Révolution,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 359 (January–March 2010); “Botany and Provincial Enlightenment in Montpellier: Antoine Banal père et fils, 1750–1800,” History of Science 43 (2005); and “Material Culture, Economic Institutions and Peasant Revolution in Languedoc, 1770– 1830,” Past and Present, no. 182 (June 2004). Funding makes it fly, and I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and Trinity College Dublin, who financed the extensive periods of archival research for this book. The Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Department of History at Harvard University also offered vital time for research and writing. Finally, I would like to mention the people of Mèze, in particular my co-équipiers at Rugby Club de Mèze. It was one of the joys of my life to sail into the harbor at Mèze carrying home in triumph our bouclier as Champions du Languedoc to be met on the quay by the town and the buòu. Our family spent two wonderful years on the Étang de Thau, and we were honored to be presented with the medaille de l’amitié by the conseil général of the département of the Hérault. Too little of that experience is portrayed in this book, but I hope my book is suffused with the spirit of the place.

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INTRODUCTION

Global transformation, beginning in the late eighteenth century, was breathtaking in its scope.1 Growth rates in countries around the Atlantic began to rise and compound themselves annually as prices of a set of basic commodities became integrated across and between continents.2 This was the first moment of true economic globalization. Growth in trade networks was paralleled by the extension of public credit networks that stretched out to old empires and newly independent ex-colonies alike, imposing new disciplines and transforming politics.3 As new technologies, including canals and eventually steamships, lowered transport costs, they made possible exchanges on a new scale and intensity. One unforeseen effect of change was that chattel slavery intensified as the profits of the cotton trade increased.4 There is even evidence that the diffusion of a profusion of manufactured objects and new experiences altered psychological character and the relationship of the species to the rest of nature.5 Commercial society promised, or threatened, to alter everything, even the foundations of human personality. The effects of intensified international trade and industrious revolution, the phenomenon of rising productivity in traditional economies, were not confined to Europe, or even the Atlantic basin. The Bay of Bengal and 1

INTRODUCTION

the Yangtze Delta experienced the same concentration of urbanization, net gains in productivity, and cultural creativity as the Netherlands or urban England in the eighteenth century.6 The power and global reach of this transformation is so clear that it can lead us to overlook two nagging questions. Why did sustained transformation occur then, rather than at any other period? Why were the institutions and concepts that governed this new world rooted in European experience? Episodes of growth were relatively common in the early modern world, an observation that has provoked Jack Goldstone to ask that if “traditional” societies around the globe regularly experienced these growth spurts, then why did the modern world emerge belatedly and relatively locally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?7 Growth bubbles were historically highly vulnerable to rent seeking and high-level equilibrium traps that limited their effect.8 The really radical problem therefore is not to understand the origins of growth, though this is of course a fascinating problem in itself, but rather to understand why this particular moment was sustained to eventually become globally institutionalized.9 The answer Goldstone gives to his own question is that the steam engine allowed the eighteenth-century British economy to escape the limits to growth that had bedeviled other intense episodes, such as the Antonine peak of the Roman Empire or the glory days of fourteenth-century China.10 His hypothesis is not a rehearsal of technological determinism. His point is that the steam engine was a product of a rich scientific and technological culture that was oriented toward innovation and experiment. This idea has been most fully explored in the British case by Margaret Jacob, who argues the relevant culture was Newtonian, and Joel Mokyr, who offers a compelling account of the centrality of the Enlightenment to the British Industrial Revolution.11 Knowledge culture, in this account, is the vital factor that differentiates the late eighteenthcentury transition from all previous episodes of growth. The idea of a knowledge culture as the key to understanding sustained innovation is compelling, but the specific model of a knowledge culture used by scholars in this tradition does not adequately explain the transition, or the specific role played by Europe. Their work and more finegrained studies of local “knowledge economies” such as Peter Jones’s study of the West Midlands do a fine job of describing regions and countries in 2

INTRODUCTION

the process of escaping the limits to growth.12 Guido Tabellini similarly offers convincing evidence that the long-term economic health of European regions reflects historic levels of literacy and the nature of regional political institutions, another way of describing knowledge culture.13 But this evidence does not adequately answer Goldstone’s question. Just why would science or technology-based growth be immune to capture by new interests? The accounts by Mokyr, Jacob, and even Goldstone himself all rely too heavily on the character of scientific and technological elites to explain just why modern growth was different. This kind of cultural exceptionalism is exactly what is most criticized by global history. An efflorescence of an industrial region, or even an industrial country, in isolation, would have been vulnerable to exactly the same limits as any other dynamic change. New interests created by the new technology would have had every opportunity to institutionalize their advantage in order to extract rents, rather than run the risks of pursuing continuous growth.14 Examples of rent seeking and exploitation in the commercial and industrial revolutions are easy to find, and imperialism was ubiquitous. Without special pleading can we identify some contingent feature of politics, economy, culture, or society that limited exploitation and created the possibility of sustained growth? The institutions that create the possibility of societies oriented to continuous innovation are those that make it impossible for elites to monopolize sources of power. The problem we face therefore is not to identify innovating elites or entrepreneurs, even knowledge elites, but to find the context that allowed subalterns to mobilize and to limit elite rent seeking. To understand why the technologically driven efflorescence of the eighteenth century became self-sustaining we need to see the knowledge culture that produced it in a much wider context than that of the industrial regions themselves, and we need a much more compelling account of adaptation than diffusion. The entire Atlantic basin and Western Europe were able to participate in the epochal shift of the early nineteenth century, even though industrial regions and trade centers made up only a very small part of that world. How did the provincial people who were not part of the metropoles learn how to adapt themselves to a changing world, to take on new opportunities, hedge against new kinds of risk, and associate with others in novel forms of collective action? James Scott’s critique of failed modernization projects offers some interesting clues that 3

INTRODUCTION

point us in the direction of an answer to that puzzle. Scott emphasizes the importance of implicit or tacit knowledge in improvement projects that have succeeded.15 Was there a tacit knowledge, a know-how, that provincial Europeans acquired through social experience? If so, what were those experiences? How could we credibly account for a process of cognitive change profound enough to offer a novel repertoire of collective action on a wide and deep basis? Can we find a context through which we can identify the co-creation of dynamic stability between elites and subalterns?16 The intellectual challenge most difficult to overcome in this approach is to place everyday life and subalternity at the heart of the creative processes of innovation in the moment of the emergence of a global system, rather than as supplements or residues to the projects of elites.17 Drilling down to catch a glimpse of creativity and adaptation, without being captured by economic, political, and intellectual modes of appropriation of those innovations, is difficult. At its heart this is a problem of changing social pedagogy and epistemology. No particular agent, even one as significant as the newly dominant British Empire, nor any particular sector, even one as generally significant as the cotton trade, can credibly explain the transformation of values and norms that allowed old societies to adapt to very new patterns of risk and opportunity.18 Even the most highly sophisticated accounts of this nature eventually rely on coercion to explain how new patterns were generalized. There is a glaring contradiction between the literature on innovation and growth, which stresses social capital and institutional capability, and the work on global expansion, which emphasizes coercion and violence.19 The record of looting, coercion, and violence in the expansion of early modern European empires was clear, even to early modern Europeans.20 There is, however, no credible body of work that asserts that long-term social innovation based on the most coercive kinds of looting and rent seeking has been or can be successful. Successful and sustained innovation in Europe must have been despite, rather than because of, imperial expansion.21 The hypothesis this book explores, inspired by the Holmesian dictum that if you eliminate the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case, is that the cultural innovations in Europe necessary to adapt to global transformation were general, widely shared, and 4

INTRODUCTION

actively pursued. New patterns of work and sociability were not disseminated from “centers of calculation” but constituted a process of collective learning that transformed the horizons of judgment in the European lifeworlds.22 Normative change allowed for new kinds of political and economic negotiations between elites and subalterns, for a reassignment of roles, and, in some cases, for transformations of relationships. Democratic and economic transformation were intimately linked. This book addresses these questions through a history of the knowledge culture of the eighteenth-century Languedoc.23 There is clearly no such thing as a typical province, but the Languedoc is a good case to explore because it enjoyed no particular advantages in respect of the emerging networks of global commerce and communication. It was not on the Atlantic littoral, it did not have particularly strong connections with Asia, its textile trade through Marseilles with the eastern Mediterranean was under threat. Nevertheless the people of the Languedoc created complicated credit instruments and used them to pursue public and private goals. They established networks of natural historians and agronomical innovators who introduced new plants and new ideas of scientific authority. They changed the pattern of land use in their holdings and experimented with new kinds of farm machinery. The argument of this book is that we have to see these developments, and the other experiences of the same sort in other places, not as series of events in the history of public finance, the history of science, and the history of agriculture, but as a process of collective learning. Subtly and incrementally, much in the fashion of the industrious revolution, the people of the province of the Languedoc performed a cultural revolution. They produced a public culture of reason that was robust enough to sustain civility through political and economic revolution. This book owes much to both intellectual and economic history, and even more to the history of science. It, however, approaches the problem of sustained global innovation through none of these routes but rather through provincial history.24 This may seem like an idiosyncratic, or even perverse, strategy.25 Are not the global and the provincial at antipodes to one another? The hypothesis that drives the book asserts the contrary. It is in the local contexts of experience, the provinces or regions, that the norms of global culture had their most important effects. Global trade 5

INTRODUCTION

has always been conducted through the great cities, and so there have always been communities of merchants who lived global lives. A global system that unites the households, villages, towns, and regions beyond the great trading centers is, however, historically rare. To characterize the substance of what it meant to live globally in the eighteenth century we have to pay attention to people who may never have left their pays, but who found themselves taking on new habits and changing their attitudes, spontaneously adapting to the actions of strangers. The view that regional and local innovation was the basis for global change is a well-established idea in American economic and cultural history. Historians are familiar with the differing but integrated histories of the evolution of the Chesapeake from a tobacco monoculture to grain and mixed farming, and the commercial specialization of the Mid-Atlantic.26 This interregional perspective has been important in Atlantic history, but the potential for global history has not been explored. Provincial experience should lie at the heart of the exploration of systemic change in the eighteenth century. There was nothing novel in trading cities conducting international trade or merchants, and the communities that sustained them, communicating across boundaries. Real change occurred when provincial elites, independent peasant households, and local political institutions began to act, in some way, like those trading cities and merchants. That change became systemic when it became culturally embedded in everyday life and local contexts.

Local Knowledge and Global Contexts: The Languedoc in the Eighteenth Century In 1698 Nicolas de Lamoignon de Basville, intendant of the Languedoc, wrote a description of his province.27 Nearly a century later his successor, Charles Bernard de Ballainvilliers, repeated the exercise, and a casual reader could come away with the impression that little had changed in the intervening years.28 The two intendants described the twenty-three civil dioceses of the province in very similar terms. Even though they were agents of the state, they seemed to look on the province much as a conservative landowner would look on his or her estate, surveying a set of resources with a view to extracting the maximum return from rent. That casual 6

INTRODUCTION

reader, and any graduate historian, might have run across the magisterial work on the Mediterranean by Braudel and the study of the Languedoc by his student Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and if so the context for the attitudes of the royal servants would not be hard to understand.29 The Languedoc, in these accounts, was a region of peasant farmers whose demography and environment generated an agrarian cycle of periodic booms and collapses. Like some other rural regions of France, the Languedoc was a société immobile, incapable of generating endogenous growth or innovation, trapped in an organic economy. If the casual reader had taken his or her research a little further and confronted William Beik’s account of the relationship between the state and the local aristocracy created by the monarchy of Louis XIV, then the conservatism of the intendants would have been even easier to understand.30 Absolutism was an alliance between local elites and the state organized around the most efficient extraction of rent and taxes from the peasantry. The Languedoc did have an extensive textile industry, but even that was constrained by the mercantilist politics of the absolutist state and unable to commit itself to continuous growth.31 If the intendant had the attitude of an extractive landlord it was because that was how the state thought of itself. One observer who would not have agreed with this reading of his world was Ballainvilliers himself. He thought that “since M. Basville had published his memoir, the province of the Languedoc has taken on a new aspect.”32 For Ballainvilliers the eighteenth century was not one more turn on the wheel of a society that could not transcend the limits imposed by its environment and the rapacity of rent-seeking elites; everywhere he looked he saw that environment transformed. “Trunk roads,” he wrote, “have encouraged abundance and the fertilization of the most sterile lands, canals have opened up commerce and made trade less expensive,” and he was clear that these transformations were driven by the “Estates, continually preoccupied by the happiness [of the province].” The state, a complicated entity due to the subsidiary powers of the Estates in the province, did not see like an unimaginative landlord in Ballainvillier’s account but instead saw like a prudent capitalist, and sought to maximize the growth of resources, not maximize the rent from them.33 In the aftermath of the Revolution Claude-Joseph Trouvé, the prefect of the new department of the Aude, made the same positive judgment of the governance 7

INTRODUCTION

of the now defunct province.34 The Languedoc, seen from the perspective of these administrators, was a dynamic province that was successfully pursuing a strategy of development. The report by Ballainvilliers, which was compiled in collaboration with his correspondents in the dioceses, offered a differentiated picture of economic development in the province that was sensitive to contrasts and differences. Different towns and cities played different roles. From his perspective Toulouse and Béziers were really significant as market centers for their agricultural hinterlands, Alais was an industrial center, and Montpellier a nexus for communication. Significantly, Ballainvilliers had little to say about their legal and clerical institutions. One of the most striking observations he makes is that development could have perverse results. In his account of the dioceses of Carcassonne and Alby he notes that the intensification of the textile trades had raised labor costs and so made it hard to find agricultural laborers.35 The core of his analysis turned on the interaction between the canal- and roadbuilding efforts of the monarchy, the Estates, and the dioceses. Both sub-delegations in Alais (Alais and Rodez) compensated for terrible land by having active silk and coal industries that relied on the recently constructed roads that linked them to the canals and major routes.36 Sète was not having the economic effect hoped for, because the canal system linking it to the agricultural and industrial regions was not yet complete.37 Ballainvilliers even had some interesting observations on the futility of uncoordinated efforts at development. The bishop of Castres had attempted to make the river Agout, which runs through the diocese, navigable and had made progress on the project by financing the construction of twenty-three locks. On his death, however, the project had been abandoned. Ballainvillers argued that only the Estates had the long-term view necessary to carry the project through to completion.38 Alongside his description of the role of the state and local institutions in creating the framework for economic activity, Ballainvilliers constantly noted the spontaneous activity of the community. In Alais prosperity was due to the “industrie and activity of the inhabitants,” and the same was true of Bédarieux, where the mining and textile industries were sustained by local innovation.39 Ballainvillier’s account, which was addressed to the state rather than the public, was a careful and critical account of an industrious community, conscious of 8

INTRODUCTION

the uneven nature of development but offering a coherent account of an active society and a developmental state.40 Historians interested in understanding the nature of eighteenth-century change in Europe have recently come around to the substance of the view Baillanvilliers took of his particular province. The elements of an account of endogenous change driven from within the local and provincial European world are well established. Jan de Vries’s influential idea of an industrious revolution helps us to explain how the seeming continuity of social life in Europe in the eighteenth century masked transformations of work and family within the peasant and urban households.41 The intensification of work in farms and workshops generated sustained productivity gains without the necessity for an anterior structural transformation. The industrious revolution, alongside the increased trade in commodities around the Atlantic and in finished goods from Asia, underpinned the slow commercialization of everyday life in all regions around the Atlantic.42 Christopher Bayly’s synthesis illustrated the impact of long-distance trade on even the most local and intimate areas of social life, such as the cotton clothing increasingly worn in new styles.43 Closer to home, Philip Hoffman’s work describes just how French farmers achieved sustained productivity gains in a “traditional” economy and the political processes that inspired this growth.44 Hoffman and his collaborators Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Pierre Rosenthal have also provided detailed accounts of the financial institutions of ancien régime France that supported this century of growth.45 The old model of early modern Europe as a set of immobile provincial societies, which would latterly be transformed by exogenous forces, namely, cities, industry, war, and revolution, has been replaced by a much more differentiated, complex vision. The intendants’ comments, and the historians’ analyses, echo debates around development that were lively and contested in the eighteenth century. One of the most important issues in eighteenth-century French public life turned on the motors of development. Should the state stimulate development by coordinating economic activity and investing in infrastructure? Was a better strategy to create transparent and well-known rules for property ownership and taxation in order to allow agents other than the state to innovate? Should the state carry a lot of public debt to stimulate development or eliminate debt, other than in time of war, to 9

INTRODUCTION

allow private agents the greatest liberty and access to credit? All strategies had their adherents, and we enjoy an insightful and well-developed literature on the history of French political economy that reconstructs those debates for us.46 The object of the debate on development and debt, which extended far beyond France, turned on the dangers and opportunities created by the emergence of commercial society.47 The debate on commercial society was highly sensitive to the challenges of change and was far from optimistic about the future of a commercial order. Contemporaries were well aware of the dangers posed by expanding extensive trade and were particularly alert to the possibility of commercial centers dominating their hinterlands. The history of Italy, especially of Naples, illustrated to eighteenth-century Europeans the dangers of unequal development.48 Naples did not exchange with its hinterland in any significant way. Instead it extracted value from it to the extent that it actually hindered development. Neapolitan political economists had a very clear sense of the problem, though they struggled to find a solution. Adam Smith argued that Europe, and indeed the global economy, suffered from a systematic problem that mirrored the exaggerated example of Naples. The “unnatural and retrograde” overexpansion of trade through the hyper-exploitation of agriculture threatened to create an unstable and probably explosive situation.49 David Hume echoed and even amplified his friend’s gloomy outlook on the probable future for Europe. Commercial civilization with its taxes and customs created unsustainable tensions between opulent towns and the impoverished countryside. As a further unforeseen consequence of these arrangements, the ability of the states to raise taxes, and anticipate taxes through public credit, allowed them to assemble armed forces out of all proportion to the wealth of their populations.50 This feature of modern life was so dangerous that Kant proposed, in his Thoughts on Perpetual Peace, a complete ban on loans contracted in connection with the foreign affairs of the state. Commercial civilization was doubly threatened by social war between town and country and civil war between the states of Europe. As we know, the worst imaginings of Smith, Hume, and Kant were not fulfilled. When French peasants revolted in 1789, as the independent farmers in Massachusetts and the Carolinas had before them in 1776, or Ulster Presbyterians and Wexford Catholics would after them in 1798, 10

INTRODUCTION

they rallied to ideals of reform of modern commercial states, not their abolition. Not that Smith’s fears had been entirely unfounded. The revolution in Naples did collapse into a jacquerie that hardened social distinctions and made reform impossible for centuries afterward. Even in states that survived the crisis, various regions collapsed into the kind of conflict that Smith had feared. Western France was devastated by a civil war that pitted town against country. The heartland of Spain suffered in the same way in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion. In conditions of genuine hyper-exploitation of agricultural workers, in the slave-based colonies, the revolutionary crises were truly terrible.51 The Pugachev rebellion in Russia and the White Lotus rebellion in southern China are other examples of mass peasant mobilization that rejected commercial transformation and were effectively counter-systemic. Wahhibism was an example of yet another possibility, a retrenchment of religious commitments, created during the moment of crisis in the development of commercial society. If anything the social thought of the eighteenth century was not imaginative enough when considering the possibilities of reaction to commercial civilization. For France, the Low Countries, Britain, and the United States, however, the exit from the revolutionary crisis was not collapse or the abandonment of commercial ideals. Instead, these countries became more dynamic, became even more committed to commercial development, and came to form the core of a new global system in the nineteenth century. The crises foretold did occur in the late eighteenth century, but their outcomes were not those that had been predicted. Some element in the texture of European society allowed it to manage crisis, and more than twenty years of war, and adapt to it. What distinguished the European experience in the eighteenth century was that the trading cities did not implode, collapse under the weight of their own expansion; nor did their dynamism devastate their hinterland, in the manner Spanish imperial expansion had hollowed out Castille in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The problem is working out why. Accounting for adaptation to change and sustaining social coherence in conditions of change is not a new problem. In the social science literature it has been addressed most directly by the concept of social capital.52 Social capital refers to the relative density of networks and organizations an individual can leverage to achieve his or her ends.53 It is a central 11

INTRODUCTION

concept in Robert Putnam’s historical account of the relative success of northern Italian cities in creating coherent and viable environments, in comparison to their southern neighbors’ inability to create civic cultures.54 Putnam used the concept of social capital to explain the civic problems that Gaetano Filangieri and the other Neapolitan scholars had identified. The idea that Europe’s dense network of associations, guilds, confraternities, and clubs provided the social environment that managed change is plausible. It also provides a more extensive context for the literature on the industrious revolution, which deals largely with households and families. The argument that a coherent society, one that enjoys high levels of trust, will be successful in managing change, is inherently attractive. There is no clear evidence, however, that trust played this role in European society in the great transition. The only close empirical study of social capital in European transformation, Sheilagh Ogilvie’s multiyear project on Württemberg, raises serious doubts about the explanatory power of the concept.55 Ogilvie argues that the stock of norms and conventions that made up social capital were more often used to stifle and inhibit change than to manage it. Law courts, for example, enforced gender norms that allowed male heads of households to restrict women reallocating time to market-based activities, one of the key features of the industrious revolution. Ogilvie’s skepticism about the capacity of social capital to account for divergent experience is reinforced by the fact that key institutions, such as guilds, were at the center of economic life across the globe, not just in Europe.56 Clearly there was no simple correlation between dense networks of invested social capital and successful management of the transformation of society. Social capital may have sustained meaningful social relationships in a period of change, but managing that change, and participating in it, demanded that Europeans had to develop much more specific tools. Trade, the state, and science all relied on universalistic, cosmopolitan ideas. Money, rights, and reason did not respect borders. To survive and flourish in a world increasingly ordered by such features, provincials had to develop their own cosmopolitanism from their own experience. Looking for a cosmopolitan thread in the experience of the provinces of Europe might seem a little perverse. As Margaret Jacob remarks in the very first 12

INTRODUCTION

line of the first chapter of her book chronicling the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal, “Cities are, and were, the natural habitat of the cosmopolitan.”57 There is a big difference, however, between cosmopolitans, a very specific identity, and cosmopolitanism, a cultural capacity that can coexist quite comfortably with other more specific loyalties and commitments. What this book identifies is the elements of a new “thin” culture that was created in the European provinces in the eighteenth century. The capacity to manage change depended on the capacity for innovation, for reorientation to new values and ideas.

Thin Culture and Thick Description A cultural history of mobilization of subalterns and provincials in periods of significant change would have value in itself. The focus of this book on innovation, in particular on the way new ideas created new kinds of cultural capacity, however, brings the book onto the terrain of one of the most difficult questions in global history. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes in the opening pages of Provincializing Europe, one cannot invoke such concepts as “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law” without reference to their European context of origin.58 The vexing problem of the role of Europe in global history arises again. Chakrabarty’s critical demolition of the mythic “Europe” of achieved modernity as an explanatory principle and normative standard is as liberating to French or Breton history as it is to Indian or Bengali experience. The problem, however, of the “universal” or exemplary nature of European categories comes back in through the empirical window after being shown the theoretical door. The most influential coordinating ideas in modern life are universals.59 Our questions about rights turn on just how universal they are. Do animals have rights? Could particular people cease to be under the protection of their rights and so be tortured? Similarly, there is no area of territory, besides Antarctica, that is not politically organized by a state, no ground that is not property.60 Despite a rich vein of writing that illustrates just how historically conditioned it is, the idea of a self, cognate with every other self that inhabits the globe, seems universal, natural, and obvious.61 It is difficult for most of us to conceive of a framing idea that is not 13

INTRODUCTION

of this form.62 We even distinguish, in political terms, between an ancien régime, characterized by legal privilege, and a modern world of rights. Modern life is universalistic by its nature. The issue of the communicability of local experience through universal categories was not just an abstract problem that troubled natural philosophers worried about the reliability of the observations and instruments made by others.63 It was a pressing problem for Bengali thinkers looking for a category through which they could assert the dignity and power of their intellectual traditions.64 It was also an intensely practical problem that asserted itself in very workaday fields such as agronomy. “Hence it has come to pass, that many great improvements have been made with regard to the plowing of a field, the construction of an instrument, the formation of a water meadow, the introduction of fallowing, green crops, and other articles of a particular nature; while several of those of a general kind, such as the proper quantity of land for a farm, in which both the individual and community are highly concerned, remain to this day unassertained, either by any common mode in practice, or by any general principle in theory.”65 Without shared norms local innovation could not be generalized and the value of local experience recognized. For rural Europe the market and the political economy that animated it could not have replaced a moral economy unless they were embedded in a more extensive process of modernization in which there were many opportunities for actors to appropriate new norms. Other studies of particular institutions, such as property rights, have allowed for subtle historical accounts of the interaction of economics and politics in the creation of particular economic configurations. Avner Grief ’s study of medieval Genoa and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal’s work on the creation of water rights in the French Revolution both argue that political institutions created the conditions for economic growth.66 The role of the state in creating the conditions for new kinds of exchange is undeniable, but it is not sufficient. The cultures and capacities that sustain modern political economy are not uniquely economic. Moreover, identifying the repertoire of collective action that creates the conditions for modern economic life is not itself an economic, or even social, problem.67 The intuitions of justice that inform exchange relations are elements of a more capacious model of reason. The condition of possibility of global experience is the 14

INTRODUCTION

communicability of experience, and that requires actors to have concepts to hand that translate between multiple environments.68 Explicating the elements of the substantive, post-Enlightenment, practice of reason remains a site of important philosophical work.69 The challenge confronted in this book is to offer a credible historical, empirical narrative that accounts for the European genesis of operative categories of global experience, without appealing to some form of European exceptionalism. It would be impossible to address problems of adaptation and change in a French province in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without paying attention to the role played by the French Revolution. The Revolution makes a complex explanatory problem even more difficult to solve because it radicalizes the issue of the relationship between economic and political change. The agricultural societies and other associations became the seedbeds for Jacobin clubs during the Revolution. Ideas of universality and equality that were implicit in the knowledge culture of the eighteenth century became explicit objects of contention after 1789. The articulation of the democratic republic as a political ideal, at least for some of the population, underpinned a new ideal of citizenship that included, in its sans-culotte phase, a right to work. Even after the radical moment of the Revolution had ended in 1794, political and economic categories remained entwined in models of citizenship. The failure of successive republican regimes to stabilize themselves meant those ideas of citizenship remained highly contested until, at the earliest, the Third Republic. Ideologically inflected ideals of modern economic life contested for control of the state in France, making it difficult to capture the changing nature of economic experience closer to the ground. It is not the ambition of this book to account for the economic content of the Revolution, but one hopes it will make it easier to understand how and why social and economic experience could sustain and survive political contestation. For all the enthusiasm Basville had for the transformation of the Languedoc, its new roads, ports, and cash crops, in all likelihood he would not recognize his province as it appears in this book. Many of the characters, such as the officiers who subscribed to public debt, the members of the Société royale des sciences, or the faculty in the medical school in Montpellier, would have been familiar to him, but the contexts in which they are presented in this book would seem strange. The book is set in the 15

INTRODUCTION

Languedoc rather than attempting to give a full account of social experience in the eighteenth-century Languedoc. So much of the rich texture of this fascinating place cannot find a place here, which is to be regretted. The methods used to identify the repertoire of new techniques of communication and association necessarily filter out much of the rich social experience of the province. Techniques derived from the history of institutions and the history of science, themselves founded on standards of social science foreign to any eighteenth-century French public man, have to be deployed in the effort to identify the new elements of the knowledge culture of the eighteenth-century Languedoc. This strategy does not ascribe to the people of the Languedoc beliefs or goals that they did not explicitly embrace, but it does exploit perspective to reconstruct the landscape of ideas in which they talked, wrote, and worked. The process of collective learning they experienced can only be appreciated indirectly. Tax records, the correspondence of scientific societies and agronomical clubs, botanical handbooks, and descriptions are all read in this book much as they might be by scholars in the subaltern studies tradition, very much against the grain. But out of those difficult sources a robust and clear culture of reason emerges, a surprisingly general process of intellectual and cultural change. Handling money, communicating ideas, and working with things taught the men and women of the Languedoc new ways of seeing the possibilities of the world and of acting together.

16

CHA PTER ONE SMALL CHANGES Credit, Debt, and Money in the Languedoc

In 1763 Jacquette Caiserfues, a fille de service (female hospital orderly) from Montpellier, subscribed three hundred livres to the public debt of the sénéchaussée of Carcassonne, and so became a public creditor.1 She appears again in the list of creditors for the sénéchaussée in 1772, but at some point between that date and 1779 her asset, a rente perpetuelle, was transferred, possibly after her death, to Marie Caiserfues, another fille de service.2 Marie Caiserfues continued to collect her nine livres a year in rente at least until the last set of consolidated accounts for the sénéchausée was sent for oversight by the Committee of the Estates of Languedoc in 1787. These women were not the only petty investors in the funds of the sénéchausée. In the 1780s more investors of the same social status as the Caiserfues turn up in the archive, possibly attracted by the rise in the rate of return in the intervening period from 3 percent to 5 percent.3 Among the loan contracts taken out at this rate in 1784 Catherine Jardinier, a servant (domestique), contracted for five hundred livres, and Louis Archimbaud, a cook (cuisinier), for double that, while Denis Sabourdy, a valet de chambre, invested two thousand livres. These examples are not numerous enough to stand as evidence for mass popular involvement in public debt, but they provide a fascinating 17

SMALL CHANGES

index for the complex ways in which the public credit system was beginning to be used by different kinds of people. These ordinary people saw the public funds as secure and reliable enough to be part of their own planning for their future. This small but significant trend of popular investment sat among a series of patterns of continuity and discontinuity in public investment in the sénéchausée in the late eighteenth century. The region had 168 outstanding credit contracts in 1755, just before the onset of the Seven Years’ War, which would place new stresses on state finances. The average return for each contract was 246 livres per annum, and the total repayment burden totaled 20,576 livres. All of these contracts were redeemable, transferrable rentes perpetuelles paying 3 percent per annum return to private investors and 4 percent to charities and the clergy. By 1787 the extent of indebtedness on the part of the sénéchausée had expanded considerably. Total payments had almost doubled to 40,534 livres on 241 contracts, and the average return for each contract had expanded to 327 livres per annum. Of the 291 debt contracts emitted by the sénéchausée before 1789, forty-six had been redeemed or repaid in full. The oldest rente that was still current in 1787 had been returning 4 percent per annum to the Oratorians of Pézenas since 1678.4 Many of the later contracts made after 1765 were for larger sums and at a higher rate, 5 percent, than the older debt.5 In 1755 only twelve contracts were owned by seigneurial elites and officers in the royal army or titled members of the nobility, and in 1787 their share had barely risen, to fourteen contracts. The patterns that altered are more revealing of the changing nature of debt and money in the eighteenth-century Languedoc than those that remained relatively stable. In 1755 magisterial elites, officeholders in the finance and law courts of Toulouse and Montpellier for the most part, held thirty contracts for debt from the sénéchausée, but by 1787 they held only fifteen. Individual bourgeois, on the other hand, had increased their share of debt from fifty-two contracts to sixty-seven. The makeup of the category of nonprivileged investors also changed. In 1755 the contracts were held by a wide variety of individuals. Professors from the university in Montpellier, lawyers pleading in a variety of courts, a receveur de tabac from Nîmes, some parish priests, and merchants all figured on the list that represented the traditional nonprivileged elite of the province. In 1787 those social groups 18

SMALL CHANGES

were still represented, and it is clear that lawyers had increased their commitment to this particular kind of public debt, but they were surrounded by new figures, many of them so obscure that they were identified only by their town of residence in the province. There is evidence that there was an active secondary market in this debt. In 1787, seventy-eight of the credit contracts that were still extant there were held by individuals and institutions other than those who had first contracted them. Much of the debt was being bought by charitable corporations and religious orders.6 In 1755, forty-eight contracts were owned by religious orders and another twenty-six by other charitable institutions, all of them from within the province. In 1787 similar proportions of debt were owned by religious orders, with seventy-eight contracts, and charities, which held forty contracts. Some subtle patterns were hidden underneath this carapace of mutually reinforcing local political, economic, and religious institutions. Of the religious orders that held this kind of debt the vast majority were nunneries. Seventy-two of the seventy-eight religious institutions holding this kind of debt contract in 1787 were made up of female religious institutions. If this pattern was reproduced around France this might explain why the church was vulnerable to expropriation in 1789, as these holders of debt were not politically represented in the National Assembly. Recurrent investments by such orders as the Ursulines in Narbonne, Lodève, and Montpellier, or the order of Saint Catherine in Carcassonne and Montpellier, may well have been made by bursars looking to the well-known and trusted relying on the credibility of local institutions, much in the manner notaires worked in markets for private debt. The later emanations of debt, however, were not taken up by these local charities in a predictable pattern. Small foundations in second-ranked Languedoc towns, such as Gignac and Sommières, which had not previously appeared in the market for public debt, bought three thousand and 2,400 livres of debt, respectively, in 1768, disturbing the cartel of the provincial centers.7 The financial backing for bienfaisence rather than charité can begin to be discerned. The Charité des dames de la bouillon of Agde invested 2,400 livres in 1784 to provide long-term funding for their soup kitchen. Even more tellingly, female-endowed charities from outside the province altogether began looking to buy the debt of Carcassonne. In 1765 the Sisters of the Order of the Visitation from Lyon acquired sixteen 19

SMALL CHANGES

thousand of the thirty thousand livres of debt sold by the sénéchausée in that year.8 The other fourteen thousand livres also had some female subscribers: the Presentation Sisters at Castres for three thousand, Louise Marguerite Aimargues for three thousand, and two micro investors, Françoîse Tourner, who acquired four hundred livres of debt, and Marie Lavigne, servant des maîtres from Montpellier, who acquired the last six hundred livres. The salience of women in the contracts for debt in 1765 was not anomalous. Women acting as individual creditors, usually as widows or as daughters endowed with independent wealth, stand out from the records. Fifty-three contracts were owned by individually named women in 1787. We can trace the transfer of particular contracts through the accounts to reveal how individual women gained control of financial resources. In the accounts for 1787, Jeanne and Marie Grand, sisters from Montpellier, owned two hundred livres of rente. That rente had had originally been sold to the hôpital général of Montpellier in 1688 and latterly sold on to Barthelemy Dupy acting “au nom et comme tuteur” for the Grand sisters in 1770.9 As late as 1779 the rente was still in his name and under his control, but by the later 1780s they were controlling their own resource. The history of this single credit contract illustrates the varied and changing uses to which subscribers were putting public investment. The sénéchausée promulgated 180,000 livres worth of debt in two tranches in 1784 and 1785. The patterns in subscription to this large body of debt shown in table 1 illustrate the wide base that public debt was developing. These categories are not exclusive. For instance, some of the debt held by women was held by widows and daughters of officiers and nobles, some of it was in the hands of very humble single women. On the other hand, two of the contracts assigned to charities were held by communities of nuns, and so might be assigned to female debt. What is striking is how little of the public debt was held by traditional and clerical elites, the continuing importance of institutional elites, from the world of the university and law primarily, and the role played by women and the nonprivileged. A service elite had been joined by a new economic elite as well as some elements of the subaltern classes. The most salient development, however, was the amount of this new public debt owned and controlled by women. 20

SMALL CHANGES

table 1 Subscribers to the debt of the Sénéchausée of Carcassone, 1784–1785 Charities Women

Subalterns Officiers Military Church and (law, etc.) and noble bourgeois

Number

7

11

5

8

2

3

Value

46,900

44,100

17,000

23,400

11,000

9,000

(in livres)

Credit and debt were everyday features of European life. An older historiography saw debt as the road to impoverishment for peasants and other nonelites.10 In those accounts urban bourgeois offered credit to economically marginal peasants with a view to their eventual default and the expropriation of their land. Peasants, understood in this way, would only have recourse to credit in moments of crisis. Newer work has exploded this view and illustrated that even in areas of viticulture, where direct control of the land offered increasingly real benefits, creditors made investments with a view to long-term returns, not as a means of establishing domination over the peasantry.11 Conversely, peasant families were using credit to expand their horizons, not only to manage moments of difficulty. Debt was becoming one of the many networks that made up a commercial society. The work of historians such as Béaur, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal illustrates how local credit markets operated in provincial France.12 Notaires, who oversaw contacts between individuals, were able to assess risk both for borrowers and for lenders. They were crucial intermediaries who ensured that capital was efficiently allocated, that borrowers with credible projects could find funds, and that lenders with capital to invest could do so with relative safety. Borrowers and lenders were working in a system that knew how to assess risk. That body of work all addresses private credit, however, and the kind of public debt that the records of the sénéchaussée of Carcassonne relate to had a completely different structure. There was no equivalent to the notaire when buying public debt; in fact, the relationship was very unequal, since the state, or its agents, could default without fear. So why, 21

SMALL CHANGES

then, do we find this broad spectrum of people buying public debt, far outside the circle of royal and local officiers who could have exerted enough economic, moral, and political pressure to ensure repayment? To answer this question we have to change our focus. If we consider public debt as a set of contracts between the state and particular individuals, it is impossible to explain how any individual could trust that his or her loan would be honored, particularly given the checkered history of the French state. When, however, we see public debt as one element of a more extensive financial system, the rationality of investment becomes much easier to understand. The public debt of this sénéchausée did not have to establish its credibility independently. It derived its credibility from the integrity and reliability of the French financial system, but particularly from the credit of the province. Public credit and private credit not only supplied money to French society, they formed the foundation for public faith in money. When we examine it closely we can see that finance in the Languedoc, in its many aspects, including tax collection, debt service, and supporting public goods, formed a coherent system. Engagement with the world of money was one of the modes through which the population of the Languedoc developed new resources for rational collective action.

Money and Collective Action The study of money as a social institution has been largely neglected.13 Émile Durkheim thought that credit networks, “the monetary system I use to pay my debts, the credit systems I use in my financial transactions,” were among the most important modern social institutions, and Talcott Parsons saw money as one of the general media of communication and interaction that constituted modernity, but few scholars have exploited these general remarks to generate a historically grounded account of the evolution of money as a form of communication as well as a medium of exchange.14 The possibilities of such a history of money as a vector of change in Europe have been well illustrated by one exceptional book, Alexander Murray’s pathbreaking account of the consequences of the circulation of Islamic silver coins in Europe from the tenth century onward.15 Murray claims that the circulation of a unified element amid the diversity of medieval Europe created a possibility of unified judgment, a 22

SMALL CHANGES

model for reason. On the basis of this study Murray has challenged our chronology of the emergence of modernity. His study models the possibilities opened up once we understand that money has never been a neutral, transparent symbol of value. Money is a technology, or rather an array of technologies, and has been one of the most powerful instruments for the creation of new forms of society, culture, and politics.16 The nature of money changed in Europe in the late seventeenth century. The worldwide circulation of American silver had, from the early sixteenth century, provoked economic expansion through trade across Eurasia and stabilized the finances of such states as the Spanish and Ottoman Empires.17 By the late seventeenth century this system had become unstable. In the culmination of a long process the imagined relationship through which the commodity value of metal was directly related to the value of coin was broken.18 The influx of American gold and silver from the end of the fifteenth century had provoked price inflation that had political, social, and economic consequences. The inflation, and the export of coin to Asia, meant there simply were not enough precious metals to represent the value of money in circulation.19 John Asgill, in 1696, explained why a new kind of money had become necessary: “The past contracts now depending in the kingdom for payment of moneys in specie do far surmount all the species of money in the kingdom.”20 In response, monarchies, towns, empires, and provinces had to invent apparatus that supplemented the supply of coin with other financial instruments. States and monarchies experimented with new forms of public credit from the sixteenth century onward. The city of Paris sold annuities for the first time in 1522, and in 1542 the emperor Charles V sold a new instrument, a rente, a perpetual annuity backed by the tax receipts of the Habsburg Netherlands, and so created a new kind of credit market.21 Public credit was not the only means of creating new kinds of financial instruments. Antwerp merchants innovated by making bills of exchange, a venerable means of transferring money, negotiable through endorsement. This allowed bills to circulate through many hands and settle a series of transactions. In 1609 the Wisselbank was founded in Amsterdam and invented bank money, banco, by making what had originally been bills of exchange fully convertible between merchant banker account holders. This created a fully liquid means of exchange.22 The process culminated in England in 23

SMALL CHANGES

the Financial Revolution. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 put an end to the capacity of goldsmiths to charge discounts of up to 20 percent on bills.23 Bank of England paper would circulate at face value and eventually replace the tallies and goldsmith’s notes that had supplemented the inadequate and thoroughly debased supply of coin. William Paterson, the bank’s founder, argued that the prime public good that would be fulfilled by the bank would be to lower the price of money by making more of it. “The want of a bank, or publick fund, for the convenience and security of great payments, and the better to facilitate the circulation of money, in and about this great and opulent city, hath, in our time, among other inconvenience, occasioned much unnecessary credit, to the loss of several millions by which trade hath been discouraged and obstructed.”24 Paterson’s inspired idea was to use government debt held by the bank as an asset to back further credit, which he foresaw would eventually transform the nature of the money supply. “If the proprietors of the bank can circulate their foundation of twelve hundred thousand pounds, without having more than two or three hundred thousand pounds lying dead at one time with another, this bank will be in effect as nine hundred thousand pounds, or a million of fresh money brought into the nation.”25 The final transformation in the relationship of metal to money in Britain was, paradoxically, sponsored by the Great Recoinage, begun in 1696 and concluded in 1699. As Ming-Hsun Li explains, the artificially low exchange rate to silver used for the recoinage made it a “complete failure in as much as it did not achieve its purpose,” supplying milled silver coins to support financial transactions.26 Undervalued silver coin was melted down into bullion and exported as fast as it was coined. As a result the monetary standard converged on gold guineas, and since these did not circulate, in practice they were replaced by bank notes that became the normal resort of trade and a preferred means of saving. Fractional deposits of bullion came to support a quantity of money far greater than the quantities of metal available.27 The bank was authorized to issue more than a million pounds in bank notes in 1697. English currency enjoyed the dual benefits of a hard standard without being constrained by the supply of metal, or the quantity of land in the country, the standard favored by Asgill.28 Goldsmiths turned bankers, such as Stephen Evance 24

SMALL CHANGES

and Richard Hoare, became financial intermediaries who made the system work by aligning family investment strategies, national economic conditions, and international money markets.29 Money was generally understood to represent a known quantity of gold but was in fact liberated to support one of the most spectacular economic expansions in history. The transformation in the relationships between money, debt, and the state took a different form in France. The potential stimulus to economic development offered by monetized public debt in the form of a paper currency was well understood, and the most ambitious effort to take advantage of these ideas was the Mississippi Scheme, created by John Law. Law had described the new possibilities for an economy animated by paper money in his 1705 pamphlet, Money and Trade, and again in its more widely circulated 1720 second edition. He saw that increased supply of money was a stimulant to economic activity. “Domestic trade depends on the money: A greater quantity employs more people than a lesser quantity. A limited sum can only set a number of people to work proportion’d to it.”30 The specific effects of the failure of Law’s scheme on the political possibilities for nonmetallic money in France are not obvious. The Mississippi Company was an odd hybrid that backed the value of circulating currency with the value of shares in the trading company, rather than the taxing power of the state.31 It effectively privatized the public debt and issued banknotes based on ownership of that asset, but with the advantage that from 1716 the notes were accepted by the state as payment of taxes. The collapse in the share price of the company in the summer of 1720 in turn produced a collapse in faith in banknotes. This process did not necessarily undermine faith in all forms of nonmetallic money, and in any case circulating coin was also depreciated, though not as radically as paper, through recoinages in 1709, 1718, 1720, and 1726. The South Sea Scheme in Britain had the same structure and also suffered a collapse, but in Britain the Bank of England offered an alternative source of paper money based on a different relationship to public debt. The curious effect of the South Sea crash was to convert illiquid ninety-nine-year annuities into tradable company stock, paradoxically jump-starting national financial markets. The collapse of the Mississippi Scheme left behind it no such happy legacy. It may not have completely frozen financial experimentation but it did close down the political possibility of a national bank in 25

SMALL CHANGES

France for three generations.32 As late as 1790 the debate on the issuance of assignats continued to be conducted by reference to Law.33 Despite this troubling history, throughout the eighteenth century France created financial markets and institutions.34 Daniel Dessert’s work explains how royal finance became more systematic in the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.35 The pressures of war had variable results, however. Guy Rowlands argues that the decision of Louis XIV to engage in the War of the Spanish Succession created a fiscal trap that made the state so dependent on its financiers that it could not pursue reform.36 The limitations on fiscal reform posed by the extent and social incidence of tax exemptions is a classic theme of eighteenth-century French history.37 The monarchy did find it very difficult to prosecute systematic financial reform, though such efforts as Desmaretz’s creation of the dixième, levied on all property, in 1710, and Silhouette’s abortive 1759 plans for progressive taxation have to be taken seriously.38 Intermittent defaults by the French state were anticipated by markets that priced in the political constraint on reform, in the form of higher rates of return for French against British government debt.39 The premium paid by the French state was in itself a feature of a coherent financial system. Given the political constraints on the central state, much of the innovation in the financial system occurred elsewhere. Notaries, merchants, and provincial estates created money through issuing debt. Even though France had no public banks, the functions performed by banks in England and the Netherlands were fulfilled by other institutions. From 1690 to the end of the Napoleonic period, France, like every other state in Europe, never balanced its budget. In consequence it created a huge market for public debt and a need for institutions to manage that market. In the absence of a central bank, the Estates of Languedoc, alongside other public institutions, such as the Hôtel de Ville de Paris and the Estates of Burgundy, fulfilled that need.40 The needs of the state were particularly transformative in the pays d’état, the provinces of France that had retained independent representative bodies and could manage debt for the monarchy. Between 1740 and 1789 the monarchy raised more than 330 million livres in loans from the pays d’état: Artois, the Cambrésis, Flanders, Brittany, Burgundy, and Languedoc. All of these provinces could raise money at considerably cheaper rates than the monarchy because they did not present the same 26

SMALL CHANGES

default risk to investors.41 The structure of French eighteenth-century credit markets around a plurality of quasi-sovereign institutions meant that French public finance had more in common with the Dutch than the English seventeenth-century experience, being based more on the credit of the constituent provinces and cities and on a variety of financial instruments such as short-term obligations.42 Recent scholarship has revealed the transformation the French state underwent to accommodate itself to a new world of public credit. We do not have a history of the other side of that relationship, of how provincial society was changed by the circulation of this new sort of wealth. Household and individual strategies organized around participation in a world of money and credit demanded cultural and cognitive skills very different from management of more tangible assets, such as land. Historians’ visions of the distance between the French and British models of public finance have been reinforced by a parallel account of the social and political alliances that sustained the French state. The fiscal system of the ancien régime, it has been argued, remained based on the expropriation of surplus from peasants rather than the appropriation of profit from the emergent trading economy. The alliance of Crown and nobility did not allow a credit-based, merchant-dominated, fiscal-military state to emerge, and the lack of national representative bodies made a redistribution of the surplus generated by elements of the social base of the regime impossible.43 Recent work has, however, put the complete institutional immobility of the French monarchy in doubt. Even the founding act of the fiscal system of the ancien régime, the 1634 conversion of mounting short-term debt into rentes, can be seen as innovation toward a new model of public credit rather than simply as a failure of fiscal management. Rentes were negotiable and created a market. Clearly France did not follow the English model, but the polarization of English innovation and French immobility, both social and fiscal, is a caricature of a much more complicated reality.44 In any case both France and England unwittingly faced the same underlying fiscal problem. China’s economy was moving in a direction opposite from that of northwest Europe, from a fiduciary to a silver-based monetary system, and was pulling the bulk of the silver available from South America to East Asia.45 Endogenous and exogenous conditions demanded that France reorganize its monetary 27

SMALL CHANGES

system, even if it did not revolutionize it. As Jean-Laurent Rosenthal puts it, “Capital markets were less well developed in France than in England, but they were thriving in both countries.”46 Money shares a history parallel to that of sovereignty. In the seventeenth century both became disembedded from any particular institutions of governance or exchange to become signifiers of power and value in themselves. State- and merchant-generated credit money was one of the most important innovations of the seventeenth century.47 Participation in a world made up of bills of exchange, credit contracts, rentes, obligations, or shares was not based on the exchange of metals but on the mutual understanding of and the ability to coordinate through a form of value that was almost purely abstract. This was particularly clear in France, where the most generally denoted money of account, the livre tournois, was not sustained by equivalent metal deposits or even by a public bank, such as the Bank of England, holding fractional deposits. By law all long-term debt had to be denoted in livres, but it was up to the Crown to define the relationship between specie and the unit of account. The Crown could depreciate debt easily and legally at need; between 1688 and 1726 the livre lost half of its value in silver.48 Money held its value through acts of royal will, but its use and circulation depended on the social institutions through which it circulated. The study of public credit in France, in particular the difficulties faced by the eighteenth century French state in managing public debt, is a classic topic of historical scholarship.49 It is difficult to ignore the contribution of fiscal crisis to the end of the monarchy or to avoid the suspicion that some incoherence and irrationality in the financial system was the cause of the French Revolution. Tax was at the heart of politics in the late eighteenth century. Every party to the political debates of the 1780s promoted some version of fiscal reform as part of its political program. In the first Assembly of Notables of 1787 the plan of the contrôleur-général des finances, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, to refashion the tax base of the regime, reform the legal system, and institute provincial assemblies was resisted by adherents to Jacques Necker’s “Anglo-Genevan” vision of constitutional reform and resort to international markets for deficit financing.50 In neither plan, however, was there any apprehension that the entire structure of state and private finance might be threatened. There was deep and meaningful political contestation over the interconnected problems 28

SMALL CHANGES

of taxation and credit, both public and private. That contestation masked the more profound reality that the French state and society had become saturated with credit. The state’s debts formed part of this world of debt and credit. All reform projects took for granted the security of exchange, debt, and taxation. When circumstances undermined that assumption, political crisis would eventually turn into social revolution. That outcome, however, was unpredicted and unpredictable before the definitive fall of the monarchy in 1792.51 The coherence and the integrity of the fiscal system should not be lost under the later collapse of the monarchy and the trials of the revolution.

