Before the Deluge : Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution

by Sonenscher, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781400827701
• ISBN10: 1400827701
• Copyright: 2009-08-17
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself. Before the Deluge examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Facing the Future	p. 22
Three Descriptions of the French Revolution	p. 22
The Terror and Its Causes	p. 34
Balanced Government and the English Constitution	p. 41
England's Future in a French Context	p. 52
Sieyès and His Contemporaries	p. 67
True Monarchy, or the Idea of a Modern Republic	p. 75
Montesquieu and the Idea of Monarchy	p. 95
The Troglodytes and the Morality of Monarchy	p. 95
Law's System, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and the Grand Design	p. 108
From The Persian Letters to The Spirit of Laws	p. 121
The Inheritance of Property and the Inheritance of Thrones	p. 131
The Problem of Sovereignty and the Nature of Monarchy	p. 149
Jansenism	p. 153
Fénelon and His Legacy	p. 159
Trade, the System of Ranks, and the Alternative to Public Credit	p. 166
Morality and Politics in a Divided World	p. 173
Montesquieu's Legacy	p. 173
François Véron de Forbonnais and the Limits of Trade	p. 179
Physiocracy, or The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies	p. 189
From Friendship to Mankind to Political Economy	p. 199
Rousseau and Physiocracy	p. 222
Rousseau and Mably	p. 239
Industry and Representative Government	p. 254
Agriculture, Industry, and Inequality	p. 254
Helvétius	p. 266
Turgot	p. 281
Chastellux	p. 290
Jacques Necker and Burke's Paradox	p. 302
Joseph Fauchet and Pierre-Paul Gudin de la Brenellerie	p. 311
Pierre-Louis Roederer	p. 322
Jean-Baptiste Say	p. 334
Conclusion	p. 349
Bibliography	p. 373
Index	p. 403
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