A Financial Revolution or the Reinvention of Privilege in the Languedoc? No province, writes Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, was as important as the Languedoc for the recruitment of financiers, the creditors of the French state, in the eighteenth century.52 The Languedoc was not on the booming Atlantic littoral and so did not directly participate in the growth based on Atlantic trade, but it enjoyed some other advantages. The ascendancy of Cardinal Fleury, whose family came from the world of Languedocian officiers, helped families such as the Crozats survive their association with the failed Law experiment and continue to act as state creditors.53 Allied to this political factor, the international and Protestant networks of the Languedoc elites gave them access to credit markets all over Europe. Chaussinand-Nogaret also points out that many financier families generated their wealth from manufactures, sugar refineries, soap works, and leather works, but most significantly textiles.54 New kinds of economic activity supplied capital for investment, and so Languedoc finance was not totally dependent on land and rents. The most important reason for the success of the Languedoc in the world of finance, however, was the existence of independent political institutions. Just as in Britain, the Languedoc enjoyed a set of institutions that sustained credible commitment to service debt, because the debt holders were represented in them.55 The Languedoc lacked only the last of the four elements needed for a successful eighteenth-century fiscal-military state: public officials to raise taxes, representative institutions, a system of debt management to 29

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anticipate tax receipts as loans, and a central bank capable of managing debt and extracting seigniorage from issuance of paper money.56 Political and fiscal institutions were completely integrated in the Languedoc. The annual Estates, which met during Christmas and New Year, topped out a nested set of representative assemblies, in the dioceses and the local communities. The Estates were composed of thirty-two representatives for the clergy and the same number for the nobility alongside sixty-eight for the Third Estate. Voting was by head, though only sixtyfour third-estate votes were counted, but in any case voting was not the most important procedure in an assembly in which agenda of the Estates was heavily managed and oriented toward consensus. The Estates understood they performed a crucial deliberative role and after 1776 published their proceedings, because “the more well-known your governance was, the more it would attract the support of all enlightened and well-meaning citizens.”57 This function of the Estates was paralleled and reinforced by its administrative and representative roles. Representation was not simple or direct. The Third Estate was represented by capitouls, syndics, and maires, all of whom reflected the elites of their areas. The representation of the nobility was restricted to holders of baronies, which seemed to limit its ability to negotiate for the second estate and was heavily criticized.58 Even in this constitutionally restricted domain, however, the Estates exhibited flexibility. In the regulations for the composition of the Estates the same baronies are noted every year, and in many years attendance was thin.59 This might indicate that the Estates were moribund, but if we look to another source, the arrangements for lodging the representatives, we see another picture. Taking two examples of 1773 and 1780, we can see that the majority of baronies were represented not by the title holder, but by an envoyé.60 Moreover, there was considerable turnover in these envoyés. None of the nobles sent in 1773 was still in attendance in 1780, which indicates that there was competition, or at least collective deliberation, among the nobility of the province. Furthermore, the work of the Montpellier III team on the Estates indicates that the proportion of envoyés sent to the Estates increased across the eighteenth century even as the quantity of activity in the Estates increased.61 The political elites of the Languedoc were not trapped by the rules governing their political institutions but were capable of adapting them to their needs. 30

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The Estates guaranteed the fiscal independence of the province. They appointed the Trésorier de la bourse, who managed its financial affairs, and this bureaucratic wing of self-governance was flanked by the legal apparatus of a sovereign court, the Parlement de Toulouse, and an independent fiscal system controlled by the two bureaux des finances at Toulouse and Montpellier, overseen by the Cour des aides, which was also situated in Montpellier.62 The system operated with a division between administrative and legal authority. Two courts exercised final jurisdiction over disputes on property, debt, and taxes. The Cour des aides in Montpellier was the court of final instance for cases called over the cadastre and all contestation over the division of the tax burden within and between communities. The Parlement in Toulouse ruled on challenges over property rights, which included customary rights, such as the parcours (grazing rights), and on contested elections in the province. The sheer density of the institutional machinery gave communities and individuals opportunity to assert themselves in cases of conflict. The taxation system in eighteenth-century France was extremely complex, and the independent political institutions in the Languedoc complicated them further. The medieval idea that the king should finance his court and servants from the revenues from customs and the royal estate, and call on taxation only for extraordinary expenses such as war, had long ceased to have any practical relevance. Even before the wars of Louis XIV Crown expenditures rose more quickly than income, and so Mazarin had been forced to resort to consistent deficit financing.63 The forms of taxation, however, still reflected their origins as temporary support for the monarchy in time of war. The taille was the core annual “extraordinary” tax on “biens, facultés et industrie” and alongside its supplements, the taillon, the subsistances, and the étapes (for the support of troops in transit and in winter quarters) was still legally linked to the support of royal armies.64 Just what local control of imposition meant practically had been defined in the royal proclamation of 9 October 1694 that asserted that ultimate authority for taxation lay in the will of the king while it reasserted that the Languedoc was a region of taille réelle.65 All land not specifically excluded by royal decree was tailleable, but the Estates apportioned the land tax and set its rate. Provincial taxes were apportioned among the twenty-three dioceses by a tariff fixed by the cadastre. 31

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Diocesan assemblies then apportioned their imposition and the funds they were allowed to raise for their own purposes. The sum imposed on each community by the diocese was a mande. Communities then broke that down according to the cadastre of routurier lands, lands subject to the taille, adding their own expenses and the costs of debt service, capital repayment and droit de collecte, the fees accorded to the tax collectors.66 This system of tax assessment and imposition was inherently reflexive.67 Local communities could borrow against local tax receipts to pursue public works or cases at law, and if they had difficulty raising the money from credit markets local residents could forward the money and become preferential lenders.68 Working within this layered, interlocking system required a sophisticated understanding of money, taxes, and credit, even at the local level. The fiscal system centralized the decisions to allow loans and their servicing taxes to be raised, but distributed the decisions about taxation throughout the province to sénéchaussée, diocesan, and communal representative bodies. It was a highly adaptive system that integrated formal rule-governed procedures, such as the cadastral survey, with deliberative elements. These direct taxes were supplemented by indirect taxes on consumption, termed the ferme de l’équivalent, that were levied on fish, meat, and wine, and the oldest consumption tax, the gabelle, levied on salt.69 All of these taxes were leased to groups of investors by the Estates, and the process was highly regulated. For example, when the contract to gather consumption taxes from 1782 to 1788 was put up to auction in 1780, only bidders from Languedoc were accepted, all their investors had to be from the Languedoc, and the province imposed a 20 percent tax on their receipts.70 Authority for the imposition of taxation lay with the king, but control of the taxation system was highly localized. The nature of provincial institutions, not just those of the Languedoc, as well as the role and function of the taxation they implemented are at the center of a renewed debate about the changing nature of absolutism in the eighteenth century.71 Alexis de Tocqueville’s old argument that the monarchy undermined the provincial estates in the eighteenth century, leaving them with nothing but status functions, has been exploded. On the contrary, it is now clear that as the monarchy faced more domestic and international problems the Estates regained wider powers, even if 32

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they did not reacquire their old role as independent political institutions. Instead they gained political power not through a reassertion of provincial autonomy but because some of the attributes of the monarchy devolved onto the provincial bodies and away from the intendant. The monarchy needed financial help, administrative capacity, and political support, and an alliance with the Estates offered a way of achieving these goals.72 As early as in the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV the Estates were acquiring an enhanced role in governance, and a capacity to defend their economic, social, and political interests, because of their capacity to fund the state.73 Though there is consensus on the direction in which the relationship between the monarchy and the Estates was developing, there is less on the effect of the reconfigured relationship between central and local institutions. Julian Swann argues, for instance, that the Estates of Burgundy used their new freedom of maneuver to protect noble privilege and to construct an effective clientage network around the house of Condé.74 Mark Potter, on the other hand, has argued that the revived role of the Burgundy Estates enabled the creation of political coalitions, “networks of individuals, usually from across different corporate, privileged or professional backgrounds who shared common political objectives,” which differed from clientage networks because they were not inherently hierarchical and had goals beyond the protection of the status of the client group.75 Both Swann and Potter acknowledge that local elites profited enormously from both office and participation in the credit contracts of the provinces, but they differ markedly in their views of the terms under which they did so. For Swann, privilege was reinforced as a principle of the regime, and no new values or ideas were generated. In Potter’s view the new roles taken on by the Estates and the alliances that supported those roles organized themselves around ideals very different from those of privilege and defense of the constitution of the province. Rafe Blaufarb’s work on the contestation between representative assemblies in Provence, the Corps of the Nobility, and the General Assembly of the Communities of the province, dominated by the tax-paying Third Estate, sees effects in Provence similar to those Potter sees in Burgundy.76 Political contestation in Provence did not reduce to a competition for political rents but turned on the public goods that the nobility claimed were 33

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advanced by its tax exemption. The eventual outcome was a systematic attack on the very principle of noble tax exemption, put forward in the widely distributed 1780 memoir by Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, using the same criterion of the advancement of public goods.77 Extending the defense of the nobility by reference to such ideas as the public good and merit had the perverse effect of making the nobility more rather than less vulnerable.78 The efficiency and effectiveness of the fiscal system itself, and the effect the system had on the local economy, became the criteria of the public good, replacing older notions of status and honor. Work on the Languedoc Estates has developed along similar lines. Michel Perronet argues that the new role of the Estates as a principal creditor of the monarchy reinforced the power of the local nobility and their capacity to extract surplus product from the peasantry. He argues that the crisis of 1789 was provoked by the costs of servicing the royal debt, which put the rentiers represented in the provincial estates in an impossible bind.79 Increasing royal debt, from which elites profited, could only be achieved by allocating surplus extracted from the peasantry away from rents and dues, from which they also benefited and, more important, which were the basis of noble power in the province. The crisis drove a wedge between Crown and nobility, the alliance that had constituted the ancien régime, and so alienated support from the Estates on the part of local elites. Money, seen from this perspective, was not an instrument through which signals about value, opportunities for investment, or collective decisions could be transmitted but a means of domination for the accumulation of social power.80 Stephen Miller’s work substantially revises Peronnet’s argument.81 Miller argues that the crisis of the 1780s did not turn the elite against itself. Rather, the exigencies of controlling a complicated system of public finance had already transformed the system of governance. The king’s agents and the Estates’ executive agents (syndics généraux) helped peasant communities obtain rulings from the royal council to quash the judgments of local courts and to protect village revenues from the claims of privileged landlords. Royal rulings stripped lords of honorific rights and did away with the humiliating shadow of seignorial suzerainty so that competent villagers would take part in local government and improve the administration. Just as in Burgundy, in the Languedoc the system of public credit endogenously generated new standards of public rationality that had direct effects on governance. 34

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Concentrating on the social incidence of taxation, the returns from debt service, or the opposed interests of royal servants and nobles obscures the social and cultural effects of changes in the fiscal system. The pattern of change within the fiscal system illustrates that it cannot be understood as a mechanism for extracting surplus value from peasants and artisans, a zero-sum competition between rent seekers.82 Crucially, even though the economy expanded in the late eighteenth century, elites did not use their control of the state, and capacity to charge political rents, to capture the profits of that growth through increases in tax. Increases in the tax burden itself were not significant enough to drive change.83 The total tax burden on the Languedoc did rise, from six million livres to ten million livres, during the Seven Years’ War; however, with the exception of the intermittent imposition of the vingtième, it remained roughly stable from 1763 until the Revolution.84 The province was able to accept extraordinary impositions in emergency situations, such as its contribution to paying down the costs of the American War of Independence in 1783, largely funded by doubling the vingtième for that year, but such rises were temporary.85 The really striking change in the fiscal system was the rapid reorientation of tax receipts in the province away from direct payment to the monarchy and toward debt service.86 Debt service, obviously, went up as debt was issued. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War the monarchy could find buyers for rentes only at rates of up to 10 percent, while the province could issue debt at 5 percent. Raising money through the provinces was a rational response to the monarchy’s circumstances, even if it carried the risk of compromising the monarchy’s political control. The nature of public credit changed in the late eighteenth century. The first two periods in which the Estates issued debt in support of the Crown were periods of civil and military crisis: the aftermath of the collapse of the Mississippi Company and support for the Seven Years’ War.87 In 1770 the province floated two loans, totaling nineteen million livres. Those issuances did not respond to a crisis but instead supported the monarchy’s development strategy. No further loans were floated until 1776, when the province issued another eighteen million livres in debt, and the pace at which debt was issued picked up from that point, so that by 1783 the province had raised sixty-seven million livres worth of debt for the monarchy. The province’s 35

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table 2 Repayments schedule of the public debt of the Languedoc, 1783–1789 (in livres) Year

Debt outstanding

Payments

Debt retired

Debt remaining

Total taille

1789

72,032,705

9,428,644

3,746,443

68,237,753

10,617,093

1786

58,654,378

8,789,046

5,786,720

53,269,574

[omitted]

1783

41,141,804

5,560,000

3,357,729

37,725,520

9,638,990

credit was not threatened by this weight of debt, because to that point the repayment schedule, 10 percent of the principal every year, was being honored. Twenty-six million livres of the sixty-seven million issued since 1770 had already been repaid by 1783. Because the province controlled both the imposition and the collection of the taxation that supported debt, it guaranteed repayment, and that guarantee was reinforced because the officers of the Estates made up many of the subscribers to its debt. As is clear from table 2, the situation changed after 1783. Between 1783 and 1789 debt service moved from being the predominant charge on the taille to almost completely absorbing it. Royal indebtedness toward the province became unmanageable by 1789. At that moment the total tax receipts of the province still covered debt service, but only at the cost of slowing down the rate at which debt was retired, imperiling the credit of the province and the subscribers. The archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne, wrote to Calonne, the contrôleur-général, in 1787, responding to his scheme to consolidate existing debt and pay it off through a sinking fund, rather than continuing to pay off the capital at a fixed rate, to explain why this could not work. Brienne accepted that the scheme addressed the needs of the central state, but he pointed out the effect would be to destroy the monarchy’s credit in the province, and by extension the credit of the estates, because it would create a capital famine. By frustrating the expectations of financiers who had anticipated a steady return on their original investments, a reorganization of the monarchy’s debts in the province would destabilize the entire credit system.88 36

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One exit from this squeeze would seem to have been obvious: raising taxes. In principle royal borrowing did not threaten, but rather enhanced, the capacity of elites to capture resources.89 Local elites subscribed the royal loans, and those debts were secured against taxes. There was therefore no conflict between the credit demands of the central state and the needs of local elites, because royal debt offered a way to charge rents on local sources of wealth, but indirectly, without direct imposition by the Estates, to the benefit of officeholders and pension holders. Royal debt allowed local elites to capture tax revenues and therefore allowed them to increase their income without increasing the fees and other charges they could levy in the service of the state. Increasing royal debt meant that less money left the province over the long run as it gave local elites greater control of tax revenues. In provinces with representative bodies that could manage the imposition of taxes, and effectively farm them themselves, royal debt increased local political leverage. In a province like the Languedoc, 1789 could not be a crisis of rentiers, state or elite, each struggling for control of a fixed body of resources. Increases in royal indebtedness, at least in the Languedoc, could have offered opportunities to capture resources for local elites abetted by the monarchy. Increased taxation would have eventually strengthened local elites. If the Estates of Languedoc merely represented a rentier elite, there would have been no crisis in 1789. In fact the crisis was of a different kind, it was a crisis of allocation. Raising taxes to service more royal debt would have reallocated the public credit resources of the province, and this was politically and economically unacceptable. The monarchy was only one of the four major state or state-like actors seeking credit in the Languedoc, and the monarchy had to compete with the province, the sénéchaussées, the dioceses, and even local communities. The political difficulty created by increased royal demands was that local public credit was supporting economic strategy. All of these levels of governance had directed significant resources toward strategies of development. The consolidated accounts of expenditure produced by the Estates every year reveal the way in which they used provincial resources.90 These accounts specified the amounts spent on particular budget lines, everything from the hundreds of thousands of livres paid for fourrages, fodder for the royal cavalry, to the thousand livres a year spent on compiling a 37

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history of the province.91 From these highly detailed lists we can reconstruct the spending priorities of the Estates. Spending by the Estates fell into four broad categories, military, emoluments, bebt service, and public goods. Emoluments cover both the sums directly awarded to officers, usually as montres, and royal impositions on officiers paid by the Estates, and so transferred to general taxation. The categories evolved from the Estates’ own accounting practice. In the Estates’ accounts for 1756 there were no categorical distinctions and the line items were jumbled together, but by 1762 the accounts were categorized under rentes et pensions, which covered debt service, and appointments, gages et gratifications, and abonnements, which covered emoluments. Within these categories there were some ambiguities. Did a pension for the former inspector of manufactures count as an emolument? These categories also included some military spending, primarily on the militia, and public goods, such as support for the société royale de science and the salaries of the provincial corps of engineers. The nature of debt service in the province also changed in the period as old debts, largely derived from the consolidation of diocesan and local debt, were retired and new debts, on the royal account but also for public works, took their place. The category of travaux publics detailed work on the province’s road and canal network and dépenses ordinaires et extraordinaires were mostly taken up with military expenditures.92 Finally, emoluments included direct payments to officiers and payment of fees to the monarchy on behalf of classes of officiers. These sums reflected the money spent directly by the Estates, not the sums raised for royal taxation by the taille, capitation, and vingtième. When we aggregate the spending from these categories we find that it grew by 178 percent from 1750 to 1789, and that there were significant and interesting changes between and within those figures that illustrate the changing nature of public finance in the Languedoc in the eighteenth century (table 3). Already in 1756 the province spent almost 373,618 livres on public goods. The money was primarily used for canal improvement and roadbuilding but also for salaries for public officials.93 The province was capable of mobilizing resources quickly and efficiently. For instance, again in 1756, it set up a coastguard system, including a chain of signal- and watchtowers and capitaineries at Sète, Narbonne, Beziers, Agde, Mauguio, 38

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table 3 Expenditure of the Estates of the Languedoc, 1756–1786 (in livres) Year

Debt

Emoluments

Military

Public works

Total

1756

677,810

217,318

431,896

373,618

1,700,642

1762

757,819

314,896

633,977

436,962

2,143,654

1774

1,223,963

401,197

505,145

1,051,865

3,182,170

1781

1,049,460

428,214

742,892

1,186,204

3,406,770

1786

867,555

433,326

995,017

938,004

3,033,902

and Aigues Mortes.94 Overall the province redirected resources away from servicing its own debts, and providing benefits directly to elites, and toward support of the military and investment in public goods. In the years of peace in the 1770s every other commitment gave way to investment, and military spending increased only in response to the needs of the American War. The scale of the province’s commitment to public goods was transformed as the absolute value of the spending on roads, harbors, and other infrastructure tripled between 1756 and 1781. Over thirty years the province systematically constructed a road, canal, and harbor system and employed its own corps of engineers, founded in 1741, to oversee the design and strategic development of the transport infrastructure. In 1781 alone it had twenty-six bridge-building projects in hand.95 In 1782 the Toulouse bureau of the corps had fifteen inspectors and sub-inspectors involved in developing the transport network.96 The initiative for these major schemes increasingly came from the Estates themselves and not from the central state. In documents prepared for the Estates in 1754 the instructions from the Conseil du roi laid out the anticipated expenditure on public works for the coming year, including thirty-nine thousand livres for the upkeep of jetties at Sète and twelve thousand livres for a new mole at Agde.97 In 1765 the province took over responsibility for planning all public works and even set the standard size and gauges for roads in the province, six toises for a provincial road, five for a senéchausée, four for a 39

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diocesan route, and 3.5 for communal roads.98 In 1767 the Estates, at the prompting of the archbishop of Narbonne, created four new commissions, on extraordinary business, agricultural improvement, manufactures, and accounts, to manage the quantity of work for which they were now responsible.99 The Estates’ role in political economy went beyond fiscal policy and the provision of public works to the politically explosive issue of the management of the grain trade. In 1767 they altered the conditions for the cancelation of grain exports, by pointing out that prices at Beziers, the market used as a reference point to judge scarcity, were always higher than the average because of the high quality of the local supply. In support of the principle of “free foreign export, . . . which had been an aspiration of the Estates,” it proposed to set a new, higher, price level that would allow more room for a true market in grain.100 By 1786 the province directly employed thirteen engineers to plan and oversee the transport network and had extended its commitment to publicly funded development to support horse breeding, silk manufacture, and the Chambres de Commerce in Montpellier and Toulouse.101 It also spent twenty thousand livres to support academies, schools, and other establishments of public education (figure 1).

figure 1. Percentage expenditure of the Estates of the Languedoc by category, 1756–1786 40

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By 1781 expenditure on public goods had risen to become the biggest item on the province’s accounts. Even more significantly, the level of debt service by the province fell significantly, and the direct transfers to elites in the form of various kinds of political rents stayed stable. Even as the monarchy was losing control of its borrowing, the province was managing to lower its own debt while simultaneously increasing the amount it committed directly to public goods. The Estates managed to reduce the absolute amounts paid out as “gratifications extraordinaires” to royal servants, from 130,388 livres in 1753 to 87,735 in 1789 and also to restrict the rise in the expenses associated with the Estates to 12,800 livres, from 220,000 to 232,800, in the same period.102 Obviously the clerical, merchant, landed, and official elites of the Languedoc had not been transformed into selfless guardians of the public interest. The change in the nature and extent of public credit had instead transformed them into self-interested guardians of the public interest. The creditors of the province acquired a vested interest in the economic health of the province, and in consequence they were willing to restrict and restrain their own ability directly to extract revenue from the province in order to enhance the capacity of the province to support a credit-based economy. The same transformation toward a fiscal system organized around the support of public credit and the pursuit of growth took place at the other levels of governance. If we look at the amounts of diocesan debt in 1780 we see that even this lowest level of governance was mobilizing significant sums of credit in pursuit of development.103 The dioceses were in many cases pursuing their own development strategies by raising money for public works and even education as well, and in some cases had to be restrained if they asserted too much autonomy. In 1765 the province had to set limits on the amount of money that diocese could borrow for road construction without authorization (figure 2).104 The most indebted dioceses, Montpellier, Nîmes, Uzes, and Alliers, were, unsurprisingly, in the regions of the province with the greatest density of textile manufacture and metalworking. These were areas where there was greatest need for infrastructure investment and so had taken on the greatest burden. The direct payments to tax officials made up a relatively small proportion of expenses. The contrast with Toulouse, which was more dominated by nobles and officials, is striking. While Toulouse 41

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figure 2. Diocesan debt, 1780

carried considerably less public debt than these regions, it allowed its tax collectors to charge more for their services than any other diocese, besides the impoverished Le Puy. Le Puy and Mende allowed tax collectors to extract more rents from the local population, in absolute terms, than nearly every other diocese. Where elites had not made the transition to a new way of extracting political rent through control of the credit system they continued to impose a heavy burden directly on the populace. Where public credit had been used to pursue development the debts were larger, 42

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but exploitation of offices had been curbed. And even in the dioceses that were still run on an extractive rather than developmental model there was change. Alongside the fees that it approved in its meeting in 1788, and the funds for building and maintaining the diocesan roads, the diocese of Toulouse also put aside money for a free course on midwifery.105 It also successfully retired the 5 percent debt, contracted new credit at 4 percent, and considered a bypass around the town of Sainte-Sulpice-la-Pointe for the road from Montauban to Castres to save the money that would be incurred in widening the route through the town.106 The dioceses and communities were the two lowest levels of governance in the province. Between the twenty-three dioceses and the province itself were three senéchausées, Toulouse, Carcassonne, and Beaucaire-Nîmes, which also raised money to address collective tasks through the public credit system. Examining this intermediate level of governance brings out the transformation in the nature of the system of public credit with clarity. The Sénéchaussée of Carcassonne, covering approximately a third of the province, had expenses of 259,567 livres in 1787.107 Of this amount only 40,504 livres were directed to servicing the debt of 851,584 livres, and the bulk of the money, 215,383 livres, was applied to the costs of public works. The lion’s share of this money was spent on the transport network, four main roads linking Albi, Castres, Saint-Pons, Béziers, Trebes, a spur from Mirepoix to the main route, and a crossing route from Agde through Pézenas to Lodève (table 4).

table 4 Expenditure of the Sénéchausée of Carcassone by category, 1755–1787 (in livres) Year

Debt service

Public works

Accumulated debt

1787

40,534

215,383

851,584

1779

30,748

220,459

760,919

1772

29,138

164,799

724,919

1755

20,576

78,700

[omitted]

43

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Even more strategic was the campaign of bridge building. The provincial engineers had plans and funding for nine bridges in the Sénéchausée of Carcassonne, which allowed mountain communities to connect with the plains, and another three thousand livres were set aside for minor routes between villages. This program of public works developed in parallel to the projects of the Estates and complemented them. Taxation was not directly redistributing income from the peasantry to the nobility, bourgeoisie, church, and state, or at least this was not the only effect of taxation. Visitors, such as Arthur Young, who saw only the main trunk roads and wondered why such excellent engineering—“these ways are superb, even to a folly”—was employed for routes that did not seem to carry enormous quantities of traffic, missed the systematic nature of the building program.108 Taxes were supporting the use of credit to pursue collective goals and through investment in infrastructure were lowering the risk involved in economic experiment for everyone. The change in the way the province used money promoted significant political innovation. The source of this innovation was, paradoxically, rooted in a traditional concern to protect the tax base. The possibility that uncontrolled local borrowing could undermine the capacity of the villages to sustain the national tax burden and the ability of the state to meet its own needs troubled both the local representative of the king, the intendant, and the Estates themselves. Communities had the ability to borrow to fund buildings and works, such as town halls, churches, walls for a cemetery, and to dig a well, but they had to have the intendant’s permission to raise such loans and had to put up all contracts to competitive tender.109 To protect the tax base the Estates created a joint commission with the intendant in 1734 to investigate and oversee communal debt and to control expenses. The commission tried to sponsor a thoroughgoing reform of local administration. By 1739 it had investigated and verified the debts of all twenty-three civil dioceses and 2,800 communities in the province.110 It also reorganized the communities into seventeen classes and regulated the fees payable to officers. After this reorganization, when it might have been thought that the commission had achieved its mission, it remained in existence and tried to restrain customary impositions by local seigneurs for which there was no legal basis. Even more controversially, it campaigned 44

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to abolish payments for redemption of seigneurial rights for the use of common land. Minimizing the expenses of the communities often conflicted with the creative efforts taken by communities to give themselves new charitable and educational institutions. The royal authorities in Montpellier were disturbed, in the 1750s, that communities had turned the schools that had been created in 1698 and 1724 to convert Protestant children to Catholicism into parochial primary schools funded by taxation.111 The efforts of the intendant to close the schools were blocked by the bishops, who saw them as an instrument of confessionalization, and by the local communities that valued the schools and were willing to pay for them. In the civil diocese of Agde alone, in 1751, sixteen communities were supporting parish schools, and thirteen of those were providing schooling for girls as well as boys.112 The commission also found that the consuls of the communities had been engaged in creative bookkeeping: “The revenues from the community patrimony which should have been used to lower taxes, were not returning as much they should, and have been used to pay for ordinary expenses.”113 In effect communal property was being used as income as well as the security and means of meeting loan obligations. The direct administrative role of the commission was important in sustaining the internal coherence of a fiscal system that could issue debt from so many different entities, but it was an unremarkable element of governance under the monarchy. The manner in which it became a theater in which the Estates and the intendant could negotiate the changing political economy of the province was more innovative. The commission was used as an institution that aligned the various elements of governance in the province. Negotiation was not always a consensual process. In principle the commission was made up of the intendant, the military governor, three syndics, four representatives of the Estates, of whom two had to be from the Third Estate, and two royal nominees, but in 1756 the Estates succeeded in having two of the nominees of the intendant, SaintPriest, excluded from the commission.114 Directly attacking royal control in this way was unusual. In most cases the process of accommodation to the increase in autonomy for the province was smooth. Membership of the commission remained very stable. Major officers, such as the officiers de finance from Toulouse and Montpellier, were represented alongside 45

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provincial notables, such as the mayors of Montpellier, Buillarget, and Cambacères, one of the syndics from Narbonne.115 The commission of 1734 operated as an executive commission, gathering the threads of governance to coordinate the fiscal policy of the province. Public credit in the Languedoc had become a true system, one through which the province constituted itself physically as a space for commerce and ideally as a community using credit to communicate need and opportunity. The Estates managed public credit and guaranteed its integrity. Participation in a world of extensive public credit changed the behavior of political elites. The concept of the public good slowly became identified with a program of development that benefited the elites and the people of the province. Elites controlled the bulk of the capital invested in public projects, but the population had opportunities to benefit from both investment and outcomes. The political role of negotiating interests was taken on by the Estates and in novel institutions, such as the commission, that managed the relationship between the province and the monarchy. Coherent norms of rationality governed the entire system, and decisions about money, about investment and debt, were collectively understood. Public debt in the Languedoc was made virtuous, in the eighteenthcentury sense of directed to the public interest, and rational, in our contemporary sense of systemic and predictable.

Turning Debts into Millstones: The Languedoc and Revolution The financial crisis of the monarchy in the 1780s did not provoke a credit crisis in the Languedoc, it provoked a political crisis. The calling of the Estates-General and the creation of the National Assembly transformed the context for public debt. Just who would be responsible for the debts of the old pays d’états was very much in question. Deputies at the National Assembly from the old pays d’élections, who had not enjoyed independent political institutions and so had not been beneficiaries of the system of public finance, argued strongly that the debt should not be nationalized, since their regions had carried a higher tax burden without enjoying the benefits of independent control of public credit. For them now to redeem the debts of the provinces that had avoided those impositions would be unjust. The response of the commission de liquidation in 46

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Montpellier to this proposition was telling. It argued that if the departments of the ci-devant Languedoc had to meet the costs of the debt of the old province, then they in turn should be exempted from taxation that supported future public works in the rest of the country.116 The debt had been accumulated creating the infrastructure that, ideally, the nation would now create across the territory of France; it was not the outcome of “feudal” irrationality and imposition. That argument grew out of ideas that had already been in circulation in the province. An anonymous pamphleteer had argued in 1788 that the exemption from taille of noble lands only extended to the don gratuit. All the taxation supporting the debts incurred for public works should be universally imposed, since the public works are universal benefits.117 All parties in the Languedoc understood the relationship between public credit, taxation, and development. The Estates mounted a similarly robust defense of their stewardship of the financial health of the province against domestic critics. The crisis opened the door to questions about the development policy the province had been pursuing. An anonymous pamphleteer from Toulouse was incensed that the tax imposition in his diocese had gone up fourfold since 1750.118 The cause, he felt, was the unnecessary public works undertaken by the province and the diocese, a pure luxury, and in particular the credit instruments that financed them. Critics further concentrated their fire on the unrepresentative nature of the institution, the sums of money spent as fees and awarded as pensions, and the vast sums wasted through the inefficiency of its administration. The Estates waved aside the detail and pointed to the benefits they had provided: “How can the benefits of your administration be contested? How can one not be surprised on inspecting an administration as vast as the Languedoc, composed of more than three thousand communities and which includes whole provinces, attempt such extensive works, so varied and expensive, with such limited funds?”119 The criticisms of the Cour des comptes, which had ultimate responsibility to vouch for the integrity of the institutions of the province, could not be so easily waved away. Against that body they had to defend their legitimacy as well as the efficacy. The Cour des comptes argued the Estates were utterly unrepresentative; the bishops and barons sat by virtue of their offices and fiefs, the archbishop of Narbonne was permanent president and could not be challenged, and the standing body of syndics 47

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were unelected.120 To these issues of process and principle the lawyers added the criticism of the entire development and credit policy of the Estates; too much debt, too many public works, and “the loans on the King’s account, which absorb from day to day the resources of the King in the province.”121 The first line of defense against these attacks was the constitution of the province. The more interesting line taken by the Estates, however, was to argue that they were a genuinely public body open to public account. They pointed out that the Estates had been opening themselves to public scrutiny by publishing their debates since 1776 and they particularly invited scrutiny of the unified accounts they offered to the province.122 The commission that created those accounts thought they were more than a set of numbers: “When they are printed and made public, they will become a kind of code, where all the inhabitants of the Languedoc can discern all they need to know about the constitution and the administration of the province.”123 The Estates were confident that the structure and functioning of their conduct of public finance could withstand the scrutiny of the newly regenerated nation. Why, then, did the Estates not resist their dissolution and argue for their continuing utility? Why, in terms of the debate on finance, did the fall of the Bastille mean the triumph of la banque and international money markets, over la finance and the French elites who had financed the monarchy through its venal and representative institutions? There was clearly an environmental component to the challenge the Estates faced that challenged their capacity to guarantee the public good. The 1780s were characterized by a series of bad winters and diseases of cattle and sheep that put great stress on the local economy.124 Abolishing the Estates, however, was not an obvious response to problems of governance. The old director of Ponts et chaussées for the province wrote a pamphlet in 1790 pointing out that in order to maintain the transport infrastructure created by the Estates, some institution with oversight over the whole system across the territory of the old province would have to be created.125 The new departments would not have the perspective necessary to understand how the whole system hung together, or the resources to maintain it. The problems that could be anticipated did not take long to emerge. A proclamation was necessary later in 1790 to give all the local authorities along the route of the Languedoc Royal Canal the authority to remove all obstructions and to punish attempts to 48

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remove or destroy wood and stonework.126 It was not, however, the scale of the exogenous challenge or some collapse in confidence in their capacity to govern that undermined the will to govern of the Estates, it was the nature of their debts. For the Languedoc the prospect of a “virtuous bankruptcy” was terrifying because it might destroy much of the capital of the province. The province’s debts, which were assets when created at the behest of the monarch, could quickly become liabilities when the monarch’s sovereignty was questioned. In the new conditions of national sovereignty the debts owed to a “privileged assembly” were not sovereign debts; to become secure they had to become the nation’s. The argument that the Estates were an illegitimate privileged body threatened the security of every kind of property created by the Estates, and that argument was advanced. The Cour des comptes stated: “We are convinced that the constitution of the Estates has never been free of flaw; that as an ally of the tyranny of privileges, they have never properly defended, or even acknowledged the sacred rights of humanity, and that a century of reason and justice should no longer allow the spirit of the centuries of barbarism and superstition to survive.”127 The efficiency or inefficiency of the Estates’ management of public finance, or even their representative function, were beside the point in the context of such a thoroughgoing critique of privilege. Paradoxically, the evolution of the Estates, from a privileged to a governing body, allowed their members a clear understanding of the political and legal basis for a virtuous default. They could understand how a collective interest was more than an aggregation of individual interests. The president of the Estates, Arthur Dillon, archbishop of Narbonne, unwittingly developed the argument in his opening address to final meeting of the Estates in January 1789. He articulated the power the upcoming Estates would enjoy in terms that could have been endorsed by Sieyès: “The state holds an indestructible mortgage on the property it protects, and nothing can be given, or taken away, to the detriment of the fundamental principle of every society, that it has common interests to pursue, and in consequence common costs to bear.”128 At the point at which Dillon developed this view it was unimaginable to him that an institution as fundamental as the Estates of Languedoc could become an object of such a critique, but conditions swiftly changed. The fate of the assets of 49

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the church, redefined as biens nationaux and appropriated, illuminates how vulnerable forms of property that were derived from privilege could become. The abbé Maury, a conservative leader in the National Assembly, was very hostile to Necker, the French minister for finance, whom he saw as an agent of international speculators, and explained the vulnerability of creditors who were not seen as national creditors. Maury argued that by promising to honor state debt though the sale of asset-backed assignats, Necker was effectively expropriating one set of state debtors to satisfy others.129 Since the discount in the money markets on all royal debt was at least 10 percent, by promising to meet face value Necker was effectively guaranteeing a profit to the mostly foreign speculators who were buying the debt. The losers were the clergy, who were effectively turned into unsecured creditors for their salaries, and whose property was being expropriated and transferred, at a large discount. The nation lost as well, Maury thought, since the current discount of 3 percent on the value of the assignats increased even further the value of real assets that the state creditors would receive. Maury was a conservative, but he was not a reactionary. He was against the expropriation of the church on principle but understood that a unified national debt could be a resource, not by paying it off, but by servicing it and retiring some debt through a sinking fund. “I declare in a loud voice that the nation has sufficient resources to meet its debts with honor, as long as the King has under his control a public force and political authority, without which the taxes will never be paid.”130 Maury worried, however, that without an economic establishment similar to that in England, the understandable desire to make government spending more efficient could have destructive consequences. “When a popular government commits to economies, it usually commits cruel injustices, and judges its right to act only in terms of the limits of its power.”131 No regime in the Revolution managed to turn the public debt into an asset, either economic or political, and so reimbursement, rather than ownership of the debt, had to be the strategy of fiscal elites. As political crisis deepened, having existing provincial debt be acknowledged as part of the national debt became far more important to provincial elites than maintaining their independent administrative and political role driving the public policy of the province. Their fears were 50

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not unreasonable. As the financial situation of the state worsened across the revolutionary decade, the temptation to partial default on elements of the debt increased. As late as 1792 the National Assembly had to reiterate that the debts of the province, “having been deliberated on by themselves and then authorized by arrêts from the Conseil du Roi,” had to be honored according to conditions in the original contracts.132 The Estates had to be sacrificed to sustain the integrity of the fiscal system they had created. The conditions of the Revolution brought to an end the relationship between money and sovereignty that had allowed the Estates of Languedoc tremendous room for maneuver throughout the eighteenth century. The politics of the Revolution could not, however, unravel or dissolve the process of collective learning that the population of the province had undertaken through engagement with public credit. The province provided a theater within which new attitudes to risk and investment and new understandings of development and the public good had been rehearsed. The population, down to the most ordinary inhabitants, had learned how to manage the relationships between self-interest, risk, and development through the optic of an abstraction: public credit. The cognitive capacity necessary to articulate the relationship between the most concrete and local of circumstances and an abstract universal horizon was an invaluable asset enjoyed by the population. This story, of engagement with money, was only one of the narratives through which the province acquired an orientation toward the world. The same process of old institutions and structures providing the seedbed for new values and orientations was replicated in the knowledge institutions of the province. Ideas could be as transformative as money for those who handled them. The institutions of the province did not survive the revolution, but the public culture they had incubated survived those institutions.

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Just how have truth and social power spoken to each other? That question, which seems so simple, has become one of the most debated topics in the social sciences. In the aftermath of the collapse in authority of positivist models, scholars became highly sensitized to the implication of strategies of inquiry and interpretation with strategies of control.1 Even in areas of the social sciences that did not commit to discourse as a master category, the suspicion that the claim to a form of truth, or knowledge, entirely distinct from power, was in fact nothing more than a mystification had explosive consequences. The history of science in its many forms has been transformed.2 In turn, the challenge to an easy universalism in the sciences has been foundational to the emergence of global intellectual history.3 The philosophical and methodological challenges of even the most mediated and subtle kinds of constructivism create dual fundamentalist temptations, toward a self-refuting reductivism or an overstated idealism.4 The “strong program,” associated with the Edinburgh University Science Studies Unit, pursued a wholehearted sociology of science and argued that the truth-value of particular scientific ideas was itself social in origin, thus collapsing the discovery/validation 52

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dichotomy.5 The scandalized reaction of practicing scientists to the attack on their claims to represent reality led to the outbreak of the “science wars” that are with us still.6 These theoretical disputes have had direct effects on specific research programs. Highly charged debates around the Enlightenment have driven philosophers and historians to overstated characterizations of the potential for either emancipation or domination in the world of knowledge. Happily, despite the unhelpful projection of a binary politics of knowledge into the field, more fine-grained and local studies of cognitive change have succeeded in analyzing knowledge claims as a particular kind of claim, with distinct features, and have avoided the parallel traps of seeing all social and political content as a kind of contamination or any claim to independent knowledge as a form of domination.7 Studies of the sciences as practiced beyond Europe have been particularly sensitive to the complex and often unexpected consequences of scientific practice. Work on the role and influence of Joseph Banks in creating the world of the life sciences from his base at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and from his private collection at Soho Square in London, illuminates the complexity of practice. As Vanessa Smith explains, some accounts of Banks saw his scientific practice as an almost pure accumulation of power, the creation of a center of calculation.8 Latterly, however, scholars have illuminated the extent of collaboration and communication in the world Banks constructed. The meaning of objects and botanical samples was created with culturally and geographically dispersed participants, and within norms and rules that constrained all the participants. Banks may have held a strategic position in the assemblage that was late Georgian botany, but he was subject to its norms as much as any South Asian collector.9 Social power and knowledge created an assemblage, but they were not reducible one to the other. Working backward from the evident existence of global networks of communication, and from the evidence of effective collective action across time and space, scholars such as Andrew Sartori have developed a compelling neorealist understanding of the specificity of knowledge claims in global intellectual history.10 Sartori argues that intermediaries and other go-betweens had to hybridize quasi-universals to create the conditions for global knowledge. In his core case of Bengal he establishes 53

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how the concept “culture” took on this load-bearing global function.11 Intercultural communication is made possible by the category of culture that frames it. Curiously, this account of knowledge aligns the “intermediary” or “spokesperson” offered by Latour as the bridge between science and politics (or “nature” and “culture”) with Habermas’s idea of “philosophy as stand-in and interpreter.”12 Knowledge in both these accounts is not just another social practice but a very specific practice that comprises social elements and consequences. More interesting yet is the insight that participation in new worlds of knowledge can have socially transformative effects. Participation in a field of knowledge could transform the social and political relations between the actors in that field. Neither colony nor metropole, the Languedoc has not been well integrated into discourse studies or the history of knowledge. In any case the “provincial” is a difficult space to map with the tools we have to hand. Scholars such as Arnold Thackery, Ian Inkster, and Larry Stewart have illustrated how provincial scientific communities in England contributed to the creation of a distinctive provincial culture and economy, but to this point the provinces have not been seen as a conceptually useful space to capture the work of mundane or everyday reason.13 Space is a vital category in the history of colonial science, and class and gender have both been crucial to the work on artisans and amateurs. Old assumptions about function and social role reassert themselves, however, in work on and in Europe, in particular in work on the provinces. If anything provincial Europeans had greater room for agency than participants in colonial science precisely because the space they occupied sat within the imagined boundaries of European civilization. Through close archival work we can look through institutional continuity to recover the way that new practices of reason and forms of value were generated. When we aggregate the groups and individuals involved in intellectual communication and exchange in and through the Languedoc in the eighteenth century, a surprisingly dense and active network emerges. It is also a curiously elastic space; the shape of the intellectual Languedoc that comes out of this project of mapping does not coincide with the boundaries of the historic province but extends well beyond it. Once we see how knowledge and truth claims were embedded within French ancien régime society we can begin to understand how new kinds of authority 54

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claims within the world of knowledge, even when articulated by figures endowed with social power, could radically alter social and political relations. An incremental, local, knowledge revolution paralleled the industrious revolution.

The University of Medicine The most important institution of learning in the eighteenth-century Languedoc, up to its dissolution in 1793, remained the University of Montpellier, in particular its renowned medical faculty.14 The university’s prestige drew students and scholars to the Languedoc, and the student population formed the nucleus for the wider intellectual community. One of the earliest foundations in Europe, the university had emerged from the cathedral schools in the twelfth century and was recognized as a corporate body by a bull issued by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289. Regulations for medical teaching had already existed from 1220.15 The faculty was one of the liveliest centers of medical teaching in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. Inspired by its contacts with Arab centers of learning the medical school appointed its first demonstrator in anatomy in 1376.16 Richier de Belleval created the first botanical garden in France in the promenade du Peyrou, just outside the city center, in 1593 and established the leading position of Montpellier in botany.17 That garden would prove to be a particularly innovative space and open up the university to communities beyond its own students and scholars. The university continued to be flexible and innovative well into the eighteenth century. In the early modern period it realigned its central intellectual commitments twice. Having been one of the first centers to abandon Galen in favor of Hippocrates, and having become a bastion of Paracelsianism in the seventeenth century, the university became a sponsor of vitalism, the intellectual competition to the dominant iatromechanist medical theory in the 1740s.18 The university continued to contribute to the development of medicine even as research activity in that field began to center on Paris. The first contribution of François Boissier de Sauvages to the local scientific society, after his return from study in Leiden, was a project to “to classify all the diseases, in the manner of a botanist.”19 His developed work in nosology in the 1730s and 1740s 55

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hybridized the typological strategies of Carl Linnaeus with Montpellier’s medical tradition to create a new method of diagnosis and disease classification.20 A surgical college was added to the medical university in 1741, lending academic luster to what had traditionally been an auxiliary specialization. Montpellier graduates, especially de Bordeu and the chemist Gabriel-François Venel, who contributed 673 articles, were enthusiastic contributors to the early volumes of the Encyclopédie.21 The university, unlike many others in the eighteenth century, was not a bastion of conservatism or an intellectual backwater. The university played a social role as well as fulfilling an intellectual agenda. It was, as Elizabeth Williams emphasizes, a civic institution and an economic asset to the province.22 From that perspective it was effectively a privileged legal body, recognized by the monarchy and taken up by the same issues of clientage and lineage as any other corps.23 The elites who staffed the university used the same techniques of negotiation and collaboration with the monarchy and its agents, and they instrumentalized the university in family promotion strategies, in exactly the same manner that lawyers, merchants, or nobles used their corporate bodies.24 Venality and survivence, legal capture of positions by family members, were the rentseeking strategies that were deployed, but we should not transpose anachronistic ideas about corruption to an era that often saw lineage and family connections as positive contributions to the quality of its institutions. Jean Astruc’s history of Montpellier’s medical faculty celebrated the family connections that had dominated the university: “Illustrious men leave behind them a suite of men who are more illustrious again. This noble emulation, called esprit de corps, makes us ashamed to fall below the glory of our predecessors.”25 Montpellier doctors were well integrated into the structure of the monarchy. Graduates of the Montpellier faculty controlled key institutions in Paris up to the early eighteenth century. The Montpellier doctor Guy de La Brosse founded the Jardin du roi in 1635. The garden presented a site where Montpellier graduates could offer courses in chemistry, anatomy, and botany under royal patronage and in defiance of the monopoly of medical education claimed by the Paris medical faculty.26 This particular independent foothold was compromised when Buffon acquired the directorship of the garden in 1739, but the long-standing nexus between the 56

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Montpellier medical faculty, the court, and Paris continued to develop. Antoine-Joseph Desailler d’Argenville recruited the subscribers for the plates for the second edition of his Conchyliologie through the Paris network of Montpellier graduates.27 François de La Peyronie pursued parallel social and professional goals through the Montpellier medical network in Paris. From a less prestigious surgical, rather than medical, family, he was highly successful in Montpellier. He was a founder member of the Montpellier scientific society in 1706, a lecturer in anatomy in the university, and surgeon-general in the Hôtel Dieu. Despite this eminence the lure of Paris was too strong, and he moved there in 1714, was ennobled in 1720 for his care of Louis XV, and was appointed chirugien du roi in 1736, succeeding Georges Mareschal. In 1731 he and Mareschal had persuaded the king to sponsor a new Académie royale de chirurgie, laying the foundations for the preeminence of Paris in anatomy for the rest of the eighteenth century.28 De La Peyronie’s later career centered on battles with the Paris medical faculty to create room in the medical world for his newly professionalized model of surgery, exemplifying a new model of social power centered on expertise rather than lineage.29 The most powerful medico-social nexus in Montpellier was organized by the Chicoyneau family. Already well embedded in the university, and related to Richier de Belleval, the family saw an opportunity to consolidate its mutually reinforcing positions at court and at the university when a group of doctors led by François Chicoyneau demonstrated their usefulness to the monarchy in controlling the outbreak of the plague in Marseilles in 1720. They achieved this success despite the fact that Chicoyneau rejected the contagion theory of the disease. Another servant of the Crown from the Languedoc, and ally of the family, Dominique Senes, an engineer and captain of marines, designed and controlled the cordon sanitaire that localized the outbreak. In the aftermath of their success the contrôleur-général des finances, Le Peletier de La Houssaye, directed the intendant, Bernage, that his majesty desired he “furnish their families with everything that the present financial circumstances permit, and to assure them that the King will graciously grant them rewards proportional to their service.”30 In 1730 Chicoyneau’s father-in-law Pierre Chirac was appointed premier médecin du roi, a post to which Chicoyneau succeeded him in 1732. Chicoyneau held the post until his death in 1752, 57

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leaving the chancellorship of Montpellier in the hands of his survivancier and grandson. The Chicoyneau connection to the court further opened up the Paris market for medical services to Montpellier graduates. Court doctors had the right to practice in Paris without obtaining an expensive Paris medical degree, and as late as 1789 twenty-six of the forty-nine doctors in the royal medical household had been trained in Montpellier.31 Elizabeth Williams argues that Théophil de Bordeu’s vitalism, the medical philosophy associated with Montpellier, was elaborated as an identity for Montpellier doctors at court rather than as a new ideal for medical education at Montpellier.32 The university was a site that could project prominent members into positions of real influence at the heart of the state and society. Social power was important, and the university generated social power, but social authority and intellectual authority did not entirely coincide. The misalignment of social prominence with competence could create absurdities. Students were very perceptive of threats to the quality and effectiveness of their education. Samuel Auguste David Tissot, who attended the university from 1745 to 1749, was highly critical of the curriculum and the teaching.33 The students organized their own supplementary courses in their pensionnats, and that was where some of the reformers in the university first got the chance to teach. This situation, where the most effective teaching and research could be done outside the formal structures of the university, was not unusual in Montpellier. Pierre-Joseph Amoreux learned all his botany from his housemates Pierre Cusson and Antoine Gouan.34 Cusson and Gouan went on to become demonstrators in the botanical garden, standing in for Imbert, despite having cowritten a pseudonymous guide to lectures by Imbert satirizing his botanical ignorance.35 The system of survivance, and the rigid allocation of particular tasks to particular chairs, meant that professors often were not assigned to teach their competence. As Amoreux explained, “Several of the professors were not in the position that best used their personal talents, they had to give the courses attached to the chairs they were appointed to. For example, M. Fizes, a good practitioner, gave the chemistry course; M. Venal who had a fine reputation as a chemist did not give the course, he was in charge of the internal medicine course.”36 Venal got around this inconvenience by teaching a 58

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private course in chemistry along with the pharmacist Montet, “and we owe to them the expansion of the taste for chemistry in Montpellier and several reputable chemists.”37 The university sustained a body of scholars and students and gave them official recognition through the awarding of degrees. Much of their actual education was provided by various kinds of private initiative. The most vocal adherents of challenge to the dominant groups in the university in the later eighteenth century would all be students of the internationally recognized François Bossier de Sauvages. Looking back from the 1790s the agronomist and botanist Jean Jacques Brunet explained that a nexus came together in Montpellier in the 1750s made up of Louis Gérard, who was back in his native Provence working with his father; Philibert Commerson, who was on the point of beginning his botanical voyages; and Pierre Cusson, who had just returned from his unsuccessful trip to the Balearics.38 Gouan would later join them and become their most visible spokesperson. They would develop their critique of the medical faculty precisely on the grounds of competence and expertise. The comparison made by Étienne-Hyacinthe de Ratte, a physicist, between Sauvages and his colleague Gerald Fitzgerald in Fitzgerald’s eulogy before the Société des sciences developed a contrast between a competent, but intellectually moribund, timeserver and a genuine botanist.39 Fitzgerald had died two years before, ending the arrangement made in 1740 whereby he shared botanical teaching in the university with Sauvages.40 Éloges, particularly scientific eulogies, were not innocent or sentimental phenomena. Rather, they offered opportunities to identify scientific traditions and to define new priorities as much as they were opportunities to memorialize the deceased. Ratte’s criticism of Fitzgerald in his eulogy was not just a personal attack but a criticism of a tradition.41 In 1740, on the death of Chicoyneau fils, the son and survivancier of François Chicoyneau, Sauvages and Fitzgerald were given the duty of lecturing on botany in alternate years. Each filled the role well, though in different ways, which gives you an idea of their respective capacities. M. de Sauvages is filled with a strong passion for botany, loves that science for itself and seeks to communicate his passion to others. He explained his ideas at length, as he continues to do today, about the different methods created by the most famous authors. 59

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A name for a plant never escapes him and he has always taught botany not just through its relevance to medicine, but in the way it might be taught by a natural philosopher, seeking to uncover all the mysteries of nature. M. Fitzgerald restricted himself within more narrow limits, and was much less animated by curiosity. Any plant whose uses were unknown, or at least in question, did not interest him. On the other hand he knew what to say about those that were most generally used in medical practice, describing at length their properties. For him botany always went along with medicine and in fact the medical content was often more evident.42

Effectively Fitzgerald was being accused of not really teaching, or even knowing, botany, while a corresponding portrait of a proper botanist, theoretically sophisticated and empirically astute, was drawn around Sauvages. Fitzgerald’s death gave Sauvages control of the botanical garden, though not of the chair of botany, and the opportunity to propose himself for Fitzgerald’s vacant chair. His own chair, which he held from 1734, had its income alienated in favor of Marcot, premier médecin du roi.43 The interregnum threatened the university’s controlling interest. The succeeding Chicoyneau was only fifteen years old, and, despite the best efforts of his mother and the brevet in his favor dating from 1740, the intendant, SaintPriest, was determined to promote Sauvages.44 Saint-Priest succeeded in controlling the budget, and though he was not successful in separating the chair of botany from the chancellorship, he did succeed in having Sauvages made permanent head of the garden. The ultimately successful opportunity to exploit the tension between patronage and competence was opened up by the end of the hegemony of the Chicoyneaus in the university. While they continued to generate male progeny their hold on the university could not be definitively loosened, but when the last François Chicoyneau died in 1758 his replacement in the accumulated posts of chancellor, professor of botany, and professor of medicine, Jean-François Imbert, became highly controversial. Imbert was imposed on the university by the monarchy through the patronage of his father-in-law Jean-Baptise Sénac, premier médécin du roi, who had no Montpellier connections.45 Imbert’s imposition revealed an unnoticed side effect of the direct connection to royal patronage; it opened up opportunities, but it also made the local institution vulnerable to interference from 60

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Versailles. Imbert was highly unpopular for this reason if no other, but the campaign against him was conducted not on the basis that his leverage was generated from outside the local circuits of power but rather that he was incompetent in botany, one of the main subjects of his post. Imbert’s position depended on patronage, and Imbert overestimated how powerful patronage and unsupported social authority could be. In 1766 he tried to control the competition for three new chairs in the faculty of medicine by filling the appointing committee with a majority of doctors. Doctors were technically qualified to serve (as distinct from medical professors), but it was a radical departure from settled practice. The remaining professors, including the eminent Henri Haguenot, who had founded the medical library, resigned en masse from the appointing committee, which undermined its credibility. The result of the protest was that the three new professors, who would include Antoine Gouan, were eventually directly appointed by the king.46 The social alliance between the corps and monarchy was complex and unstable because it was negotiated through cognitive norms and ideas of competence that did not simply reduce to political or social strategy. The changing balance of social power within the university was not simply the replacement of one patronage network by another, it also marked an evolution in the terms under which power was exercised and those of the alliance that held state, society, and knowledge together. The tension between the demands of the medical corporation and the emerging standards of public science continually reasserted themselves. The two demonstrators who inspired Pierre-Joseph Amoreux to take up botany, and who had done the teaching in the botanical garden in the 1750s, Antoine Gouan and Pierre Cusson, both former students of Sauvages, led the campaign to have Imbert disaggregate the chairs and appoint a supplementary professor of botany. They went as far as publishing a satire on Imbert, written in the fictional voice of a supposedly dim surgery student.47 The construct, named Des Esquilles, worked as a type of ingenue who revealed that the professor, Imbert, was the scientific puppet of his employee, the gardener Antoine Banal. The joke was that the surgeon was too stupid to tell practical knowledge from science anyway: “Does it really matter if our professor didn’t know even the name of a plant a few months before giving his first course? Can one doubt that 61

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the gardener who has tutored him knows them? Doesn’t the numbered catalogue the gardener has made for him guide M. Imbert when he is naming plants during lessons? And no one should suspect that someone could switch plants between pots or swap pots. The gardener is under strict orders to look before every lesson to make sure that the plants are organized in the flower beds in the same order as in the notebook.”48 The fictional dim-witted surgery student, who continued to attend classes when the more discerning medical students had long abandoned them, praised Imbert for professing agreeable knowledge, free of all the annoying complications of method, nomenclature, and botanical philosophy. Who could criticize Imbert for his modesty, when he mistook a Swedish visitor to the garden for Linnaeus and avoided him by running away by a back gate, or his trusting nature, when he mistook a coffee plant for a banana tree because Banal had changed the numbers on the pots? The obsession for detail of the savant was inappropriate to the dignity of the professor and chancellor of the university, especially when he had a servant who was so competent that he could take on the demonstrating himself. The satire turned on the fictional Des Esquilles’s adherence to the values of an older republic of letters, one which reconciled the society of the old regime to learned life through politeness, when new values now demanded the loyalty of the learned. The joke turned on anachronism. Ideas of mutually reinforcing standards of social and cultural authority that had been robust were now drifting apart. This development demanded that pretenders to authority in the sciences had to develop a new repertoire of behavior to sustain that claim. These dynamics were played out most vividly in the Société royale des sciences. The social constitution of the university was constructed from the same elements as other social institutions of the monarchy, but that did not make it indistinguishable from any other corporation. The balance of social and cognitive norms in its internal organization was one differentiating factor, and its participation in international networks was another. One hundred and fourteen doctorates were awarded by the university to persons from outside France between 1706 and 1789 (figure 3).49 Of course, this substantially underreports the numbers of foreign students who attended the university, many of whom would not have taken degrees, but it will stand as a proxy for that wider community. 62

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figure 3. Foreign doctorates at Montpellier by country of origin, 1706–1789

The international network of the university had three striking features. It depended on two, contrasting, sets of historical relationships that were highly conditioned by the politics of religion of the seventeenth century. More students were recruited from the Swiss cantons than from anywhere else in Europe, and among the cantons they were disproportionately recruited from those of Bern and Geneva, both Protestant. This engagement spoke to the historic Protestantism of Montpellier and to the continuing loyalty of refugee families who continued to send their sons to Montpellier for their medical education even after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Important figures in the university, notably Sauvages, remained sympathetic to Protestantism throughout the eighteenth century as did the group around the Haguenot family.50 The other striking European zone of recruitment was Ireland. The influence of political history on the recruitment patterns of the university is clear in this case as well. Irish recruitment was heavily skewed toward Munster, in the southwest of Ireland, and this was precisely the zone of recruitment for the Jacobite regiments in the service of France in the eighteenth century. Irish medical students in Montpellier were part of the patterns of diffusion 63

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of the Catholic gentry of Ireland in search of service and advancement in Catholic societies and courts. The university became an education center for two diasporas, one Protestant, the other Catholic. Irish Catholics were attracted to Montpellier after the closure of medical training to non-Protestants in the British Isles after the Glorious Revolution. This aspect of the international network of Montpellier was a result of political changes the causes of which lay far beyond the control or influence of the university. The same its true of the third striking feature of the university’s recruitment pattern: the numbers attending from Asia and the Americas. Ten of these doctoral students between 1706 and 1789 came from France’s Caribbean possessions, mostly Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), but there were also students from Cuba, Peru, Brazil, and, most strikingly, Chandragore (modern Chandannager) in Bengal. Again Montpellier’s recruitment pattern here clearly followed that of France’s colonial expansion. The rhythm of recruitment mirrored the intensification of international communication; sixty-three doctorates were awarded to students from outside France after 1750, compared to eighteen before. Aside from the Swiss and Irish recruits, students came primarily from the territories of the Bourbon monarchs, French and Spanish. In the most literal way imaginable the horizons of the university corporation in Montpellier became global in the late eighteenth century. The aspiration to conserve Montpellier’s situation as an ally of the state had unwittingly transformative effects. The capacity of the medical corporation to fix the meaning of competence and cognitive relevance was undermined by the variety of new agents and new interests the university attempted to manage. The transformative potential of knowledge was amplified further when it moved out of the university and into more novel forms of social organization.

The Société Royale des Sciences The Société royale des sciences was founded in 1706 and became the alternative locus in the Languedoc within which a new relationship between reason and society was developed.51 The members of the society balanced the competing claims of social, intellectual, and political authority in a manner very like that of the faculty of medicine. Even many 64

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of the individuals involved were the same. The implication of the society in the project of “useful knowledge,” or improvement, however, directed the society to different kinds of local, national, and international contexts. “Useful knowledge” was an ambiguous, contested idea and did not of itself establish a clear direction for the new society. At least two different projects for useful knowledge were articulated in the early years of the society. The society had been created at the instigation of the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon and the Cassini family as a southern pole for their project of mapping France.52 The Montpellier society was one of a series of initiatives promoted by the noted academic entrepreneur Bignon, all of which sought to harness knowledge to national flourishing.53 This model of useful knowledge was centered on the state’s need for accurate information that would allow it to shape society and would eventually develop into the mature tradition of French social statistics.54 Bignon’s project of governmentality shared space with efforts toward a politics of nature. Recent work on natural history has recovered how it offered an alternative to political economy as a means of mapping value in the world in a moment of imperial expansion and the extension of global trade.55 Natural history animated imperial projects, notably Joseph Banks’s efforts to organize a global exchange of biota, but also allowed local elites to create strategies of economic development that did not depend on access to colonial trade.56 Instead, by “improving” local productivity, either through intensifying the exploitation of local biota or by the domestication of exotics, one could arrive at a model of development that did not commit the society to the creation of large states capable of sustaining commercial rivalry.57 A variety of programmatic statements made in the society at various points in its history directed it toward natural history as the core of its activity. Pierre Barrère, a corresponding member from Perpignan who had conducted botanical research in Guyana, drew a distinction between “looking into every natural curiosity” and a sustained attention to the natural history of “our own pays.” He supported this view, not out of local sentiment, but from a skeptical position. He argued that local knowledge was key to the sciences: “To be convinced of the truth of certain facts, one must see them oneself ”; the standards of the new natural philosophy drove the society toward its local context.58 Jean-Antoine Chaptal read a 65

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memoir to the society in 1736 that argued that all the plants necessary “to cure our ills” were already in the province without recourse to foreign exotics.59 An entrant to one of the prize competitions pointed out that the “most ordinary phenomena are not always the most easy to explain” and that the task of the society had to be to reinterpret the body of observations made by the population, “now that the flame of natural philosophy has come to light up the different branches of natural philosophy.”60 While the society was agreed on the orientation toward natural history, its members struggled to define that orientation. The flora, fauna, climate, or geology to study lay at hand, but how were the observations to be organized? The appeal to natural philosophy did not solve the problem, because both the categories and the methods of analysis proper to the study of what we would call the life sciences were unclear. The term “biology” was not coined until the 1730s and was only accepted as a general description of this area of investigation at the turn of the nineteenth century. The study of living phenomena was inherently problematic and imposed epistemological problems on practitioners.61 The Aristotelian account of analysis, developed in the Posterior Analytics, the foundational text laying out the logic of investigation, describes the model of secure knowledge of particulars through a logical procedure of the establishment of differences.62 Aristotle’s identification of the axiom as the center of scientific activity had been fundamental to the practice for two millennia.63 The new science, or natural philosophy, substituted facts for axioms but embraced the same procedure for analysis. That science excluded final causes, teleology, and described function as a feature of system. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the most prominent natural scientist in France in the eighteenth century, even argued that the very act of classification introduced imagination, and so falsification, into the process of establishing truth; “genres, classes and orders exist only in our imaginations.”64 Buffon made the most all-encompassing claims for a rigorous empiricism but was driven to use narrative technique in his account of the earth’s formation in the very first volume of his Histoire naturelle.65 It was impossible, however, to practice natural history without regard for the function of the phenomena that were studied; teleology was unavoidable in categorization.66 Phenomena that were truly ambiguous, such as Trembley’s polyp, discussed in the society in 1742, caused genuine difficulties for even the most rigorous empiricist.67 66

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Londa Schiebinger has underlined how in the absence of explicit categorical schemes eighteenth-century taxonomies relied on metaphors, particularly sexual metaphors, and analogies to lend them coherence.68 Some of the most interesting efforts to reconfigure knowledge and power came from individuals who struggled with the tension between programmatic claims about the life sciences and the necessity to deploy discredited strategies, such as narrative, to account for natural phenomena.69 Pierre Magnol’s thoughts on the categorization of coral turned on this problem of definition.70 As Magnol explained, ancient natural scientists, such as Pliny, allowed for chimeras, mixtures of categories, and so could identify coral as a hybrid stone tree. For them particular instances did not have to be stable, since they were not the subject of scientific attention; science attended to universals. Moderns, on the other hand, needed to identify exactly what coral was under credible and reliable categories because the specimen was the ground of knowledge, not the universal of which it was a type.71 Understanding corals and typing them correctly remained a standing issue for members of the society well into the eighteenth century. The conchologist Antoine-Joseph Desaillier d’Argenville had a heated dispute with Bernard de Jussieu in 1743, when Jussieu attempted to persuade him that corals were a kind of mollusk, and that mollusks were a kind of worm. Desaillier d’Argenville indulged himself in irony at the absurdity of the idea. “Isn’t is fanciful to propose that the oyster is a worm? These are the kind of errors we have to snuff out at source.”72 For a large number of the members of the society, medical humanism, understood as the study of life through a series of analogies, solved the epistemological problem of the study of life and provided stable categories of understanding and analysis. Guillaume Nissole, François Chicoyneau, and others laid out their understanding of where botany fitted in this world in a series of papers. Botany was a branch of medical science: “Botany is that part of medicine that deals with the knowledge of plants; that knowledge consists in knowing perfectly the different names that various authors have given them, to understand how they grow, in what climate, where they are found, and the various uses to which they can be put: and that final point is the base for all the others—since of what use is it to know the names, to know how to cultivate them, in what ground and the climate in which they flourish if you do not know how to use these 67

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plants?”73 The members of this program oriented toward the medicinal uses of plants had a theoretical foundation in the analogy of plants with animals.74 Their most prominent botanical interest, research into the digestive system of plants, was grounded in the analogy they saw with the circulation of the blood.75 The central contention, that all living beings shared fundamental features, also drove Chicoyneau’s contention that sap, “if one can express it this way, is the master liquid in plants, as blood is that in animals.”76 Harvey’s account of circulation was particularly attractive as an analogical base because it was prestigious but Aristotelian, matched their philosophical conservatism, and its extension to plants had the support of “Perrault and Mariote, académiciens of great reputation” to the point that Chicoyneau thought it “so well established, so generally agreed,” that it was useless to describe their principal experiments.77 François Xavier Bon, marquis de Saint Hilaire, who was successively president of the Cour des comptes and intendant of Roussillon, articulated the same idea of analogy as the key to insight in the life sciences: “Even with a little study of the structures of plants one can easily perceive that their organs do not differ substantially from those of animals.”78 The model of life science organized in this way also offered a robust understanding of experimental fact as the outcome of authoritative medical practice. A paper by Antoine Gauteron argued for the introduction of opium as a sedative based on “the experience, many times repeated, that once one has taken opium, the pulse becomes a little less elevated, and then you smell a fragrance that fills your head, that anxiety and pains diminish and that as a consequence of the tranquility you feel you always sleep well.”79 Gauteron was supported by his colleague Guilllaume Rivière, from a family of pharmacists, who thought good-quality opium could be grown in the Languedoc to replace imports from Anatolia.80 The alliance of natural history with medical humanism was an institutionally embedded and well-articulated program that used human experience as a template for a science based on strategies of analogy, a late version of the great chain of being. Magnol’s denunciation of this analogy of plants to animals as unproven and unfounded was the thin end of the wedge Magnol wanted to drive between medical science and botany.81 In his view the absence of any organ that played the role of the heart in plants exploded the analogy and 68

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demanded of botanists that they approach the plant kingdom in its own right. Magnol called for a botany based on that of John Ray, who was not a doctor, and for a taxonomy independent of medical practice.82 While Magnol endorsed Ray’s project for an autonomous botany he rejected his empiricism and sought, though unsuccessfully, to define a categorical scheme, based on the calyx, or flower, that would provide a reliable basis for categorization.83 His student Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, working from the Paris Jardin des plantes, found more acceptance for his systematic distinction between species and genus and clear orders of hierarchy, but his method of classification based on observation of the corolla did not.84 Magnol’s dissent from what was the majority position in the academic and intellectual community was important because outside Montpellier he enjoyed far higher status in botany than anyone else. His distance from the Chicoyneau interest also prolonged old animosities based on religion. Magnol had been denied a chair in 1667 due to his Protestantism and later, even after having converted, was denied the chancellorship in favor of the much younger Chicoyneau.85 This religious coloration seems to have been retained by Montpellier botanists; in 1746 Sauvages would be recruited to help have a Calvinist pastor released from custody.86 Montpellier botany thus had two competing research programs represented by two patronage networks, and the Sauvages group was a late outgrowth of Magnol’s program. Without any doubt the embrace of Linnaeus by the Sauvages group at Montpellier was the most intellectually defining choice made in the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. The alliance with Linnaeus created a powerful assemblage that had significant intellectual and social leverage. Sauvages had come into contact with Linnaeus through their shared education in Leiden. He recognized the importance of Linnaeus’s work even before it was published.87 Montpellier would eventually become the French pole of the international Linnean network and the alternative coordinating center of natural history to Buffon’s Jardin royal in France.88 Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1738) and Philosophica Botanica (1751) rescued the life sciences from the twin problems of intellectual and practical confusion. The Linnean naming system of genus and species streamlined botanical communication, while the Linnean artificial system of classification, selecting one feature of the plant in order to determine its nature, simplified 69

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recognition. Linnaeus’s sexual system allowed practicing natural historians to communicate their ideas within a known system of comparisons and, essentially, with an agreed vocabulary, vital in communication at a distance.89 As Pierre Joseph Amoreux succinctly explained, “He [Linnaeus] dispersed the confusion that plagued botany and introduced a proper nomenclature to it.”90 Paradoxically, while his ideas made botany more practical and empirical, his theoretical background was very traditional. Linnaeus was an adherent of the doctrine of the fixity of species and an unchanging nature. He dealt with the evident variety and change in the natural world by arguing that the proper object of study in the life sciences was the genus. Species and their attendant varieties were inessential features of the natural world; the work of the naturalist was to map the plenitude of life and its rational order as revealed in the array of genera. The reception of Linnean theory in Montpellier did not conform to the role Linnaeus plays in the orthodox history of botanical ideas. For historians of biological thought he was the end of the tradition of essentialist botany as classification, of taxonomy based on the principle of logical division.91 Ernst Mayr criticizes him for continuing to see the object of study in botany to be the essences of the plant (represented by the genus) rather than the plants themselves.92 Linnaeus comes off badly in comparisons with such figures as Michel Adanson, or even Magnol, who made genuine efforts toward classification according to a “natural system” based not on essences but on observation of the assemblage of features of the plant. Oddly, the botanists of Montpellier saw Linnaeus’s importance in precisely the opposite way. They embraced Linnaeus not because his system was perfect but because it could be applied to practical botanizing. They saw his contribution as the creation of an approximation to a natural system that could end fruitless debate on method, clarify nomenclature and move botany out of the lecture hall and into the field. One must arrange the members of the plant kingdom in an order that nature has scorned to impose. The weakness of the human mind means we need classes, genera and species and a specific name for every plant. For this reason a botany that wishes to understand plants, before we even begin to discuss their uses, has two essential elements: method and nomenclature. The most important thing is the principle of a system in which every plant will be placed by virtue of its inherent affinities and characteristics, 70

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so that the progression from one plant to the other happens almost imperceptibly, and by nuances so neat and subtle that one can hardly see them. Linnaeus carried this out in part with a certain number of plants and created the fragments of a natural system. After him Van-Royen and Haller, working from the same principles, and Adanson following his own ideas, have revealed more of the complexity of this system.93

For Gouan, who wrote the éloge of Linnaeus quoted here, and the other practicing botanists in Montpellier, Linnean taxonomy was important because it was imminent, derived from features internal to plant structure, even if it was not perfect. Practical agricultural reformers, like the abbé François Rozier, agreed. A perfect botany would reflect the natural order, but “experience has shown us that up to now no system fulfills all demands; even the system of the chevalier Linnaeus, which comes closest to doing so, is not without its faults.”94 Moreover, it was portable; field botanists carried the organizational schema with them in their investigations and on collecting trips. One of the heroes of Montpellier botany, wrote J. J. Brunet, was Philibert Commerson, who had been inspired to wander all over the province in search of specimens even before he left for Mauritius.95 As Gouan put it, the critics of Linnaeus were largely put out because the “revolution” he sponsored in botany made entry too easy.96 His theoretical clarity ended theoretical dispute and moved botany into the field. The members of the Sauvages circle, however, were not committed to Linnaeus’s philosophical promotion of the genus over the species and were even willing to compromise his methodological ideas. Sauvages experimented with a classification method based on leaves.97 He thought that Linnaeus’s method was too constrained because it could only be carried out on flowers or on fruit.98 Jean-Guillaume Bruguière did not hesitate to remove elephant grass from the genus Linnaeus had given it based on the number of stamens when that characteristic conflicted with his observations of its other features.99 The strange conjunction of Linnaeus and Adanson, who is usually seen as a critic of Linnaeus, makes sense when seen from the perspective of a community of botanists who were less focused on the philosophical problem of identifying real classes, and were rather seeking to establish their autonomy by stressing their distinctive activities: collection, identification, and classification.100 71

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Linnaeus’s ideas inspired a new wave of botanical research and simultaneously threw into even sharper relief the problems of explanation in the life sciences. The clarity and explicitness of cognitive criteria and a concomitant leveling, or at least bracketing, of social hierarchy was a general feature of the social organization of eighteenth-century science. Vincenzo Ferrone argues that Piedmontese “men of science” were liberated from the social hierarchies of the monarchy by acceding to the norms of a common scientific spirit, “unlike humanistic learning.”101 As the life sciences emerged from the medical faculties as distinct practices, they developed a particularly wide base.102 Moreover, in botany, in particular, even the most established practitioners were dependent on webs of local collectors until well into the nineteenth century.103 Botany was also the field where Linnaeus’s contribution of “lowering the educational and financial entry fee to the study of nature” had most impact.104 Because of their novelty, and their transparent nature, the life sciences offered opportunities for marginal figures to acquire authority and status. Linnaeus deliberately cultivated his identity as a rather rugged provincial; Lisbet Koerner describes him as “sentimental, suspicious and devoid of general culture.”105 In form, his key work, the Philosophica Botanica of 1752, even mimicked the form of popular literature. It was organized as an almanac with tables and some useful illustrations at the back.106 Antoine Gouan and Pierre Broussonet were particularly alive to the historical significance of the organization of botany around Linnean theory. They argued that since Tournefort, Ray, and particularly Linnaeus had established secure classes and genera, and so made possible the search for a natural system, botany had become a “true science, no longer restricted to a dry recitation of names needing more memory than insight and directed instead toward the direct study of nature.”107 Gouan resurrected the historical memory of Magnol, and completely misrepresented him, to explain the practical consequences of the triumph of Linnean botany. He depicted Magnol’s scientific calling as working directly, and often dangerously, with nature. “This is a science one cannot entirely master at your desk or from books: beyond reading and study it also requires a vigorous temperament to withstand the inclement weather, enough strength to climb the most rugged mountains and the most exposed rocks, courage enough to lower yourself down the deepest crevasses. Ordinarily nature 72

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hides its rarest treasures in these wild terrains, to keep them for those adventurers who seek them out.”108 In Gouan’s reconstruction of the history of botany in Montpellier, Magnol was praised not for his own theoretical work but for his practical botanizing. His collecting and his conjunction of theoretical insight with direct knowledge of the local flora made Magnol the father of Montpellier botany. It was not his medical professorship and his academic credentials that were cited but rather the traits he shared with the field botanist: collection, identification, classification. In a later elaboration of the genealogy of Montpellier botanists Gouan listed the medieval medical practitioners but pointedly excluded anyone outside the line descending from Magnol in the eighteenth century.109 When discussing his own botanical career Gouan abandoned the traditional site of academic botany, the botanical garden, altogether and asserted that the real “nursery of Europe” was the Pyrenees.110 One of the most important features of the Linnean project was its international scope. Communication across borders of plants, seeds, and other samples was one of the most salient characteristics of all botany. Voyages of botanical discovery were particularly important to botanists inspired by Linnaeus looking for possible candidates for acclimatization. Lisbet Koerner identifies nineteen first-generation students of Linnaeus who took part in voyages, including natural scientists such as Daniel Solander, who accompanied James Cook on his first voyage.111 Montpellier acted as another node for recruiting these botanical pioneers, most notably Philibert Commerson, Pierre Poivre’s companion in exploring the biota of Mauritius, Michael Adanson, who worked on Sénégal, and Jean Guillaume Brugière, who was part of the Kerguelen expedition to the South Seas and wrote on the native species of Madagascar. Besides these prominent and well-known figures was another population of correspondents who reported their findings to Montepellier from their travels. In September 1746, for example, a description of the cocoa plant by Milhau, along with the botanical drawings he had made and the results of his experiments in the Caribbean, were presented to the society.112 Pierre Barrère, a professor of medicine from Perpignan, delivered the essay he had written on the natural history of Cayenne in 1744.113 These networks maintained the status of scholars in the Languedoc by establishing reciprocity of esteem between a variety of scholarly centers. 73

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Relationships with centers in northern Europe, and with Edinburgh and London in particular, increased in importance for the Languedoc across the eighteenth century. Pierre Broussonet explained that for his work on dogfish he had used the specimens in the cabinet du roi that Daubenton gave him access to, some of the rarest species taken from the private collection of “M. le chevalier Banks,” and other specimens sent to him by the British Museum. “I have also had the opportunity,” he reported, “to fish in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.”114 Broussonet and other scholars and scientists in the Languedoc were able to take advantage of existing financial networks created by Huguenot refugees who had already established a banking network that connected Montpellier to London, Geneva, and Cadiz.115 The foreign and corresponding members of the Société royale des sciences allowed the center of gravity of Montpellier’s network to move from France to northern Europe.116 This international context had direct effects on the local organization of knowledge. The scholarly world of Montpellier reorganized itself and subtly adjusted its social and intellectual ideals after 1750. Participation in cultural exchange injected dynamic forces into the local context. The Languedoc offered novel perspectives to scholars in the British Isles, such as Jethro Tull, who developed his horse-hoeing agriculture from his observations of intense vine-growing practices in the region, to Jeremy Bentham, who used Sauvages’s nosology as the model for his table of crimes and punishments. Bentham’s idea of penology as curing the social disease of criminality was directly derived from Montpellier medical practice. The central Benthamite metaphor of crime as a disease of the social body used the analytical strategies of the reform community in Montpellier as the basis for its logic.117 The Languedoc network, in particular its eminent late eighteenth-century member Pierre Broussonet, was central to the foundation of the Linnean Society of London, which was to be the most prominent center of biological research in Britain in the early nineteenth century. George Bentham, nephew of the more famous Jeremy, and latterly president of the Linnean, whose Catalogue des plantes indigènes des Pyrénées et du Bas Languedoc was a late flower of this FrancoBritish cultural exchange, went on, in collaboration with his colleague Joseph Hooker, to establish the Genera Plantarum, which is still in use. Cultural transfer occurred between a variety of centers, including 74

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Uppsala, Dublin, Edinburgh, Geneva, and London, and generated a distinctive body of work. The members of the Société royale were highly conscious of the importance of maintaining their position in the international division of intellectual labor. The strategy was illuminated and explained by Antoine Gouan.118 Gouan, born in 1732, was well qualified to explicate the world of the sciences in Montpellier. A graduate of the university, he had worked as an instructor in the botanical garden in the 1760s when its neglect by the chancellor and professor of Botany, Imbert, had threatened its survival. Gouan became its director in the 1790s. A member of the Société royale from 1757 and a correspondent of Linnaeus’s, he made an international career from Montpellier. In responding to the claim by a M. Deleuze, in the Moniteur of 27 October 1811, that Montpellier had been losing its preeminence in the natural sciences since the time of Pierre Richer de Belleval in the sixteenth century, Gouan replied not by reciting a continuous list of natural scientists practicing at Montpellier since Rondelet but by drawing attention to the two generations of Linnean botanists, including Broussonet, Cusson, Dorthes, and himself, all of whom had first been taught by Sauvages and had been active in the university, the botanical garden, and the scientific society since 1740.119 Gouan deliberately chose that very particular group of Montpellier scholars to defend the honor of the whole. What really stung Gouan was Deleuze’s claim that botany had become systematic only since Parisian botanists had laid down the foundations of a natural system of classification. This was a calumny as the Jussieus and Commerson, who had developed these new ideas, all had extensive links with Montpellier; in fact Commerson had been a classmate of Gouan’s. Gouan’s response was not to recapture those scholars for Montpellier, to make a genealogical claim. Instead Gouan stood his ground on association of the Montpellier group with the Linnean system and the importance of that system. Abandoning Linnaeus would lead to chaos, and Linnean botany was the gift of Montpellier to France. Montpellier represented the collective wisdom of Europe in this regard: “This way of thinking is not confined to my colleagues and myself: English botanists, Swedes, Danes, Russians, Germans, Italians and the Spanish, that is to say, all of scholarly Europe is currently agreed on this point. . . . It is in 75

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the Philosophica Botanica of Linnaeus that M. Haller calls opus magni momenti et magni laboris, from which one extracts the principles of a true science, even if it is said at Paris that this book has done more harm than good.”120 The international significance of the Montpellier school of natural science, according to Gouan, derived from the participation of this particular group of scholars in the international Linnean network, in which northern Europe was privileged. This idea that the Montpellier scientific society was distinguished by its particular European vocation was not a new one and had already been articulated by Georges-Christophe Wurtz, writing from Strasbourg in 1785 seeking to be made a correspondent of the society. Wurtz presented the society with his early writing, including the journal of his medical voyage to Vienna. “Your academy,” he explained, “is too famous and composed of too many members revered throughout Europe for any man who desires to make a career of letters not to present to you his work.” He went on to offer his services as another eye over Europe, “placed as I am between the borders of Switzerland, and already a correspondent of the Musée de Paris, I will assiduously seek out any occasion to make myself useful to the society.”121 Montpellier seemed an obvious place for a provincial scholar to reinforce his international connections, particularly one already integrated into the web of scientific societies. Court de Gébelin’s Musée aimed to organize and recruit exactly that newly emergent body of scientists and scholars who were not comfortable in the structure of the academies.122 The Wurtz family of Lutheran pastors would continue to have a presence on this European stage and later produced Adolphe Wurtz, who would be central in the introduction of new German ideas to French chemistry in the middle of the nineteenth century.123 Gouan did not try to assert greater importance for Montpellier within French science; instead he asserted an international standard of comparison. This was the strategy that Montpellier scientists had employed for nearly seventy years. After 1740 the students of Sauvages were instrumental in generating a dynamic that moved the Montpellier société des sciences away from the model of the academy that had dominated its first forty years and toward that of a society. As James McClellan explains, these two differing models of intellectual sociability derived from the roughly contemporaneous

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Parisian Académie des sciences and the London Royal Society, though the academy model clearly had roots in Italy and France earlier in the century. The academy acknowledged scholarly eminence through royal patronage and promoted the sciences by integrating their leading members with the social and political elite.124 Societies, on the hand, were composed of self-organizing groups of scholars and scientists that recruited external members who in turn acknowledged and internalized their scholarly values. McClellan argues that an embryonic network of societies of this sort, composed of the London, Oxford, Dublin, and Boston scientific societies, already existed by the 1680s.125 The language of the republic of letters submerged these differences and connoted a wider ideal of scholarly unity, but as Anne Goldgar has argued, we need to be sensitive to the differing, and sometimes even incompatible, values promoted in different regions of that republic.126 After 1740 the Montpellier scientific society distinguished itself from other French provincial societies by adhering to the northern, mostly Protestant, ideal, but it was not totally isolated in southern Europe. The Turin scientific academy similarly abandoned the humanistic ideal of the academy in favor of the model of the sciences.127 Cultural exchange with the British Isles was central to this development. The way the knowledge elite that made up the society was constituted changed in parallel with the alteration in its intellectual focus and location in the world of knowledge. On its foundation in 1706 the society had assumed the same structure as the Parisian Académie des sciences of associates, honorary associates (generally socially and politically prominent men without distinctly scholarly interests), “free” associates (meaning nonresident scholars), students, and correspondents. The resident associates were made up of fifteen members split into five classes of three.128 From the foundation the residents used the other posts as an element of the patronage network centered on the medical faculty. The six honorary posts were offered to the bishop of Montpellier, the archbishop of Narbonne (who was the titular head of the Estates of Languedoc), the Marquis the Castries (Lieutenant-General of the Province), the Intendant Lamoignon de Basville, the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (nephew of the comte de Ponchartrain), and François-Xavier Bon. These posts continued to be used throughout the existence of the society as a means of acquiring

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credit with the political and social elite of the ancien régime. The free associates similarly mapped the status pyramid of the ancien régime. The nineteen men honored in this way were almost all French, the exception being the Irish chemist Richard Kirwan, but he was appointed very late in the life of the society, in 1787. Otherwise this group comprised a classic mixture of social, political, and scholarly distinction. The most eminent scholar was Jean François Séguier, the classicist who deciphered the inscription on the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, and he was flanked by Antoine de Parcieux, the hydraulic engineer, and Desaillier d’Argenville, who had done primary work on the classification of mollusks. The bulk of the free members were elected by virtue of their social role and position. The successive perpetual secretaries of the Paris academy of surgery, the head of the Languedoc Corps of Engineers, and a variety of intendants, members of the Cour des comptes (the highest court sitting in Montpellier), and syndics general of the Estates were invited to join the society. In some cases the society played a literal role in the reproduction of the local elites. Joseph de Carney was made an associé libre in 1732 and went on to marry the eldest daughter of Jean de Clapies, a founder of the society and the holder of the senior chair in mathematics. Much of the scientific work of the society would have been impossible without the support of these men. The enthusiastic support and involvement of Jean Antoine de Montferrier, syndic general of the province, was crucial to the funding of the institution, as the abbé Bignon, himself a scientific entrepreneur of great skill, acknowledged.129 This model of scholarly life tended, however, to locate Montpellier within a national hierarchy and to reinforce its provincial stature. The latent alternative model of the society as an element in an international, or more properly interregional, scholarly world was represented in the less prestigious class of correspondents to the society. The sheer number of correspondents (Elizabeth Kindleberger calculates up to two hundred persons were at one time connected with the society in this way) allowed different patterns of recruitment within this one class.130 Clearly one pattern formed part of the patronage system of the authorities in the medical faculty. A plurality of correspondents came from the Languedoc. Many future associés were first introduced to the life of the society through this route, and one of its functions was to identify talent. This was not its only function, 78

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however. Fifteen correspondents came from beyond the borders of France, of whom only one was from the traditional zone of influence in the Swiss cantons (figure 4). This group represented the embryo of an alternative network into which members of the society might integrate themselves if they wished to devise an alternative to the endless attraction of Paris. In 1743 the society invented a new class, associé étranger. Phelypeux, comte de Saint Florentin and secretary of state, whose family had dominated French cultural and scientific policy for a century, allowed the society to appoint four foreign members at the behest of François Xavier Bon, premier president of the Cour des comptes in Montpellier and president of the scientific society for that year.131 In return Phelypeux was appointed as an honorary member of the society, in the classic pattern of reciprocal patronage. There could be no better example of the interpenetration of scholarly and social elites, but the use to which this new instrument of network building was put helped transform the society and to give it a new international orientation. Appointments to this new grade were almost totally captured by the group of botanists, physicists, and chemists inspired by Sauvages. Ten men were elected as foreign members

figure 4. Correspondents recruited to the Société royale des sciences by country of origin, 1706–1789 79

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from 1743 to 1789, Carl Linnaeus, Peter Simon Pallas, Tobern Olaf Bergman, Charles Bonnet, Eustachio Zanotti, Philip, second Earl Stanhope, Georges Louis Le Sage, Pieter van Musschenbroek, Gabriel Cramer, and Jean Jallabert. Linnaeus was the heart of this group of scholars, and the network into which the Montpellier scientists were projecting themselves can easily be interpreted from the cumulative table of memberships of its foreign members. All these men were members of multiple societies, and their memberships overlapped in telling patterns. As well as holding these multiple memberships, particular individuals were members of academies at Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, Göttingen, Philadelphia, Utrecht, and Lyon, all of which reinforced the northern bias in this selection (figure 5). Several of the elections were deliberate moves within the smaller world of university politics and were calibrated to undermine medical humanism, the dominating position within the university. Even appointments that seemed to compromise with that ideal were in fact at odds with it. The astronomer Eustachio Zanotti was a graduate of the University of Bologna, which along with Montpellier had been one of the first universities in Europe to incorporate a medical faculty.132 Zanotti, however, was not a member of the faculty but instead ran the observatory at the

figure 5. Corresponding memberships of scientific societies held by members of the Société royale des sciences, 1706–1789 80

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Accademia delle Scienze, part of the private institute founded by the Count de Marsigli in 1714.133 That institute was animated by exactly the same dissatisfaction with the teaching and research of the medical faculty that drove the reform group around Sauvages in Montpellier. The conservatism of the University of Bologna was so obstructive that Pope Benedict XIV, who had been bishop of Bologna, patronized the new institute and supported its efforts to participate in the world of the analytic sciences. There was even a historic link between reform efforts in the two university towns. The Count de Marsigli had been a correspondent of the Montpellier society from its inception. He had communicated at length with the society in 1706 and 1707, when it was debating the nature of corals, and had even displayed admirable intellectual flexibility in moving from his initial position to finally accepting that corals were plants.134 Marsigli had been associated with two groups in the society, the mathematicians around Bon and the botanists and natural scientists Pierre Magnol and Pierre Nissolle, and all three were members of the Royal Society (Marsigli himself had been appointed in 1691).135 Hans Sloane, the longtime president of the Royal Society, had studied botany in Montpellier under Magnol’s supervision and sustained his links with Magnol and his friends.136 Nissolle was receiving packets of samples from Sloane even on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession.137 This group of dissident ex-Protestant medical faculty, such as Magnol, and surgeons, like Nissolle, who had been interested in locating the Montpellier society in the emerging European world of the natural sciences, were initially eclipsed by the more locally powerful Chicoyneau interest. That patronage network had instrumentalized the society in pursuit of national power, place at court, and eminence in Paris.138 Even in the early years of the century, however, when the Chicoyneau interest was most dominant, connection with the network of the Royal Society was not totally eliminated. The chemist Antoine Deidier, who taught Sauvages, corresponded with James Jurin and was appointed a fellow in the 1720s.139 Appointing Zanotti was a means of reaching over the intervening period to reconstitute engagement with this international world. Van Musschenbroek was another recruit from the Newtonian world centered on London. Like Pallas, he was also a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy. Increasingly the society located itself in a global rather than national network. 81

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One of the most striking elements in the patterns of appointments to these honorary posts is the total absence of overlap with the Paris academy of science and the contrasting importance of the Royal Society in the intellectual makeup of the group. Montpellier scientists were deliberately inserting themselves into an alternative network not dominated by Paris rather than attempting to build an entirely new network. If we unpack the individual stories behind the group portrait, the intellectual choices that were being made stand out even more starkly. Four of the foreign correspondents were from Geneva: Charles Bonnet, Gabriel Cramer, Jean Jallabert, and Georges Louis Le Sage. This would seem on the face of it to be an entirely unremarkable and even predictable pattern, as Montpellier and Geneva had shared scholarly connections since the Middle Ages. This old connection was not what promoted them to the society, however. Le Sage was interesting because he had so spectacularly failed in Paris, leaving without earning his medical degree or even examining for it in one of the cheaper provincial faculties, such as Caen or Reims.140 Three of four of these men were mathematicians and Newtonians, and one of them, Le Sage, was fascinated with the mixture of religious heterodoxy and scientific speculation of Nicolas Fatio de Duiller, the contemporary of Isaac Newton.141 Fatio had even more dangerous connections, to the French Huguenot Prophets of the Cévennes, in the early decades of the eighteenth century.142 Le Sage acquired Fatio’s manuscripts from England so that he could develop their ideas. He was able to do this because in 1764 he had been appointed tutor to Charles Stanhope, the son of Philip, second Earl of Stanhope, and a member of one of the most consistently radically Whig dynasties in English politics. Philip Stanhope was elected as a foreign member of the society along with these Genevans. Charles Stanhope, Le Sage’s student, would go on to be one of the most important British supporters of the French Revolution and president from 1788 of the Revolution Society. The Genevan connection also led to London. The Montpellier network was a curious hybrid. It did not operate as a pole with spokes extending to dependent partners. The network was multipolar, with London as a prominent second focus. In 1750 Desaillier d’Argenville sent to the society the prospectus for the Encyclopédie, to which he was one of the major contributors, and underlined that he had also visited London to promote the project with the Royal Society.143 Even 82

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though the dominating ideology of science in London was Newtonian, Montpellier scientists viewed London through the optic of Uppsala and endlessly reasserted the primacy of a Linnean ideal of science. In his letter stressing the alignment of London with the Encyclopédie Desaillier d’Argenville went on to point out that the map of human knowledge had been designed on Linnean lines. Gouan also explained how his writing was conditioned and disciplined by this Linnean network in the précis of his 1776 work on the flora of Montpellier he offered to the society. “My own mistakes as well as those made by others have taught me that one must be very careful before pronouncing on plants that on first sight seem to be of a new species. If I have doubts about certain species I consult the most prominent botanists in Europe, such as the celebrated Linnaeus, Jussieu, Haller, Gessner or Séguier and I come to no conclusion until I have had their responses.”144 Pierre Joseph Amoreux identified the light of scientific reason, “the spirit of method that must serve as the Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth of the sciences,” with Linnaean ideals in his éloge for his friend Brunet.145 The same metaphor had been used by Antoine Banal in his introduction to his catalogue of the plants in the Montpellier botanical garden forty years before.146 The scientific imagination of Montpellier was dominated by the figure of Linnaeus. It is therefore completely unsurprising that Montpellier scientists were instrumental in the foundation of the Linnean society in London in 1788. The founder of the Linnean Society of London, James Smith, had been captured for the Montpellier network through the friendship he struck up with Pierre Auguste Broussonet while they studied medicine together at Edinburgh. Smith introduced Broussonet to scholarly sociability in Scotland and had him elected as a member of the medical society in the university.147 In 1787 Broussonet founded a Linnean society in Paris, and the following year Smith did the same in London. One of Smith’s collaborators was John Sibthorp, who had been trained in Montpellier and Edinburgh before returning to Britain as professor of botany at Oxford. Broussonet’s effort to extend the Linnean network into the citadel of Paris was a total failure, but Smith’s foundation, buttressed by his acquisition of Linnaeus’s collections, was successful.148 Smith may not even have been aware of how far his relationship with the world of Continental science was mediated by the Montpellier network. When he 83

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was on tour with Arthur Young in France in 1787 they were passed around the network from Johann Hermann in Strasbourg to PierreRémy Willemet in Nancy and then down to Gouan in Montpellier.149 Broussonet worked hard to sustain the Montpellier connection, recommending to Smith that he sustain a correspondence with Jacques-Antoine Dorthes if he wished to retain his supply of botanical samples from the Languedoc and eventually introducing him to Gouan.150 Gouan, by the late 1780s the center of the network, was delighted to be made a fellow of the Linnean, and in his letter to Smith offering thanks for the honor he revealed that he was thinking of starting a new Linnean society in Montpellier as well, while also sending on twenty new botanical samples and news of their colleague Thomas Pennant.151 If we look at the membership list of the Linnean Society of London in 1788 we see that Gouan was one of five Montpellier members, including the gardener at the botanical garden Antoine Banal, and in all there were thirteen French members of the new society.152 Social competition, epistemological challenge, and the changing needs of the state combined to create the conditions for the incremental transformation of the knowledge elite of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. The pattern of slow incremental adjustment and innovation within traditional structures is very close to the pattern of change in the province’s economy. In both cases the cumulative effect of small changes was to create new terms for the exercise of power and influence. Preexisting social tensions within the knowledge elite were transformed into disputes about knowledge. The effect was to disembed knowledge from a total social organization and turn it into a separate power. The Languedoc created the elements of a communicative order though the dynamics played out within the knowledge institutions of an estate society. But did this communicative order extend beyond elites? In the next chapter we will explore how the project of improvement, which extended far beyond the elites who operated in the university and the scientific society, disseminated new standards of judgment and rationality.

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CHA PTER THR EE T H E N AT U R A L P R O V I N C E O F R E A S O N Agronomy, Botany, and Subaltern Science

In 1769 the Société royale des sciences at Montpellier opened a new prize competition. Reflecting the renewed national interest in agronomie, the society invited analyses of the characteristics of the best lands for wheat cultivation and the means of expanding tillage.1 In the following years a trickle of entries for the competition arrived in Montpellier. Anonymous entrants took up the question in surprisingly varied ways. Entrant number 10, very likely a M. Mouret from Saint-Jean-de-Bruel in the Rouergue, saw the problem as a technical issue of raising productivity and so prepared a report based on the data derived from twenty-five years of experiments he had conducted on his farm.2 For entrant number 1 the issue of improvement was best approached through political science rather than agronomy. In an early example of path dependency theory he argued that the terrible effects of the post-Roman barbarian invasions were only then being redressed by the salutary efforts of “many learned societies who transmit their findings to the public.”3 For this writer the technical problem was trivial; the real problem of improvement was fixing knowledge institutions in order to mobilize society. Entrant number 7 took on the issue in an even more profound way as a problem of basic norms and values. He 85

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thought that agriculture could only be improved by a root and branch reconstruction of the rationality of French peasants. They needed to have the utility of scientific rationality demonstrated to them by practical experiments if they were to understand that “bodies are composed of four elements, salt, sulfur or oil, water and earth, and that these four elements can be fermented by the heat of the sun.”4 To see this kind of popular neo-Aristotelianism wrapped up in the language of Enlightenment meliorism offers an insight into how widely the idea of improvement had spread, but also how varied, and even contradictory, the versions of reason that inspired it could be.5 What are we to make of this riot of responses? Can we credibly claim to perceive any trend in the everyday lived culture of knowledge in the province that could amount to an improvement movement? Should we resign ourselves to microhistories of embedded forms of knowledge, leaving millers and farmers to their particular traditions, and abandon any attempt at a synthesis? It is very difficult credibly to argue for some unambiguous pattern of change in the content of dominant ideas, such as the rise of science, using evidence of this sort, and much of the evidence is of this sort. The archives have many examples of the diffusion and use of ideas in all sorts of contexts across the province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century, but the evidence is difficult to interpret. This kind of complexity frustrated contemporaries in much the way it challenges historians. Pierre-Joseph Amoreux, for instance, was completely dismissive of the “old mistaken view” common among “most farmers and gardeners” that if, despite all their care, they could not raise a crop it was because the land had mercury in it.6 He contrasted his knowledge, based on “careful study and many experiments,” to their “old mistaken opinions.” His red line between truth and error enjoys the virtue of clarity, and he clearly represented a body of opinion among some of the improving elites of the province that saw themselves as members of an enlightened vanguard. The price paid for this kind of clarity, however, is to make the vectors of change among the “farmers and gardeners” invisible. His older self, secure in the identity Amoreux had as a graduate of the university and a member of the scientific society, was forgetful of his own genealogy. His first steps into the world of the natural sciences had been made with his father, “who grew flowers of all sorts in a garden he owned near the 86

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old gate” in their native town of Beaucaire, “but who was not a botanist” and though he owned a copy of Linnaeus, “had very vague notions about plants and insects.”7 When his academic career was temporarily stalled Amoreux stepped back into that world and, he wrote, “had once more the pleasure of planting in my garden, organizing my natural history specimens in my drawers and showing them to various people, who were astonished to see things that to them were entirely new.”8 The kind of pleasure he took in his garden and collection was not really that distant from the pride of M. Deyde of Perpignan in his giant cabbage when he sent it for assessment to the Société royale.9 The roots of truth lay in error, and the line between the savant, the dilettante, and the amateur could be crossed and recrossed. In recent years historians have found new ways to understand the popular Enlightenment, that curious zone between authoritative knowledge and diverse opinion. All of those routes are useful in approaching the popular experience in the Languedoc. The hypothesis of the “public sphere” inspired historians to rediscover the public use of reason by theater audiences, newspaper readerships, and crowds at exhibitions without the prominent writers who were important sources of authoritative ideas.10 We have come to understand how progress could be marketed in the form of medicines, clothes, or foods.11 Consumption was a practice that went far beyond objects; there was a sphere of public science, and a market for scientific lectures and displays, in eighteenth-century Paris and beyond.12 Consumption, of medicines, wonders, or ideas, was one way for ordinary people to immerse themselves in the experience of natural philosophy, but not the only way. If we are to understand changing values, then popular participation in the practice of science was another route, and there has been some interesting work on this phenomenon. Artisans have been recruited to the Enlightenment as instrument makers and collaborators of the natural scientists.13 Margaret Jacob has argued for the importance of Newtonian physics to “any self-respecting business family with industrial interests,” and chemistry is now understood as a science that was dominated by subalterns and amateurs in the eighteenth century.14 This work has profoundly changed our view of the transformation of ideas and practices among the popular classes. 87

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The thesis of the diffusion of elite ideas has been supplemented by an awareness of popular participation in the making of the Enlightenment. We have not, however, fully recognized the import of this phenomenon; for all the attention that we have paid to the culture of the Enlightenment, we have been less sensitive to the reflexive effect of such participation for identity formation and the possibilities of collective actions among subalterns. Despite an important theoretical literature, exemplified in the work of Jacques Rancière, we have not properly understood the transformative effect of new cognitive and cultural experience on the individual and collective political and social imagination.15 We have a clear view on the role of subalterns in the making of the Enlightenment; we are less clear on the role of the Enlightenment in changing the character of subalterns. As with so much of the work on transformations in values in the eighteenth century, the focus of attention in popular science had until recently been urban and even metropolitan; we have only lately begun to develop research techniques that get beyond dissemination from centers of calculation. The key change in the social world of the learned in the eighteenth century provinces was not recruitment of new swathes of the population into schools, reading publics, or any other feature of mass print culture, which is a feature of the nineteenth century. Rather, the key change was the alteration in the terms of inclusion, a fusion of what had previously been the characteristics of the learned and the unlearned, of botanists and gardeners, chemists and instrument makers.16 The emergence of science as a unified critical practice and the emergence of meritocratic social organization for science were mutually reinforcing but historically distinct processes. They have been addressed by separate research strategies. Thomas Broman has called for a genealogy of science based on the evolution of cognitive norms, like truth, separate from the social history of science organized around actors’ strategies like “trust.”17 Roger Cooter and Stephen Pomphrey, in turn, argue for a transformation of the social history of science by eschewing the representations of social order that already have elite dominance inscribed within them in favor of an approach to subaltern science through its material artefacts.18 Anne Secord’s account of “botany in the pub” has, for the English case, focused attention on the skills and aspirations of local collectors.19 The challenge is to find the popular experience outside these kinds of urban environments. There is no 88

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one nexus, like the pub, through which popular or subaltern participation in the world of natural science in the eighteenth-century Languedoc can be viewed. Instead we have to build up a map made up of many overlapping networks. These include artisan and peasant botanists as well as ordinary men and women caught up in the project of economic botany. One of the most visible and vibrant populations engaged with new ideas in the natural sciences in eighteenth-century provincial France was the community of agricultural reformers.20 Agronomy was an intellectually and socially complex arena bringing together the natural and life sciences alongside political economy and engineering. Agronomy became central to state strategies for increasing agricultural productivity, and in 1761 the ministry of Bertin, contrôleur-général des finances, founded a Comité d’agriculture to coordinate the effort of local agricultural societies and improvers. The first French agricultural society had been spontaneously founded in Brittany, another opened in Tours, and following Bertin’s intervention a network spread across the whole country.21 Despite the best efforts of the founders, however, and the repeated assertion that the societies should devote themselves to practical questions and not become a talking shop “devoted to theory,” the initiative was not successful.22 In 1785, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, commented that the work of the agricultural societies had been stalled “for many years.”23 An anonymous officier in Versailles added his opinion that because the societies had been founded at the high point of physiocratic influence they had been dominated by discussions of tax and gross national product to the exclusion of “agriculture properly understood.”24 The frustration of this particular state-led initiative contrasts with the success enjoyed by the Almanach du bon jardinier, the agronomical and botanical journal founded in 1755 by Pons Augustin Alletz, which was successfully published annually until 1914.25 The state was not driving the creation of a community of botanical and agronomical innovators, but the community did exist, even in the royal domain. In 1767 an artisan from Lorraine, Augustin Pilant, demonstrated his method for eradicating the European mole cricket (courtillière) in the royal potager at Fontainebleau.26 He went on to destroy the pests in Versailles, the Tuileries, and the gardens of some of the most well-known names in the French court. Pilant came out of a world of practice and innovation that was just becoming visible to elites. 89

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The records of the Estates of Languedoc open up a picture of botanical and agronomical activity that needed to be managed through techniques much more subtle than central control allowed. In 1723 the monarchy proposed offering individuals free saplings from nurseries to help replace the continuing losses from the terrible winter of 1709.27 The Estates were critical of the plan and proposed instead a change in the law to restrict common rights to firewood as a means of protecting wood stocks. In the same year they decided to set up a network of nurseries to support mulberry cultivation by using identified commercial botanists in the province.28 To create these plantations the Estates wrote contracts with local entrepreneurs in Castelnau, Saint-Chinian, Saint-Bauzille, Anduze, Mellien, Saint-Esprit, Saint-Andreol, and Tournon. Local initiatives in mulberry plantations were sustained throughout the century. When Seigneur de la Bastide asked for support to create a public mulberry plantation at Albi the local sub-delegate recommended that the request be denied because “there are many individuals in different parts of this civil diocese who have nurseries of these trees.”29 Agronomy also made a contribution to the improvement of that industry through several projects investigating the optimal methods for the propagation of silkworms.30 The abbé Bignon, who was also one of the earliest supporters of agronomical research in the province, pointed out that this kind of success encouraged the estates and private individuals to further invest in these kinds of projects.31 By the end of the eighteenth century there were four million mulberry trees in the province, and all of these gardens had their gardeners.32 Networks of independent gardeners and improvers carried on their own experiments in horticulture. Jean Bertrand, in Narbonne, was one of the pioneers in improving olive trees.33 His plantations demonstrated to the local populace that the stony, clayey soil that they thought could not be usefully cultivated, when properly fertilized, could produce olives, vines, and mulberries. Joannis Althen, an Armenian immigrant, worked as a kind of botanical entrepreneur, introducing plants that were common in Asia Minor. He initially came to France as part of the project of “industrial espionage” conducted by Jean-Claude Flachat at the behest of Philibert Trudaine-de-Montigny.34 His initiatives included madder, grown from seed imported from Smyrna (Izmir), and cotton cultivation in plantations in Castres and at the gates of Montpellier.35 These initiatives 90

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were successful, recognized by the scientific society and emulated at Lille, Carpentras, Arles, Toulon, and Fouques.36 Althen’s statue in Avignon remains as a monument to the efforts of improvers. Althen was remarkable but not unique; all across the Languedoc could be found networks of experimental gardeners, such as those in Limoux who discovered they could protect their apple trees from aphids by introducing insect predators into their orchards.37 The network of experimental gardeners was robust and extensive. When it was proposed to reintroduce woad (pastel) to the province, the intendant resisted calls to set up an inspectorate to control quality by pointing out that the “owners and farmers” were in the best position to make those kinds of judgments.38 The scientific society stimulated a farmer, who wished to remain anonymous, to write a report explaining why production of the plant had declined in the province. His view was that the plant variety needed to be replaced to make a more effective dyestuff.39 Similarly, in 1785 the estates did not create public nurseries to encourage improvement in the species of olive trees grown in the province. Instead they embraced a more subtle approach that addressed the community of improving cultivators and offered incentives to experiment with new varieties.40 The Estates, it was argued, did not have to create gardens or even educate gardeners; all they had to do was print and distribute the best advice.41 The network of experimental gardeners in the Languedoc made up a highly visible element of the social landscape that was courted by reforming elites. Agricultural reform in the Languedoc was paralleled by and embedded in a period of expansion of the rural economy. In contrast to areas such as Anjou in the west of France, the bulk of the Languedoc was able to participate in the economic growth of the late eighteenth century.42 The fertile coastal plain was well integrated into markets and adapted a commercial agriculture; the uplands were an early center of proto-industrialisation.43 Rural and urban worlds interacted beneficially in the region, and even small villages retained institutions of self-government.44 As a consequence rural society was flexible and capable of promoting and reacting to change. Colin Jones, for example, has noted that the debt crisis in charitable institutions at the end of the eighteenth century provoked a wave of foundations of confréries, mutual aid institutions that replaced the social insurance functions of the hôpitals.45 In the Lower Languedoc the rural world 91

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was strong enough to participate in the processes of economic, political, and cultural change and did not have to define itself as systematically hostile to whatever emerged from Montpellier or Toulouse.46 In Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed’s words, the region possessed a “culturally valuable rusticity” rather than a debilitating rurality.47 There is, however, a serious and credible argument mounted by scholars who argue that the peasant economy did not innovate but rather intensified its exploitation of family labor to survive, a perspective canonized in Le Roy Ladurie’s contention that the peasant economy of the Languedoc was in crisis in the eighteenth century.48 It is clear that economic change was uneven, and towns that relied on traditional products of cereals and sheep continued to decline. The introduction of more specifically marketoriented crops, however, from mulberry trees for silk, through new fodder crops, to new vineyards, allowed the region to escape the limitations of cereal agriculture.49 Growth in the rural economy was not uniform; some regions clearly benefited from the extension of markets in the eighteenth century, such as Alais, but others did not, such as the Narbonnais.50 In consequence the “thin culture” of rural experimentation was not a universal experience. One particularly dynamic group of agricultural reformers centered on the experimental farm run by the abbé François Rozier in Béziers.51 Arthur Young visited Beauséjour, Rozier’s farm, during his tour in 1787 and acknowledged that it “succeeded well. I walked over the farm, which is beautifully situated on the slope and top of a hill, which commands Béziers, its rich vale, its navigation, and a fine accompaniment of mountains.”52 Young did not quite know what to make of Rozier when he finally met him in person two years later in Lyon, and in truth Rozier was a little difficult to categorize.53 He was a hybrid of administrator and farmer and had come to practical farming through administration and political economy, as one of André-Robert-Jacquet Turgot’s assistants. Then again much the same could be said of Young, who was not a particularly successful practical farmer. By 1772 the abbé Rozier had graduated back from his Béziers farm to Paris, where he was editing the compendium of work on physics, natural history, and technology and, in turn, encouraging local correspondents in the Languedoc to continue to report the results of their work to him.54 He was more of an intellectual entrepreneur than a local érudit. 92

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His work exploited a fruitful tension between political economy and the results of his experience on the ground. In the article on abundance in his Complete Course in Agriculture Rozier made a straightforward defense of free trade. He argued that without free trade a good harvest was a disaster for farmers because oversupply of local markets would lower prices and drive the farmers to ruin.55 Open exports not only allowed farmers to benefit from good harvests, it gave them an incentive to raise productivity. Rozier was, however, much more an agronome than a physiocrat and did not argue that any administrative instrument, either free trade or the single tax, could stimulate plenty. Instead he identified a particular, situated rationality as a necessity for agricultural development. He criticized those who “without thinking about it, plow their land or trim their vines, . . . as their fathers plowed and trimmed,” but thought that “those who know agriculture only from books, yet speak with authority and decisively without having any familiarity with the countryside and without leaving their studies,” were the “most pernicious and do the most damage to agriculture.”56 His experience allowed Rozier to escape false comparisons of mercantalists to economic liberals. He argued that while legal institutions could remove obstacles to change and growth, increasing productivity depended on an immanent process of improvement. Rozier drew a detailed picture of the process through which successful agronomical research, as opposed to bookish speculation, drove change in local contexts. General principles had to underpin any systemic approach to agricultural improvement, but “before committing oneself to any experiment, one has to have a real understanding of the climate of the land and its exposure, above all of the quality of the soil, how deep it is, and its capacity to drain or retain water.”57 The nature of the local society and the process of emulation in rural life were even more important than the specific characteristics of the land. Peasants and farmers “do not read and do not know how to read, but they observe,” and they innovated not as individuals but as a community inspired by example and imitation. Rozier deployed an explicit distinction between the kind of individual insight necessary for “invention” and the collective process he observed around Béziers. “If you show them an innovation that strikes them as interesting, they will spend a long time looking it over, thinking about whether or not to take it on, until finally, if one of them does, then 93

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all the inhabitants of the canton follow on.”58 Rozier’s amphibious identity, coming from the world of state reformers but embedded in a local context, gave him a particularly sharp appreciation of the experience of social innovation, which relied on collective emulation more than on individual inspiration. Rozier’s account opens up the experience of change in the rural Languedoc for us. Most important of all, he recognized the specifically subaltern, collective process of appropriation and emulation that interacted with the classic communicative forms of scholarly life. The same observation of a specific mode of popular appropriation of new ideas and habits was made by other observers, though often to criticize it. Amoreux argued that in the art of dyeing “the workers often spontaneously achieve better and more subtle mixtures of colors than those attained after thousands of unsuccessful experiments and trials conducted fruitlessly by inventors,” and that effectively among inventors we should properly include “skillful artisans and clever workers.”59 Among members of the knowledge elite of the province engaged in applied forms of research there was a clear understanding that such research was a collaboration, not simply the application of previously articulated theory. The knowledge community, properly understood, extended far out into the province and down its social structure. Rozier was not an isolated example of a rural savant; parallels can be found across the province. The most impressive was the series of experiments inspired by the agronomic writing of Duhamel de Monceau, carried out on some waste land from 1759 by M. Mouret of Saint-Jean-de-Bruel in the isolated Rouergue.60 Mouret decided to investigate whether or not grain yields on the worst soils of his village could be improved by working the land, turning it repeatedly, as recommended by Jethro Tull. His notebook for the first year of the ten he spent on his experiment opens a window onto the difficulties faced by anyone conducting these kinds of experiment.61 After plowing deeply in the autumn Mouret saw early shoots in November, but after this early result his reports are nothing but a catalogue of disaster. In March the communal herd invaded his experimental field and grazed it flat. Hares did the same in June. Finally, despite Mouret seeing some good effects from hand hoeing, the entire harvest was destroyed in the late summer by insects and an outbreak of disease. Undeterred, he carried on his experiments for another nine years. Another example of a local agronome was 94

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J. J. Brunet, who carried out his experiments on the small property he inherited from his uncle near Laverune. Brunet’s experimental farm specialized in new strains of cotton and cattle feeds.62 All of these initiatives became centers of emulation for their localities, and over the long run there is evidence that the work of experimental farmers and agronomists had practical effect. Séguier, from the town of Montels just outside Béziers, where Rozier had his farm, reported to the agricultural society of the Hérault that “we do not grow as much grain here as we could,” because “cultivators think fallow is a necessity,” but more enlightened members of the commune know that “if they were more aware of the practice of altering and varying crops, if they plowed more frequently and more deeply, and if they made sure the land was fertilized, that which is well farmed cannot be exhausted.”63 Five years later the associate member of the newly refounded departmental agricultural societies from Béziers explained that grain production in the west of the canton was higher precisely because new forage crops had been introduced that restored vitality to fallow ground “and that has made comfortable men of a large number of proprietors who had difficulty surviving twenty-five years ago.”64 The power of example was changing practice on the ground and creating a mode of reason that articulated general principles and the needs of regulatory institutions, primarily the state, in relation to the lived experience of communities and individuals. The ambition to transform local circumstances through engagement with the globe was characteristic of economic botany. Economic botany, the systematic study of plants with a view to their use, was popular in the province and found outlets in agricultural reform, industry, and medicine. Gouan reported in 1794 that in Montpellier “the botanists of the botanical garden run for several centuries by the medical school have generated such a taste for botany that the town is adorned by several amateur botanical gardens.”65 He was sensitive to this context because he depended on the network of local botanists, such as the Gignac apothecary M. Saulières, who gathered the mast from ash trees for him and sent along samples, to act as his collectors and to conduct elementary experiments.66 One of the most important publications to come out of the Montpellier school of botany was Gouan’s Flora Monspeliensis of 1765, the fruit of this concentration of activity and the first systematic work on botany in France to use Linnean nomenclature.67 Bioprospecting by Linnean scholars was one 95

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of the features of eighteenth-century voyages of discovery, and closer to home the simplicity of Linnean categorization techniques and naming practices facilitated collaboration between socially and geographically diverse individuals. Economic botany was effectively a Linnean project, especially in the Languedoc. Rozier, in his entry for botany, explained that if humans had perfect recall then no artificial naming system would be necessary, but since they don’t enjoy that facility, “this is the only way to communicate to understand one another and to communicate, from country to country, the observations and discoveries that may be made in the kingdom of the plants.”68 In the Languedoc practice and theory all revolved around Linnaeus. Gouan’s 1765 publication became a point of departure for a renewed wave of botanizing in and around Montpellier. Gouan’s students were important champions of economic botany. Brunet reorganised his botanical garden in Laverune on Linnean principles on the prompting of his friend Orthez, who had been another of Gouan’s students.69 Yet another student at Montpellier, John Sibthorp, supplemented Gouan’s work with a description of local mosses that were not found in Gouan’s work.70 In later years Sibthorp sustained the project of economic botany and founded the chair of rural economy at Oxford. Pelissier and Banal found an aquatic fern in the woods of Grammont that so defied categorization it had to be sent to Linnaeus himself to be categorized.71 Economic botany, and the culture of improvement it was part of, could, however, have perverse results. The sheer scale of bioprospecting in the Languedoc threatened the biosphere. In the handbook he wrote for the students of the new School of Health during the Revolution Gouan complained that while enclosures and intensified exploitation had created environmental stress, the most salient cause of species loss in Languedoc was collectors: “There is another cause no less injurious to the propagation of plants, and against which Linnaeus spoke out, and this is the insatiable avidity of botanists that drives them to make huge collections, so much so that by taking so many plants in flower, they destroy the resources for the coming year.”72 There were so many popular botanists in the province that they were denuding the landscape. We gain another perspective on the density of economic botany in the Languedoc from the efforts of the scientific society to coordinate 96

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correspondence between local agronomes and such figures as Edme Beguillet, who carried out experiments on the classification of grains in his native Dijon.73 The capacity of the province in economic botany was also recognized by foreign correspondents. Peter Templeton, secretary of the Society of Arts, founded in London in 1754 to promote technological change, wrote to Montpellier in 1760 inquiring whether “any herbs or species of grass grow in your country in the most inclement part of the year (which we consider to be the months of December, January, February, March and April) so as to supply all sorts of cattle at that time with a vegetating food?”74 Templeton went on to articulate a beautifully clear statement of the aspirations of economic botany: “We know that nature has disseminated her bounties through the habitable world, so that some species of fruits and herbs arise spontaneously in one country and other in another, but that most of them are capable of being transplanted and thrive in the most distant regions. It is the business of philosophers and naturalists to explore these treasures of nature and spread the knowledge and uses of them for the benefit of mankind.”75 The efforts in the Languedoc formed part of a global movement that aspired to transform the conditions of life by capturing the resources of nature. Across the south of France, towns, corporations, and individuals had an interest in the introduction of exotics and the project of acclimatization of valuable plants. Barrère conducted experiments in Perpignan to introduce rice cultivation, based on his observations in Valencia.76 Joseph Lieutaud, one of the médecins du roi, was granted a twenty-year lease on an acclimatization garden at Hyères, near the port of Toulon, in 1764.77 Lieutaud’s work in the hospital at Versailles continued, so to prosecute the practical work in the garden on the Mediterranean coast he needed local collaborators and found them in Fille, who had been studying botany for thirty years. Fille eventually went into a partnership in experiment with the abbé Nolin.78 Their garden, which was particularly good at developing frost-resistant species of orange trees, became internationally known and was visited by Young and Jefferson on their respective agricultural tours.79 There was also a royal botanical garden at Hyères, attached to the naval base at Toulon.80 The agricultural society in Carpentras developed yet another garden and followed an independent strategy of introducing new strains of madder and potatoes as well as encouraging olive tree plantations.81 97

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By the 1760s the agronomical community in the Languedoc and Provence was extensive and visible enough to be attractive to the state as a partner in the project of agricultural reform. Saint-Priest wrote to Étienne-Hyacinthe Ratte, the physicist and secretary of the scientific society, to ask him to help organize an agricultural survey of the province. The Parisian agronomical society did not have access to the network of local correspondents needed to investigate “practical means of improving land in the clearest detail.”82 He had made the same request for the same reasons for help in compiling Pierre-Joseph Buchoz’s natural history of France.83 Other agronomists and natural scientists were happy to have their work recognized by the Languedoc community. René Antoine Ferchault de Réamur, for instance, was delighted at the reception of a little study he had written on chicken farming.84 The very vibrancy and density of agronomy and economic botany in the Languedoc made it oddly unreceptive to the initiative to create agricultural societies advanced by Bertin, contrôleur-général des finances, in 1761.85 Resistance to the extension of the national network of agricultural societies on the part of the Estates of Languedoc disappointed the intendant, who had assumed he would have their support.86 He thought their alternative plan, to make oversight of agronomy part of the remit of the commission of 1734, was a blocking maneuver, designed by the conservative Estates to frustrate the national plan for societies, “approved and established in different provinces” and “ the only good system, preferable in every way to that proposed by the Estates.”87 Saint-Priest was only half right. The resistance was calculated to obstruct extension of a national plan, but not because the Estates did not agree with the goals of Bertin, Turbilly, and the other founders of the Paris Agricultural Society. Rather, the local agronomists thought the national initiative would be ineffective. They shared the view of Jean-Baptiste-François de La Michodière, the intendant in Lyon, who had pointed out that if the state did not provide funds for an experimental farm as the central activity of the new agricultural society, then the practical farmers involved would just drift away, and “this establishment will quickly degenerate into a kind of academy.”88 An initiative of this sort, led from the center, would be an exercise in rent seeking rather than a dynamic, self-supporting movement.

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The anxiety that without consistent support the new national network would become fragile proved prescient. In 1785 Vergennes noted in a memorandum that the correspondence between Versailles and the agricultural societies had fallen away for many years, and that “all emulatory energies” had been extinguished.89 In contrast the Estates could rely on the existing structures of governance in the province and the wide international network of agricultural reformers to continue to direct attention to more specific goals in agricultural reform. The syndic général of the Assembly of Alais (modern Alès) reported in 1761 that the Estates were appealing to “all patriotic farmers” to send in their suggestions for the kinds of agricultural reforms they thought would be of most benefit, and in the following year he reported that Jean-Charles Joubert was gathering material for a survey of all land that had been removed from cultivation in the province.90 Local organs of government took on the new role in promoting agricultural reform in different ways. In 1770 scholarships to the new veterinary school at Lyon were offered by the dioceses of Nîmes and Albi, as well as the Estates of the Vivarais, as a means of stimulating improvement locally.91 In 1767 the Estates established a commission for the amelioration of agriculture to coordinate the governance of improvement across the province.92 As the state, and substate, bodies such as the Estates and the Société royale intensified their commitment to the project of improvement they unearthed local cosmopolitans in unexpected places. Louis Gérard, of Mende in the Lozère, was delighted to be approached by Gouan in 1777 to become a correspondent of the Société royale.93 He was a model of the embedded, local cosmopolitan, as well as being extremely productive. He had a study of beekeeping and observations on inoculation ready to communicate to the society and was working on a statistical account of the Vivarais, on the model of the work he had already done on the Gevaudan. He even had a reflective piece on the utility of academies; “it is very flattering,” he wrote, “for me to agree on certain points with M. de Condorcet on this subject.”94 Gérard had been invisible to the outside scholarly world to that point because he had seen himself as a client of “the respectable M. Séguier of Nîmes.” His reaction to the approach from Gouan was to ask for the addresses of the other corresponding

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members of the society, “with whom I have no relationship.” He was pivoting from a closed and hierarchical model of communicative action to forming his own network. Eventually he would become a corresponding member of the Linnean Society of London in his own right. All of this evidence builds a compelling picture of a knowledge community that effectively organized itself across the region. The evidence allows us to map changing practice and to understand the way in which the various sites of botanical and agronomical endeavor formed part of a common enterprise. What is striking is the constant reference to common ideas of reason and the importance of Linnaeus both as a symbol of the rugged rural improver and as the author of the taxonomy that most explicitly offered a mechanism for the translation between the local and the universal. That shared culture is what made a movement out of the efforts of the botanists, gardeners, and experimental farmers. Coordination of collective action, even in a province with well-established structures of governance such as the Languedoc, was more implicit than explicit. While sites of communication, such as the scientific society, were obviously important, imaginative convergence, holding the relevant norms in mind while separated in space and time, was the condition of a coherent knowledge community. Most striking of all are the moments of reflexivity in the evidence in which reformers such as Amoreux and Rozier identified for us the nature of hybrid rationality that animated the culture of improvement in the Languedoc. Their observation that “improvement” turned on hybrids, men and women who crossed social boundaries as well as the boundaries between theoretical and applied knowledge, has been echoed by historians of early modern science and innovation.95 Holding together the heterogeneous elements of the rural Enlightenment demanded skills very similar to those of the urban Enlightenment, they just presented themselves in a different guise. The mixture of cosmopolitan or universal principles with embedded knowledge rooted in practice is precisely the compound that John Fea identified in his protagonist of rural Enlightenment on the Delaware, Philip Vickers Fithian.96 On both sides of the Atlantic, though in very different social and political settings, the process of improvement mobilized rural society, and in both cases the culture of reason shared the same structure. Vickers Fithian, however, though a graduate of the College of 100

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New Jersey and consequently heavily influenced by John Witherspoon’s version of the Scottish Enlightenment, was recruited from among farmers, while the majority of the individuals we have sources for in the case of the Languedoc were not. We can infer the collaboration of a wide circle of farmers and gardeners from the evidence left by local savants and provincial institutions, but to understand the process fully we need direct evidence from representatives of the hybrids themselves. Only from that position can we properly evaluate this culture of reason.

From Gardeners to Botanists: Banal Père et Fils Botanical gardens and experimental farms were the spaces in which the relationships between expertise and authority, between artisanal capacity and social status, were negotiated. Much of that work of negotiation and adaptation is invisible to us, but a remarkable series of documents open up a full picture of the careers of two gardeners, Antoine Banal father and son. They both worked as head gardeners in the Jardin botanique royale in Montpellier (now the Jardin des plantes de Montpellier). Unlike for so many other people of their social status we have good sources for them precisely because of the social and intellectual tensions created by changing norms of authority in natural science. For the most part the politics of knowledge in the garden were discussed in academic committees and in correspondence between administrators and authorities in the university. As the criteria of competence in botany became clearer, however, the contradictions in the role of the head gardener, the most proficient botanist in the garden, spilled over into public debate. A satirical pamphlet that lampooned old-fashioned medical humanists played on the gap between status and competence, and the contradictions of patronage for the elder Banal once he was given the title of instructor: “Yes Banal,” wrote the anonymous authors, “clever people are as aware as you are that your new title is due to the delicate way you have conducted yourself in your job. You have a son for whom you can entertain some expectations. You should use the time Imbert leaves to you to tutor him. You can justifiably hope that he will repay the effort and come up to the standard of his forebears. The day of merit may dawn. Perhaps one day you will have the pleasure of seeing . . . you understand me.”97 Just what might Banal 101

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hope for his son, and by what merit could he hope for it? In answering these questions we can throw new light on the interconnected questions of popular participation and the place of the life sciences in the provincial Enlightenment. The careers of Antoine Banal père and Antoine Banal fils allow us to understand how provincial or rural subalterns participated in the Enlightenment. At first sight they seem to follow a path parallel to that traced by the Thouins, who held the same posts in the Paris Jardin du roi. Emma Spary describes how in a generation the Thouins acceded to gentlemanly collaboration from labor.98 No doubt Banal senior’s hope for his son was that he would become a scholarly gentleman and be assimilated into the university hierarchy as a professor. The intriguing element of the story is that this ascent did not happen, or at least not as an ascent through the rungs of the old regime educational institutions. The younger Banal acquired greater authority in the world of science, but it threatened his social and institutional position. The progressive rise in the claim to scientific authority by the head gardeners contrasted with their employment history. As their competence grew, the gardeners became less secure in their tenure. The Banal family had held the position of head gardener tranquilly for a hundred years, until the elder Banal was fired in 1750.99 He was then rehired in 1761 when his replacement, Malassagne, proved unsatisfactory. The younger Banal inherited the position in 1772, only to be locked out of the garden in 1779 and briefly replaced by a new gardener called Paul, and he only gained definitive control of running the garden in 1795. It would seem that as the Banals became better at their job they became more likely to lose it. Clearly the integration of those who had once been servants as colleagues, or at least participants, in the collective enterprise of botany generated a series of tensions. The Banals faced these problems because they acquired authority in the contested and previously occupied ground of university faculties, medical corporations, and local academies rather than in the more novel spaces of the public sphere or the market. They illustrate that in the provincial Enlightenment the vital change in the structures of intellectual sociability was a flattening of the hierarchies within the learned world, not the diffusion of a notion of publicity. As the terms of inclusion of the learned world 102

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changed, subordinate, or subaltern, members of that world, who would not have enjoyed membership of the republic of letters, acquired the new role of articulating provincial popular culture and the Enlightenment.100 The mutual reinforcement of epistemological and social hierarchies, which Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer argue was characteristic of seventeenth-century science, unraveled in the eighteenth century. This meant cognitive authority could potentially be acquired by those without social authority, so setting up new claims to equality within scientific and scholarly life.101 The case of the Banals underlines that it is precisely at the intersection of these two histories, of the theoretical account of practice and of the management of objects, in this case plants, that we ascertain the trajectory of the social history of eighteenth-century provincial science. The fate of the Banals was completely tied up with their place in the botanical garden. The garden was attached to the medical university, discussed in the preceding chapter.102 The head gardener was the only person in a stable position who had direct responsibility for the running of the botanical garden. The operating budget for the garden was in the control of the head gardener; in 1754 alone he signed for 2,466 livres worth of work.103 Except for the salary attached to the chair of botany, the whole budget passed through Banal’s hands. The use of the money was not restricted to routine tasks; in 1754 Malassagne reorganized a considerable area of the garden and had Jean Barthelemy design and build a new waterwheel. In the absence of the head gardener one of the under-gardeners could take financial responsibility. Mercier the under-gardener claimed back twenty livres for outlay he had made for building a new flower bed while Malassagne was on a collecting expedition in September. We can suspect that even the under-gardeners were comfortably off by the standards of the time, since they could carry quite considerable debt loads. In the general squeeze on budgets in the late eighteenth century the Cour des aides in Montpellier became tardy in transferring the sums owed to the garden, and so the gardeners had to wait longer to be reimbursed. In 1763 all the workers in the garden, from the concierge upward, petitioned to have their quarterly salaries paid. Mercier, still under-gardener in 1763, complained to Imbert, the chancellor, that he had been underwriting the garden’s petty cash: “Mercier would particularly like you to recognize, Sir, that six months ago he incurred expenses in the garden under your orders, 103

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but though you have signed the receipts, he has not been reimbursed for the sum, which creates difficulties for him; he hopes that you will be kind enough to arrange this for him.”104 By 1768 the arrears had stretched from six months to two years, though the chair’s salary was still paid on time.105 The very tardiness with which credits were covered only reinforced the control of the gardeners over the material structure of the garden. The absence of Malassagne in September 1754 points us to another of the roles played by the head gardener; he was the chief field botanist for the institution. As such he was responsible for collecting the plants that allowed the garden to participate in the network of exchanges that constituted international botany. In 1759 Malassagne made nine botanizing tours of more than one day to as far away as Mende and Perpignan.106 In 1780 Banal would travel in the company of Gouan as far as the Pyrenees and the Cevennes.107 These local collecting expeditions gathered the resources that were the basis on which Banal could trade with other gardeners to maintain the garden’s reputation. In 1772 he was harrying his superior, Imbert, who was on a visit to Paris, to remind André Thouin that he owed Banal a packet of seeds in return for the supplies he had already been sent.108 He also wanted Imbert to go to Boutonet’s hardware shop to get him his favorite brand of pruning secateurs. By all accounts Banal was a very good field botanist as well. In 1774 he found an aquatic cryptogam in the woods of Grammont, a favorite botanizing ground, which had never been found south of the 56th parallel.109 Finally, the Banals ended up doing a lot of the practical teaching in the botanical garden. In 1762 Imbert responded to student demand for more regularity in teaching botany by advertising that the gardener would display and explain the plants for an hour before and after the lecture by the professor, and would take the students botanizing every Wednesday.110 The relationship between Imbert and the elder Banal was particularly complex. Imbert regained control of the budget of the botanical garden from the intendant in the spring of 1761, having been chancellor since 1758.111 That February he also rehired Banal, who had held no position since 1750, as gardener.112 Imbert’s goal was to establish his own authority as a teacher of botany, if not an actual botanist, over his demonstrators, Gouan and Cusson, both well trained in botany by Sauvages.113 If the satirical account of his lectures, written by those same demonstrators, is to be believed, he 104

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could only exercise that authority through the gardener. Banal organized the garden in numbered containers and wrote a catalogue for the professor to allow him to identify the plants he was discussing.114 This was the basis for the textbook Banal junior later published. Eventually Banal was appointed under-demonstrator, effectively conducting the tutorials for Imbert’s course. Nor was this teaching confined to supplementing the course given by the professor or his replacement. Banal gave his own lessons and was accepted as an instructor. On his retirement he petitioned to be allowed to continue to give his own course in the botanical garden. The dean reminded Imbert, “You will be aware how useful this course is to our students.”115 Overall, given that the gardener took care of the finances, directed much of the research, and took on some of the teaching in the botanical garden, it is difficult to see what there was for the chair to do. One might suspect that the reason for the continual trouble between the chair and the gardener was this confusion of roles. Isn’t it likely that gardeners were fired as the chancellor sought to reassert his authority, at least intermittently? It is undoubtedly the case that the directors had mixed feelings about the pretensions to knowledge by the gardeners, particularly as they had no formal qualifications. In 1779 Imbert was tempted to support the dismissal by his deputy, Paul-Joseph Barthez, of the younger Banal in order to reinforce the university hierarchy, notwithstanding his knowledge that Barthez was destroying the garden.116 Yet even in this crisis Imbert avoided such a heavy-handed insistence on hierarchical precedence. In most cases the ambiguity created by the position of someone who was technically a servant of the university actually playing such an important role could be managed within existing structures, and hierarchy could be subtly managed to accommodate real functions. Clothing, for instance, could be used as a marker of status and respect. The gardener was not required to wear any livery; other servants of the university working in the garden were required to wear it, and all other liveried persons were barred from entry.117 The head gardener occupied an anomalous position, neither university officer nor servant. In fact to be in the personal service of the director was a sign that one was not a true botanist. Imbert noted, in explaining the dispute between Barthez and Banal, that the man who had replaced Banal was a servant of Barthez’s and continued to be one, rather than a real gardener, who was independent 105

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by definition.118 It was Barthez rather than Banal who was seen as unsettling what should have been a settled division of roles. When Banal was replaced by Paul in 1779, the students raised a petition against Paul on the grounds he was not competent to teach, and they gave a picture of the activities they thought proper to the gardener: “We the undersigned assert that during the period that we have followed the course on botany given in the jardin royal in Montpellier we have not seen the man called Paul fill any of the functions of a gardener. That is to say he does no planting, does not organize the plants, does not demonstrate during the lectures, nor does he instruct on the plants that have been discussed after the lectures, all of which are the basic duties of a head gardener in this garden. We assert also that it is well known that Paul knows nothing about plants, as he worked in both Narbonne and Montpellier as an agricultural day labourer.”119 The increasing competence of the head gardeners, and some form of insubordination, was not in itself reason for their constant troubles with directors and deputy directors of the botanical garden. If anything the division of labor between a director who presided over a botanical garden and a head gardener who ran it was a sensible one for both parties. What we have to explain is why such a division of labor became untenable. The relationship between head gardener and director became systematically difficult when the most characteristic and specific function of the gardener, field botany, became the object of scientific dispute. The gardeners became vulnerable when the scientific community, especially the medical community, was unable to find consensus on what constituted good practice and was further unable to retain dissensus within itself. There had been dispute about the place of botany in the university and in the Société royale des sciences from the late seventeenth century. By embracing Linnaeus’s program in botany the scientific community in Montpellier unwittingly escalated that set of disputes into a crisis and began a classic struggle for institutional power. Linnean ideals refocused botanical practice around the skills of the gardeners and created terrible problems for them. The sin of the Banals was their mastery of skills that became the focus of claims to authority by Linnean-inspired botanists. The elder Banal lost his job precisely at the moment that the sponsors of Sauvages sought to redefine the directorship of the botanical garden 106

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around the identity of the Linnean botanist. The subsequent firing of Malassagne and Banal fils, in 1761 and 1779, respectively, occurred at similar moments of vulnerability for the medical community. Imbert, newly appointed, reappointed Banal as he finally succeeded in regaining financial control of the garden from the intendant. The dismissal of Banal fils in 1779 illustrated the tension between the themes of scientific identity and hierarchical authority in a particularly vivid manner. Unlike his father, the younger Banal was explicitly committed to Linnean botany. In the introduction to his catalogue he argued that “to make any progress in botany you must understand its methods; as Linnaeus says, theory is the Ariadne’s thread for botanists, without it botany is nothing but chaos.”120 From 1772, once Paul-Joseph Barthez became survivancier to Imbert, who had moved to Paris, Banal acted as the effective director of the garden. Although Barthez had many other qualities, his ignorance of botany was notorious, and the younger Banal, secure in his scientific identity, was not willing to stage-manage the performance of authority on the part of the chancellor in the manner of his father.121 The relationship between the director and the gardener was poisonous. Barthez tried to rid himself of Banal in 1775 and 1777 and finally had him thrown out by changing all the locks in the garden in November 1779.122 All these maneuvers ultimately failed because the professional identification of Banal as a botanist meant he kept taking responsibility for the garden’s fortunes, even when he was not being paid, and because that professional identity was recognized by Barthez’s colleagues. Banal’s position in the world of botany allowed him to ignore Barthez and to continue to act as head botanist. During the 1777 dispute he continued to manage the garden and to maintain its position in the exchange network. He told Imbert, “I have written to my acquaintances everywhere to replace those plants that were lost. A packet of seeds will arrive to you in Paris from Valenciennes soon, please hold them until you next come to Montpellier. While waiting for everything I have requested I have transferred over a hundred plants from my own garden to the jardin du Roy.”123 On Banal’s 1779 dismissal the university convened an investigation on the running of the garden and rejected Barthez’s contention that the university had no authority in the case.124 Banal’s competence in botany was accepted as warrant for what was effectively insubordination. Barthez’s colleagues 107

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went so far as to collude with Banal to subvert Barthez’s direction. Antoine Reine, the dean of the faculty, suggested to Imbert in 1779 that if Barthez refused to fund Banal’s plant gathering trips to the Pyrenees then Imbert should direct Banal to go as Gouan’s assistant.125 The gardener was understood to have authority equivalent, though different, to that of the director. The complexities and even contradictions of the social and scientific roles played by Banal are emphasized once the optic is widened to take in his place in international networks. If we look at the membership list of the Linnean Society of London in 1788 we see that Antoine Banal was one of the thirteen French members of the new society.126 For Smith, the founder of the London society, Banal was socially qualified for membership because he was scientifically useful. His relationship to the university was problematic, and he would never have been considered as a candidate for membership of the local academy of sciences because of his social background. Different models of social authority adapted in more or less flexible ways to changing ideals of scientific authority. The year Banal was inducted to the Linnean Society of London he was also unearthing an old gardener who “remembered” the burial of Narcissa, Edward Young’s daughter, in the botanical garden. Young’s poem, published in his Night Thoughts, contrasted the botanical garden, where his dead daughter was buried secretly by night, to the graveyard she was denied as a Protestant. While Nature melted, Superstition raved; That mourned the dead, and this denied a grave. It drew a very clear picture of a universal, humanitarian Enlightenment, sheltered in the garden. It is striking that Banal got involved in associating the Montpellier garden with the memory of the death, since the unfortunate young woman had in fact been publicly interred in Lyon in 1736.127 Banal’s role in developing the myth of Narcissa illustrates his integration into the mainstream culture of natural history. The sentimental simile between young women and the transient beauty of plants became a popular trope of literary culture, and Banal was feeding the appetite of the audience for girls, plants, and death.128 His membership of international networks of natural history and participation in elite culture contrasts with his exclusion from local elite institutions. It was only during the Revolution 108

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that Banal was fully socially integrated into scientific society when he became one of the founder members of the Société libre d’agriculture, which also regrouped much of the scientific and academic notables of the region, such as Amoreux and Gouan.129 The scientific culture of late eighteenth-century France was ambiguous. It could and did foster and recognize changing norms of scientific authority and recognized the roles played by collaborators of varied social status in the process of making knowledge. The social system in turn was flexible enough to accommodate and adapt systems of honor to reflect changes in function; gardeners did not have to continue to be laborers to satisfy the demands of social hierarchy, though there were moments when this kind of conservative retrenchment seemed tempting. The limits of this relatively flexible culture were reached when claims to institutional and scientific authority came into conflict and could not be reconciled by some internal adjustment, when the status hierarchy did not have to adapt but to change. The problem confronted by the younger Banal when he claimed to be a botanist was that there was no mechanism to renegotiate the structure of the botanical garden as a whole in a way that could securely recognize the interests and ideals of all parties. Accommodation and adaptation could only go so far; indeed, the very flexibility of the institutional and social system threatened to shatter it if a way could not be found to reform it in a manner that acknowledged the cumulative effects of change. As in so many domains of experience in late eighteenth-century France, the creativity of the society was creating new norms but struggled to embed those norms in new institutions.

The Political Limits to the Culture of Improvement The fortunes of enclosure of waste land or clearance (défrichement) in the Languedoc illustrate the awkward consequences of a process of change that could not embed its outcomes in renewed institutions. In the late eighteenth century the agriculture of the Languedoc began to recover from a century-long depression.130 Unsurprisingly, then, the opportunity to enclose land offered by the royal regulation of 1771 was eagerly exploited by every kind of farmer.131 Under the provisions of the royal arrêt, all land that had been abandoned and uncultivated for forty years, except woodland and 109

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hillsides, could be enclosed, claimed, and remain free of all obligations, including tithe and all feudal dues, for fifteen years. By 1773, 225 enclosures were undertaken in the diocese of Alès alone.132 In the parish of Vézénobres 351 setérées were enclosed in that year by thirty-four individuals. The average enclosure was approximately eleven setérées, and one may calculate the significance of that size by reference to the fact that a property of ten setérées was considered too small to pay tax on.133 These microenclosures were largely created by small farmers bringing marginal land into cultivation to grow cash crops such as vines and olives. All over the diocese the majority of enclosures were of less than fifty setérées (figure 6), and in any case, as the local agronomist Séguier noted, “less lucky than the English, we cannot aspire in our cantons to enclose large commons. The nature of the land resists this . . . emulation drives us to investigate the land, to find the best banks and veins of earth, to fertilize them well and to open up those vast wastes that are a disgrace to industriousness.”134 The opportunity to acquire more land was taken up not only by small farmers. Large resources were appropriated by big producers. In the parish of Boissel two individuals enclosed more than four hundred setérées each, but even in that parish, where large enclosures were more prevalent than in any other, the greatest area of land was enclosed in units of

figure 6. Enclosure by size in three Languedoc villages, 1771–1789 110

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between twenty-five and fifty setérées (figure 7). Unlike in England, where enclosure transferred resources from small landowners to landlords, the terms of enclosure encouraged every stratum of rural society to participate in the expanding economy. The state, agricultural reformers, and farmers themselves had a clear rationale for allowing newly enclosed lands to enjoy the privileged status of being free from tax, feudal due, and tithe. Clearing and enclosing risked both labor and capital, while the collector of the tithe and champart was exposed to no risk at all. Tithe and champart might be property, but they could be suspended without offending “the basis of society.”135 As a local defender of the property rights of the enclosers of Alès put it, by levying tithe and feudal dues on newly cleared land one taxed the substance of the peasant rather than the fruits of the earth.136 The province enjoyed sophisticated legal and administrative instruments that could negotiate some of the complexities generated by particular cases and offer judgments on contending interests. A memorandum to the Estates for 1772 synopsized the issues that had arisen and the steps recommended to address them. These included a proposal that enclosures made to create vineyards should be granted the exemptions from taxation offered under the law even if they had been undertaken before 1762, because

figure 7. Enclosure by area in three Languedoc villages, 1771–1789 111

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of the length of time it took to bring along a crop.137 They also thought leases might be adjusted for properties that gained such new exemptions, in order to share the benefit, and asked the Estates to address an anomaly whereby poor peasants who burned off some of the waste to raise a crop were still liable for the tithe because their clearance did not qualify as an enclosure. The anonymous author of the report also grappled with issues created by the process of improvement itself. Tithe farmers claimed that enclosures that gave up grain production to sow sainfoin were, in terms of the law, abandoning the fields to pasture and so were liable for the foregone tithe.138 The memorandum rejected this view on the grounds that sainfoin was part of a crop rotation calculated to increase grain production. The province had the capacity to integrate different orders of knowledge, legal and technical, to manage processes of change in rational ways. Yet despite the clear agreement between the state, reformers, and farmers that enclosures required this kind of legal protection, it could not be guaranteed. The exemptions that made such clearances rational for the individual undertaking them had to be constantly, and in many cases unsuccessfully, defended.139 In the absence of political institutions for the negotiation of types of property claims, privilege could, and did, overturn political decisions to encourage productive activity. An agronomist in Lorraine expressed the problem perfectly: “One is not the owner of land if one does not have the right to the entirety of its product, one is not the farmer if one does not have the right to adopt this or that method or crop, all of which are made impossible by rights of gleanage, cropping and all the other communal rights.”140 Accommodations and adaptations to the prevailing legal norms threatened to embed privilege and inhibit development. The Alençon agricultural society, for instance, argued that bourgeois should be allowed live on the lands they were improving, without losing their civic privileges and without making them liable to pay the collecte like peasants.141 This would have effectively created a new kind of agrarian privileged nobility, and so was rejected by Bertin and his allies. Clever ideas to make privilege and improvement legally compatible could and did have perverse results. The problem was again illustrated by the decision of the Parlement of Nancy to uphold rights of cropping for animals on land newly enclosed under the edict of 1771 and to maintain the regulations of the use of this land.142 The very threat of legal action could inhibit or denature efforts 112

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at enclosure. The syndic of Milhars, in the diocese of Albi, appended a note to his calculations of enclosure for 1772. He noted that the tithe farmers were arguing that any benefit derived from land before it was enclosed, such as wood, were due a tithe and that they were contesting the waste status of much land. “These arguments, the threats by the agents of the tithe farmers to ruin individuals in law cases if they do not pay the tithe on newly cleared land, the fear of others that they will displease the curé if they don’t pay and a host of other obstacles” all conspired to make clearance a risky business.143 The lack of coordination between the central state and the province also opened up opportunities for rent seekers to capture resources. The syndic général of the province wrote to Necker, recently appointed director general of finance, to explain that an amendment to the law on enclosure, promulgated in 1775, enumerating the terms under which an enclosure could be contested, had created an opportunity for tithe farmers.144 The new amendment did not explicitly recognize the province’s own regulation of enclosure from 1770, used definitions of waste from a 1776 law that were tighter, and so reopened all the loopholes that had previously been closed. When claims to land were this insecure there was a constant temptation to ignore the long term to take advantage of the moment. The disincentives created by competing legal claims on territory could even undermine the most basic economic relations. The environs of Montpellier served the nearby urban market and so encouraged commercial agriculture and investment in viticulture.145 Even there, however, many of the enclosures generated by the 1771 edict were not rational redeployments of resources but destructive land grabs. As Albert Soboul, who has done the most comprehensive study of the effect of the edicts in the locality, put it, “Small landowners, above all day laborers, the workers of Montpellier, and those who had little money to invest, attacked the garrigues.”146 Attacking, rather than developing, the waste would in the long term destroy a potential resource. Ballainvilliers noted the contrast between the systematic change in land use and the vexatious effects of uncoordinated clearance in many areas of the province. The plain in southern Albi was a paragon of wellorganized change.147 A three-field rotation had eliminated fallow and encouraged introduction of new fodder crops and pulses. Farmers had diversified their crops, introducing potato cultivation and even planting 113

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new rows of chestnuts, to hedge against the risks they ran in producing grain for market. At the same time, however, in the more mountainous northern part of the diocese, land clearance was eroding the topsoil. Around Toulouse uncoordinated clearance even threatened the security of wood supplies.148 The institutional deficits of the ancien régime threatened to create a tragedy of the smallholding. Local men and women, as well as local administrators, were conscious that the problems they faced were political in nature. In 1781 the communities of Le Cailar, Vauvert, and Aimargues (all located just north of the Camargue) organized a campaign to reduce the cricket population, which was destroying their crops. To make the campaign effective, the prior of Saint-Gilles, a rich abbey originally founded by the Knights of Saint John, would have to cooperate, as the abbey owned the majority of the territory in that parish. A note in the hand of the intendant, Saint-Priest, remarked that while “it would be desirable for the Intendant to have the power to oblige the Grand Prior of Saint-Gilles, their tenants, and farmers of lands close to the territories of the supplicants to cooperate,” in law he did not have that power to compel them to, and neither did anyone else.149 The advice he had from the syndic general of the province was that all he could do was to write and appeal to the good nature of the prior to help with a campaign that would fail without them. If the powers of persuasion failed, there was no other way of forcing the prior to at least engage with the needs of his neighbors. Pierre Broussonet offered his own analysis of the systematic limits to improvement under the monarchy in a speech he gave to the Royal Agricultural Society in 1791.150 He acknowledged that the old regime had not been systematically hostile to all kinds of social change and innovation: “The progress of agriculture demanded some kind of organization among farmers (laboureurs),” and so the regime had created organizations with that end in view. In his view those efforts were futile, not because of some atavism or lack of rationality on the part of the farmers, but because of politics. Farmers and peasants suspected that any gains in productivity they made would be snatched away. “The inhabitants of the countryside . . . saw the wolf in shepherd’s clothing, they feared they would be used like those trees that are carefully cultivated until their barks are pierced to drain away all the nourishing sap that was only been 114

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allowed to accumulate in order to steal it.” This image of rubber or maple harvesting nicely tied together domestic and imperial economic botany, and made the point that social and economic progress had to be made politically secure. Two hundred years before the debate on the “great divergence” the core problem, of sustaining innovation, had already been identified. Political economy and natural history were two Enlightenment projects of improvement and were enormously creative discourses. They were not, however, authoritative languages of power. Public reason was ultimately enshrined in law, and law was ultimately politically defined. The difficulties the Banals faced in having their social position recognized, the frustrations encountered in organizing pest control, and the perverse outcomes of enclosure movements all spoke to the same problem. Without institutional change, the creativity and innovation displayed by the farmers, botanists, and agronomists were not secure. The social and cultural innovations of the eighteenth century, far from securing the political regime, would—and did—create political crisis.

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CHA PTER FOUR THE SWING PLOW AS AN EIGHTEENTHCENTURY UNIVERSAL MACHINE

The abbé Rozier’s Complete Course in Agriculture, published in 1793 (the year its author was killed in the siege of Lyons), was a compendium of the accumulated experience of a generation of agricultural reformers, and of the farmers with whom they had worked.1 In volume 2 of the nine, Rozier opened up a long discussion of agricultural machinery, particularly plows, with the observation that though it was acknowledged that the plow was the most important piece of agricultural machinery, “it is only in our time that attention has been paid to how to improve it, and to make it more useful.”2 Rozier’s claim was well founded; the eighteenth century was indeed the period during which plow design, which had been fundamentally unchanged since the invention of the heavy plow in the Middle Ages, was transformed.3 The sheer number of new plow types and other kinds of machines that were proposed and created in the latter part of the eighteenth century can seem to be bewildering. The agronomic literature is filled with plans and models for every kind of instrument under a wide variety of names. A catalogue of “instruments of husbandry” offered by John Wynn Baker to the Dublin Society in 1767 listed eighteen different types of plow alone, all adapted to different uses, draught animals and 116

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kinds of soil.4 Beneath the complexity lie some very clear patterns. Wynn Baker offered small illustrative notes on all his machinery, and of the last plow in the list, the wheeled Hertfordshire plow, he commented that it “cannot be so effectual in general use as ploughs without wheels.”5 This Hertfordshire type of heavy-wheeled plow had been the standard European model for nearly half a millennium, and its alternative, the “plough without wheels” as Wynn Baker put it, was the swing plow. The swing plow has been described as “the greatest improvement in plough design since the late Iron Age.”6 The swing plow replaced the heavy plow that had shaped core elements of tillage-based societies, and had even played a role as the object around which gender roles and identity had coalesced.7 Like so many of the transformative technical innovations of the early modern period, the swing plow emerged from an “invisible” world of artisanal and subaltern technology.8 Restoring to visibility the forgotten collaborators in the elaboration of new instruments, such as the air pump so crucial to the success of Boyle and Hooke’s program for the Royal Society, is not just an addition to our existing knowledge, a due acknowledgment of technicians in a process guided by engineers and designers.9 As Lissa Roberts and Simon Shaffer explain, reliable instruments and machines were not created by the application of science in a linear fashion.10 Instead the outcomes of ingenuity and invention had various orders of knowledge, abstract and concrete, embedded in them. The cognitive value of an engine, object, or instrument was not determined by an exogenous theoretical account but was an emergent feature of the process of creation and discovery. Once we understand this, we can recognize the powerful impact of novel instruments as agents, rather than catalysts, of cognitive change. New machines and objects imposed demands on their users and drove cultural change. The point is not to promote the value of “craft” over “thought,” or “techne” over “episteme,” but rather to acknowledge the implication of the two in the worlds we commonly refer to as “science and technology.” Artificers, designers, and blacksmiths were as caught up in the cognitive content of innovative machines as engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers. In fact this historical insight was already in the minds of enlightened reformers, such as the Irishman Samuel Madden, who wrote that he hoped for repeated inquiry, by the “best heads of the kingdom, assisted by hiring 117

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and employing the most skilful hands in agriculture,” so that they could put aside the “lumber of books.”11 In the case of many intellectually complex, socially ubiquitous, and highly significant technologically innovations, such as the development of fore and aft rigging for sailing vessels that intensified coastal trade in Europe and later the Caribbean, the individuals who were part of the world of innovation are lost to us, even if we can identity the community that promoted the change.12 The craftsmen who worked on plows are mostly forgotten but not entirely unrecoverable. The majority of the blacksmiths who experimented with plows do remain anonymous, but the contribution of James Small was so striking that he left behind a written record as well as a material object.13 Small was a blacksmith and cartwright from Berwickshire in southern Scotland, who in 1764 introduced a wheelless iron plow inspired and provoked by his adjustments to the Rotherham plow patented in 1730 by Joseph Foljambe and Disney Stanytown.14 What made Small stand out was that he was able to articulate the thinking that underpinned his innovations in design. “My situation in life has deprived me of many advantages of theoretical learning,” he wrote, but he was confident he could not only create a new kind of plow but also explain why it was an improvement on the old.15 He defined the plow not as an object but as a function: “In ploughing three things are performed. A slice of earth is cut off from the general mass. This slice is removed some inches to one side. It is so turned that it may expose a new surface to the air.”16 With this clarity to guide him he simplified the design of the plow to create a 130-degree curve from the coulter that cut the earth, through the share that lifted it, to the moldboard that turned the slice. Small united the mathematical skill to imagine the shape the moldboard would have to take with the technical capacity to make it and adapt it through the testing process. His prototype plow had embedded within it an abstraction from the mathematics of curves, alongside a craftsman’s understanding of the capabilities of the iron that would take on the shape and a plowman’s ability to use the new instrument in a way that illustrated a new way to work, but that could satisfy the expectations of farmers and plowmen who had grown up using very different instruments. The plow was a transformational technology that could subtly and almost imperceptibly provoke individuals and communities who took it up 118

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to change themselves. Any decision to invest in the new instrument would open up the household that made it to new kinds of risk. The cost threshold of acquiring a plow became steeper during the eighteenth century as plow types improved. These new tools were costly, five pounds each in Scotland by 1825, and they required use of expensive horses. Draught animals in Scotland had cost five pounds before the introduction of these new implements, by 1825 horses were worth forty pounds on average.17 Owning plows placed new demands on farm households and is a key indicator that peasants and farmers were participating in the more general transformation of the instruments of farming that took off in the 1780s.18 The swing plow was not just a gateway to new kinds of risk, however. Using the new plow, which was effectively an upright airfoil, demanded a different intuition of the physics of plowing. Because it was so much lighter than the older design, it also placed much greater demands on the skill of the plowman. Building or using a swing plow imposed characteristic cognitive stresses on its communities both of manufacture and of use. Small’s plow became the template from which the other swing plows were derived. At the same time that it was being copied and adapted across Scotland, the statistical account, a survey of more than nine hundred parishes, was being led by John Sinclair, and so we have an unusually detailed picture of local adaptation in that country. In his synopsis of the account, published in 1825, Sinclair explained that “the ploughs now used are chiefly of Small’s design, with iron heads and mouldboards.”19 Like all synthetic views Sinclair’s analysis obscured the more subtle evidence of adaptation and change given in the more local accounts. John Naismith, in his publication of the account for Clydesdale, stressed the process of local adaptation and adjustment of the swing plow. He gave Small credit for being an “ingenious mechanic” but reported that his original design “has undergone many modulations, almost every plough-wright having his own cast of the mould-plate etc.”20 This is fascinating evidence of a culture of improvisation. Naismith remarked on the characteristic calculation of interest and risk that was imposed by the new instrument. In his region, farmers found the swing plows difficult to use, but because it required only two horses to pull rather than a plow team of oxen, it had replaced the older wheeled Scotch plow.21 Learning new skills as well as investing in new livestock was not an impediment to adopting the new plow. 119

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Farther north, in the Mearns, the same process of adaptation and cooptation took place. George Robertson reported that nineteen plows in twenty made in the county were based on Small’s design, and that “Small’s plough has itself undergone an alteration, in this county, more adapted to the nature of the soil, with its remarkable stony soil. The curve of the cast-iron mould-board is made convex at the back part, so as to push the stones more readily aside than if the original concavity of that part had been retained.”22 Kincardineshire was also remarkable because even though the farmers here had adapted their plowing techniques in the same manner as those from Clydesdale, this technological creativity was not reflected in changes in land use; the county remained substantially unenclosed.23 Small’s plow reached into communities well outside the areas of intense commercialized agriculture. Sinclair himself observed, in his account of the Highlands, that on the Black Isle, “Small’s chain plough, with the curved mould board, and the feathered as well as common sock, is now mostly used, not only by proprietors and principal farmers, but by some of the common tenants.”24 What was really interesting in Black Isle was that some of Sinclair’s correspondents recognized that the instrument in itself could not bring about positive change. They asked Sinclair to recommend cart and plow carpenters who could come onto the island and help to change the culture. “Whatever instrument is constructed, let its principle be ever so much approved, the whole is rendered ineffectual, and its intended advantage still unattained, unless the artist at the same time instructs the worker, or user, in the true manner of applying the powers that are to bring it into action, yet this is seldom or ever much attended to, but every man left to the discretion of his own genius.”25 The three elements, the machine, a community of use, and norms of evaluation, all had to be in place if the plow was to embed itself and become a meaningful element of transformed cultural and material life. The cultural and cognitive contexts of adaptation and use of new material objects were as complex as those of discovery and invention. A lot of recent work has investigated the new worlds of fabrication and use of objects in eighteenth-century France.26 Scholars such as Leora Auslander, Felicia Gottmann, and Rebecca Spang have explored the techniques through which French society made new objects culturally meaningful.27 Auslander stresses change. The destruction of the court during the 120

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Revolution destroyed the emulative mechanism that had governed the value of high-quality furniture, allowing a new, market, mechanism to emerge. Spang’s study of restaurants has revealed how the Revolution unwittingly promoted the idea of pleasure as the central norm conferring value on a particular commodity; in this case meals served in public. Before the Revolution eating in a restaurant, like buying furniture, had been embedded in the idea that consumption reflected a particular characteristic of the consumer. In this case their sensibility demanded they eat food adapted to their physical frailty. After the Revolution consumption was, ideally, a moment of fantasy. Commodities became valued to the extent that they allowed consumers imaginatively to escape defining social, political, and economic structures.28 Consumers found the objects that they hoped would give them pleasure. Markets became the institutions through which these pleasure-seekers organized themselves, and political economy the science that explained the new system of consumption. Gottmann interrogates the political agency of acts of consumption themselves. She illuminates how the circulation of banned printed Indian cottons undermined the idea of the common good that had been represented by the regulatory powers of the French state. She argues that the evidence of new taste regimes, literally paraded on the streets by men and women, was a form of propaganda of the deed for new ideas about value.29 The dynamics around new values for objects were not restricted to consumer objects. The meaning of guns, both hand arms and artillery, was destabilized by new techniques for mass production that opened up the possibility of recreating an armed citizenry.30 New light cannon and mass-produced muskets made imaginable a militarily mobilized nation. A nation of armed men became another model for a world of citizens, alongside the model of a world of consumers. The plow was an instrument neither of citizenship nor of consumption; as a capital good it drove a different kind of change. Ownership of a plow became a key indicator that farmers were engaged in market-oriented agriculture. Peasants acquired plows as they reached the limit of a family’s capacity to extract any more increases in productivity from their own labor. There is a steady pattern in France that peasants acquired plows as they reached thresholds of landownership, fourteen hectares for an individual and twenty-five for a family unit.31 Below these limits a family could 121

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efficiently practice hoe agriculture, as was common in the highly subdivided areas of Belgium and the Netherlands. The costs of agricultural machinery reinforced peasant commitment to commercial agriculture. In 1815 a correspondent of Sinclair’s calculated that agricultural machinery for a hundred-acre farm in Flanders cost 3,312 francs. This contrasts with total wage costs (for farm servants and casual labor) of 4,188 francs. The relative importance of the cost of machinery was misrepresented, however, because the true cost included the power source, the oxen or horses need to work the machines. Sinclair’s calculation hid this in the 17,204 francs estimated as the cost of all farm animals, including cattle.32 Farmers could not acquire such expensive items without also acquiring a debt burden. To understand fully the transformation in material culture of the peasantry it is not enough to map the acquisition of a particular technology. Just as guns were technologically appropriate under particular conceptions of the battlefield and war, so plows could only be evaluated within particular models of the farm, of property, of markets, and of the institutions in which rights and interests were negotiated. The social life of plows took place with farmers but also with agronomists, legislators, and administrators. The fortunes of the plow were determined as much in the agricultural society as they were in the field. Political and economic institutions, and particularly conditions of land tenure, set the conditions under which communities and individuals created their material lives. To understand if a plow was being operated efficiently in turn demanded new criteria of evaluation, which were slow to emerge. Was the key virtue of a plow the depth of sod it could turn, the regularity of its furrow, or the greatest economy in the use of labor? The process of evaluation widened the social life of plows to include relationships with plowmen, farmers, agricultural engineers, and administrators. The problem of evaluation could be curiously reflexive. Sinclair, in his synopsis of the Statistical Account, used ownership of the swing plow itself as an indicator of a sustainable agriculture. He argued that the statistics established that small farms, that is, farms under sixty acres, were the best cultivated.33 This was a politically charged claim, especially in Scotland, where crofters, small mixed farmers practicing spade agriculture, were seen by improvers as an impediment to development.34 Sinclair managed the political risk he had opened himself up to by his claim that the lower 122

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limit for a viable farm size was that it should “admit of a tenant’s having a plough.” Any smaller than that, and the productivity advantages of division of labor would be lost, undercutting “the introduction of those arts, by which bodily labour is so wonderfully saved, and fewer hands necessary to carry on cultivation.”35 For Sinclair the machine was the objective correlative to a standard of rationality that integrated economic function, political role, and social hierarchy. Different political, social, and economic contexts could evoke a very different, or in some cases even no, role for the machine. In British America, the low cost of land, the high wages of technically proficient plowmen, and the lack of communication between widely separated blacksmiths meant that there was no perceptible improvement in plows until very late in the eighteenth century.36 The cultural stimulus generated by independence, aligned to the economic stimulus of the emerging cotton complex, transformed the context for adaptation of the plow.37 In the Deep South of the United States the old plantation crops of rice, tobacco, and sugar based on the hoe, which had itself been a technological innovation in the seventeenth century, were superseded by new techniques for plowbased cotton cultivation from the late eighteenth century onward.38 The American case illustrates how much contingency there was in the transformative effect of new technologies. Sinclair saw the plow as the instrument that characterized rational, independent farmers; in the South of the United States it was central to the spread of intensive slave-based plantation agriculture. The contextual problems of social development, political change, and economic adaptation directly affected late eighteenth-century France and were the objects of sustained debate. The state pursued economic development through complex, and often competing, policies that aligned public investment, and an embrace of markets, with a defense of social hierarchy.39 The politics around state strategy were mirrored in the local and provincial contexts within which individual farmers made decisions about adapting new instruments and new techniques. When we look at the evidence for the introduction of new kinds of machines into the Languedoc in the period, we therefore have to be conscious of the political and cultural work that had to be done to create criteria of evaluation and meaningful social environments for these objects. The plow was a disruptive and 123

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disturbing object that provoked debate about the very terms of development and brought that debate to the fields of the Languedoc.

The Social Life of Agricultural Machinery in the Late Monarchy The minister for the Maison du roi (equivalent to the later Ministry of the Interior), Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin, created a network of agricultural societies after 1761 with the express purpose of modernizing French agricultural life, and introducing new farm technology was part of that project.40 The difficulties Bertin encountered illustrate the institutional impediments to sustained innovation under the late monarchy. In 1765 he passed along a newly invented two-share plow to the Paris Agricultural Society for testing. Evaluation of the new plow was not a simple matter. It demanded construction of a common epistemological ground between groups that were assumed to share very different cultures: those of the savants of the Paris society and the farmers of the region.41 Previously, the society had sought the help of farmers to adjudicate a competition for improved farming. In that case the gap between the practical knowledge of the farmers and the theoretical, and socially sanctioned, knowledge of the savants had been bridged by an oath. The oath, through which the farmers swore “to help as much as possible, and to make all their knowledge available, to find out everything necessary for the completion of their investigation,” was designed to compensate for the mistrust and consequent lack of confidence in judgment across social differences.42 The same problems were encountered, and the same solution unsuccessfully applied, to the evaluation of Bertin’s plow. The Paris Agricultural Society gave the plow to the winner of the earlier competition for husbandry, a M. Guillaume of Bobigny, who performed public trials on his lands. The account of the trials narrates a comedy of misunderstanding.43 The commissioners appointed to evaluate the plow, Turgot and Nolin, could observe its operation, noting that it turned a furrow twenty-two inches wide in light soils, for instance, but they had no way of working out what this might mean for real farming. Neophytes in this field, their measurings and notings contrasted with their loss of control of the event as the local farmers asserted their own interest in the instrument. A tenant farmer of Villeneuve, also called Bertin, was skeptical of the utility of the 124

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new plow for previously untilled ground. As a result the whole affair was moved to his farm, and tests continued there with the entire neighborhood now commenting on performance on whatever grounds they thought proper. Eventually the scientific process became a social process, and the final evaluation of the plow emerged as a general discussion over lunch rather than as the authoritative judgment of mathematically informed scientific reason. The final report reflects this logic of conversation rather than the exactitude desired by the savants: “No matter how strong the prejudice against the new instrument many thought it might be useful for sowing. There was a lot of debate about the improvements one might make to the plow, but nothing concrete or decisive emerged.”44 The plow became the occasion of an agreeable debate rather than the center of the transformation of agricultural labor, because no one knew how to discuss how and why such an instrument might be useful. This inability to find criteria of evaluation was not restricted to plows. A committee of artisans convened by members of the Académie des sciences in 1786 to evaluate the steel from the works at Amboise produced the same result.45 They could only agree that “that they needed to make individual experiments to be able to give a more exact reply.” Collective judgment and technical innovation were not emerging from collaboration and debate. The trials of new agricultural machinery in Paris had mixed results. Farmers and plowmen were interested participants in trials, but the various interests and identities involved in the process did not share an understanding of how to evaluate these new machines. An integrated horizon of judgment for new instruments and techniques was as difficult to find in the Languedoc as anywhere else. As early as 1751 the natural history section of the Société royale des sciences at Montpellier was in communication with Genevan instrument makers hoping to design a plow adapted to the light soil of the region.46 The region even had its own James Small in the person of Arnaud Montréal, of Montpellier, who in 1763 invented a new seed drill and plow.47 The different trajectories of Small and Montréal’s inventions illuminate the differences generated by different contexts and institutions. In both cases the inventions were taken up by the local improving community through a process of demonstration and emulation. Montréal reported to the Estates that over four years, between 1763 and 1767, he conducted twenty trials and distributed forty models of 125

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his improved plow in the district.48 In 1767 his improved implement was recommended by the committee of the Estates, which passed it along to the diocesan authorities of Montpellier for testing.49 The farmers of the diocese of Montpellier, convoked by the syndic, Nicolas d’Espallier, were particularly impressed by the seed drill.50 In their view it was a huge improvement on broadcasting because it saved seed and placed it at a measured distance so that every ear of wheat could thrive. While the context of innovation between Scotland and the Languedoc shared similarities, the institutional environment did not. James Small had private backing for his experiments, from John Renton of Lamberton, but Montréal was able to call on four hundred livres of public money from the Estates to cover the costs of engraving plans for his new machines and publishing them, while Small had to publish at his own expense. While Small’s plow became widely emulated, however, Montréal’s remained a local curiosity because he “would have willingly looked for an exclusive privilege for that machine” to finance his further experiments, “the success of which depend on the skill of the experimenter, and on following the preparatory stages and calculations demanded by the obligatory principles of experimentation, and which he has not yet felt obliged to communicate.”51 Montreal acknowledged in his mémoire to the Estates his respect for their disinclination to award privileges but asked to be compensated in recognition of what he termed “counterfeiting” his design. Emulation was constantly threatened by the legal possibility of someone claiming a privilege and imposing a rent, which in turn drove innovators to claim the privilege for themselves. Small, in a public-spirited gesture, did not claim a patent for his plow and could be confident that no one else could or would; Montréal could not exhibit the same confidence. Even something as simple as a press designed to take a second pressing out of olives could offer the temptation for a claim to “privilege.” In this case the baron de Breteuil, in the midst of the crisis of 1788, took time to write to the inventor to explain why a privilege for an instrument like this was a bad idea.52 For individuals, privileges were a means to hedge the risks involved in new kinds of investment and were not necessarily strategies to extract unearned rents. Figures more socially prominent than Seigneur Linon of Toulouse could successfully argue this case. The vicomte de Narbonne, the baron of Ganges, successfully petitioned Joly de Fleury in 126

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1782 for a privilege for his coal-fired iron smelter at Fontanès, between Nîmes and Montpellier.53 To preserve wood stocks Narbonne was going to have to source coal at Alais, and he wanted to ensure that no one else would locate a smelter between his plant and the mines to undercut him on the basis of lower transport costs. The protection offered to his enterprise made sense, but the form, privilege, put a brake on emulation. Sustaining the ability to make a profit out of an innovation was an endemic problem in the coal and iron industries around Alais, and the use of the law to protect investment was a consistent strategy. In 1740 Burtin de Bressan had written to the intendant complaining that Henri-Paul-Irénée Reboul had opened an iron smelter at Bagnols, using iron ore from Corsica and Sardinia, which could be imported up the Rhone. His complaint was that the technical direction of the smelter was given by an English iron founder who had originally been recruited, at great expense, to work in Alais. Burtin argued that if the state did not support the rights of masters and control workers, “every day we will be vulnerable to seeing work stop, or even be driven to abandon it.”54 Even where privileges, in the widest sense of hedges against competition, were not claimed, they remained a latent threat. The state may have been willing to support new instruments and ideas in the Languedoc, but the institutional and legal environment for emulation and adaptation was more hostile there than in Scotland. The industrial survey of the Languedoc carried out in 1788 illuminated both the technical resources of the province and the cultural and intellectual deficits that made it difficult to mobilize them. These surveys could be, and were, highly criticized because the categories they used did not reflect real practice. A respondent complained even twenty years later that surveys continually underestimated the quality and nature of industrie in the Gard: “Here we do not concentrate in a few workshops or even one building all the workers necessary for production. Scattered throughout the countryside, manufacturing populates and animates every corner and it is rare to find a habitation in the countryside without some activity.”55 The industrial survey more accurately represents the state’s ability to recognize resources than their real presence on the ground. The survey showed that the diocese of Nîmes was the most industrialized area of the province, with a total of five hundred and forty-eight feux (machines powered by coal, wood, or charcoal) in 1788.56 The society around Nîmes was 127

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sufficiently technological for administrators to recognize complex and diverse forms of activity. There were eighty-seven forges supplying everything from keys to horseshoes to the sixty-six villages that reported some industrial activity in the diocese. The very fact that forges were reported shows that local administrators, at the very least, were seeing technology as a category in this area. Outside this zone mechanization, at least as far as the administrators canvassed for the survey were concerned, was almost nonexistent, and the idea of technology simply did not exist. Sète had forty-eight feux but no forge, which is just about credible since it is a port, but that Lodève reported forty-seven feux but no forges means even the administrators did not see blacksmiths and farriers as technology. The same pattern of administrative blindness to the nature of technology in the diocese was repeated in Narbonne, which reported three feux and one forge in the whole diocese. The sub-delegate at Castres fell between the technological vision of Nîmes and that of his other colleagues. He reported that “there are no metal industries here” and then almost as an afterthought added, “Of course there are forges used by locksmiths, farriers, makers of agricultural instruments and other kinds of smith, which are vital to the local economy and are all powered by coal.”57 Outside the areas of intense mechanization the technological resources of rural society were not appreciated by the state and so are barely visible to us. The evidence suggests that outside very particular areas, such as Nîmes, the world of the country or market-town smith and that of proto-industrialization were separate realms.58 Before the emergence of an agricultural machinery industry in the early nineteenth century, technological capacity would derive from local sources, but those sources could be invisible to important state elites. New kinds of plows could not acquire a recognized social value before the Revolution. As Hilton Root explains it, “Political markets to facilitate the trading of property rights among owners of goods and services” were not secure, and this meant risk was very hard to calculate.59 In other words, the kind of communication between different interests demanded if such novelties as the swing plow were to have an acknowledged value was very difficult when political institutions did not encourage negotiation. There is evidence of interest and engagement with new technology, 128

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but not of any context within which one securely might take advantage of that interest. As Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Hilton Root have both argued, the dominance of privilege in the legal system meant that the state could not guarantee the status of any novel kind of property, such as enclosures of waste land.60 It was impossible to generate criteria for the evaluation of capital goods, including plows, when fundamental economic institutions such as property were undefined.61 The condition of legal and political uncertainty even opened the door to a view that social and economic change was unnecessary and unwelcome. M. de Roquemaurel complained to his local sub-delegate that by creating a manufacture royale for textiles at La Terrasse the state had “badly affected agriculture” in the diocese. Moreover, the “insolence and pride of the peasants and artisans,” who now had new economic opportunities, was only restrained by the efforts of the mounted police and the threat of enlistment in the army.62 The sub-delegate at Castres who recommended a workhouse in every town to eliminate malingering was hardly thinking creatively about the use of land, labor, and capital.63 A survey conducted to assess means of making aid to the poor more effective picked up similar attitudes outside the administration.64 Thirty-seven bureaux de charité from around Montpellier made suggestions for the relief of the local poor: seventeen called for a reimbursement of the excessive tithe, eight for greater access to charitable institutions in Montpellier, and another ten for an increase in charitable giving. All of these assumed that there was a fixed amount of resources available and that the best one could do was to assign a bigger slice of a fixed pie to the poor. Another economic consciousness can be discerned, however: one that saw the local problems not as a problem of an unchanging moral or social order but in the context of an evolving global economic system. Saint-Jean-de-Buiyac and Frouzet both argued that the greatest contribution to the alleviation of poverty would be to build a road from their respective villages to the highway to allow them access to markets. Agomes reported that it did not distribute charity but instead gave income support to the working poor. This support allowed the poor to commit themselves to their small properties to improve their own circumstance. Economic and social innovation was ubiquitous in the province, but it was not secure and was vulnerable to political reverse. 129

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In the case in hand the efforts of the ministry to provoke a renovation of farm machinery had no effect. The one instance of practical experiment was not repeated, and the model farmer, Guillaume, eventually went broke trying to support the process of experiment from his own resources. There was no real institutional context through which innovations of any kind could acquire their value. As a consequence the agronomic institutions that were designed to facilitate precisely the kind of knowledge that would in turn encourage innovation became moribund. A bureaucrat evaluating the possibility of using the agricultural societies to promote economic growth in the 1780s wrote that they were “incoherent, without any authority, and so of no use, one might almost say effectively non-existent.”65 A correspondent of the Société royale des sciences reported that despite the improvements in productivity in Languedoc the methods and instruments used remained “archaic, two-field rotation and plowing with the light araire drawn most often by two mules.”66 In the provinces, as elsewhere, projects of reform were frustrated by institutional deficits.67 Technological innovation could not find the institutional context in which it could drive systemic change.

The Institutions of the Republic The Revolution added no new element to the social, economic, intellectual, or technological life of either peasants or elites in the Languedoc. The agricultural machinery they used had been invented long before the Revolution, and though the agricultural societies they met in were newly founded after 1796, their inspiration lay in the 1760s. By changing the legal-institutional framework in which improvement occurred, societies debated, and plows were used, however, the Revolution transformed the nature of all these activities.68 The universalist model of rights and the political imperative to citizenship shattered the complex of privilèges that had conditioned and contained rural life.69 Jean-Laurent Rosenthal has explained how “simple rules and state authority” created the opportunity to overhaul totally the transport and irrigation networks.70 By transforming the institutional context for agriculture, the revolutionaries created new opportunities for local societies to innovate. Patterns of enclosure directly and quickly reflected the changed institutional context. In November 1789 the National Assembly reiterated the 130

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terms of the 1771 edicts encouraging the enclosure of waste. Until the law of 10 June 1793 was passed this continued to be the legal instrument through which common and waste land could be broken into individual plots.71 Under the new dispensation, where claims to privilege could not compromise property rights, the manner in which this instrument was used was transformed. The commune of Cessenon in the district of SaintPons illustrates the difference; its waste lands were not randomly broken into but totally redistributed and made use of in a new way. In October 1791, 158 individuals of the commune of 370 households registered their claim to newly enclosed lands in the waste.72 The beneficiaries ranged from the largest landowners to the blacksmiths and the day laborers. This egalitarian redistribution reveals that though the revolutionary land settlement created the conditions for communities to reconstruct the manner in which they used resources, the peasant revolution in turn set the terms under which they did so.73 Old tactics of legal contestation proved too weak in the new revolutionary situation.74 Closer to Montpellier the benefits to be gained from a more productive organization of resources generated a plethora of projects. The commune of Montarnaud, much in the manner of Cessenon, divided the waste common of the hamlet of Prades into fifty-eight lots, only one of which was larger than ten séterées.75 The egalitarian nature of this division reflected the unity of the peasant revolution but was balanced by the concentration of the newly divided land in family hands. Four Higonets, four Azemas, and five Mallets were given plots, allowing the Mallets, for instance, to acquire a consolidated holding of twenty-three séterées. The difference from earlier invasion of the waste was that rather than individuals cutting out fields in the midst of the garrigues in an uncoordinated way, here the community divided one area of waste in a coherent and planned manner. The new institutional context did not determine the form that reorganization of land use could take. In the commune of Saint-Jean-de-Vedas the Cambon family reorganized the use of waste ground on their own.76 Seven members of the family enclosed an unprecedented 5,488 séterées of waste. They hedged the considerable costs of the undertaking by selling eleven lots totaling 325 séterées to other individuals. Joseph Cambon, later to be a prominent conventionnel, took the lion’s share of the land, thus allying agricultural and political revolution. Different communities exploited 131

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the new arrangements in different ways, and they continued to do so as the Revolution developed. In the years VI and VII, after the suspension of the law of 10 June 1793, fifty-one individuals in the commune of SaintBauzille-de-Montmel cleared and enclosed a total of 242 séterées of land under the terms of the 1771 regulations.77 One improver even proposed to grow sugarcane on his newly enclosed plot. As John Markoff has already underlined, these actions reflected the balance of local forces rather than the outcomes of national politics; they were features of the Revolution among the peasantry rather than any singular peasant revolution. Despite the differing social and political imperatives that drove the different patterns of subdivision, in every case the local community was inspired to a reorganization of productive resources prefiguring the transformation of land use that would underpin the viticultural revolution in the Languedoc. The garrigues that were entered were almost universally transformed into vineyards, leaving the fertile plains to continue to produce grains.78 By 1798 the local agronomist André-Antoine Touchy could describe the agriculture of the department of the Hérault in a systematic fashion. The good plains grew wheat and were the natural pasture, supplemented by plantations of lucerne (alfalfa) and sainfoin. The inferior plains were under vines, fodder crops, and olives. The hills were planted in vines, olives, and almond trees, and the intervening valleys were used like the plains.79 The Revolution created the institutional context through which an active peasantry could transform its material circumstances and remake the environment to reflect their own needs. The revolutionary transformation of political and economic ideas is reflected in the replies to a circular on economic conditions distributed to its constituent cantons by the administration of the department of the Aude in 1798.80 The department’s interest was rather limited; it focused on the narrow question of the self-sufficiency of the cantons and so framed the questionnaire around subsistances. The replies went beyond this frame and dealt with the problems of the economy generally and in a variety of ways. The questionnaire asked the cantons whom they supplied with grain and by whom they were supplied. This information allows us to gauge the involvement in particular areas in trade networks. We can use the distance from the area reported as supplying a particular town as an index of engagement in markets: the longer the distance to 132

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the supplying center, the more involved the area in trade. The cantons were further asked to nominate the impediments to increasing production of grain in their area and the possible solutions to these problems. What the replies reveal is the evolution of rural opinions from what they were earlier in the century. Significant numbers of the peasants of the Aude were identifying cultural and social deficits in their own communities as their biggest problems. The fundamental distinction in the replies was between those cantons that saw grain supply as impossible to improve, and so sought to appropriate resources or lower impositions, and those that saw it as one element in an economy in which growth could be fostered through trade. The divergence was based in real factors, such as preceding participation in trade networks. The district of Quillan in the south of the department was outside the major transport networks and so had limited opportunities for trade. Its respondents reported that they were supplied by the towns of Chalabre, Mirepoix, and Limoux. As a result their thinking in the circulars on the productivity of the region was entirely within the model of a static economy.81 They all thought that the greatest impediments to increased productivity were poor soil and bad weather, while they stated that lower taxes and more animal fertilizer were the best that could be hoped for. Autarchy was the economic model that drove these responses, and they had not evolved from the ideas of the cahiers.82 The contrast with the responses of cantons that were on the line of the Canal du Midi between Carcassonne and Toulouse, or had access to other kinds of water transport, could not have been more stark. The cantons of Cailhau, Chalabre, Durban, Fendeille, and Sallèles all reported that the major impediment they faced was either the lack of capital to invest in improvement or a lack of labor. There was nothing in these responses about the various kinds of privilege that had been the major concern of the cahiers. The politics of privilege had simply disappeared, and these responses assumed that it had given way to a unitary model of property. The reply from Durban made the theoretical point that the best encouragement that could be offered by the state would be the systematic defense of property as a principle. The new certainty about property fostered an appropriation of classical political economy by local communities, but the institutional incentives did not stop there. The cantons of 133

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Trèbes and Tuchan both identified the infrastructure as their problem and called for new canals. Trèbes and La Bastide Danjou also demanded a transformation in farming techniques. The most fascinating responses were those from Azille and Villa Savary, which both stated that the real problem was the lack of a scientific culture in their area and so called for education in agricultural science as a means to transform rural practices. All of these responses identified endogenous elements of local practices and structures, from roads to habits, as the problem they faced. This attitude demanded that the local societies see themselves, rather than outside forces, as the agents of transformation of their lives. It required not only the economic opportunity but also the political will to do so. David Nicolas from Montagnac on the outskirts of Béziers offered an analysis of why some rural societies were now willing to understand themselves as elements of a dynamic system rather than competitors in a zero-sum game. His area had been monocultural olive producing, but under the new dispensation farmers were aware of other possibilities. “It is no longer the case that the agriculture of this canton is restricted to a monotonous production of olives, farmers (cultivateurs) who have lost money selling an overabundant crop or otherwise educated themselves, have embraced changes and innovations that may be fruitful for them. They have abandoned the routine practices of our grandfathers.”83 Economic and political experience combined to create a new kind of rationality in rural Languedoc.

The Plows of Republicans Political change created the institutional context for a transformation of peasant economic culture; did it similarly allow for a transformed material culture? The Revolution turned clearing and enclosure from a brave foray into uncharted legal waters into a predictable economic investment under known terms. Political economy, rather than a patchwork of local legal codes, became the field of knowledge through which an enclosure could be understood. Could a similar rationality be found through which the use of agricultural machinery could be evaluated? Even in the depths of the short-term economic dislocations of the Revolution a new discussion around machinery began to emerge.84 The revolutionary state certainly thought of itself as innovative in this way. In 134

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the year II the district of Montpellier was encouraging applications for a four-thousand-livre grant toward agricultural improvement. “Every citizen who might be able to make a discovery that could simplify or improve our methods or our agricultural implements, find a way to increase the productivity of vineyards and olive trees, improve sheep breeds,” or indeed make any other contribution in agricultural science was asked to apply for this aid.85 An early sign that the population could see the new regime as innovative came from a correspondent of the agricultural committee of the Convention who wrote from the Aisne to advertise his new plow type.86 Pierre Maruale argued that his combined plow and sowing machine was particularly adapted to the exigencies of the revolutionary state. It was egalitarian, no special skills were needed to operate it “because many villages lack intelligent workers,” and “it would almost always be in the hands of those who are used to routine.” To be generally useful it had to “cost little, because the majority of farmers are close to indigence, even though they are the real wealth of the state.” The last two criteria he proposed for the evaluation of his machine were the most interesting, though. He argued that it had to save manpower, since that was the most pressing need of the revolutionary state, and that it had to make sense for any individual to invest in it, so it should increase profits by a quarter. The plow had to satisfy the interests of modern individuals and the good of the community. It is unlikely that any machine could meet all of these social, political, and economic needs at once. The articulation of so many revolutionary goals with a technology illustrates the immaturity of this debate. Since nothing had been reliably known of agricultural technology, for lack of grounds to know it, literally anything might be expected of it. The lack of context could be disquieting; Le Carlier-Tousy, of Couci, also in the Aisne, communicated his sowing machine to the committee as well but was obviously nervous about what might follow from becoming involved in a national debate. He hoped the sowing machine might be useful, but if not, “concerned as he is about having his manner of farming disturbed, he asks you citizens, convinced as you must be that his only goal is to be useful, to allow him to continue his experiments peacefully, and to be assured of his gratitude.”87 In this, as in many other spheres, the benefits of a national conversation were threatened by the risk of an inappropriate politicization. 135

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The possibility of reaching more limited, specific, and appropriate criteria for the technological life of farmers was created by the survey of plows commissioned by the Committee of Public Safety in the year II.88 The design of the survey itself promoted reflection on the machinery. Communes were asked to specify the number of plows in use by individual proprietors and those owned by landlords. They were further asked to calculate the average number of arpents every plow tilled. The committee was trying to establish a relationship between technological capacity, farm size, and labor resources. The correspondents replied in kind, and their replies revealed the complex relations in which technology was deployed. The district of Carcassonne reported that two-thirds of the 2,934 plows in the district were owned by landlords and worked by plowmen. The other third were owned by independent farmers with more than thirty arpents, shared between landlords and sharecroppers or jointly owned “by groups of citizens who create associations to make sure there is enough work for a pair of oxen, mules or even horses throughout the year.”89 These different arrangements meant that a plow was maintained for every thirty arpents of arable land, no matter how the land was owned or leased. The number of plows in use was a function not of the technology but of a set of assumptions about the correct relationship between land, labor, and capital goods. Even more interesting was the social arrangement that allowed smallholders access to plows through a timeshare agreement. The use of technology depended on social capacity. The Aude was not the most technologically advanced department in the Languedoc. The average of a plow for every thirty arpents of land implied that land was only lightly tilled and that in consequence yields were poor. In the neighboring department of the Hérault, the commune of Clapiers reported exactly the same pattern as the district of Carcassonne: thirty arpents per plow both for tenant farmers and for individual proprietors. The communal administration there appended a note to its return, however, saying that this was too few plows for the land area the farmers had to work. Individual proprietors in the Hérault worked an average of twentytwo arpents for every plow, allowing three tillings of any plot of land for every two a similar plot received around Carcassonne.90 The Hérault also deviated from the pattern in the Aude because there were significant differences in the numbers of plows owned by individual proprietors 136

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(cultivateurs), compared with the quantity used on tenant farms. There was only one plow for every fifty-five arpents in use on rented land. The differences were even more marked in certain communes. The communes of Verargues, Villetelle, Saint-Nazaire, and Saint-Feries reported that a plow tilled seventy-five arpents, 207 arpents, ninety-eight arpents, and fifty-eight arpents, respectively, if it was used on rented land, while peasant proprietors used one plow for every thirty-four, twenty-two, seventeen, and twenty-eight arpents. Much of the land not worked by the proprietors in these communes were garrigues, and so unsuitable for the plow in any case, but the patterns reveal that technological capacity was now more marked among the peasant proprietors. The trend was even more obvious around the urban centers, which encouraged commercialized agriculture by their very nature. The commune of Montpellier reported that all of the 237 plows in use belonged to independent proprietors. The search for the republican plow unearthed a stratum of peasant innovators. The commune of Castagnac in the Haute Garonne reported this directly to the Committee of Public Safety, pointing out that “the smaller properties are better cultivated and more productive.”91 If in the Aude technology use reflected social stability, in the Hérault it was one element in the makeup of a differentiated and evolving society. The practical and local focus of the new agricultural societies set up after 1796 meant that one of the first tasks they gave themselves was producing agricultural surveys of the departments. In the Hérault this was organized by canton, and members of the society were commissioned to report on the situation in their localities.92 The local and practical nature of the societies gives us a unique insight into the material culture of the revolutionary peasantry. The canton of Saint-Chinian, it was reported, used very simple plows, “that is[,] without moldboards, because of the shallowness of the soil.”93 This was because the bulk of the canton had very stony soil that was more appropriately used for vineyards. The material culture of this community developed in a different way. The local blacksmiths in the hamlet of La Servelière were famous for their scythes and shears. The commissaire suggested that they should be encouraged to cooperate to increase production by harnessing the power of the local river.94 In the areas of the department more suited to cereals we see a more classic picture. The canton of Servian had faced real difficulties, as 137

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frosts killed many of the olive trees on which the local economy depended. Local farmers had responded by changing the structure of land use, planting more fodder crops and especially adopting new tillage practices. The land of Servian was now tilled five times in a growing season, which demanded use of the new technology.95 Mazel described the new machine they were using: “It has only one big moldboard to the left of the share and a large coulter in front of that. It turns the earth more fully and digs out weeds far more efficiently than the ordinary plow.”96 What Mazel was describing was a swing plow, the most advanced agricultural machinery of its day. Local appropriation of these new machines did not stop at the transfer of new technologies—it extended to their redesign. The description of the commune of Caylar reported that there they used the plow of Montpellier with a special joint that adapted the plows for rocky ground. In Béziers the local correspondent found a newly invented sowing machine in use.97 All over the department local correspondents reported on local societies creating new relationships with machines. The republican plow was not just an aspiration of the revolutionary state but a feature of the social landscape in a transformed countryside.

Plows and Material Culture in the Aftermath of Revolution Early in 1802 the newly installed prefect of the Gard sent out a circular to his administrés alerting them to the continuing efforts of the state to improve the plows used by its citizens. The Société centrale d’agriculture du département de la Seine was relying on the efforts of the local farmers to support their trials, but the prefect, Jean-Baptiste Dubois de Jancigny, thought that one department should not have to shoulder the burden of this kind of effort alone.98 He called on the citizens of the Gard to conduct these experiments themselves and also to subscribe to the fund he was creating to buy the improved models from Paris. In effect Bertin’s idea of a national debate on agricultural improvement was again being posed, but with very different results. Five years later the national committee organizing the plow trials could report a huge response to its call for a national debate on the plow and even an emerging consensus on what kind of plow best served the 138

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country. The rapporteur clearly analyzed the social process through which the material object had come into circulation. “If at first the competition only generated plans, those plans at least revealed the engagement with the problem . . . we waited for a new wave of experiments.” Without clarity about the norms of assessment nothing could be done; once that process had begun, “you called the spirit of the engineer to the aid of agriculture and it has replied. Today after numerous comparative experiments we can announce a new level of perfection on the basis of clear facts.”99 The rapporteur confidently listed the criteria for judging plows as “simple, solid construction, ease of direction, continuous passage through the earth, that the coulter cut the sod turned by the share, that it can be adjusted for deep or shallow plowing, that the sod is completely turned, and that it needs as little power as possible.”100 With these criteria in mind the committee recommended the Guillaume plow, an adaptation of Small’s swing plow. The recommendation of the Guillaume plow set a national standard that allowed for comparison and improvement. Local communities asked for models of the plow to be sent to them as objects of emulation.101 The prefect of the Tarn was particularly anxious to get an example of the Guillaume plow into his department because “the most successful way to get new practices adopted, however useful they may be, and to destroy the authority of long-held habits, however harmful, is to put the object (chose) under people’s eyes.”102 A local blacksmith in the department was inspired to create a model plow (in one-tenth scale) that was adapted to plow around vineyards.103 The agricultural society of Boulogne explained why the Guillaume plow, and the clear standards of evaluation that accompanied it, were so important. Up to this point “the farmer had felt that the plow he used had to be appropriate to the soil of his region, and to minimize, as far as possible, the power needed to draw it,” but for lack of reliable information, “routine had stalled all improvement.” The elements of the plow had been the same everywhere, but there had been no standards to judge any of them.104 The new standard set the baseline, and even if the members of the Boulogne committee found it difficult to adjust the height of the model they were given to test, they recognized that it met all the standards of “almost all the plows in use in England, described in Arthur Young’s English Farmer.”105 139

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The recommendation of a standard model provoked innovation as well as dissemination. In Boulogne the local improvers took the search for precision in judgment to a new level by using a dynometer to measure the force applied in pulling the plow.106 Even where true plows were of little use, such as in the stony territory of the Var, local blacksmiths were inspired to find ways of improving traditional instruments. Claude Bertrand from Monguis offered a new design for the araire, the light plow that had been in use around the Mediterranean since antiquity.107 Some of the proposed innovations seemed exaggerated, such as the giant machine with nine shares that could turn five rows simultaneously invented in Lyon.108 Interestingly, this instrument was not encouraged, precisely because it did not fulfill one of the criteria for a plow, namely, that it economize on the power needed to draw it. The most successful local variation on the Guillaume plow was the true swing plow invented by Mathieu Dombasle.109 His plow was less an invention than one more variation on Small’s model, but by mechanizing production near Nancy he was able to disseminate the new model throughout eastern France.110 Unsurprisingly, the accumulated experience of forty years of experiments inclined the reforming community in the Languedoc to follow its own judgment in the evaluation of improved plows. The local agronomes enthusiastically committed themselves to the national effort but continued to exercise their own judgment. From the very first announcement of the plow competition Dubois, the prefect of the Gard who was also an agronome, was clear that the key features of any new plow that would be useful in the South would be that it would save labor, be lighter, would therefore turn more land in a shorter space of time, and need only two beasts to pull it.111 He took the “reformed plows of foreign countries” as the starting point for the local experimenters. An anonymous contributor to the Bulletin de la Société d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault in 1808 described his five years of experiments that responded to the national competition by testing Jethro Tull’s contention that well-worked lands were more productive without the use of fertilizer.112 This was a more welldesigned experiment than the prerevolutionary trials. Instead of focusing on the instrument the investigator calculated the quantity of earth turned over, whether it was with “the spade, the hoe, or any of the different machines that have been dreamed up to turn the earth.” He did not propose 140

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a new plow design but, very much in the tradition of Small, abstracted the features of successful plowing to offer the experimental community robust criteria to guide its judgment on which instrument achieved the best results. The criteria that emerged from the national discussion were embraced by the community in the Languedoc, but the societies did not think that the Guillaume plow most effectively fulfilled them. As a reviewer in the Bulletin explained, “The comparative trials that have been done, by order of the Royal Society of Agriculture, leave no doubt of the superiority of the simple plow to the complex plow,” and “Small’s design . . . is the best and the most adaptable to every terrain.”113 The Hérault agricultural society found the best local version of the swing plow in the work of Philipp Emmanuel von Fellenberg in Berne.114 Fellenberg’s plow, “the English plow of Small,” had been adapted for southern European conditions by making the moldboard an interchangeable part, and improved by using cast iron, to make the moldboards more durable. Achilles-Nicolas Isnard was highly impressed with Fellenberg’s establishment when he visited it.115 Fellenberg’s workshop formed part of an integrated experimental agricultural station that included all the skills necessary for supporting agronomy. Fellenberg’s practice of agricultural improvement as moral improvement—the daily routine included a pause for prayer, after which the day’s tasks were distributed—harked back to the ambitions of the eighteenth-century agronomists to find a development theory that united moral and economic development.116 An echo of the ambitions of the Enlightenment hung around the more precise technical vision of the nineteenth-century improvers. The evolution of a material culture of the plow around Small’s swing plow could be interpreted as a colonization of the lifeworld of farmers by engineers. Techniques of measurement, and the instruments for measurement, were made central to the evaluation of plows, but the social context was still dominated by those who used them. Where was the ground for the integration of the interests and cultures beyond knowledge elites? By the 1830 a new social institution had been created that united precisely the preferences of these two groups: the plowing match or competition. Plowing matches, like the new plows themselves, originated in the British Isles. Sinclair endorsed the utility of plowing matches—“nothing has been found so useful, as annual plowing matches”—and thought the first matches had 141

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been promoted by Hugh Reoch of Alloa in the Mearns in 1784.117 This is an underresearched area, and there is probably no way of adjudicating a priority dispute between Ireland and Scotland, but there is some evidence that plowing matches had been instituted in Ireland before the 1780s. When the Dublin Society finally published its volumes of statistical accounts of the Irish counties after 1800 it remarked on plowing matches all around the country, from Wicklow in Leinster to Clare and Cork in Munster.118 Commentary on Joseph Archer’s survey of Dublin, material for which had been gathered in the 1770s, unearthed a dense culture around plowing matches. The authors complained that at a plowing match in Castleknock participants and judges had their own, local, criteria of judgment. “Here the farmers of the neighbourhood seemed to prize the man that carried the greatest weight of earth, and kept his left hand nearest to the ground.”119 In any case, plowing matches had become so integrated into rural life in Ireland that after its foundation in 1800 the Farming Society of Ireland was able to institute a national plowing championship (which is continued to the present day).120 Plowing matches were hugely popular in the early nineteenth century; for a joint match between the departments of the Gard and the Hérault the agricultural society petitioned for elements of an infantry regiment to help police the crowds, as “the detachments of gendarmerie sent last year were entirely insufficient.”121 They even could become the site of politics. The subprefect of Béziers thought it was best to be careful about exactly which regimental band to send to a plowing match at Pézenas given the local memory of tension with various regiments; “the problem is a delicate one.”122 The plowing championship for the arrondissement of Limoux had to begin at six in the morning to accommodate all the competitors who wished to participate. First and second prizes were both taken by plowmen using the simple plow.123 A program for a match at Peuch-Redon in the Gard carefully explained the various categories of plow that would be judged, and laid out in detail the criteria for judgment, “the width, depth and clarity of the furrow, its length and straightness.”124 The program reassured competitors that expensive horses that could supply more power would not give well-funded competitors an advantage; the competition would assess plow design and the skill of the plowmen. Matches so cleverly aligned the culture of the farmer with that of the engineer that there were 142

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efforts to extend the practice. The Comice agricole, the local farmers’ association, of the canton of Claret proposed a vine-trimming contest in 1840.125 The plowing match sustained a space where the embedded experience of judgment and reason could encapsulate the norms of engineers. The Revolution marked the moment at which engineering standards became accepted as appropriate for the evaluation of plows. In so doing it created the space for a new form of technological life for the farmers, agricultural engineers, local savants, and administrators who would participate in it. The unitary model of rights and the political imperative to citizenship promoted by the Revolution allowed previously existing elements of culture, society, and the economy to become integrated as a feature of the material culture of rural Lower Languedoc.126 The acquisition of a particular innovation, Small’s swing plow, is an index of the communicative possibilities opened up by the Revolution, and an object that in itself allowed for new combinations of men and things. The plowing match is the best illustration of that. Novel technological life was not tied to the revolutionary dynamic, though, but rather marked an evolutionary shift in the possibilities enjoyed by rural society. The transformations in the material culture of the Languedoc underline once more how subtly and profoundly the themes of the Revolution and the structures of French society interacted across the revolutionary decades. By the middle of the nineteenth century the experience of improvement, of addressing individual and collective problems within a culture of rationality, had become so embedded in everyday life that it formed a tradition, something taken for granted, a meaningful history that could be objectified.127 It was so embedded that it turned up in the most ordinary and everyday places. In 1839 the president of the agricultural society of the Hérault was invited to give a speech at the prize-giving day of the Comice agricole of Claret, where the chef-lieu was made up of a community of 759 souls.128 This speech was an exercise in cliché, a rehearsal of what everyone expected to hear, and is all the more interesting for that. The theme of the speech was the relationship between the community, “necessarily agricultural,” and its environment, “a dry and mountainous region, less favored than the plains with roads.”129 The intelligence and hard work of the ancestors, aieux, had brought plenty from this difficult terrain. “Wise judgment guided our forebears when they introduced excellent fruit trees, vines, and 143

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mulberries, which have been dissemination by cultivation.” The eighteenthcentury trope of the ignorant peasantry, trapped in routine and unable to pursue their own interests because of their systematic irrationality, was replaced in this speech by a new trope of the rational community, engaged in process of progressive self-transformation. “By pruning, grafting and every kind of care, from year to year, the harvests have increased . . . and so we earn more than they did and enjoy more resources than them.” This process of a community working collectively and rationally to transform itself was embedded in the past, operative in the present where the comice identified “the best examples and proposed them as models,” and would continue into the future. The rewards of reason were so evident that they would dissolve whatever remained of atavism. “The population will be convinced that the passage of time dissipates all anxieties, and gentle efforts are all that have to be made to show that the best is not the enemy of the good.” The spokesman for this little community reflected its global orientation back to itself to reassure it that it could master the future, and retain its cohesion, because the universal standards of rationality were already embedded in its culture. Obviously this speech is idealized and is nothing like an accurate description of Claret or any other agrarian community in the Languedoc. No doubt the community was rent by the tensions between engrossing large farmers and smallholders inherited from revolutionary changes in land tenure.130 The same forces that drove farmers to hyper-exploit female family labor in northern France were at play in the Languedoc.131 The optimism that animates this speech, and the confidence that creative labor could master the relationship between the community and the environment, would be severely challenged by the outbreak of phylloxera in the 1860s.132 But the importance of this speech, and others like it, is not that it offers a rich document of social history. Rather, it is important because it establishes that the repertoire of a culture of reason had become embedded in social practice. It shows that people who did not necessarily look beyond their pays were now working with values and norms that integrated them into global processes. It shows how the social experience in everyday contexts, which had been the cradle for the collective learning of the province, had converged on an explicit and recognizable set of values that oriented the community in a global context. The interdependent 144

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meanings of “global” and “rational,” which are occluded in most contemporary accounts of global history, are made visible in the lived historical experience of the people of the Languedoc. The implication of technology and science in the acculturation of French provincials to their global condition may also throw light on the often remarked upon role of science in the popular imagination of the French colonial effort later in the nineteenth century.133 The farmer at Restinclières who put six hectares aside every year for experiment, and proposed in 1831 to acclimatize pack animals for service in Africa, may mark a turning point and a new imperial dimension to the global experience of the province.134 Global history had come to Claret, and to the other communities of the Languedoc, in the guise of new kinds of implement, and through using the implements Claret entered into global history.

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If we understand global history as the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms, then the French Revolution is one of its most important moments.1 Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light.2 It is hard to find a local context to which the French Revolution was not relevant; in fact it is so global that it seems less and less French. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order. Many varieties of revolutionary saw education and science as intrinsic elements of citizenship; commitment to the human and natural sciences made citizens of the world 146

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out of modern republicans. This cultural aspect of modern republicans, in tandem with the commercial nature of the modern state, was expected to guarantee the difference between modern republics and their ancient, warlike, inspiration. These aspirations reached into the most local contexts of the Revolution. André-Antoine Touchy articulated this sensibility in his writing on the natural history of the newly formed department of the Hérault. The Hérault “contains all the geological elements of which the world is made up,” a wide variety of climates, flora, and fauna.3 The department was a world made knowable by natural history, and that environment and the science necessary to understand it made global citizens of its inhabitants. Faith in the scientific mission of the Revolution or the republic was compromised by political violence. The politics of science in the Revolution, particularly during the Terror, did not map in any simple way onto left and right. Sans-culotte egalitarians were suspicious of intellectual elites and reflected Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s criticisms of the alienating effects of the sciences, but no one was as scathing as Joseph de Maistre on the baleful effects of philosophie. The instability of the new regime, the unexpected ubiquity of violence, and the ferocity of the revolutionary wars undermined and complicated the relationship between reason and the state.4 Such entities as the sovereign nation and the citizen offered new foci around which knowledge could accrete, and new strategies and institutions of knowledge, particularly in the human sciences, emerged with the mission of making this new world knowable.5 The sphere of politics expanded enormously. Disability and mental illness were only two of the phenomena that were redefined in terms of impediments to the ideal of rationality understood as adult males enjoying full citizenship.6 In this moment of politicization the world of “mundane reason,” the everyday cosmopolitanism that developed in the civil sphere, became occluded by sovereign reason, but it did not disappear.7 Offering an adequate account of the intertwined histories of the sciences and politics in the Revolution lies outside the scope of this book, but even keeping a more local focus the theme is challenging. Tracing the trajectory of the communicative province through and beyond the Revolution reveals a fragmented and even contradictory record. The state, the incarnation of sovereign reason, did not always recognize other institutional and social 147

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cultures. The institutions and membership of the provincial world were only intermittently visible and relevant to agents of the state, themselves part of a history of the development of a new kind of administrative and legal sensibility.8 In 1803 the prefect of the Gard gave faint praise to the agricultural societies but was aware of their history: “People have ridiculed the agricultural societies, but despite the sarcasm and the jokes it is clear that these establishments, which have spread across France over the recent past, have made a real contribution to the improvement and the variety of the produce of this beautiful empire.”9 By 1821 his successor was writing to the local society and recommending agricultural experiments as if they were a novel idea: “I send you on a copy of a memoire on a model farm established in the department of the Doubs by the Besançon Agricultural Society. It is desirable that similar establishments might be created in different parts of France. They would show farmers useful examples of methods based on experiment, and so contribute to the improvement of our agriculture.”10 Just what was going on if in 1821 the state was promoting the foundation of institutions that were already up and running, in fact were so well embedded as to have jokes told about them, in 1803? The later comment is more surprising, since model farms had long been well established in the Languedoc. There was an experimental farm at Restinclières in the 1820s, run by George Bentham the botanist, and it was still in operation in the 1830s after the Benthams sold it, though the purchaser was unhappy at his inability to continue large-scale experimentation. “My meagre fortune,” he wrote, “does not allow me to take on grand experiments, but I am happy to give over five or six hectares every year to trials that people think are helpful in agricultural improvement.”11 There is a tension in the sources where the evidence for independent activity in agronomy or botany can be ignored. Intermittent bureaucratic blindness seemed to afflict the agents of the state after the Revolution with respect to the history of improving societies in the Languedoc. At points the political nature of the selective blindness is easy to understand. A speech given by the subprefect at the opening of a new agricultural society in Gabriac in the Gard in 1820 was a defense of noble elites. The subprefect described the process of improvement as a

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heroic struggle of a rural elite against ignorance, represented by the peasantry: “I do not need recourse to antiquity, gentlemen, to establish the distinguished place agriculture should occupy in the state. . . . Circumstance has for a long time relegated men, destined by their learning and talent to more brilliant careers, to live in rural obscurity far from the towns. These men, modest as virtue, wise as the laws, . . . have devoted their lives to the work of the fields, and brought light to agricultural affairs, otherwise abandoned to the most disgusting ignorance.”12 Clearly the point of this speech was a defense of the legitimist nobility as a source of knowledge as well as virtue. The nobleman carries rational light, his authority is derived from his moral attributes rather than the will, and the model of society is spatial, polarized between town and country. The image of the legitimist nobleman living on his estate was a royalist utopian vision, not a serious observation. In 1851, the mayor of Vigan reported more heroism overcoming local indifference to set up an agricultural society.13 The politics of this example were different. Fifty years before, and again in the 1820s, projects to create a bureau of the agricultural society of the Gard in Vigan had failed, so there was some cause for self-congratulation. In those earlier cases the proponents of the new societies had not thrown their hands up at the irrationality of the local farmers but explained that it was because they were rational and hard-working that they had not supported the scheme. “Very different as well to those other departments where the nature of the soil demands extensive methods of cultivation and where you find large properties, the Gard is made up of an infinity of smallholdings each cultivated in the way that has proved most effective in each area. In no other part of the country are the vine, the olive tree and the chestnut better tended than in the Gard. The industrie of the inhabitants, their natural liveliness, encouraged by the high prices for oil and wine, have encouraged intense agricultural engagement.”14 There was no need for a stimulus to agricultural improvement when the agrarian society was this animated. In 1851 the willingness of these rational, hard-working smallholders to associate stood as testimony to the civilizing mission of the newly reinstituted republic. The presence or absence of agricultural association could be read into different cultural and ideological logics.

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The odd, intermittent inability of the state to see the cultural resources of the population and to ascribe irrationality to them was not restricted to the department of the Gard. In 1868 in the neighboring Hérault the recteur adjoint of the academy was asked by the prefect about the provision of agricultural education in the department. Surprisingly, the rector said there was no agricultural education but then went on to explain that what he meant by that was that there was no formal state provision of agricultural education. Informally a lot was going on. Dr. Touchy, the latest graduate of the Montpellier medical school to have responsibility for the botanical garden, was giving a course on agricultural science at the école normale, the teacher-training school. His colleague Jean-Baptiste Hortoles, who was mayor of Lattes, was a peripatetic lecturer on arboriculture around the department. If the question was widened out further beyond agricultural education to take in the broader universe of institutions promoting collective effort in the various life sciences, there was even more activity. To take just one example, the departmental horticultural society had 311 members in 1875 willing to pay ten francs a year. It ran its own acclimatization garden and a series of competitions.15 We know this because the president of the society wrote to the prefect and the minister of the interior to protest at their grant from the Conseil général being cut in half and asking for central state support. Unsurprisingly, this request was not successful. Clearly something systematic is going on here. Some aspect of social reality was ontologically unstable, not really real, for these agents of the state. Agricultural societies were designed to align society, the state, and knowledge in a project of improvement. So just why were elements of the first part of that triad, society, intermittently invisible to agents of the second, the state, in the aftermath of the Revolution? Why was something as humdrum as a network of agricultural societies vulnerable to political construction? To answer that question we need to move in two directions. We need to have a much sharper view of the fate of the knowledge community of the Languedoc during the Revolution. Did the institutions of “mundane reason” survive the upheaval? We also need to understand the stakes of the national politics of knowledge. The knowledge community of the province became hidden in the gap between the legitimation crisis of the postrevolutionary state and the trajectory of the local society. 150

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Science, Reason, and the Citizen The year 1789 was a big one for Pierre-Joseph Amoreux. In that year he published or presented no fewer than eleven academic and scholarly papers and was accepted as a member of several academies, including the prestigious Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and Arts of Lyon. His academic success finally compensated for what he felt had been the unjust failure of the faculty of medicine at Montpellier to appoint him to a chair of botany in 1765. Ignored then by his medical colleagues, twenty-four years later he was recognized by the public and also by the province, which simultaneously commissioned him to set up a system of olive tree nurseries.16 The year was a high-water mark of self-assertion; he would never again be so productive. Yet despite the injuries he felt he had suffered from the corporate organization of learning, and his struggles to assert himself among a wider public, he later lamented the lost world of academies, societies, and the university that was being undone by the Revolution. “On the eighth of August 1793 the National Assembly [sic] promulgated the terrible decrees that destroyed the academies, the colleges, the societies for useful knowledge, the confraternities, the juridical corps, the religious orders and every corporation. This eclipse threatened to annihilate letters and manners in our unhappy France. Ignorance and barbarism seemed to unite to harass prominent men, the cultivated, nobles and the rich.”17 The old corporate structures of knowledge had not been kind to Amoreux, but even then he was fearful that removing them would cause the collapse of learning. Like many other savants, he was driven by his concern for the liberal and mechanical arts to engage with the new revolutionary institutions, though he was less than happy with them. At the height of the Revolution, Amoreux and his savant colleagues in the Languedoc sought to control the consequences for their provincial world. In 1794 they set up a Commission sur l’agriculture et les arts in the Hérault, which argued that revolutionary energy should be organized under scientific tutelage: “Despotism accustomed us to leave to others that which we could do for ourselves. It obstructed us from taking a hand in the improvement of the economy; even public subscriptions for public goals were unknown. Fellow republicans, we must throw off this monarchical lethargy, every science, all wealth must be directed to improvement,

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to helping us profit more from the bounty of nature and to the creation of the institutions that aid men to live in society.”18 The membership of the revolutionary commission effectively reconstituted the old Société royale, even though the rhetoric around the commission asserted that the world of science was republican, democratic, and antimonarchical. Amoreux explained that he joined the new commission, despite some acts of revolutionary vandalism, because “several of my old colleagues from the Société des sciences were members.”19 Of the twenty men who constituted the revolutionary commission twelve had been members of the old society. This group would prove adept at sustaining local scientific identity. When in 1798 the republican state promoted a new wave of local agronomical societies, these local knowledge elites would already be in place to give local expression to the national project. Amoreux’s muddled and complex relationship to the Revolution was not idiosyncratic. In the first year of the new department of the Hérault, Henri-Paul-Irénée Reboul, as a member of the Administrative Assembly of the new department, took up the old issue of the management of the botanical garden and its budget.20 He denounced the “usurpations” of the old Estates, the incompetence of the chancellor and his servant Paul, and the mismanagement of the collections. He asked that the new department definitively give control of the institution, and its annual budget of 2,400 livres, to the professors in the university. He was happy that the National Assembly had sufficient wisdom and authority to disentangle an important resource from the political complications that had restrained it. His faith in the capacity of the regenerated authorities to recognize and support the forces of light was less obvious when he went on to speak of the reorganization of the university, which as he knew was a privileged body. “Only the National Assembly,” he wrote, “can sustain or change university organization,” but he feared that resources that had been built up with funds from the Estates, like the equipment in the physics laboratory, would be distributed to the new departments.21 Sustaining institutions of knowledge was a good in itself, and in cases where the needs of an institution were in tension with the revolutionary reorganization of the nation, the needs of knowledge should prevail. Finding a politically viable position from which to articulate the needs of science when they did not coincide with those of the regenerated 152

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nation was no simple matter. Agronomy was one ground on which a new model for scientific authority could be built because of its hybrid, subaltern nature. Even before the Revolution agronomy had been recognized as the science where the insight of savants was most needed, and would lead to the greatest public benefit, but only where it was allied with local knowledge: “Geometry, mechanics, chemistry and physics are the same wherever one finds oneself on the globe, but this is not true of agriculture. This changes with the degrees of longitude and latitude and varies from one canton to the next. In fact very often an excellent local practice is restricted to one canton. It needs a central point where insights can be gathered and digested. The greatest number of our farmers, and every day confirms this terrible truth, are trapped in a blind routine, and this makes them deaf to their own interests.”22 The local application of agronomical knowledge created a virtuous circuit. The independence of the savant was one of the conditions of the circulation of useful knowledge from locality to nation and back again. Agronomy had been theorized as the contribution that a regenerated nobility would make to the nation by Touchy, another member of the Montpellier knowledge society, as early as 1778: “New agrarian laws promoting the happiness of the farmer will be written by wise magistrates and instituted by the most humane of princes. The idle noble, no longer disdaining his country seat, will find in agronomy an occupation worthy of him, and this calling will be another mark of consideration for his inferiors.”23 Étienne-Hyacinthe de Ratte and Jacques Poitevin, old colleagues of Touchy’s and Amoreux’s, used the political opening offered by popular agronomy to begin to reorganize the knowledge institutions of the province in 1796.24 The Horatian image of the reinforcement of social hierarchy imagined through the relationship to the land was rehearsed almost exactly by Amoreux in the preamble to the course on agronomy he gave at the école centrale in 1798. He also reprised the dichotomy of routine and insight that distributed rational insight to an elite and left the populace locked in a spontaneous, unreflective form of mental activity. A language of social function and a language of scientific authority were blended to create a model of a revolutionary knowledge society that could pursue public goods without imposing a rigid egalitarianism. “Creating chairs of agriculture has not affected the lack of knowledge of country dwellers; they would have been better 153

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served by landowners who had themselves received a proper agronomical education during their school days. These have an interest in acquiring the insights of knowledge and in transmitting them to the farmer, the plowman, the vineyard worker, the gardener, and that method of teaching those who are trapped in routine would certainly be more profitable, more direct and more certain than writing, in the way we have, elementary textbooks and catechisms.”25 The way in which hierarchies of knowledge were mobilized to replace the disciplines of the corporate order could find no better illustration than this substitution by Amoreux of the landowner, an economic function, for the noble in his model of the social basis of agronomy. The ideal of reinforcing society by scientific or rational capacity was not without competition. It is clear that at least some savants thought it preferable to reconstruct institutions with strong authoritative roles for themselves based on old strategies of corporate control, but this preference was not acceptable to the audience for agronomy or any other science. Amoreux, whose private thoughts embraced the notion of a natural role of enlightenment for a social elite, developed a very different image of the use and rationale for scientific institutions in his public writings. Arguing in favor of agricultural societies in 1798, he argued that the sorry state of French agriculture was not because of the resistance of an ignorant population to improved techniques. Instead he analyzed a lack of interaction between farmer and savant around empirical agronomical experiment as the key impediment. “A plan for improving our agriculture will identify the deficiencies in our current practice. These deficiencies are obvious and well known and we can remedy them, perhaps not all, but the greater number of them. Some derive from habits that turn practices into routines; the others are the fault of savants, who in their researches in the sciences with bearing on agriculture have neglected to inform farmers of their discoveries through practical demonstrations.”26 In this version of his plea for a continued commitment to the practical sciences Amoreux identified the key relationship not as that between savant and landowner (propriétaire) but rather as that between savant and farmer (cultivateur). Moreover, the relationship he idealized was of exchange and communication rather than dissemination from the elite to the populace. This alternative vision of the interaction of political 154

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economy and agronomy was echoed by other writers in the revolutionary agricultural society. The description of the canton of Montagnac argued that dissemination and elite tutelage held no promise for agricultural reform. “Agriculture was doubtlessly the first of the arts and will forever be the most useful. Similarly[,] personal interest was and always will be the greatest motivator of human action. In this sense it is convenient for society that private interest and the general good are so intimately connected, and so the farmer who works incessantly to satisfy his needs and to increase his pleasures works most efficiently for the general good, when he wishes only to work for himself.”27 The reorganization of scientific sociability in the Hérault used an alternative notion of practical science, immanent in the population, organized around a rationality that was common to all rather than arcane, while simultaneously being epistemologically robust and ameliorative. This model was cited by the founders of the society in the Aude in 1798, who wanted the “infinity of enlightened farmers” in the department to be associate members, and in the Gard three years later, who planned bureaus for the society in every canton.28 The applied sciences were being used to flesh out an ideal of an authoritative, republican science in which respect for hierarchies of knowledge was not offensive to equality of rights. During the Directory (1795–1799) conscious efforts were made to generalize the complex model of agrarian science as a template for a democratic, modernizing republic. Key figures, such as the minister of the interior François de Neufchâteau, and the editorial team of the Décade philosophique, promulgated the idea of the republic as an improving regime that would create the institutional and cultural environment necessary for citizenship. The wave of new societies created at the instigation of the Ministry of the Interior in 1798 was, alongside their educational policies, one of the practical initiatives to unite population and reason in the republic. The changed cultural and political context was quite explicitly understood by local agronomists, who advertised the new institutions through a critique of the old corporations. In their publicity for the new agricultural societies they underlined that improvement could not be a bureaucratic procedure but would have to come from the population itself. “Despotism accustomed us to wait to have done that which we could do for ourselves . . . we were denied the possibility of participating in the 155

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improvement of our political economy and public participation in voluntary associations was unknown. Let us shake off this monarchical lethargy.”29 The spontaneous foundation of an agricultural society in the town of Gignac, which demanded to be incorporated in the departmental society as a bureau, responded to this notion of a new role for intellectual societies. Thirty citizens in Gignac decided to get together and exploit the opportunities created by inclusion in a new nation committed to reason and improvement. “the goal of these members is fixed on the improvement of agriculture, with the help of the agricultural press and the experiments they plan to conduct.”30 The local group, composed entirely of farmers, thrived. In 1805 they were communicating their sessions to Montpellier, recommending the folding of sheep and protesting at the continuation of gleanage.31 Local scientific sociability of this kind was exactly what was envisaged by the supporters of the Revolution. For the theorists of revolutionary science any new agricultural society could not be a recreated academy, because it would be inherently committed to accepting the demands from local farmers for inclusion. The democratizing effect of the Revolution accelerated the collapse of knowledge hierarchies that had already been inherent in the evolution of the local knowledge society. While local savants held onto their positions in the administration, the ordinary membership was dominated by farmers; the first list of fifty associate members did include nineteen honorific names, such as the minister of the interior, but the other thirty-one were all working farmers in the department.32 The society of the Hérault was not alone in having this practical bent. The society in the Aude was set up precisely to create a forum for innovative farmers. The society took the idea that its goal was to foster the innovations of working farmers to its logical conclusion, “since an infinite number of enlightened farmers are in the department, who either because of their age or because they are fully occupied and especially because of their distance [from Carcassonne] cannot be put on the limited roll of associate members . . . it is proposed that they all be given a diploma of associate correspondent and asked to send into the society their observations on the different branches of rural economy.”33 The foundation in the Gard did not have the aspiration to include every farmer, but it used a different model, of

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local bureaus, to reach into the world of the practitioner. The administration of the department of the Gard had already decided to set up an agricultural society in the year VII but was not finally created until the year IX. The primary goal of the society was to create a statistical account of the four arrondissements of the department, following the Scottish model, and its membership was set at forty, all to be farmers. That membership was split into four bureaus, at Nîmes, Alès, Uzes, and Vigan, where they could actually inspire improved agriculture.34 The new prefect of the Gard made perhaps the most explicit connection between the energy of local farmers and the institutional possibilities opened up by the Revolution in his letter advertising the new society. “The department of the Gard has more owner-occupiers than any other, and therefore more men ready to profit from the advice we can give them, and to give, in their turn, a good example to farmers less enlightened than themselves.”35 The agricultural societies in Languedoc would be part of a debate in, rather than about, rural society. Citizenship and knowledge reinforced each other by recognizing the capacity for innovation in the population. There are other indices that point to a revival in technological citizenship. The revolutionary state instituted a very liberal patent law, allowing anyone to file a patent. This gave individuals no privileges and did not establish intellectual property but was the precondition for any subsequent claim of copyright in the courts. The patent register is therefore a good index of interest in novel objects. Leaving aside Paris, where the majority of patents were filed, 20 percent of all patent claims made in France between 1791 and 1812 were filed in the departments making up the historic province of the Languedoc, a rate out of all proportion to its population.36 A partnership between the state, the population, and knowledge elites existed, and there is evidence that it provoked innovation and activity among the population. This model was politically marked, however. Effectively neo-Jacobin, the institutional logic that was oriented to the creation of modern citizens through science could not and did not survive the fall of the Directory, even if the societies themselves continued to function. In the aftermath of the republic the relationship between state power, society, and science would have to be rearranged.

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Reason and the Unachieved Social Order Jan Goldstein has offered the most comprehensive account of the articulation of reason and the state after the Revolution. She uses the optic of identity to map how public culture created models for ordered, private experience. She articulates exactly the same problem that animates this book, of identifying the norms that stabilized experience in conditions of change and so supported coherent collective action. Knowledge was the key. “After 1789, . . . the changes associated with the emergence of modern economic forms could safely be carried out as long as scientifically inflected reason could find, or invent, substitutes for the restraints on imagination formerly exercised by corporate bodies.”37 This insight has a symmetrical consequence; just as the institutions of self-fashioning, with their attendant theorizations, stabilized the economic realm, so markets and political economy stabilized psychology. Or rather, this was the way that the two regimes were ideally supposed to provide support for the institutions of an emerging bourgeois order in which the postulates of rationality, across its several domains, were embedded in mutually reinforcing orders of experience, not necessarily restricted to those of interiority and exchange.38 This ideal complementarity, however, was never achieved, and ideological conflict made a hegemonic political economy impossible to institute in postrevolutionary France. Goldstein argues for the centrality of Victor Cousin and the work of philosophy to the reflective elaboration of the terms of selfhood in the more politically troubled world of nineteenthcentury France. Cousin theorized the achieved self as “a dynamic will capable of moulding the world and as a foundational principle that endowed private property with metaphysical status,” and he succeeded in institutionalizing this understanding across the French educational system.39 But did a sovereign reason, embedded in the state and incarnated in a newly dominant class, succeed in establishing hegemony? Could subaltern reason simply be stitched into the fabric that clothed the new order? There were areas of the globe where reason, in this sense, was practiced as well as theorized. The rights-bearing middle-class Englishman, seeking to contribute to the common good by maximizing his own happiness, could find the rationality of his self-understanding endorsed in John Stuart Mill, exemplified in his place of work and inspired in his agitation

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for the extension of the suffrage, repeal of the Corn Laws, and protests against the slave trade.40 The parallels with Cousin and the reform of French educational structures can easily be found. In the sphere of education in Britain self-creation was understood as “character building,” and the educational reforms inspired by Matthew Arnold at Rugby were endorsed by an upper-middle class who created their “selves” in the public schools as well as by a middle class who endorsed and emulated those values.41 Utilitarianism stabilized social, economic, and political orders and provided a unified vocabulary of the self through which an Englishman could negotiate the various claims of politics, economics, society, and culture while retaining a coherent identity and sense of self. The history of the self is vitally important, and the contrast between the French and British histories is highly instructive. The self, or at least the version of the self as self-determining individual, is the postulate of every variety of liberalism and its institutions, and it is clear that we need to deepen our understanding of this highly successful ideology. Goldstein’s work certainly contributes in a fundamental way to our understanding of the production of the bourgeois self in France. There are, however, vital differences in the way in which the self is produced, the rationality it exemplifies, and the institutions it inhabits between countries where the project of class was successful, such as England, and those where it was not, such as France.42 The notion of a bourgeois self is a class term: it implies a particular social habitus, a form of life characterized by a particular understanding of the world. On this view it is impossible to disentangle claims to social authority and claims to knowledge. In France, where the Revolution set up contestation over political economy, there was not a consensus on the place of exchange in national life. Science was not aligned so clearly to class, and subalterns had been invited into worlds of knowledge as citizens during and after the Revolution, and so scientific contestation in turn amplified debates over knowledge and authority and allowed for multiple claims for a self. Common sense, in Sophia Rosenfeld’s formulation, could not buttress forms of power, because all of them were contested.43 In consequence the British bourgeois self, integrated through Mill’s writings, had a far greater scope than that of Cousin. Interest or utility became a much more successfully naturalized notion of selfhood than introspective will. Unlike the members of the English middle class, the self-knowing 159

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French bourgeois found their authority, and indeed their very claim to an insight into the nature of selfhood, contested in nearly every sphere of life. Reason was authoritative but contested. It would be a misrepresentation to see the mobilized revolutionary citizen as the singular limit posed to the scope of the authority of the bourgeois self. It would be even more of a mistake to imagine that the alternative to the bourgeois self was an alternative model of class, the popular self. As Jacques Rancière established in his history of popular reading, the self of the popular classes was not imagined in class terms.44 The failure of class as an authoritative project of social reconstruction allowed a variety of alternative modern selves, imagined on different bases, to be viable.45 The citizen was only one of the alternative models; André Malraux’s list, in his 1974 Lazare, comprised “saint, chevalier, caballero, gentleman, Bolshevik.”46 The gentleman, or bourgeois, and the Bolshevik, or Jacobin citizen, were only two of many aspirations to integral selfhood. A small army of cultural historians has interrogated how the flâneur— the dandy—and the other inhabitants of the social menagerie of midcentury Paris diverged from bourgeois norms and has investigated the critique of forms of life social and cultural plurality it sustained. Even in Britain, however, the world of the arts incubated alternative projects of personhood, and so it is hardly surprising that la vie de bohème rejected bourgeois norms. Romanticism has long been taken for the alternative source of moral insight in a bourgeois order.47 More surprising, and less well known, were the debates explicitly about the nature and form of scientific authority conducted by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier between 1830 and 1832, precisely the moment that Cousin was acquiring power in the University of Montpellier.48 The subject of the debate was the work by Geoffroy on mollusks and his claim that there was an analogy between their morphology and those of vertebrates, which contradicted Cuvier’s view that there was a set of invariant forms in nature.49 The stakes extended beyond the realm of science, since Geoffroy’s transformationist ideas and explicit appeal to a general public undermined the claim to social and epistemic authority based on competence in an autonomous sphere of scientific inquiry.50 Geoffroy’s tactics in the debate undermined the notion of a different kind of self, a scientist, who had greater authority in debate because of his greater control of higher mental faculties. This 160

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struggle over the roots of authority, the identity of those who should exert it, and its ends was echoed and even cited in other areas of cultural endeavor. In 1832 Léonce Reynaud supported Henri Labrouste’s rejection of the classical orders as the elements of architecture, and his attack on Quatremère de Quincy’s control of the Académie des beaux-arts, by citing Geoffroy’s views on mollusks.51 The humble mollusk, constructing its shell around its body, became a metaphor for adaptive power and a polemical refutation of the idea that hierarchies of order were natural and generated authority. Quatremère’s venerable three orders of architecture, as well as the more novel four branches of corporeal design advanced by Cuvier, could not establish their claim to be natural and so were not robust resources for an account of authoritative reason and the nature of the person who exercised that reason. The conditions for the construction of the self in nineteenth-century France were particularly complex because a scientific account of the self could not lean on social authority to make it credible, and there was no convincing account of scientific authority to act as a template for social authority. In the absence of a hegemonic bourgeoisie, the self could not be univocally bourgeois. Nor could a hegemonic bourgeoisie be constructed on the base of a particular version of the self. The alternative ideas of selfhood that animated French political and social life allow us to avoid a problem inherent in the emerging theme of modernity as the topic of central concern in French history.52 The various politically, culturally, and socially available selves will allow us to avoid the trap of interrogating French modernity in terms of a particular content for that modernity. The individual of social theory, and particularly economics, is constructed from an amalgam of Lockian rights theory, eighteenth-century Scottish social thought, and American constitutionalism. A history of the self, or rather selves, separates the history of modernity from the history of that individual, and it allows us to recognize other norms and other institutions besides those constructed around that individual as modern. The provincial and the subaltern had their reasons, and the Revolution makes it easier to see in France the complexity, variety, and even incoherence within modernizing societies. The very fecundity and variety of French society provoked blindness, and even sometimes hostility, on the part of institutions, such as the state, 161

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that claimed hegemony. The French state suffered a century-long legitimation crisis, most obviously in the succession of revolutions and attempted revolutions. No wonder that the agents of the state should see such different things when they looked at the institutions of rural life. The reality of contestation at the level of the state makes the relative success of French society in managing the era of change even more remarkable. Despite the state failing to provide a coherent and consistent legal and constitutional framework for the population, the society still managed to orientate itself through the most profound period of change in human history. That it did so not by reasserting old norms but by embracing new ideas makes the record of French social history even more remarkable. The history of social innovation in France, under conditions of continual political disruption, offers a radical example of the capacity for self-organization of complex societies.

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Political fragmentation is often identified as the feature that differentiated Europe from other regions of the globe, from the fall of Rome to the twenty-first century.1 The argument of this book does not contest that view, or the view that fragmentation was a key reason for Europe’s idiosyncratic development during the eighteenth century. The position developed in the book, illustrated by the case study, is that researchers have not fully thought through the nature and consequences of stable diversity. We have concentrated on the Darwinian mechanisms of interstate competition and have been less sensitive to the capacity of fragmented but stable societies to form dynamic learning communities. The most important feature of a fragmented Europe, from this perspective, was not the spur to innovation of interstate competition that forms the focus of the research on the fiscal military state or its variant, the development state.2 The incentives to cooperation incubated in local, provincial contexts where individuals and groups were in constant contact were, if anything, even more important in explaining successful adaptation to change. The provinces of Europe, in a best-case scenario, could create stable contexts for cooperation and innovation. 163

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This argument aligns with the ideas of Robert Axelrod on the importance of iterative interaction for the emergence of stable patterns of cooperation, developed in his influential Evolution of Cooperation and Complexity of Cooperation.3 Axelrod’s formal argument is that, over the long term, strategies of cooperation are dominant in social games. Citing Axelrod is not to take a position among the many responses to and criticisms of his ideas in game theory, evolutionary biology, or developmental sociology, or even to contribute another option to the animated debate around the models derived from his work.4 From a historian’s perspective, looking for testable ideas that help order emerge from the chaos of the archive, Axelrod’s contribution has been to abstract the core characteristics of a cooperative society. Axelrod’s definition of stable cooperation offers a decidedly useful heuristic that helps us to understand and explain why the region or province could be an incubator of adaptive change. Axelrod’s spare conceptual language helps cut through the complexity of the historical record to identify the elements that have explanatory force. In this case it alerts us to how the European province, as a stable community where agents of all sorts had to interact over time, could manage systematic and substantial cultural, economic, and social change. Axelrod’s ideas do not propose a model of history but rather raise a question: Are there historical examples of emergent strategies of cooperation? That question spurred this body of research. If Axelrod’s ideas do offer some real historical explanatory insight, then we might expect that regions which were not institutionally stable and in which individuals did not have to expect to work with one another over time would turn out to be highly uncooperative. The work of Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon illustrates a contrasting case.5 Their work analyzes how levels of penetration by the slave trade into different regions of Africa are negatively correlated with contemporary income levels, because of endemic coordination problems. Slaving generated ubiquitous insecurity because both neighbors and strangers had incentives to kidnap, trick, and sell each other into slavery.6 That insecurity destroyed trustenhancing social institutions. Because any individual might be removed from the region against his or her will, there was no incentive to embed a culture of reasonable cooperation. Quite the opposite: a culture of mistrust became rational, and in the absence of trust coherent collective 164

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action became difficult.7 The negative contrast helps us to calibrate how important cultures of cooperation were to sustain successful societies. We have real analytic purchase on how provinces, the contexts of experience for most people in Europe in the eighteenth century, could incubate a culture of reason, a body of norms that conditioned and managed innovative behavior in a noncoercive way. The dense archives of the Languedoc allow us to reconstruct the patterns of communication and innovation through which such new norms emerged in that province in the eighteenth century. Reason was discovered and invented, not imposed, in a variety of contexts and through a variety of practices, but over the long run those practices and contexts converged on a coherent norm. The local story of adaptation and change explains how the citizens of the Languedoc, despite the radical institutional and political discontinuity of the Revolution, engaged successfully in the globally oriented world of the nineteenth century.8 The institutional context of the province was the necessary condition for a cooperative culture oriented toward a universalist horizon, but once that culture had established itself it could survive the eclipse of the institutions. Culture is ubiquitous, but general and systemic cultural change of the sort described in this book is rare.9 The ready-to-hand ideas and rules of thumb that govern everyday interaction are so deeply embedded, so taken for granted, and so necessary for mutual comprehension that they are very difficult to alter.10 The provincial perspective emphasizes how challenging and profound the emergence of a global system was. New norms of behavior reached down to the most banal and everyday spheres of experience in villages and fields. These universalist norms of global rationality did not replace other strategies, affective and discursive, that made social action meaningful. The globalization of experience has never become so total, even now, that all values are global values, all meaning globally communicated. The repertoire of global action, embedded in credit markets, orders of knowledge, and worlds of work, imposed itself everywhere, however. By the early nineteenth century, global experience had become everyday and inescapable in the provinces of Europe.11 Approaching the definition of the global through provincial history rescues global history from the problem of circularity. The provincial perspective recovers the emergent process through which the substantive 165

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content of global norms was articulated. The Languedoc was not a “center of calculation,” it did not have strategic leverage on the world of finance or science, it could not impose meaning. Instead it was one of the many nodes of interaction around which global networks were woven. From Montpellier we can see how the world, and its provinces, became global. From Montpellier, or any of the other globally connected provinces, it is very hard, however, to establish why the global system took the shape it did. The impetus for change in the provinces was clearly exogenous, and the elements of those exogenous shocks, primarily deriving from the discovery of the Americas, are well understood. But it is far more difficult adequately to account for the trajectory of change toward a capitalist world order. The cultural changes in the provinces made a global world, they did not make a capitalist world. In the current state of research it is impossible to explain the global hegemony of capitalism in the early nineteenth century. Chris Bayly argued that the changes of the revolutionary era were “catastrophic,” that they created new kinds of resources, material and ideological, and that capitalism as we know it emerged from elite adaptation to that shock.12 Bayly’s hypothesis is a creative starting point but only that. To accurately explain how the era of the French Revolution created the conditions for global capitalism we will have to confront some difficult historiographical challenges. The emergence of capitalism was a contingency, which is just an awkward way of saying a surprise. Capitalism was not the project of any particular movement or group in the Revolution, not even the Girondins. John Dunn observes that democracy was similarly unforeseen as a possible resolution of political crisis, and while it is impossible to point to a moment such as the summer of 1792, when the appeal to political democracy emerged, capitalism was a similarly unpredictable outcome.13 The axis of political debate before, and for the most part during, the Revolution was between those who thought the process of improvement could abolish poverty, as Gareth Stedman Jones has phrased it, and those who thought the abolition of poverty impossible.14 That polarity made for strange bedfellows and stranger oppositions. Christians, for instance, were divided between those inspired by Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenélon, Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, and George Berkeley, who thought that caritas demanded the application of industriousness to the condition of the poor, 166

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and the more rigorous neo-Augustinians, such as de Maistre, who thought that the desire to alter the human condition was sinful. The particular resolution that linked sovereignty and improvement through capital was unforeseen. We still do not have a convincing account of how and where the early modern debate on politics transformed itself in this way and how a culture with universal ambitions became capitalist. How we articulate the history of the state, and its theorizations, with capitalism will also demand that we find the right transnational context. Capitalism was not a national project, and much of the work defining the nature of privacy, crucial to establishing the space for the economy and demarcating its boundaries, was done by declared enemies of revolutionary France. The Congress of Vienna created the European balance of power that would endure to 1914 and the conditions for European imperialism. It also defined the commercial rules that would condition economic behavior. The origins of the practices of global free trade and the international legal instruments that defined it in the leagues of armed neutrality have not even begun to be explored. The commercial cosmopolitanism that animated much of the global behavior of the European powers emerged from the Revolution, but not in an obvious or linear way. The province works as the cradle of global experience, but new work will have to find a different space if we are to account for its capitalist maturity.

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NOTES

Abbreviations ADG ADH AN BM Avignon BM Montpellier BN BU Montpellier

Archives du département du Gard Archives du département de l’Hérault Archives nationales de France Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon Bibliothèque municipale de Montpellier Bibliothèque nationale de France Bibliothèque universitaire historique de médecine

Introduction 1. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2003), 125–169; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); Jürgen Oesterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2015), 637–649; R. B. Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Charles Knick Harley, “British and European Industrialisation,” in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume 1: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848 (Cambridge, 2014), edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, 491–532.

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2. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “When Did Globalisation Begin?” European Review of Economic History 6, no. 1 (April 2002): 23–50; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Path Dependence, Time Lags and the Birth of Globalisation: A Critique of O’Rourke and Williamson,” European Review of Econoic History 8, no. 1 (2004): 81–108; Kevin H. O’Rourke, “The Economist and Global History,” in The Prospect of Global History (Oxford, 2016), edited by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham, 44–63. 3. William Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution: Political Institutions, Sovereign Debt, and Financial Underdevelopment in Imperial Brazil (New Haven, 2015); Catalina Vizcarra, “Guano, Credible Commitments, and Sovereign Debt Repayment in Nineteenth-Century Peru,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 358–387; Mark Dinecco, “The Political Economy of Fiscal Prudence in Historical Perspective,” Economics and Politics 22, no. 1 (2010): 1–36. 4. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, 2005); Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2005); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016). 5. Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part 1: On the Nature and Origin of Our Ecological Sins,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630; Daniel Lord Smail, “Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past,” Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 110–122. 6. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge, 1990); Ashin Das Gupta, Merchants of Maritime India, 1500–1800 (Aldershot, 1994); Mark Elvin, “China as a Counterfactual,” in Europe and the Rise of Capitalism (Oxford, 1988), edited by Jean Baechler et al., 101–112; Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, 1990); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 7. Jack Goldstone, “Efflouresences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 331. 8. The idea of a high-level equilibrium trap is particularly important, though contested, in understanding why Chinese technological and institutional leadership in the early modern period was not sustained. Kang Chao, Man and Land in Chinese History: An Economic Analysis (Stanford, 1986); Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973); Anthony Tang, “China’s Agricultural Legacy,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28, no. 1 (1979): 1–22. 9. Peter Vries, Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna, 2017), 23. 10. Justin Yifu Lin, “The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 43, no. 2 (1995): 269–292. 11. Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, 2009).

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12. Peter Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820 (Manchester, 2008). 13. Guido Tabellini, “Culture and Institutions: Economic Development in the Regions of Europe,” Journal of the European Economic Association 8, no. 4 (2010): 677–716. 14. A version of this argument animates Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981). 15. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 1999), 313–319. 16. This problem has also been confronted by women’s historians trying to capture their contribution to systemic change. See Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, 2001); Paolo Bertucci, “The In/visible Woman: Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 226–249. 17. Michel de Certeau (trans. Seven Rendell), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984); Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, 1988), edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. 18. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2004); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014). 19. See André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998), and John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge, 2004). 20. Cecil Courtney and Jenny Mander, eds., Raynal’s “Histoire des deux Indes”: Colonialism, Networks and Global Exchange, OSE: 10 (Oxford, 2015). 21. This is a venerable argument in the history of political economy. See Robert Livingston Schuyler, “The Rise of Anti-Imperialism in England,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1922): 440–471. 22. In this book I do not systematically deploy Habermas’s distinction between communicative lifeworld and coordinating system as the template for modern social life, and the argument of the book does not turn on this insight. The idea of negotiation between subalterns and elites around universals that is at the heart of the book is, however, derived from Habermas’s idea. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986–1989), trans. Thomas McCarthy. 23. The authoritative study of the administration of the Languedoc is now Stéphane Durand, Arlette Jouanna, and Elie Pélaquier, Des États dans l’État: Les États de Languedoc de la Fronde à la Révolution (Geneva, 2014). 24. The pioneering work in this field remains Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993). 25. Alan MacFarlane argued for a provincial route to a global capitalist system in a very different mode to this book. See Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, 1978), and The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford, 1987).

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26. Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, NY, 1980); Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986). 27. BN, Fonds français 8149, Nicolas de Lamoignon de Basville, “Mémoire général de la province de Languedoc, dressé par ordre du Roy, en 1698.” All translations are by the author, unless noted otherwise. 28. Claude Bernard de Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, suivis de Traité sur le commerce en Languedoc, de l’intendant Ballainvilliers (1788), publiés pour la première fois et présentés par M. Michel Péronnet (Montpellier, 1989). 29. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966). 30. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985). 31. J. K. J. Thomson, Clermont-de-Lodève, 1633–1789: Fluctuations in the Prosperity of Languedocian Cloth-Making Town (Cambridge, 1982); Christopher H. Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920 (Oxford, 1995). 32. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 3 33. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 34. Claude-Joseph Trouvé, États de Languedoc et département de l’Aude (Paris, 1812). 35. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 58, 70. 36. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 177–190. 37. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 131. 38. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 93. 39. Ballainvilliers, Mémoires sur le Languedoc, 121, 179. 40. For a contrasting account of a developmental state see Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 41. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). 42. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999); Maxine Berg, “From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Economic History Review 55, no. 1 (2002): 1–30; John Komlos, “The New World’s Contribution to Food Consumption during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of European Economic History 27, no. 1 (1998): 67–82; T. H. Breen, “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1993): 471–501; John L. Brooke, “Consumer Virtues in Revolutionary America?” Reviews in American History 30, no. 3 (2004): 329–340; Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 2000). 43. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), 114–119. 44. Philip T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton, 1996).

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NOTES TO PAGES 9–11

45. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Credit Markets and Economic Change in Southeastern France, 1630–1788,” Explorations in Economic History 30, no. 2 (1993): 129–157; Gilles PostelVinay, La terre et l’argent: L’agriculture et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle (Paris, 1998), 78–127; Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, 2000). 46. See, among a great many others, Philippe Steiner, La “science nouvelle” de l’économie politique (Paris, 1998); John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Catherine Larrère, L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992); Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000); Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 47. The literature on commercial society has become extensive. See, among others, Edward Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994); Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), and Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Issac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, 2011); Dennis Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park, PA, 2008); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Mikko Tolonen, Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society (Oxford, 2013). 48. Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit, and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto, 2008); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). 49. Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith and Political Economy of the ‘Unnatural and Retrograde’ Order,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition in the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 372–373. 50. Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2009), and “Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France—or from Royal to Ancient Republicanism and Back,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Volume 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), edited by Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 275–292. 51. The Haitian Revolution is increasingly placed at the center of understanding of the global history of the French Revolution. See David Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001); Malick Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, 2012); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 52. For an overview of this literature see Nigel Swain, “Social Capital and Its Uses,” Archives europénnes de sociologie 44, no. 2 (August 2003): 185–212.

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53. James Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 1 (1988): 95–120. 54. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993). 55. Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Consumption, Social Capital and the ‘Industrious Revolution’ in Early Modern Germany,” Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2 (June 2010): 287–324; Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003); Ogilvie, “The Use and Abuse of Trust: The Deployment of Social Capital by Early Modern Guilds,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 46, no. 1 (2005): 15–52. 56. Jan Lucassen, Tine de Moor, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “The Return of the Guilds: Towards a Global History of the Guilds in Pre-Industrial Times,” International Review of Social History 53, suppl. 16 (December 2008): 5–18. 57. Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in EarlyModern Europe (Philadelphia, 2006), 13. 58. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 2000), 5. 59. On earlier versions of the universalization of particulars see Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitanism, Vernacularism and Premodernity,” in Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 59–80. 60. For an exploration of the historicity of this claim see Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford, 2016). 61. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998); Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989). 62. For a fascinating account of why this may be the case see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA, 1983), trans. Robert M. Wallace. 63. See the essays in Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007). 64. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in an Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008). 65. Thomas Robertson, Outline of a General Report upon the Size of Farms and upon the Persons Who Cultivate Farms (Edinburgh, 1796), 51. 66. Avner Greif, “Self-Enforcing Political Systems and Economic Growth: Late Medieval Genoa,” in Analytic Narratives (Princeton, 1998), edited by Robert Bates et al., 23–63; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights, Litigation and French Agriculture, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1992). 67. Rosenthal and Wong point this out in their critique of North, Wallis, and Weingast’s work. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and After Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2011) 3; Douglass North,

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John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009). Even very careful scholars fall into circular arguments that assume the conditions of economic outcomes. Istvan Hont, “Introduction,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 4–5. Acemoglu and Robinson’s account of the same transition avoids circularity by asserting political determinants to economic change but offers no account of how different political institutions emerge; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London, 2012). 68. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 3–30. 69. For contrasting, though similarly heroic, works in this vein, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1987), trans. Thomas McCarthy; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

Chapter One. Small Changes 1. ADH, C 8778, Sénéchausée of Caracassonne, creditors 1767. 2. ADH, C 8784, Sénéchausée of Caracassonne, creditors 1772. 3. ADH, C 8789, Sénéchausée of Caracassonne, creditors 1787. 4. A return of more than 300 percent on the initial two-thousand-livre investment over 110 years. 5. ADH, C 8789. 6. Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1982), 86–90. 7. ADH, C 8789. 8. ADH, C 8778, Autre emprunt fait en exécution de la delibération de la sénéchaussée du 2 janvier 1765. 9. ADH, C 8784. 10. For the older view of debt as catastrophic see Pierre Goubert, Cent mille provinciaux au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1968); Marc Venard, Bourgeois et paysans au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1957). 11. Thomas Brennan, “Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth-Century Champagne,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 175–200. 12. Gérard Béaur, Le marché foncier (Paris, 1984); Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Credit Markets and Economic Change in Southeastern France, 1630–1788,” Explorations in Economic History 30, no. 2 (1993): 129–157. For the importance of notaries to credit transactions in eighteenth-century France see Gilles Postel-Vinay, La terre et l’argent: L’agriculture et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle (Paris, 1998), 78–127; Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, 2000), 114–176. 13. Geoffrey Ingham., “The Social Institution of Money,” in The Sage Handbook of Sociology (London, 2005), edited by Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, and Bryan Turner, 154.

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14. Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, (Glencoe, IL, 1950), 51; Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, Economy and Society (London, 1956). See also Schumpeter’s remark that fiscal history was the basis of general history, in Schumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State?” in International Economic Papers (London, 1954), vol. 4, 1–17, cited in Patrick Karl O’Brien, “The Formation of States and Transitions to Modern Economies: England, Europe and Asia Compared,” in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume 1: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848 (Cambridge, 2014), edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, 360. 15. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978). 16. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York, 2011). 17. Jan de Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the CapeRoute Trade, 1497–1795,” in D. O. Flynn, A Giráldez and R von Glahn eds, Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800 (London, 2003), edited by Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard von Glahn, 35–106; Sevket Pamuk, “Crisis and Recovery: The Ottoman Monetary System in the Early Modern Era, 1550–1769,” in Global Connections, edited by Flynn, Giráldez, and von Glahn, 133–48. 18. Christine Desan, “Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11, no. 1, article 13 (2010). Available at: http://www. bepress.com/til/default/vol11/iss1/art13. For a critique of historians’ fascination with precious metals see Arturo García-Baquero Gonzalez, “American Gold and Silver in the Eighteenth Century: From Fascination to Accounting,” in Global Connections, edited by Flynn, Giráldez, and von Glahn, 107–122. A new relationship would be established by the creation of the gold standard after the French Revolution, which was finally abandoned in 1971. 19. Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990), 3. For a discussion of the different effects of silver flows in the global economy see Ronald Finlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, 2007), 212–226. 20. John Asgill, Several Assertions Proved in Order to Create Another Species of Money Than Gold and Silver (London, 1696), 1–2. 21. James D. Tracy, A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: Renten and Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515–1565 (Berkeley, 1985). 22. Neal, Financial Capitalism, 7. 23. Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff, 1994), 258. 24. [William Paterson,] A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England (London, 1694), 1. 25. [Paterson,] Brief Account, 14. 26. Ming-Hsun Li, The Great Recoinage of 1696 to 1699 (London, 1963), 179. 27. Davies, History of Money, 262. 28. Asgill, Several Assertions, 18. 29. Anne Laurence, “The Emergence of a Private Clientele for Banks in the Early Eighteenth Century: Hoare’s Bank and Some Women Customers,” Economic History Review

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61, no. 3 (2008): 565–586; Stephen Quinn, “Gold, Silver and the Glorious Revolution: Arbitrage between Bills of Exchange and Bullion” Economic History Review 49, no. 3 (1996): 473–490. 30. John Law, Money and Trade Consider’d; with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (London, 1720), 11. 31. Antoin Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford, 1997), 62; Richard Bonney, “France and the First European Paper Money Experiment,” French History 15, no. 3 (2001): 254–272. 32. Larry Neal, “How It All Began: The Monetary and Financial Architecture of Europe during the First Global Capital Markets, 1648–1815,” Financial History Review 7, no. 2 (2000): 132. 33. Rebecca Spang, “The Ghost of Law: Speculating on Money, Memory and Mississippi in the French Constituent Assembly,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 31, no. 1 (2005): 3–25. 34. Richard Bonney, “The Rise of the Fiscal State in France 1500–1914,” in The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500–1914 (Cambridge, 2012), edited by Bartolomé YunCasalilla and Patrick K. O’Brien, 93–110. 35. Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle (Paris, 1984). 36. Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012). 37. Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991); Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2000). 38. Gary B. McCollim, Louis XIV’s Assault on Privilege: Nicolas Desmaretz and the Tax on Wealth (Rochester, NY, 2012); Arnaud Orain, “Soutenir la guerre et réformer la fiscalité: Silhouette et Forbonnais au Contrôle général des finances (1759),” French Historical Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 417–448. 39. François Velde and David Weir, “The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746–1793,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (1992): 1–39. 40. John F Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970), 7. 41. Marie-Laure Legay, “Le crédit des provinces au sécours de l’état: Les emprunts des états provinciaux pour le compte du roi (France, XVIIIe siècle), in Pour voir les finances en province sous l’ancien régime: Journée d’études tenue à Bercy le 9 décembre 1999 (Paris, 2003), edited by François Bayard, 53. 42. Wantje Fritschy, “A ‘Financial Revolution’ Reconsidered: Public Finance in Holland during the Dutch Revolt, 1568–1648,” Economic History Review 55, no. 1 (2003), 57–89. 43. For an overview of the work analyzing the ancien régime as an immobile alliance see William Beik, “Review Article: The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past and Present 188, no. 1 (August 2005): 195–224. For the institutionalist critique see Hilton Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France (Berkeley, 1994).

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44. For a statement of the orthodox view see James Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1988), and James Collins, Classes, Estates and Order in Early-Modern Brittany (Cambridge, 1994). 45. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History, no. 2 (2002): 391–428; Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: LongDistance Trade in the Early-Modern World 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1993), edited by J. D. Tracy, 224–254. 46. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “The Political Economy of Absolutism Reconsidered,” in Analytic Narratives (Princeton, 1998), edited by Robert Bates et al., 84. 47. Christine Desan, “From Blood to Profit: Making Money in the Practice and Imagery of Early America,” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 1 (2008): 26–46, and “The Market as a Matter of Money: Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History,” Law and Social Inquiry 30, no. 1 (2006): 1–60. 48. Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, 2002), 23. 49. The founding study remains Marcel Marion, Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715, Tome 1: 1715–1789 (Paris, 1914). 50. John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford, 2010). 51. Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007). 52. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les financiers de Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970), 17. 53. Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London, 1996), 40; Christopher H. Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920: The Politics of Deindustrialisation (Oxford, 1995), 9 54. Chaussinand-Nogaret, Financiers de Languedoc, 21. 55. Douglas C. North and Barry Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803–832. 56. Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (London, 2002), 15. 57. Compte rendu des impositions et des dépenses générales de la province de Languedoc (Montpellier, 1789), 3. 58. Anon., Réflexions sur l’administration des États du Languedoc (n.p., 1788). 59. AHD C 8772, Composition of the Estates 1754, Sixteen barons attended this meeting: Castelnau, Gardiole, Castelnau de Bonnefous, Saint Felix, Lanta, Bram, Ambres, Mirepoix, Pierre Bourg, Villeneuve, Rieux, Florensac, Murviel, Alais, Calvison, Castries, and Ganges. 60. ADH, C 8782, Contrôle de logemens de nosseigneurs des Estats de la Province de Languedoc assemblés à Montpellier le 4 novembre 1773; ADH, C 8785, Contrôle des

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NOTES TO PAGES 30–33

logements de nosseigneurs des états de la province du Languedoc assemblés à Montpellier le 30 novembre 1780. 61. Sophie Durand, Arlette Jouanna, and Elie Pélaquier, Des États dans l’État: Les États de Languedoc de la Fronde à la Révolution (Geneva, 2014), 37. 62. ADH, C 9471, Mémoires sur les impositions du Languedoc, 11. Arlette Jouanna and Élie Pélaquier, “La Cour des comptes, aides et finances de Montpellier et les États de Languedoc,” in Contrôler les finances sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 2011), ed. Dominique Le Page, 454–472. 63. Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981), 247. 64. Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société, 17. 65. ADH, C 9471, Mémoire pour servir à faire connoître l’administration des communautés et la jurisdiction de M. l’Intendant en ce qui concerne les dettes et les affaires des dioceses, n.d. 66. ADH, C 9471, Mémoire pour servir a faire connoître l’administration des communautés et la jurisdiction de M. l’Intendant en ce qui concerne les dettes et les affaires des dioceses, 3. 67. For a clear analysis of the system see Françoise Corbière, “La politique fiscale des États de Languedoc, 1750–1789,” thèse pour le doctorat en droit, Université des sciences sociales de Toulouse, École droite et science politique (juin, 1999). 68. ADH, C 9471, Mémoire pour servir à faire connoître l’administration des communautés et la jurisdiction de M. l’Intendant en ce qui concerne les dettes et les affaires des dioceses, 5. 69. Stephen Miller, “Absolutism and Class at the End of the Old Regime: The Case of Languedoc,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (2003): 879. 70. ADH, C 8786, Règlement fait par les gens des trois états du pays du Languedoc, assemblés par mandement du Roi en la ville de Montpellier, au mois de novembre 1780 pour servir à l’exploitation de la ferme du droit equivalent. 71. Estates in existence in the eighteenth century: États d’Artois, du Béarn, de Bourgogne (with États particuliers de Bresse, du Bugey, and du pays de Gex), de Bretagne, de Cambrésis, de Flandre wallonne, de Foix, du Languedoc, du pays de Nébouzan, de Provence (in the form of an assemblée de communautés), du pays des Quatre-vallées,and du pays de Soule. 72. Marie-Laure Legay, Les états provinciaux dans la construction de l’état moderne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Geneva, 2001), 239. 73. Mark Potter, Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688–1715 (Aldershot, 2003), 19–20. 74. Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003). 75. Mark Potter, “Coalitions and Local Politics in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 31, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 31.

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76. Rafe Blaufarb, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s–1830s (Washington, DC, 2012). 77. Blaufarb, Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 148–149. 78. Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor, 196). 79. Michel Perronnet, “Réflexions sur les États de Languedoc: Une histoire intermédiare à l’époque moderne,” in Les assembleées d’États dans la France méridionale à l’époque moderne: Actes du colloque de 1994, edited by Anne Blanchard, Henri Michel, and Elie Pélaquier (Montpellier, 1995), 115–117. 80. For a discussion of the variable social uses of money in the old regime see William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987). 81. Stephen Miller, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in the Languedoc (Washington, DC, 2008). 82. This point is made as a general observation about early modern states by Patrick O’Brien, “The Formation of States and Transitions to Modern Economies: England, Europe and Asia Compared,” in,The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume 1: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848 (Cambridge, 2014), edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, 358. 83. Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, “Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments,” Journal of European Economic History 5, no. 3 (1976): 601–650. 84. See ADH, C 8772–8798 and C 9357, for the accounts of the estates. The data are incomplete (for instance, the accounts for 1788 and 1786 are not comprehensive). 85. ADH, C 8787. 86. ADH, C 9357, C 9471. 87. Elie Pélaquier, “Le crédit des États,” in Durand, Jouanna, and Pélaquier, Des États dans l’État, 240. 88. ADH, C 8789, M L’archléveque de Toulouse à M le Controleûr Général, 24 décembre 1787. For examples of exogenous shocks having this kind of effect see Liana Vardi, The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profits in Northern France, 1680–1800 (Durham, NC, 1993), and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks : The Experience of Nuits St Georges, 1756–1776,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994): 288–306. 89. Marie-Laure Legay, “De Dijon à Paris: Réseaux d’argent et finance bourguignonne dans les emprunts du Roi (1778–1783),” Histoire, économie et société 2, no. 3 (2003): 367–383; Mark Potter and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates of Burgundy, 1660–1790,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 4 (1997): 577–612; Mark Potter and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “The Development of Intermediaries in French Credit Markets: Evidence from the Estates of Burgundy,” Journal of Economic History 62, no. 4 (2002): 1024–1049; Mark Potter, “Good Offices: Intermediation by Corporate Bodies in Early-Modern French Public Finance,” Journal of Economic History 60, no. 3 (2000): 599–626.

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90. Five years were selected as a sample for this study: 1756, 1762, 1774, 1781, and 1786. ADH, C 8773, 8776, 8782, 8786, and 8788. 91. ADH, C 8773. This was increased to 1,200 livres granted to Père Vaissette every year in the 1780s. 92. ADH, C8776, consolidated accounts for 1762. 93. ADH, C 8773, debts and salaries for 1756. 94. ADH, C 8787. 95. ADH, C 8786. These did not include the independent bridge-building campaigns of the sénéchausées. 96. Elie Pelaquier and Stéphane Durand, “Naissance et affirmation d’une administration provinciale des travaux publics,” in Durand, Jouanna, and Pélaquier, Des États dans l’État, 689. 97. ADH, C 8772. 98. ADH, C 8779, Arrêt du Conseil d’État du Roi concernant règlement pur les travaux publics en Languedoc, 27 août 1766. A toise was roughly two meters. 99. ADH, C 364, Procès-verbal des États de Languedoc, 3 décembre 1767, 4 100. ADH, C 364, Procès-verbal des États de Languedoc, 21 décembre 1767, 508. 101. ADH, C 8788. 102. ADH, C 8772 and C 8798, papers of the Estates 1752 and 1789. 103. ADH, C 8785. 104. ADH, C 8779, Arrêt du Conseil d’État du Roi contenant règlement pour les tr avaux publics en Languedoc, 27 août 1766. 105. Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée de l’Assiette du diocese de Toulouse pour l’année 1788 (Toulouse, 1788), 9. 106. Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée de l’Assiette du diocese de Toulouse pour l’année 1788, 17. 107. ADH, C 8789. 108. Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (London, 1909), 44–45. 109. ADH, C 9471, Mémoire pour servir a faire connoître l’administration des communautés et la jurisdiction de M. l’Intendant en ce qui concerne les dettes et les affaires des dioceses, 35, 39. 110. ADH, C 11218, Mémoire sur la fondation de la commission de 1734, 5. 111. ADH, C 111460, Mémoire sur les maîtres et maîtresses d’école, 1757–1758. 112. ADH, C 111460. The towns were Agde, Pézenas, Montagnac, Florensac, Meze, Marseillan, Saint-Thibery, Loupian, Valmagne, Pomerols, Lezignan l’Éveque, Aumes, Castelnau de Guers, Saint-Pons, Bouzigues, and Pinet. 113. ADH, C 11218, Mémoire sur la fondation de la commission de 1734, 2 114. Arlette Jouanna, “Un pouvoir provincial: les États de Languedoc,” in L’invention de la décentralisation: Nobles et pouvoirs intermédiares en France et en Europe XVIIe siècle–XIXe siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2009), edited by Marie-Laure Légay and Roger Baury, 122. 115. ADH, C 11217, membership of the commission of 1734. 116. ADH, C 8710, “Réflexions sur la question: Si la nation doit se charger des dettes contractés par les pays d’états?” Commission de liquidation, 1790.

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117. Anon., Réflexions sur l’administration des États du Languedoc, 17–19. 118. Anon., Lettre d’un citoyen de la province de Languedoc à un autre citoyen de la même province (n.p., 1789), 8. 119. Compte rendu des impositions et des dépenses générales de la province de Languedoc, 9–10. 120. Arrêté de la Cour des comptes, aides et finances de Montpellier, du lundi 22 décembre 1788, 4–5. 121. Arrêté de la Cour des comptes, aides et finances de Montpellier, du lundi 22 décembre 1788, 6. 122. Anon., “Rapport de MM les commissaires nommés par délibération des États de Languedoc, du 18 janvier, 1788,” in Receuil de pièces concernant les États de la province de Languedoc, ouverts à Montpellier le 15 janvier 1789 (Montpellier, 1789), 3. 123. Anon., “Rapport de MM les commissaires nommés par délibération des États de Languedoc, du 18 janvier, 1788,” 5. 124. Arlette Jouanna, “Les dernières décennies de l’ancien régime: La périlleuse alliance avec la monarchie contre le Parlement, 1759–1789,” in Durand, Jouanna, and Pélaquier, Des États dans l’État, 596–597. 125. M. Ducros, Mémoire sur les travaux publics du Languedoc, avec des observations sur le mémoire publié par M. de la Millière, intendant du Département des ponts et chaussées, concernant les travaux et les ingénieurs de ce département (Caracassonne, 1790). 126. Proclamation du Roi pour la conservation du Canal Royal du Languedoc, du premier octobre 1790 (Paris, 1790). 127. Arrêté de la Cour des comptes, aides et finances de Montpellier, du lundi 22 décembre 1788, 2. 128. Anon., Receuil de pièces concernant les États de la province de Languedoc, ouverts à Montpellier le 15 janvier 1789, 4. 129. Abbé Maury, Opinion de M. l’abbé Maury, député de Picardie, sur les finances et sur la dette publique; dont l’état a été présenté et discuté par lui au Comité des finances, le 23 et 24 juillet 1790 (Paris, 1790), 19. 130. Abbé Maury, Opinion de M. l’sbbé Maury, députee de Picardie, sur les finances et sur la dette publique; don’t l’état a été présenté et discuté par lui au Comitee des finances, le 23 at 24 Juillet 1790, 25 131. Abbé Maury, Opinion de M. l’abbé Maury, député de Picardie, sur les finances et sur la dette publique; dont l’état a été présenté et discuté par lui au Comité des finances, le 23 et 24 Juillet 1790, 54. 132. Assemblée nationale, Projet de Décret relatif au paiement des intérêts provenans des emprunts faits par les ci-devant pays d’Etats de Languedoc et Provence, présenté a l’Assemblée nationale, au nom du Comité de l’ordinaire des finances, du 20 janvier 1792, 2.

Chapter Two. Local Ideas and Global Networks 1. Jürgen Habermas, “Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA, 1990), trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicolsen, 21–42 2. Contrast Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2nd ed. (London, 1965), with Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea (London, 1988).

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3. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 21. 4. All beautifully invoked in Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 5. For accounts of this program see Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (Boston, 1974); David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago, 1976); Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and J. Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago, 1996). 6. For a measured introduction to the “science wars” see Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins, eds., The One Culture? A Conversation about Science (Chicago, 2001). 7. For an impressive effort to generate a comprehensive sociology of knowledge in this vein see Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 2011). 8. Vanessa Smith, “Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange,” in Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 81–109. David Philip Miller, “Joseph Banks, Empire, and ‘Centres of Calculation’ in Late Hanoverian London,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge, 1993), edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, 21–37. For the idea of “centres of calculation” see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes, 1987), 215–257. 9. Karil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (New York, 2007) 10. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 3–30. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (New York, 2008), for the roots of this kind of critical realism. 11. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008). 12. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004), trans. Catherine Porter, 128–183; Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA, 1990), trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicolsen, 1–20. 13. Ian Inkster, Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain (Aldershot, 1997); Arnold Thackery, “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,” American Historical Review 79, no. 3 (1974): 672–709; Larry R. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992). 14. The other university, of arts, law, and theology, never acquired the prestige of the medical university. 15. Nancy Siraisi, “The Faculty of Medicine,” in A History of the University in Europe, Volume One: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003), edited by Hilde de RidderSymoens, 379. 16. Jean Astruc, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la faculté de medicine de Montpellier (Paris 1767), xix.

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17. Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York, 1991), 39–91. 18. Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early-Modern France (Oxford, 1997), 418–433; Elizabeth Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot, 2003). 19. ADH, D120, meeting of the Société royale, 22 November 1731. 20. Julian Martin, “Sauvage’s Nosology: Medical Enlightenment in Montpellier,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), edited by Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, 111–137. 21. Jacques Proust, L’encyclopédisme dans le Bas-Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle (Montpellier, 1968). 22. Elizabeth Williams, “Medicine in the Civic Life of Eighteenth-Century Montpellier,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 2 (1996): 205–232. 23. Roland Mousnier, Les institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue (Paris, 1974), 350– 355, for an overview of the legal status of universities. Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Eighteenth-Century France (New York, 1986). 24. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in the Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985); William Beik, “Review Article: The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past and Present 188, no. 1 (August 2005): 195–224 25. Jean Astruc, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la faculté de medicine de Montpellier (Paris 1767), xxii. 26. Edouard Brygoo, “Les médecins de Montpellier et le Jardin du Roi à Paris,” Histoire et nature 14 (1979): 3–29. 27. ADH, D 203, Antoine Joseph Desaillier d’Argenville to secretary of the Société royale des sciences, Paris, 7 February 1756. 28. Jean Vincent Ricci, The Development of Gynæcological Surgery and Instruments (Novato, Calif., 1990), 176–177. 29. Toby Gelfand, Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the 18th Century (Westport, Conn., 1980), 58–97. 30. ADH, C 529, Le Peletier to Bernage, 6 November 1720. 31. Colin Jones, “The Médecins du Roi at the end of the Ancien Régime and in the French Revolution,” in Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500–1837 (London, 1990), edited by Vivian Nutton, 228. 32. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism, 185. 33. Antoinette Emich-Dériaz, Tissot: Physician of the Enlightenment (New York, 1992), 244. 34. BM Avignon MS 1269, Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie, 23. 35. Jean-Antoine Rioux, ed., Le Jardin des Plantes de Montpellier: Quatre siècles d’histoire (Graulhet, 1994), 53. 36. BM Avignon, MS 1269, Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie, 27.

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37. Étienne-Hyacinthe de Ratte fils, “Éloge de M Venel,” Assemblée publique de la Société royale des sciences (Montpellier, 177), delivered 2 March 1776, 78. 38. J. J. Brunet, Essai sur l’influence des modes et des habillemens sur la santé des hommes (Montpellier 1799), 53. 39. Fitzgerald was born in Limerick in Ireland and had acceded to the chair of medicine in 1732. He had been tutor to the younger Chicoyneau. 40. ADH, C 527, brevet for François Chicoyneau, Versailles, 15 November 1740. 41. On éloges see Dorinda Outram, “The Language of Natural Power: The Éloges of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of Nineteenth-Century Science,” History of Science 16, no. 3 (1978): 153–178; C. B. Paul, Science and Immortality: The Éloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1666–1791) (London, 1980). 42. Ratte, Éloge de M Fitzgerald, 16 December 1751, Séances publiques de la Société royale des sciences (Montpellier, 1752), 19. 43. ADH, C 529, mémoire in the hand of Sauvages, 24 January 1748. 44. ADH, C 527, Morentin to Saint-Priest, Versailles, 22 August 1752. 45. Brunet, Essai sur l’influence des modes et des habillemens sur la santé des hommes, 60. 46. Louis Dulieu, “Antoine Gouan, 1733–1821,” Revue d’histoire des sciences, 20, no. 1 (1967): 37. 47. Anon. [Crassous, Cusson, and Gouan], Leçons de botanique, faites au jardin royal de Montpellier; par Monsieur Imbert, professeur et chancellier en l’université de médicine, et recuëillies par M. Dupuy des Esquilles, maître es arts, et ancien étudiant en chirurgerie (Holland [false imprint], 1762). 48. Anon. [Crassous, Cusson, and Gouan], Leçons de botanique, 8. 49. Figures are derived from Louis Dulieu, La médicine à Montpellier, Tome III: L’époque Classique, 2e partie (Avignon, 1986). 50. Williams, Cultural History of Medical Vitalism, 69. 51. Lettres patentes du Roy donnée au mois de février 1706 portant établissement d’une Académie royale des sciences à Montpellier (Paris, 1706). 52. Paul Brouzeng and Suzanne Débarbat, eds., Sur les traces des Cassini: Astronomes et observatories au sud de la France (Paris, 2001). 53. Geraldine Sheridan, “Recording Technology in France: The Descriptions des Arts, Methodological Innovation and Lost Opportunities at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” Cultural and Social History 5, no. 3 (2008): 329–54 54. Eric Brian, La mésure de l’État: Administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994). 55. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1342–1363; Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 1995); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 2003). 56. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, 2000).

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57. See the essays in Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen, eds., The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2012). 58. ADH, D 160, Barrère, “Mémoire sur la culture du ris,” 20 June 1743. 59. ADH, D 119, registers of the society, 23 February 1736, 27. 60. ADH, D 160, “Mémoire sur cette question proposée pour le sujet de prix de 1774 par la société, quelle est l’influence des méteors sur la végitation,” 7 July 1774. 61. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998). 62. Gilles Gaston-Granger, La théoire aristotelicienne de la science (Paris, 1976); Richard D. McKirahan Jr., Principles and Proofs: Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstrative Science (Princeton, 1992); Orna Harari, Knowledge and Demonstration: Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Dordrecht, 2004). 63. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1994), ed. and trans. Jonathan Barnes, xiv. 64. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle: Matières générales, tome premier (Paris, 1799), 52. 65. Benoît de Baere, “La discipline de l’imagination: L’experience de pensée chez Buffon,” in Imaginazione et conoscenza, edited by Sabine Verhulst, 97–98. Philip R. Sloan, “Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological Species,” British Journal for the History of Science, 12, no. 2 (1979): 109–153. Buffon himself would find a rigid empiricism impossible to sustain and move to a historicist position in his late Époques de la nature; see Thierry Hoquet, Buffon: Histoire naturelle et philosophie (Paris, 2005). 66. Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago, 1989). 67. ADH, D 120, registers of the society, 22 September 1742, 6. 68. Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004). 69. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 2005). On vitalism in medicine see Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early-Modern France, 418–433; Williams, Cultural History of Medical Vitalism. 70. ADH, D 161, Pierre Magnol, “Dissertation sur la corail,” 2 September 1706. 71. ADH, D 116, registers of the society, September 2 1706, 81. 72. ADH, D 203, Antoine Joseph Desaillier d’Argenville to secretary of the Société royale des sciences, Paris, 12 June 1743. 73. ADH, D 117, Guillaume Nissole, “Discours sur l’utilité de la botanique, avec la description d’un phascolus et d’un litophyton,” 31 March 1707. 74. ADH, D116, François Chicoyneau, “Discours sur la conformité des parties des plantes avec celles des animaux,” 10 December 1706. 75. ADH, D 117, François Chicoyneau, “Discours sur les plantes,” 17 March 1707. 76. ADH, D 117, François Chicoyneau, “Discours dans lequel il entreprend de prouver que les plantes renferment un eliquer analogue à celle des animaux,” 17 March 1707. 77. ADH, D 161, François Chicoyneau, “La circulation de la sève dans les plantes,” 16 February 1708. Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française au XVIIIe siècle: La génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1993), 112.

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78. ADH, D 161, François Xavier Bon, “Réflexions sur les changemens qui surviennent aux fleurs des plantes connues sous le nom de Chicoracées,” 1 March 1736. 79. ADH, D 161, Antoine Gauteron, “Observations sur l’opium,” 1 January 1725. 80. ADH, D 161, Guillaume Rivière, “Mémoire sur l’opium,” 7 December 1730. 81. ADH, D 161, Pierre Magnol, “De la circulation du suc dans les plantes,” 1708. 82. ADH, D 161, Pierre Magnol, “Dissertation sur la différence qu’il y a entre les plantes et les animaux,” 12 January 1708. John Ray (1627–1705) was an English botanist who made significant strides in plant classification, synopsized in his Methodus plantarum emendata (1703). 83. ADH, D 117, registers of the society, 14 April 1707, 96. 84. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Élements de botanique, ou, méthode pour connoître les plantes (Paris, 1694). 85. BU Montpellier, Q 30, Mémoires du citoyen Gouan relatif au jardin botanique, an II, 262. 86. Lawrence W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web:Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002), 392. 87. François Boissier de la Croix de Sauvages to Carl Linnaeus, 10 September 1737. The Linnaean Correspondence, linaeus.c18.net, Letter L0204 (consulted 14 July 2014). 88. Pascal Duris, Linné et la France (Paris, 1993), 39–44. 89. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linneans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735–1789 (Utrecht, 1971), 27–28. 90. ADH, D 160, Pierre Joseph Amoreux, “Réflexions sur l’habitation des plantes,” 6 September 1781. 91. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linneans, 27. 92. Ernest Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 173–178. 93. Antoine Gouan, Éloge de Linné, 28 December 1779, Assemblée publique de l’Académie royale des sciences (Montpellier, 1780), 102. 94. Abbé Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, pratique, économique et de médecine rurale et véterinaire, 9 vols. (Paris, 1793), 3:332. 95. Brunet, Essai sur l’influence des modes et des habillements sur la santé des hommes, 53 96. Brunet, Essai sur l’influence des modes et des habillements sur la santé des hommes, 109. 97. The idea had already been suggested by the much maligned Fitzgerald ten years before; ADH, D 119, registers of the society, 3 June 1733, 13. 98. Sauvages, “Projet d’une nouvelle méthode pour connaître les plantes par les feuilles,” 21 November 1743, Séance publique de la Société royale des sciences (Montpellier, 1744), 50. ADH, D 120, registers of the society, 12 June 1743, 10. 99. ADH, D 160, Jean Guillaume Bruguières, “Mémoire sur le caude et la ravenne,” 18 April 1776. 100. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 194–95; Duris, Linné et la France, 140–142. 101. Vincenzo Ferrone, “The Accademia Reale delle Scienze: Cultural Sociability and Men of Letters in Turin of the Enlightenment under Vittorio Amadeo III,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 537.

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102. Jacques Roger, “The Living World,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1980), edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 260. 103. Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis 93, no. 1 (2002): 29. 104. Lisbet Koerner, “Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place,” in Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), edited by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, 145. 105. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 16. 106. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linneans, 31. 107. ADH, D 162, report by Gouan and Broussonet on submission by Sibthorp, 13 March 1783. 108. BU Montpellier, Q 30, Mémoires du citoyen Gouan relatif au jardin botanique, an II, 262. 109. Antoine Gouan, Herborisations des environs de Montpellier, ou guide botanique à l’usage des élèves de l’école de santé; ouvrage destiné a servir de supplement au flora monspeliaca (Montpellier, an IV), 6. His full list consisted of “Rondolet, Pena, Lobel, Clusius, Gaspard et Jean Bauhin, Pison, Rauvolf, Fuchsius, Gesner, Bellon, Burser, Ruel, Dalechamp, Raj et après eux Belleval, Tournefort, Magnol, Jussieu, Sauvages. On peut encore mettre de ce nombre des savants distingués, tels que Séguier, Amoreux, Broussonet, Dombey, Bruguière et Olivier, qui tous deux voyagent à présent aux ordres de la République, de même que Riche et Labillardière, tous sortis de l’école de Montpellier.” 110. Antoine Gouan, “Projet d’un ouvrage de botanique qui a pour titre: Antonii Gouan, Professoris Medici Monspeliensis, Observationes Botanicae,” 12 December 1772, Séance publique de la Société royale des sciences (Montpellier, 1773), 22. 111. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 113. 112. ADH, D 161, Milhau, “Dissertation sur le cacaoyer,” 1 September 1746. 113. ADH, D 119, registers of the society, 5 September 1744, 43. 114. Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet, Mémoire sur les differentes espèces de chien de mer (Paris, 1780), 647. 115. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les financiers du Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970), 57. 116. The membership and correspondence record used to construct these data are in the Archives départmentales de l’Hérault, D 116–122, registers of the society, 1706–1793; D 192, 199, 202, membership lists. 117. Jeremy Bentham to Étienne Dumont, 14 May 1802, in Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, volume 7 (Oxford, 1988), edited by John Dinwiddy, 27. 118. Antoine Gouan, Lettre de M Gouan à M Deleuze, en réponse à l’article en botanique inseré dans le Moniteur du 27 octobre 1811 (Montpellier, 1811). 119. Gouan, Lettre de M Gouan, 3. 120. Gouan, Lettre de M Gouan, 6. 121. ADH, D 206, Wurtz to unknown, Strasbourg, 5 January 1785. 122. Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester, 2006), 80–82.

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123. Alan J. Rocke, Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry (Cambridge, MA, 2001). 124. David Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666– 1750 (London, 1995). 125. James McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985), 57. 126. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters (New Haven, 1995). 127. Ferrone, “The Accademia Reale delle Scienze,” 537. 128. The classes were mathematics, anatomy, chemistry, botany, and physics. 129. BM Montpellier, MS 52, Bignon to Gauteron, Paris, 31 March 1737. 130. Elizabeth Kindleberger, “The Société royale des sciences de Montpellier: 1706– 1793, Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (1979), 34. 131. ADH, D 118, registers of the society, 12 February 1743. 132. Vivien Nutton, “The Rise of Medicine,” in Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge, 2006), edited by Roy Porter, 64. 133. Maria Teresa Borgeto, “Mathematical Research in Italian Universities in the Modern Era,” in Universities and Science in the Early-Modern Period (New York, 2006), edited by Mordechai Finegold and Victor Navarro-Brotons, 133–135. 134. ADH, D 116, registers of the society, 12 August 1706, 68; 19 August 1706, 77; D 117, 1 June 1707, 120. Corals are in fact polyps. 135. John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven, 1994), 293. 136. Jean Jacquot, Le naturaliste Sir Hans Sloane, 1660–1753, et les échanges scientifiques entre la France et l’Angleterre (Paris, 1954). 137. ADH, D 116, registers of the society, Guillaume Nissolle, “Mémoire de botanique,” 14 July 1707. 138. Colin Jones, “The Médecins du Roi at the End of the Ancien Régime and in the French Revolution,” in Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500–1837 (Cambridge, 1988), edited by Vivian Nutton, 229; Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 1986). 139. James Jurin, The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750): Physician and Secretary to the Royal Society (Amsterdam, 1996), ed. Andrea Alice Rusnock, 510. 140. Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early-Modern France, 519. 141. Ellen McNiven Hine, Jean-Jacques Portons de Mairan and the Geneva Connection: Scientific Networking in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996); Scott Mandelbrote, “The Heterodox Career of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier,” in Heterodoxy in Early-Modern Science and Religion (Oxford, 2005), ed. John Hedley Brooke, John Brooke, and Ian Maclean, 264–265. 142. Charles Domson, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and the Prophets of London (Manchester, NH, 1981). 143. ADH, D 203, Antoine Joseph Desaillier d’Argenville to secretary of Société royale des sciences, 23 December 1750.

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144. ADH, D 162, Antoine Gouan, “Précis d’un ouvrage de botanique,” 1776. 145. BM Montpellier, MS 149, Éloge de J. J. Brunet, 22 December 1822. 146. Antoine Banal, Catalogue des plantes usuelles rangées suivant le méthode de M Linnaeus (Montpellier, 1786), 5. 147. Linnean Library, Smith Correspondence, vol. 1, no. 54, Broussonet to Smith, Paris, 20 January 1783; Memoir and Correspondence of the Late Sir James Smith M.D., 2 vols. (London, 1832), ed. Pleasance Smith, 1:51, 66–67. 148. Charles Coulton Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, 2004), 168–170. 149. Linnean Library, Smith Corr. 1/59, Broussonet to Smith, Paris, 3 August 1787. 150. Linnean Library, Smith Corr. 1/79, Broussonet to Smith, Paris, 16 September 1791. 151. Linnean Library, Smith Corr., 5/35, Gouan to Smith, 30 December 1788. 152. Georgia Beale, “Early French Members of the Linnean Society of London, 1788– 1802: From the Estates General to Thermidor,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 18 (1991): 272–282.

Chapter Three. The Natural Province of Reason 1. ADH, D 181. “Quel sont les principaux caractères des terres propres à la production des graines, quels sont les défauts de celles qui sont peu propres d’en produire, quels sont enfin les moyens d’y remédier, ou de tirer de ces mêmes un meilleur parti?”; André Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967). 2. ADH, D 181, anonymous prize entry 10; D 183, “Expérience de la nouvelle culture de terres fait à Saint Jean de Bruel en 1759.” Mouret was an enthusiast for Jethro Tull’s ideas. 3. ADH, D 181, anonymous prize essay entry 1. 4. ADH, D 181, anonymous prize entry 7. 5. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980). 6. BM Montpellier, MS 93, “Mémoire et expériences sur les effets que le vif argent peut produire sur les végétaux,” 1787. 7. BM Avignon, MS 1269 f.18. Pierre-Joseph Amoreux, “Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie.” 8. BM Avignon, MS 1269 f.139. Amoreux, “Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie” 9. ADH, D120, meeting of the Société royale des sciences, 7 April 1744. 10. Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1994); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985); Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture (1680–1791) (Ithaca, NY, 1999). 11. See the essays in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999); Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds., The

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Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, 2001), and also Daniel Roche, History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2000). 12. Michael Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester, 2006) 13. Larry Stewart, “A Meaning for Machines: Modernity, Utility and the EighteenthCentury British Public,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 259–294; Rob Iliffe, “ ‘Material Doubts’: Robert Hooke, Artisanal Culture and the Exchange of Information in 1670s London,” British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 3 (1995): 285–318. 14. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Amherst, NY, 1998), 78; Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 1992). 15. Jacques Rancière, La nuit des prolétaires: Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris, 1981). 16. Lavoisier’s chemistry was criticized precisely because it depended on the skills of nonelite craftsmen; see Jan Golinski, “Precision Instruments and the Demonstrative Order of Proof in Lavoisier’s Chemistry,” Osiris, 2nd series, 9 (1994): 45. 17. Thomas Broman, “The Habermasian Public Sphere and ‘Science in the Enlightenment,’ ” History of Science 36, no. 2 (June 1998): 144. 18. Roger Cooter and Stephen Pomphrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularisation and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science 32, no. 3 (September 1994): 240. 19. Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire,” History of Science 32, no. 3 (September 1994): 269–315. 20. For the definitive study of French agronomy see Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle. 21. John Shovlin, “The Society of Brittany and the Irish Economic Model: International Competition and the Politics of Provincial Development,” in The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotic Reform in Europe and North America (New York, 2012), edited by Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen, 73–95. 22. AN, H1 1510, Mémoire lû par M. l’Intendant à la première séance de la Société d’agriculture établie à la ville de Bourges; M. de La Machodière à M. de La Trudaine, Lyon, 14 November 1760. 23. AN, H1 1461, Vergennes, “Mémoire,” June 1785. 24. AN, H1 1501, “Observations sur la réunion de la Société royale d’agriculture et du comité,” 1788. 25. For an investigation of the commercial success of the botanical and agronomical press see Sarah Easterby-Smith, “Selling Beautiful Knowledge: Amateurship, Botany and the Market-Place in Late Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2013): 531–543. An intermittent series of the Almanach appeared until 1992. 26. ADH, C 5392, Lettre à M de la Place, auteur du Mercure de France, sur un moyen assuré de détruire les coutillières, 1767. 27. ADH, C 5393, memoir on plantations, 11 November 1793.

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28. ADH, C 5359, Pepinières de muriers de la province de Languedoc, 1723. 29. ADH, C 5394, subdelegate to Saint-Priest, Albi, 27 July 1767. 30. ADH, D 120, meeting of the Société royale des sciences, 24 April 1749. 31. ADH, D 203, Abbé Bignon to secretary of the Société royale des sciences, Isle Belle, 29 July 1740. 32. ADG, 9 M 6, Anon., Notice sur les produits de l’industrie du département du Gard, 1808. 33. ADH, C 5392, anonymous set of notes and observations on improvement in the Languedoc, 17 January 1768. 34. Felicia Gottman, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France, 1680–1760 (London, 2016). 35. ADH, C 5397, État des dépenses faites par le Sr. Joannis Althen à l’occasion de la plantation de coton, 1751. 36. ADH, D 120, meeting of the Société royale des sciences, 19 November 1750. 37. ADH, C 5392, Expérience physique, 6 August 1767. 38. ADH, C 5396, Mémoire sur les abus qui se pratiquent dans la culture et la commerce du pastel contenant l’ancien règlement du 17 octobre 1699. 39. ADH, D 120, meeting of the Société royale des sciences, 23 March 1745. 40. Capon le Jeune, Moyens d’encourager la culture d’olivier et d’en multiplier l’espèce (Nîmes, 1785). 41. ADH, C 5495, secretary of the Estates to Saint-Priest, 10 September 1785. 42. François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou au 17e et 18e siècles: Essai de démographie et de psychologie (Paris, 1971). 43. For technological change in Lower Languedoc see Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, 2000); the classic study of proto-industrialization in the region is James K. J. Thomson, Clermont-de Lodève, 1633–1789: Fluctuations in the Prosperity of a Languedocian Cloth-Making Town (Cambridge, 1982). 44. Raymond Dugrand, Ville et campagnes en Bas Languedoc: Le réseau urbain de Bas Languedoc meditérranean (Paris, 1963), 343–355, 431–438. 45. Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1982), 93. 46. Contrast the Vendée on all these axes in Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, MA, 1976). 47. Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed, “Introduction,” in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (New York, 1997), 4. 48. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc (Paris, 1966). 49. Alfred Chabaud, Les documents et la méthode pour l’étude de la structure et de l’économie agraires dans la France du sud, 2 vols. (Uzès, 1967), i, 192. For a long-run loser in the process see Gilbert Larguier, Le drap et le grain en Languedoc: Narbonne et Narbonnais, 1300–1789, 3 vols. (Perpignan, 1996). 50. Larguier, Le drap et le grain en Languedoc. 51. Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle, i, 107.

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52. Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (Cambridge 1929), 42. 53. Young, Travels, 242. Rozier died in the siege of Lyon in 1793. 54. ADH, D 203, François Rozier to secretary of the Société royale des sciences, Paris, 15 February 1772. 55. François Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, pratique, économique et de medecine rurale et véterinaire, suivi du’une méthode pour étudier l’agriculture par principes, ou, Dictionnnaire universel d’agriculture, 9 vols. (Paris 1793), 1: 157. 56. Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, 226. 57. Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, 227. 58. Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, 228. 59. BM Montpellier, Amoreux, “Mémoire sur les lichens économiques, ceux dont on peut faire usage en médecine et dans les arts, couronné par l’Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon, dans la séance publique du 29 août 1786.” 60. ADH, D 183, Expériences d’agriculture et descriptions de plantes et d’insectes par M Mouret, correspondant de la Société royale des sciences à Saint-Jean de Bruel, Diocese de Vabres en Rouergue. 61. ADH, D 183, Expérience de la nouvelle culture de terres fait à Saint-Jean de Bruel en 1759. 62. BM Montpellier, MS 149, Notice historique de J. J. Brunet, 1822. 63. BM Montpellier, MS 91(4), Mémoire sur la nécessité et les moyens d’ameliorer l’agriculture dans le district de Montpellier, 16 ventôse an II (6 March 1794). 64. ADH, L 1226, L’indication des principaux objets sur lesquels la société libre d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault desire de procurer des renseignements pour le canton de Béziers, 1799. 65. BU Montpellier, Q 30, Mémoires du Citoyen Gouan relatifs au jardin des plantes, An II, 4. 66. ADH, D 162, Saulières to Gouan, Gignac, 5 September 1780. 67. Antoine Gouan, Flora Monspeliaca, sistens plantas no. 1850 ad sua genera relatas, et hybrida methodo digestas; adjectis nominibus specificis, trivialibusque, synonymis selectis, habitationibus plurium in agro Monspeliensi nuper detectarum, et earum quae in usus medicos veniunt nominibus pharmaceuticis, virtutibusque probatissimis (Montpellier, 1765); ADH, D 162, meeting of Société royale, 6 September 1764. 68. Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, 330. 69. BM Montpellier, MS 149, Notice historique de J. J. Brunet, 1822 70. ADH, D 162, meeting of Société royale, 13 March 1783. 71. ADH, D 162, Abbé de Vernoy, “Mémoire sur quelques plantes cryptogames nouvellement découvertes dans les bois de Grammont,” 26 July 1781. 72. Gouan, Herborisations des environs de Montpellier, 9. 73. ADH, D 206, Beguillet to Gouan, Dijon, 1 April 1777. 74. ADH, D202, Peter Templeton to the secretary of the Sociéte royale des sciences, London, 29 July 1760.

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75. ADH, D 202, Peter Templeton to the secretary of the Sociéte royale des sciences, London, 29 July 1760. 76. ADH, D 120, meeting of the Société royale des sciences, 20 June 1743. 77. AN, H1 1461, Arrêt du Cour des comptes, Aix en Provence, 29 May 1764. 78. AN, H1 1461, De La Tour to Vergennes, Aix en Provence, 18 January 1786; Vergennes to De La Tour, Paris, 3 March 1786. 79. Young, Travels in France, 234; Thomas Jefferson, “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France etc. 1787,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume II: 1 January to 6 August 1787 (Princeton, 1955), ed. Julian P. Boyd, 430. 80. Jean-François Vuillet, “Les jardins royaux de Provence et le jardin botanique et d’acclimatation de Toulon,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 20, no. 230/1 (1940): 694–721. 81. BM Avignon, MS 1794, Procès-verbal of Société agricole, commerciale et littéraire de la ville de Carpentras. 11 germinal an XI. 82. ADH, D 202, Saint-Priest fils to Hyacinthe Ratte, Montpellier, 1 February 1763. 83. ADH, D 202, Saint-Priest to Hyacinthe Ratte, Montpellier, 25 September 1771. 84. ADH, D 203, Réamur to secretary of the Société royale des sciences, Paris, 27 January 1750. 85. Louis Passy, Histoire de la Société nationale d’agriculture de France, Tome premier: 1763–1793 (Paris, 1912), 31. Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin (1720–1792) was at the heart of fiscal and economic development strategy of the French state. 86. AN, H1 1511, M. de Saint-Priest à M. le Contrôleur Général, 22 February 1762. 87. AN, H1 1511, M. de Saint-Priest à M. le Contrôleur Général, 22 February 1762. 88. AN, H1 1510, M. de La Michodière à M. Trudaine, Lyon, 14 November 1760. 89. AN, H1 1461, Mémoire, June 1785. 90. ADG, C 1832, Procès-verbal of Assembly of Alais, 1761–1763, 7 May 1761; 8 February 1762. 91. ADG, C 367, Procès-verbal États de Languedoc, 18 December 1770. 92. ADG, C 364, Procès-verbal États de Languedoc, 3 December 1767. 93. ADH, D 205, Gérard to Gouan, Mende, 1 April 1777. 94. ADH D 205, Gérard to Gouan, Mende, 1 April 1777. 95. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, “Introduction: Why Materials?” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, 2000), edited by Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, 2–21. 96. John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Philadelphia, 2008). 97. Anon. [Crassous, Cusson, and Gouan], Leçons de botanique, faites au jardin royal de Montpellier; par Monsieur Imbert, professeur et chancellier en l’université de médicine, et recuëillies par M. Dupuy des Esquilles, maître es arts, et ancien étudiant en chirurgerie (Holland [false imprint], 1762), 15.

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98. E. C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000), 49. 99. BU Montpellier, Q 8, Imbert to Saint-Priest, Montpellier, 13 February 1761. 100. For a detailed exposition of the social world of the provincial republic of letters see L. W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002). 101. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994); Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). 102. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early-Modern France (Oxford, 1997), 87. 103. ADH, C 527. Invoices 1754. 104. BU Montpellier, Q 10, Jardiniers à Monsieur Imbert Chancellier de la medicine et intendant du jardin du roy, 25 January 1763. 105. BU Montpellier, Q 8, Jean-François Imbert a M. le Controlleur-Général, 31 October 1768. 106. ADH, C 528, Compte de ce qui j’ay fourni pour le jardin du roy de l’année 1759. 107. BU Montpellier, Q 8, Jean-François Imbert to Antoine Gouan, 14 March 1780. 108. BU Montpellier, Q 17, Antoine Banal to Jean-François Imbert, 11 May 1772. 109. ADH, D 162, [Gouan,] Mémoire sur quelques plantes cryptogams nouvellement découvertes dans le bois de Grammont aux environs de Montpellier, 26 July 1781. 110. Jean-Francois Imbert, chancelier juge en l’Université de médicine de Montpellier, professeur d’anatomie et de botanique, intendant et directeur du Jardin royale de la même ville (Montpellier, 1762), Affiche de la direction du jardin. 111. ADH, C 528, Morentin to Saint-Priest, Versailles, 19 March 1761. 112. BU Montpellier, Q 8, note in hand of Imbert. 113. Jean-Antoine Rioux, ed., Le Jardin des plantes de Montpellier: Quatre siècles d’histoire (Graulhet, 1994), 57. 114. Anon. [Crassous, Cusson, and Gouan], Leçons de botanique, faites au jardin royal de Montpellier; par Monsieur Imbert, professeur et chancellier en l’université de médicine, et recuëillies par M. Dupuy des Esquilles, maître es arts, et ancien étudiant en chirurgerie (Holland [false imprint], 1762), 8. 115. BU Montpellier, Q 12, Reine à Imbert, Montpellier, 19 February 1772, 116. BU Montpellier, Q 8, Imbert to Reine, Paris, 16 October 1779. 117. BU Montpellier, Q 8, Instruction pour le concierge du Jardin royal de Montpellier, 11 June 1777. 118. BU Montpellier, Q 23, Imbert’s notes on the Barthez affair, 1778. 119. BU Montpellier, Q 23, petition of the medical students, 6 August 1779. 120. Antoine Banal fils, Catalogue des plantes usuelles rangées suivant le méthode de M. Linnaeus demontrées par le sieur Banal, fils ainé, jardinier-botaniste au Jardin royal (Montpellier, 1786), 5. 121. BU Montpellier, Q 18, note by Imbert on Barthez, 1773. For Barthez’s contributions to vitalism, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World of Early-Modern France, 427.

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NOTES TO PAGES 107–112

122. BU Montpellier, Q 17, Antoine Banal fils to Imbert, Montpellier, 4 November 1779. 123. BU Montpellier, Q 23, Banal to Imbert, 10 November 1777 124. BU Montpellier, Q 12, Reine to Imbert, Montpellier, 3 November 1779. 125. BU Montpellier, Q 23, Reine to Imbert, Montpellier, 17 June 1779. 126. I owe this information to Dr. Georgia Beale and Dr. Gina Douglass. Of the thirteen, five (Broussonet, Gérard, Gouan, Dorthes, and Banal) were based in the Languedoc. Georgia Beale, “Early French Members of the Linnean Society of London, 1788–1802: From the Estates General to Thermidor,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 18 (1991): 272–282. 127. Edward Young, The Complaint, or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality: Night the Third: Narcissa (London, 1742), 14. For a careful reconstruction of the genealogy of the Narcissa myth see Horace W. O’Connor, “The Narcissa Episode in Young’s Night Thoughts,” PMLA 34, no. 1 (1919): 130–149. 128. Amy King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford, 2003); Sam George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester 2007); Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 2003) 129. ADH, 7 M 94, membership lists, 1798–1820. 130. For the structures of underdevelopment in the region see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966). 131. ADH, C 10 22, Déclaration du Roi, donnée à Marly, le 5 juillet 1770; concernant le défrichement des terres incultes de la province de Languedoc; avec une instruction sur la manière d’éxécuter ladite déclaration, registrée en Parlement, le 11 septembre 1770 (Montpellier, 1771). 132. ADH, C 2828. Dioceses were the administrative units of the intendance of Montpellier; the diocese of Alès (Alais) was roughly equivalent to the modern district. 133. Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc, 372. 134. BM Montpellier, MS 91 (4), Mémoire sur la nécessité et les moyens d’ameliorer l’agriculture dans le district de Montpellier, 16 ventôse an II (6 March 1794). 135. AN, H 1 1501, Mémoire sur la nécessité de suspendre en faveur des défrichemens la perception des dixmes ecclésiastiques, dixmes inféodees, novales, champart et terrages, MS Paris 1767. 136. ADH, C 2828, Observations sur le chiffre de celui qui a defriché des terres dans la communauté d’Alais en 1770, MS Montpellier 1770. 137. ADH, D 2827, Mémoire sur les difficultés qui se sont élees au sujet de l’exécution de la déclaration du Roi du 5 juilllet 1770 concernant les defrichements des terres incultes en Languedoc, 7 February 1772 138. Sainfoin is a plant member of the pea family, and so nitrogen-fixing, with a distinctive pink flower. 139. ADH, C 10 22, Déclaration du Roi, qui ordonne que le délai de six mois accordé par la déclaration du 7 novembre 1775, aux décimateurs, curés et habitans, pour contredire les déclarations de défrichements, commencera a courir dans la province de Languedoc (Montpellier, 1778).

196

NOTES TO PAGES 112–117

140. AN, 27 AP 2, dossier 2, Anon., Mémoire sur l’agriculture de Lorraine, MS 1787. 141. Louis Passy, Historie de la Société national d’agriculture de France, Tome premier, 99. 142. Arrêt de la Cour du Parlement qui ordonne qu’il ne pourra être fait aucune plantation des vines que conformément aux dispositions de la déclaration du 24 avril 1730, et sous les peines y portés (Nancy, 1781). 143. ADH, C 2829, Marginal note in returns for Milhars, 1772. 144. ADH, C 2827, memorandum to Necker, director general of finance, 31 July 1777. 145. Arthur Young, Travels in France, 43–45. 146. Albert Soboul, Les campagnes montpelliérianes à la fin de l’ancien régime: Propriété et culture d’après les compoix (Paris, 1958), Commission de recherche et publication des documents relatif à la vie économique de la révolution; mémoires et documents XII, 13. 147. Ballainvilliers, Mémoire sur le Languedoc, suivis de Traité sur le commerce en Languedoc, de l’intendant Ballainvilliers (1788), publiés pour la première fois et présentés par M. Michel Péronnet (Montpellier, 1989), 52–69. 148. Ballainvilliers, Mémoire sur le Languedoc, 14. 149. ADH, C 5392, note in hand of Saint-Priest, 7 July 1781. 150. Pierre Marie August Broussonet, Discours prononcé à la séance publique tenue par la Société royale d’agriculture, le 28 décembre 1791 (Paris, 1792), 6.

Chapter Four. The Swing Plow as an Eighteenth-Century Universal Machine 1. François Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, pratique, économique et de médecin rurale et vetérinaire, suivi d’une méthode pour étudier l’agriculture par principles, ou, Dictionnaire universel d’agriculture, 9 vols. (Paris, 1793). 2. Rozier, Cours complet d’agriculture théorique, 2:47. 3. J. B. Passmore, The English Plough (Oxford, 1930); Geoffrey Marshall, “The Rotherham Plough: New Evidence on Its Original Manufacture and Method of Distribution,” Tools and Tillage 4, no. 3 (1982): 131–138; Liam Brunt, “Mechanical Innovation in the Industrial Revoltuion: The Case of Plough Design” Economic History Review 56, no. 3 (2003): 444–477. 4. John Wynn Baker, A Short Description and List with the Prices of the Instruments of Husbandry Made in the Factory at Laughlinstown, near Celbridge, in the County of Kildare (Dublin, 1767). 5. Wynn Baker, Short Description, 24. 6. F. G. Payne, “The British Plough: Some Stages in Its Development,” Agricultural History Review 5, no. 2 (1957): 83. 7. Alberto Alesina, Paolo Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn, “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 2 (May 2013): 469–530. 8. Larry Stewart, “Assistants to the Enlightenment: William Lewis, Alexander Chisholm and Invisible Technicians in the Industrial Revolution,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 62, no. 1 (2008): 17–29. 9. Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 2011); Rob Iliffe, “Material Doubts: Hooke, Artisan

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Culture and the Exchange of Information in 1670s London,” British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 3 (1995): 285–318. 10. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007), xviii. 11. Samuel Madden, A Letter to the Dublin Society on the Improving of Their Fund and Manufactures, Tillage, etc. in Ireland (Dublin, 1739), 39. 12. In this case the rig was developed in Holland in the sixteenth century and perfected in the West Indies in the form of the Bermudan rigged sloop. Leo Block, To Harness the Wind: A Short History of the Development of Sails (Annapolis, MD, 2003), 47–55. 13. James Small, A Treatise on Ploughs and Wheel Carriages (Edinburgh, 1784). 14. Henry Home Kames, The Gentleman Farmer: Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1798), 5. 15. Small, Treatise, vii. 16. Small, Treatise, 11. 17. John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland with a General View of the History of That Country and Discussion of Some Important Branches of Political Economy (Edinburgh, 1825), 273. 18. François Sigaut, “Y-a-t-il eu des innovations techniques dans l’agriculture avant le XIXe siècle?” Le bulletin de la Société d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, nos. 1 and 2 (1999): 82; R. J. Sullivan, “The Timing and Pattern of Technological Development in English Agriculture,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 2 (1985) : 305–307. 19. John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, 273. 20. John Naismith, General View of the Agriculture of Clydesdale with Observations of the Means of Its Improvement Drawn Up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (London, 1813), 94. 21. Naismith, General View of the Agriculture of Clydesdale, 93. 22. George Robertson, A General View of the Agriculture of Kincardineshire or, the Mearns, Drawn up under the Direction of the Board of Agriculture (London, 1813), 235. 23. Robertson, A General View of the Agriculture of Kincardineshire, 245. 24. John Sinclair, General View of the Agriculture of the Northern Counties and Islands of Scotland; Including the Counties of Cromarty, Ross, Sutherland and Caithness, and the Islands of Orkney and Shetland (Edinburgh, 1795), 21. 25. Sinclair, General View of the Agriculture of the Northern Counties and Islands of Scotland, 22. 26. For a synthesis of work on material culture in the eighteenth century see Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London, 2016), 78–118. 27. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996); Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 228–248; Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

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28. For a contemporary illustration of the same process in a very different cultural context see James L. Watson, “McDonald’s in Hong Kong: Consumerism, Dietary Change and the Rise of a Children’s Culture,” in James L. Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford, 1997), 77–109. 29. Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France, 1680–1760 (Basingstoke, 2016). 30. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and the Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997). 31. Hoffman argues that five hectares was the absolute lower limit for acquisition of even the simplest plough; Philip Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton, 1996), 36. 32. John Sinclair, Hints Regarding the Agricultural State of the Netherlands Compared with That of Great Britain (London, 1815), 9. 33. John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, 248. 34. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, 2013), 232–261. 35. Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, 248. 36. Peter D. McClelland, Sowing Modernity: America’s First Agricultural Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 43. 37. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New Global History of Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 98–105. 38. Chris Evans, “The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650–1850,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 71–100; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agriculture, Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), 299–301. 39. Kirill Abrosimov, “Cultures de savoir en concurrence: La ‘science nouvelle’ de l’économie politique à travers la critique dans la Correspondence littéraire,” Dix-huitième siècle 40, no. 1 (2008): 247–262; Jeff Horn, Economic Development in Early-Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 (Cambridge, 2015). 40. Louis Passy, Histoire de la Société nationale d’agriculture de France, Tome premier: 1761–1793 (Paris, 1912), 24. On Bertin’s career see André Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967), 2:1080–1095. Bertin’s ministry was specially created for him on his resignation as contrôleur-général in 1761. 41. On the pressures on cognition generated by estate-based societies see Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), 355–407. 42. AN, H 1 1501, report on the farm of M. Guillaume, 21 March 1766. 43. AN, H 1 1501, Paris Agricultural Society to M. Bertin, 2 June 1767. 44. AN, H 1 1501, Paris Agricultural Society to M. Bertin, 2 June 1767. 45. Anon., Précis des déclarations faites par les differens artistes et ouvriers qui ont travaillé au Luxembourg le vendredi 7 septembre 1786, sur les aciers de la manufacture d’Amboise (Paris, 1786).

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46. ADH, D 182, Bonner to the secretary of the Société royale des sciences of Montpellier, Geneva, 1751. 47. ADH, C 5390, Arnaud Montréal, Mémoire sur la constrution d’une nouvelle charrue qui laboure, sême et ouvre tout un sillon à la fois. 48. ADG, C 364, Procès-verbal des États du Languedoc, 31 December 1767. 49. ADH, C 5390, “Extrait des registres des déliberations prises pour les gens des trois états du pays du Languedoc assemblées par mandement du Roi en la ville de Montpellier au mois de novembre mille sept soixante sept.” 50. ADH, C 5390, inspection by commissioners of the diocese of Montpellier, 12 December 1768. 51. ADH, C 5390, Mémoire to the Estates of the Languedoc, n.d. 52. ADH, C 5390, Baron de Breteuil to Sr. Linon, Versailles, 11 April 1788. 53. ADH, C 2738, report, 8 June 1782. 54. ADH, C 2738, Burtin de Bressan to intendant, 3 July 1740. The difficult triangular relationship between privilege, labor discipline, and consumption is explored in a fascinating literature. See Gérard Gayot, Les draps de Sedan, 1646–1870 (Paris, 1998); Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2nd ed. (London, 2015); Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2012). 55. ADG, 9M 6, Notice sur les produits de l’industrie du département du Gard, 1809. 56. ADH, C 2739, industrial survey of 1788. 57. ADH, C 2739, subdelegate of Castres to intendent of Languedoc, Montpellier, 21 June 1788. 58. This may be a long-run phenomenon ; see Marie-Christine Bailly-Maître, “Forges villageoises, forges miners: Étude comparé,” in L’artisan au village dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne (Toulouse, 2000), edited by Mireille Mousnier, 203–218. 59. Hilton L. Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, 1994), 8. 60. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights, Litigation and French Agriculture, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1992), 36. For a compelling local study of the impediments to economic activity created by specifically seigneurial justice see Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800 (University Park, PA, 2001). 61. For a schematic, but insightful, approach to French agriculture along these lines see Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973), 97–125. 62. ADH, C 5390, Vigier to Saint-Priest, Rieux, 31 July 1763. On the manufacture at La Terrasse see Jean-Michel Minovez, “Les manufactures royales des draps fins du Midi toulousain et leurs entrepreneurs au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales du Midi 112, no. 229 (2000): 21–40. 63. ADH, C 561, Mémoire concernant l’état de la mendicité et les rémèdes qu’il convient d’y apporter, comme aussi concernant les fondations et autres établissements de charité dans le diocèse de Castres, 1775.

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64. ADG, 5957, returns by parish consuls to poverty inquiry, diocese of Montpellier, 1775. 65. AN, H 1 1501, note on provincial intellectual societies, 28 June 1788. 66. Amoreux, “Méthode de battre les grains à l’aire dans les provinces méridionales de la France,” Mémoires d’Agriculture, d’économie rurale et domestique, publiés par la société royale dágriculture 5, no. 1 (1789): 39. 67. P. M. Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition. 1774–1791 (Cambridge, 1995), 138; Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley, 1987), 141–154. 68. The complex interaction of politics, environment, institutions, and economy in the Revolution is being readdressed in a developing historiography. Key work includes Gilles Postel-Vinay, “A la recherche de la révolution économique dans les campagnes, 1789– 1815,” Revue économique 40, no. 6 (1989): 1015–1046; Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution; Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780–1830: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières (Oxford, 1999); J. P. Jesenne, “Le gouvernement révolutionnaire, la terre et la communauté rurale (1793–1795),” Le bulletin de la Société d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, nos. 1 and 2 (1999): 96–116; Noelle Plack, Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution: Rural Society and Economy in Southern France c. 1789–1820 (Farnham, 2009); Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community and Conflict, 1669–1848 (Cambridge, 2015). 69. For the clearest argument for the revolutionary clarification of property rights see Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford, 2016). For a formal argument derived from a different context see Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, “Land Property Rights,” in Institutions, Property Rights and Economic Growth: The Legacy of Douglass North (Cambridge, 2014), edited by Sebastian Galiani and Itai Sened, 107–120. 70. Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution, 52. 71. The law of 10 June 1793 mandated an egalitarian division of common land on a majority vote of all adults (women as well as men) in a commune. 72. ADH, L 5102, district of Montpellier, 31 October 1791. 73. John Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 362. 74. ADH L 1349, Extrait des minutes des jugements du tribunal de la police correctionelle du canton de Saint-Chinian, 16 April 1792. 75. ADH, L 3291, register of defrichements, district of Montpellier, 1791. The average enclosure in Montarnaud was three séterées. 76. ADH, L 3291, register of defrichements, district of Montpellier, 1791. 77. ADH, L 5422, Cahier of declarations of defrichement, canton of Les Matelles, ans IV–VIII. 78. McPhee, Revolution and Environment, 178. 79. BM Montpellier, MS 101, f. 34, Rapport fait par le citoyens Barthe, Vigaroux, Coste, Nouguier et Touchy sur l’agriculture du département de l’hérault, n.d. 80. AD Aude, 1 L 587, agricultural surveys years VI and VII.

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81. Five of eight cantons replied to the circular: Belcaire, Espéraza, Espezel, Rodome, and Monthoumet. 82. John Markoff, “Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church, and State in the Cahiers de Doléances,” in Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford, 1998), edited by Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, 377–409, finds seeds of a national peasant economic consciousness in the cahiers. 83. ADH, L 1226, David Nicolas, Aperçu des revenus ruraux du canton de Montagnau, département de l’hérault, bestiaux et engrais. Précedé de son état de situation de structure contenance et population, MS. Read to the Société libre d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault, 25 floréal VII. Nicolas is himself termed a cultivateur. 84. T. J. A. LeGoff and D. M. G. Sutherland, “La Révolution française et l’économie rurale,” Histoire et mesure 14, nos. 1, 2 (1999): 79–120. 85. ADH, 1240, Conseil d’administration du district de Montpellier aux citoyens, 23 brumaire an II. 86. AN, F10 339, Maruale au Comité d’agriculture, 28 nivose an II. 87. AN, F10 339, Le Carlier-Trousy au Comité d’agriculture, 9 pluviose an II. 88. AN, F10 338, returns for the Committee of Public Safety’s Plough Survey, year II. 89. AN, F10 338, district of Carcassonne to Committee of Public Safety, 13 pluviose an II. 90. Agronomists recommended five. 91. AN, F10 338, commune of Castagnac to Committee of Public Safety, n.d. 92. ADH, L 1226, Procès-verbal of Société libre d’agriculture, priarial an VII. Statistical accounts of cantons: Benoit does Saint-Pons, Guibal Laconquie presents Beziers; Banial ainé does Martin de Londres; Roussau ainé does Florensac; Raboul does Saint-Chinian, Laroque Montet does Lunel. 93. ADH, L 1226, Raboul, Canton de Saint-Chinian; Indication des principaux objets sur lesquels la Société libre d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault désire de procurer des renseignements, MS, Montpellier, an VII, 5. 94. ADH, L 2454, Le commissaire du pouvoir exécutif près de l’administration centrale du canton de Saint-Chinian au citoyen président du département de l’Hérault, 10 fructidor an IV. 95. ADH, L 1226, Mazel, Indication des principaux objets sur lesquels la société d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault désire de procurer des renseignements, canton de Servian, MS, Montpellier, an VII, 1. 96. ADH, L 1226, Mazel, Indication des principaux objets, 6. 97. ADH, L 1226, Guibal Laconquie, L’indication des principaux objets sur les quels la Société libre d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault désire de procurer des renseignements pour le canton de Béziers. 98. ADG, 7 M 435, Arrêté relatif à une souscription ouverte pour la perfectionnement des charrues, du 18 brumaire de l’an dix de la République française, Nîmes, 1802. 99. François de Neufchâteau, Quatrième rapport sur le concours relatif au perfectionnement de la charrue, fait a la séance publique du 5 avril 1807 (Paris, 1807), 1.

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100. Neufchâteau, Quatrième rapport sur le concours relatif au perfectionnement de la charrue, 11 101. AN, F10 342, requests for Guillaume plows in 1807 from Somme, Sarthe, Tarn, Rhine et Moselle, Sarre, Yonne, Drôme, Rhône, Mayenne, Mont Tonnerre, Aude, Maine et Loire, Côtes du Nord, and Hérault. 102. AN, F10 342, prefect of the Tarn to the minister of the interior, 15 September 1809. 103. AN, F10 342, prefect of the Tarn to the minister of the interior, 26 April 1809. 104. Pierre Pichon, Rapport fait à la Société d’agriculture et des arts de Boulgne-sur-mer, au nom de la commission chargée de suivre les expériences relatives au perfectionnement de la charrue (Boulognesur-mer, 1809), 1. 105. Pichon, Rapport fait à la Société d’agriculture et des arts de Boulgne-sur-mer, 8. 106. Pichon, Rapport fait à la Société d’agriculture et des arts de Boulogne-sur-mer, 11. 107. AN, F10 342, prefect of the Var to the minister of the interior, 15 December 1811. 108. AN, F10 342, minister of the interior to the Paris Agricultural Society, 25 November 1812. 109. Nathieu de Dombasle, Rapport sur la charrue, sondiérée principalement sous le rapport ou la présence de l’avant-train (Paris, 1821). 110. Fabien Knittel, “La charrue ‘Dombasle’ (1814–1821): Histoire d’une innovation en matière de travail du sol,” Étude et Gestion des Sols 12, no. 2 (2006): 187–198. 111. ADG, 7 M 435, Arrêté rélatif à une souscription ouverte pour la perfectionnement des charrues du 18 brumaire de l’an dix de la république. 112. “Sur l’avantage des bonnes cultures,” Bulletin de la Société d’agriculture du départment de l’Hérault 2, no. 13 (15 July 1808), 4–5. 113. “Sur la description des nouveaux instruments d’agriculture les plus utiles,” Bulletin de la Société d’agriculture du départment de l’Hérault 9, no. 2 (15 June 1822): 4. 114. Amat, “Rapport adressé a la société d’agriculture du départment de l’Hérault sur les machines de Monsieur Fellenberg,” Bulletin de la Société d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault 2, no. 14 (15 August 1808): 17. 115. Achilles Nicolas Isnard, “Rapport fait à la Société sur les instruments aratoires de M. de Fellenberg,” Bulletin de la Société d’agriculture du départment de l’Hérault 2, no. 8 (15 December 1808): 18–21. 116. Isnard, “Rapport fait à la Société sur les instruments aratoires de M. de Fellenberg,” 18. 117. Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account, 303. 118. Edward Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (London, 1812), 409; Henry Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare: With Observations on the Means of Improvement (Dublin, 1808), 56; Horatio Townsend, Statistical Survey of the County of Cork (Dublin, 1810), 560. 119. Hely Dutton, Joseph Archer, and John Ratty, Observations on Archer’s Statistical Survey of the County of Dublin (Dublin, 1802), 34. 120. George Newenham Wright, A Historical Guide to Ancient and Modern Dublin (Dublin, 1821), 69–70.

203

NOTES TO PAGES 142–146

121. ADH, 7 M 957, Secrétaire perpétuel de la Société d’agriculture du département de l’Hérault au monsieur le Préfet de l’Hérault, 23 February 1842. 122. ADH, 7 M 957, Sous-préfet de Béziers au Préfet de l’Hérault, 15 April 1839. 123. AD Aude, 13 M 227, Sociétee d’agriculture de Carcassonne, 1 August 1832. 124. ADG, 7 M 103, Programme d’un concours de charrues, à Peuch-Redon, 15 May 1837. 125. ADH, 7 M 87, 25 October 1840. 126. For the contrasting fortunes of industrial Lower Languedoc see Christopher H. Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920 (Oxford, 1995). 127. For the concept of the “tradition of modernity” see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA, 1985), trans. Robert M. Wallace. 128. According to the 1841 census. See the EHESS database http://cassini.ehess.fr/ cassini/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=9613 (accessed 28 August 2016). 129. ADH, 7 M 87, Comice agricole de Claret: Concours de charrues et distribution de prix de la moralité, 21 July 1839. 130. Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,” in Études sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1963). For the notion of the peasant route to capitalism see Florence Gauthier, La voie paysanne dans la Révolution française: L’exemple picard (Paris, 1977), G. R. Ikni, Crise agraire et révolution paysanne: Le mouvement populaire dans les campagnes de l’Oise de la decennie physiocratique à l’an II (Lille, 1993), and Anatoli Ado, Paysans en Révolution: Terre, pouvoir et jacquerie, 1789–1794 (Paris, 1996). 131. Liana Vardi, The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profits in Northern France, 1680–1800 (Durham, NC, 1993). 132. Though of course agronomic research did eventually solve the problem. Gilbert Garrier, Le Phylloxéra, une guerre de trente ans, 1870–1900 (Paris, 1989); Roger Pouget, Le Phylloxéra et les maladies de la vigne: La lutte victorieuse des savants et des vignerons (1850–1900) (Paris, 2015). 133. Alice C. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850– 1950 (Ithaca, NY, 2013); Michael A Osborne, “Science and the French Empire,” Isis 96, no. 1 (March 2005): 80–87. 134. ADH, 7 M 191, de Cheseul, Restinclières, to prefect of the Hérault, 9 October 1831.

Chapter Five. Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution 1. For scholars who pursue this argument see Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford, 2008); Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, 2005). 2. Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004); William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (March 2000): 109–152.

204

NOTES TO PAGES 147–153

3. BM Montpellier, MS 101, André-Antoine Touchy, “Aperçu du département de l’Hérault relativement à son organisation physique et naturelle.” 4. Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009). 5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970). 6. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton, 1995); Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1987). 7. Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2007), trans. Arthur Goldhammer. 8. Katherine Kawa, Les ronds-de-cuir en Révolution (Paris, 1996); Ralph Kingston, Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society: Office Politics and Individual Credit in France, 1789–1848 (London, 2012); Pierre Serna, La république des girouttes, 1789–1815 et au-délà: Une anomaie politique: La France de l’extrême centre (Paris, 2005). 9. ADG, 7 M 103, 23 March 1807. 10. ADG, 7 M 191, 10 November 1821. 11. ADG, 7 M 191, 9 October 1831. 12. ADG, 7 M 114, “Discours donné à l’installation de la Société d’agriculture de l’arrondissement de Vigan,” 1820. 13. ADG, 7 M 114, 5 May 1851. 14. ADG, 7 M 101, 20 November 1821. 15. ADH, 7 M 104, report on the Horticultural Scoiety of the Herault by the presidient Doumet-Adanson, 12 December 1875. 16. BM Avignon, MS 1269, “Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie,” 1806, 78. 17. BM Avignon, MS 1269, “Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie,” 1806, 83. 18. ADH, La Commission de l’agriculture et des arts établie à Montpellier a ses concitoyens, 26 nivôse an II. 19. BM Avignon. MS 1269, “Mes souvenirs ou détails historiques des époques principales de ma vie,” 1806, 92. 20. Séance du 14 décembre 1790, Procès-verbaux des séances de l’Assemblé administrative du Départment de l’Hérault pendant la Révolution (1790–1793) (Montpellier, 1889), 1:187. 21. Séance du 14 décembre 1790, Procès-verbaux des séances de l’Assemblé administrative du Départment de l’Hérault pendant la Révolution (1790–1793), 1:189, 191. 22. AN, H1 1501, Observations sur la réunion de la Société royale d’agriculture et du comité, MS 1788. 23. BM Montpellier, MS 90 (10), Mémoire sur cette question: Quels sont les arbres les arbustes ou les plantes qui croissent sur le bord de la mer sans en avoir néanmoins besoin d’en être baignes a toutes les marées pourront être employé à la construction des digues, 1778, 131 (submitted to the Academy of Caen).

205

NOTES TO PAGES 153–159

24. Charles Auriol, Historique de la Société libre d’agriculture de l’Hérault de l’an VII juqsu’en 1819 (Montpellier, 1899), 6. 25. BM Montpellier, MS 93, Petit cours d’agriculture qui précéda mon cours de botanique. Deux mémoires et matériaux (1798), 2. 26. Pierre-Joseph Amoreux, Mémoire sur la nécessite et les moyens d’améliorer l’agriculture dans le district de Montpellier (Montpellier, 1794), 3. 27. ADH, L 1226, David Nicolas, “Aperçu des revenus ruraux du canton de Montagnac, département de l’Hérault, bestiaux et engrais. Précédé de son état de situation de structure contenance et population,” MS, an VII. 28. AD Aude, 1 L 592, Séance of 10 fructidor VI; ADG, 7 M 101, notes on foundation of agricultural society, an IX. 29. ADH, L 1240, La Commission de l’agriculture et des arts établie à Montpellier a ses concitoyens, 26 nivôse an II. 30. ADH, 7 M 96, mayor of Gignac to the subprefect at Lodève, 19 November 1803. 31. ADH, 7 M 94, Procès-verbal of Gignac agricultural society, 24 germinal an XIII. 32. ADH, L 1226, Procès-verbal of Société libre d’agriculture de l’Hérault, special meeting, an VII. 33. AD Aude, 1 L 592, Procès-verbal of Société libre d’agriculture du départment de l’Aude, 10 fructidor an VI. 34. ADG, 7 M 101, notes on the creation of the Société libre d’agriculture, an IX. 35. ADG, 7 M 103, Arrêté rélatif à la formation d’une société d’agriculture, 3 messidor an IX. 36. ADG, 9M 98, État général par ordre alphabétique, des brevets d’invention, de perfectionnement et d’importation, délivrés, en vertu des lois des 7 janvier et 25 mai 1791, jusqu’au 1er janvier 1812. 37. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and the Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 62. 38. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Sevententh Century (Cambridge, 2005), 3–45. 39. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 12. 40. On Mill’s centrality to the theorisation of the bourgeois self see, Gerald Mara and Suzanne Dovi, “Mill, Nietszche and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism,” Journal of Politics 57, no. 1 (1995): 1–23; Katherine Smits, “John Stuart Mill and the Social Construction of Identity,” History of Political Thought 25, no. 2 (2005): 298–324; Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1983): 29–50; Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1991). 41. W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London, 1950). 42. On class and the imagination in Britain see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994); Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1995)

206

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43. Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2014). 44. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1989). 45. Sara Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary 1750– 1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 46. André Malraux, Lazare (Paris, 1974), 74. 47. Jacques Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern Ego (New York, 1943); Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, 1999). 48. Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (Oxford, 1987). 49. William Coleman, Georges Cuvier Zoologist: A Study in the History of Evolution Theory (Cambridge MA, 1964), 151–152. 50. Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester, 1984), 200–201. 51. Paula Young Lee, “The Meaning of Molluscs: Léonce Reynaud and the CuvierGeoffroy Debate of 1830, Paris,” Journal of Architecture 3, no. 3 (1998): 211–240. 52. Rebecca Spang, “Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution?” American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003): 119–147.

Conclusion 1. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Econoic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 2. Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 3. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York, 1984), and The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (Princeton, 1997). 4. For a recent review see Brent Simpson and Robb Willer, “Beyond Altruism: Sociological Foundations of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (August 2015): 43–63. 5. Nathan Nunn, “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (2008): 139–176. 6. See Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); Joseph Inikori, “Africa and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Africa, Volume 1: African History before 1885 (Durham, NC, 2000), edited by Toyin Falola, 389–412. 7. Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101, no. 7 (2011): 3221–3252. 8. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “When Did Globalisation Begin?” European Review of Economic History 6, no. 1 (2002): 23–50. 9. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, “Why Culture Is Common, but Cultural Evolution Is Rare,” Proceedings of the British Academy 58 (1996): 77–93.

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10. Nathan Nunn, “Culture and the Historical Process,” Economic History of Developing Regions 27, no. 1 (2012): 108–126. 11. If not globally see Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London, 2016). 12. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), 7. 13. John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (London, 2005). 14. Gareth Stedman Jones, “An End of Poverty: The French Revolution and the Promise of a World without Want,” Historical Research 78, no. 200 (May 2005): 193–207.

208

I NDEX

Alès (Alais), 8, 99; improvement in, 110–111 Alletz, Pons Augustin, 89 Alliers, 41 Althen, Joannis, 90–91 Amoreux, Pierre-Joseph, 58, 70, 83, 151–152, 154; on agronomy, 86, 94 Amsterdam, 23 Anjou, 91 Annuities, 23 Archimbaud, Louis, 17 Argenville, Antoine-Joseph Desailer d’, 57, 67, 78, 82 Aristotle, 66, 86 Asgill, John, 23 Assembly of Notables, 28 Astruc, Jean, 56 Atlantic basin, 1–2, 9 Aude, department of, 7, 132–133, 136

Absolutism, 7–8; historiography of, 27–28, 32–35 Académie des sciences (Paris), 82 Adanson, Michel, 73 Africa, 164 Agde, 19, 38, 39, 43; education, 45 Agout (river), 8 Agricultural Society, 124, 148; Aude, 156; Besançon, 148; Boulogne, 139; Brittany, 89; Gabriac, 148; Gard, 156–157; Gignac, 156; Hérault, 95, 109, 141; Paris, 98–99, 138; revolutionary, 137–138 Agronomy, 14, 89–91, 93–94; and French Revolution, 153–155; prize competitions, 85–87 Aigues Mortes, 39 Aimargues, Louise Marguerite, 19 Albi, 8, 43, 113

209

INDEX

Caiserfues, Jacquette, 17 Caiserfues, Marie, 17 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 28 Cambon, Joseph, 131 Canal du Midi, 133 Capitalism, 166–167 Carcassonne, 8, 133; of, 136; Sénéchausée of, 17–20, 43–44 Carney, Joseph de, 78 Carpentras, 97 Castres, 8, 43, 128 Categorization, in science, 67, 70 Caylar, 138 Chambre de Commerce, 40 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, 65–66 Chicoyneau, François, 57–58, 60; position on botany, 67–68 China, 2, 11 Chirac, Pierre, 57 Clapiers, 136 Clapies, Jean de, 78 Claret, 143–144 Colonies, 65 Comice agricole, 143 Commercial Society, 1–2, 10, 65 Commerson, Philibert, 59, 71, 73 Committee of Public Safety, 136 Consumption, 120–121 Convents, 19–20 Cooperation, 164 Coral, 67 Cosmopolitanism, provincial, 12–13, 65, 75–76, 94, 99–100, 144–145 Cour des aides, 31, 103 Cour des comptes, 48–49 Cousin, Victor, 158 Creditors, female, 19–20 Cuba, 64 Cultural innovation, 4–5, 14–15, 54 Cusson, Pierre, 58–59, 61–62

Bagnols, 127 Baker, John Wynn: on plows, 116–117 Ballainvilliers, Charles Bernard de, 6–9, 113–114 Banal, Antoine (junior), 101–102, 109, 115; status as botanist, 107–109 Banal, Antoine (senior), 83, 101–102 Bank of England, 24 Banks, Joseph, 53, 65 Barrère, Pierre, 65, 73, 97 Barthez, Paul-Joseph, 105–106 Basille, Louis-Basile de, 57 Basville, Nicolas de Lamoignon de, 6–7, 77 Beaucaire-Nîmes, sénéchaussée of, 43 Bédarieux, 8 Belleval, Richier de, 55 Bengal, 1, 13–14, 53–54, 64 Bentham, George, 74, 148 Béziers, 7, 38, 40, 43, 93, 142 Bignon, Jean-Paul, 65, 77 Bioprospecting, 103–104 Bon, François-Xavier, 68, 77, 79 Botany: careers in, 59–62, 107–108; economic, 73, 95–97; research paradigms in, 67–69, 75–76 Brazil, 64 Brienne, Lomenie de, 36 British Empire, 4, 11 Brittany, 89 Brosse, Guy de La, 56 Broussonet, Pierre, 72, 74, 83, 114–115 Bruguière, Jean-Guillaume, 71, 73 Brunet, Jean-Jacques, 59, 94–95 Buchoz, Pierre-Joseph, 98 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 66 Bureaux des finances: Montpellier, 31; Toulouse, 31 Burgundy. See Estates of Burgundy

210

INDEX

Gard, department of, 138, 140, 142, 148–149, 157 Gauteron, Antoine, 68 General Assembly of the Communities of Provence, 33 Geneva, 82 Gérard, Louis, 59, 99 Gignac, 19, 95 Gouan, Antoine, 58, 61–62, 71; as agricultural reformer, 95; as Linnean, 72, 75–76 Grain trade, 40 Grand, Jeanne, 20 Grande, Marie, 20 Gravier, Charles, comte de Vergennes, 89, 99 Great Recoinage, 24–25 Growth, 35, 41; problem of, 2–4, 92, 114–115 Guyana, 65

Debt, 35, 37, 44, 47–48, 103–104; owned by religious women, 19 de La Peyronie, François, 57 Delaware, 100 Development theory, 123–124, 134, 141; historic, 9–10, 65, 85–86 Dillon, Arthur, Archbishop of Narbonne, 49 Dioceses, 32, 41–43 Dombasle, Mathieu, 140 Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis, 94 Dupy, Barthelemy, 20 Edinburgh, 74, 83 Education, 45 Elites, 2, 3–5 Enclosure, 109–114, 130–132 England, 2, 26; science culture of, 54 Enlightenment, 2, 100–101, 109; historiography, 87 Estates of Burgundy, 33 Estates of Languedoc, 30–31; Agricultural Committee, 99; Commission of 1734, 44–45, 98; Committee of, 17, 44–46; critiques of, 47–48; development work by, 90–91, 111–112; expenditure of, 37–40; investment strategy of, 7–8, 37; officers of, 31; public works of, 38–39 Europe, 1–2, 4; growth in, 11; provinces, 9

Haguenot, Henri, 61 Haiti, 64 Hérault, department of, 136–137, 142, 147, 150 Hortoles, Jean-Baptiste, 150 Hume, David, 10 Hyères, 97 Identity, 158 Imbert, Jean-François, 60, 104 Improvement, 65, 97, 100. See also Enclosure Industrial Revolution, 2–3 Industrious revolution, 1, 9, 117–118; women in, 12 Industry, 127–128 Innovation, technological, 117–118, 126–127 Institutions, 2, 62; economic, 112, 128–129; financial, 29–32; legal, 127

Filangieri, Gaetano, 12 Financial Revolution, 24 Fitzgerald, Gerald, 59 Fontanès, 127 French Revolution, 146–148; academies, 151; technological innovation, 130, 134–138, 143 Game theory, 164

211

INDEX

Louis XV, 57 Lyon, 19; veterinary school, 99

International trade, 1 Ireland, 63–64, 142 Italy, 10, 12 Izmir, 90

Madagascar, 73 Madden, Samuel, 117 Magnol, Pierre, 67, 68–69, 72–73 Maistre, Joseph de, 147 Mareschal, George, 57 Markets, 14 Marseilles, 5 Marsigli, Luigi Fernandino, Count de, 81 Mauguio, 38 Mauritius, 73 Maury, Abbé Jean-Sifrein de, 50 Medical humanism, 67–68, 80 Mende, 42, 99 Michodière, Jean-Baptiste-François de La, 98 Mill, John Stuart, 159 Mirepoix, 43 Mississippi Company, 25–26, 35 Monarchy, 34 Money, 12, 18–19, 34; evolution of, 22–26 Montferrier, Jean Antoine de, 78 Montpellier, 8, 18, 19, 31, 41, 135 Montréal, Arnaud, 125–126 Mulberry plantations, 90

Jancigny, Jean-Baptiste Dubois de, 138 Jardin botanique royale (Montpellier), 55, 56, 101–109; botanical instruction in, 58–59; during Revolution, 152; Linnean system in, 69, 106–108 Jardin des plantes (Paris), 69 Jardinier, Catherine, 17 Joubert, Jean-Charles, 99 Jussieu, Bernard de, 67 Kant, Immanuel, 10 Kirwan, Richard, 78 Languedoc: agriculture in, 132; as case study, 5, 165–166; in financial history, 29–46; in historiography, 7; knowledge culture, 54–55, 94, 96–97, 100, 134, 143. See also Estates of Languedoc Laverune, 95 Lavigne, Marie, 19 Law, 115 Law, John, 25 Le Peletier de la Houssaye, Félix, 57 Le Puy, 42 Lieutaud, Joseph, 97 Limoux, 142 Linnean Society of London, 74, 83–84, 100; French members of, 108 Linnaean system, 69–74, 83, 95–96 Linnaeus, Carl, 56; influence in Montpellier, 69–71, 75–76, 80 Lodève, 19, 43, 128 London, 74, 81–83 Louis XIV, 7, 26

Naples, 10–11 Narbonne, 19, 38, 90; archbishop of, 77 Natural history, 65–67 Necker, Jacques, 28, 50 Netherlands, 25–26 Nîmes, 18, 41, 127 Nissole, Guillaume, 67 Nobility, 34, 149 Nosology, 55–56 Old regime, 27, 62, 102, 112 Olive tree plantations, 90, 91, 97

212

INDEX

Pugachev rebellion, 11 Pyrenees, 73

Parcieux, Antoine de, 78 Paris, 23, 82 Parlement: de Nancy, 112–113; de Toulouse, 31 Patents, 157 Paterson, William, 24 Patronage, 60–61 Pays d’état, 26, 46–47 Peasants, 6–7, 11–12, 34; as debtors, 21, 44; as drivers of growth, 9; and French Revolution, 132; and material culture, 92–93, 121–123; and science, 86 Pennant, Thomas, 84 Perpignan, 65, 87 Peru, 64 Pézenas, 18, 43, 142 Phylloxera, 144 Pilant, Augustin, 89 Plow, 117–120, 135; araire, 140; Dombasle, 140; evaluation of, 124–126, 138–140, 142; Fellenberg, 141; Guillaume, 139; Hertfordshire, 117; Rotherham, 118; Swing, 117, 137–138, 141; as transformative technology, 118–119, 121–123 Plowing match, 141–143 Poivre, Pierre, 73 Political economy, 40, 65, 134, 158 Poor relief, 129 Portalis, Jean-Étienne-Marie, 34 Postcolonial theory, 13 Privilege, 14, 29, 56, 114, 126–129 Property, 14 Protestants, 69 Provinces, 5; history, 5–6, 163; knowledge cultures, 54–55, 165; as sites of growth, 3 Public credit, 1, 17–18, 22, 36, 48; historiography of, 28–29 Public goods, 5, 38–41, 46, 48

Quillan, 133 Ratte, Étienne-Hyacinthe de, 59, 98 Réamur, René Antoine Ferchault de, 98 Reason, 5, 46, 64–65, 84, 100–101, 158–159; mundane, 15, 34, 51, 86–87, 95, 144, 147, 150; sovereign, 147 Reboul, Henri-Paul-Irénée, 152 Rentes, 27 Rent seeking, 2, 4, 35, 98 Republicanism, 147, 155–156 Restinclières, 145, 148 Rivière, Guillaume, 68 Rodez, 8 Roman Empire, 2, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 147 Royal Agricultural Society, 114 Royal Botanical Gardens (Kew), 53 Royal Dublin Society, 116, 142 Royal Society, 77, 81, 117 Rozier, François, 71, 92–93; on plows, 116 Sabourdy, Denis, 17 Saint-Bauzille-de-Montmel, 132 Saint-Domingue. See Haiti Saint-Jean-de-Bruel, 85, 94 Saint-Jean-de-Vedas, 131 Saint-Pons, 43 Saint-Priest, Jean-Emmanuel Guignard de, 45, 60 Sauvages, François Boissier de, 55–56, 71; botanical career, 59 Science: and politics, 159; careers in, 59–60; colonial, 145; and French Revolution, 147–148, 153–155; historical epistemology of, 66, 72, 87–88; networks, 74, 78–81; social study of, 52–55, 76–77, 88–89, 101

213

INDEX

Tours, 89 Trade, 5–6 Transport networks, 30, 42–43, 48, 129, 134 Trebes, 43 Trouvé, Claude-Joseph, 7–8 Trust, 12, 124 Truth claims, 52–53 Tull, Jethro, 74, 94, 140 Turgot, André-Robert-Jacquet, 92

Scotland, 142; statistical account, 119–120 Séguier, Jean François, 78, 110 Self, history of, 159–162 Senegal, 73 Senes, Dominique, 57 Sète, 8, 38, 39 Sibthorp, John, 83, 96 Sinclair, John, 119 Slavery, 164 Small, James, 117, 119, 143 Smith, Adam, 10 Smith, James, 83 Social capital, 4, 11–13 Société royale des sciences (Montpellier), 57, 64–69, 125; competitions, 85–87; international connections, 76–77, 80–81; organization and structure, 77–81; and revolution, 152 Society of Art, 97 Solander, Daniel, 73 Sommières, 19 South Sea Scheme, 25 Spain, 11 State, 8 Subalterns, 4–5, 87–88, 94, 103; and technology, 117–118 Switzerland, 63

United States of America, 11, 123 Universalism, 12, 13–15 University of Montpellier, 55–57, 105–106, 151; graduates in Paris, 58; international network, 63–64; medical faculty, 55; surgical college, 56 Uzès, 41 Value, 65 Var, department of, 140 Venel, Gabriel-François, 56 Vermin, 114 Vickers Fithian, Philip, 100 Vigan, 149 Vitalism, 58 Wisselbank, 23 Woad (pastel), 91 Women creditors, 19–20 Württemberg, 12 Wurtz, Georges-Christophe, 76

Tarn, department of, 139 Taxation, 31–32, 44, 47 Templeton, Peter, 97 Tissot, Samuel-Auguste-David, 58 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 32 Touchy, André-Antoine, 132, 147, 150 Toulouse, 8, 18, 31, 41, 114, 133; sénéchaussée of, 43 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, 69

Yangtze Delta, 2 Young, Arthur, 84, 92 Young, Edward, 108–109 Zanotti, Eustachio, 80

214