"Overall, Crowston convincingly and skillfully argues for the importance of a complex and dynamic economy of regard that operated in Old Regime France. Furthermore, she presents the individuals who engaged in this system as conscious and informed participants. Important links with the intertwined themes of gender, power, and sex are highlighted, demonstrating the influence of credit upon all else."

CREDIT, Fashion, SEX

ECONOMIES OF REGARD IN OLD REGIME FRANCE

Duke University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CREDIT AND OLD REGIMEECONOMIES OF REGARD

Women in the capital enjoy not only the greatest possible freedom,but also the most incredible credit. By secret and specificmanoeuvers, they are the invisible spirit of all affairs, they succeedalmost without leaving home; they determine the publicvoice in circumstances when it seemed initially undecided.

—Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris

In the playwright Marivaux's La Double inconstance (1724), Arlequinboasts: "I am in credit, for people do what I want" ("Je suis en crédit,car on fait ce que je veux"). This bold claim nicely summarizesthe nonmaterial sense of the term credit that is the focus of this chapter. In OldRegime France fictional characters and real people frequently employed theword credit to signify a crucial form of nonmaterial capital that could take onpolitical, social, and cultural guises. As we will see, texts of this period portraycredit as an intangible, often hidden, and yet highly efficacious form of powerthat operated within and across numerous registers of life: from patronage networksat court and elsewhere to courtship and marriage transactions, intellectuallife, missionary work, and trade and economic activity.

To date, historians' attention to nonmaterial usages of the term have focusedon patronage politics at the royal court and in particular at Louis XIV's Versailles.This sense of credit referred to the influence and power a courtier accruedfrom his or her social and political connections as well as from a rangeof assets like birth, fortune, and individual charisma. While the court was certainlya central forum for the exchange of credit in its political and social manifestations—andthus constitutes a starting point for the chapter—the focus oncourtly credit has obscured the importance of the concept as a key explanatorymechanism for the operation of power throughout Old Regime society andculture. As this chapter will show, belief in credit as a hidden but omnipresentlever of power shaped the perceptions of men and women throughout Frenchsociety, whether at court, in salons, workshops, abbeys and churches, the tavern,the street, or the boudoir.

Scholars have hitherto neglected this central "category of analysis" of OldRegime France in part because there is so little formal writing on nonmaterialforms of credit. This was not because credit was unimportant. Rather,credit was the common sense and realpolitik of the era, the open secret of theoperation of power, and the constant low-level current thrumming throughtheir lives. It did not call for philosophical speculation or explanation because"everyone knew" that flows of credit directed events. French writers referred toit constantly but in shorthand and throwaway phrases, precisely because its dynamicwas so familiar and so universally accepted and understood. This shorthand—ubiquitousonce the eye becomes attuned to it—has also escaped noticebecause of the distance between the Old Regime understanding of credit andour own. We have (for the most part) lost the notion that credit can be used toprocure anything but commodities in the market; they believed it was a muchmore pervasive force, one that was at work in all aspects of their lives.

Credit could not only be found in many different realms of life, it also provideda common currency for transferring capital from one domain to another.As we will see, credit had putative equivalencies in favor, money, personalconnections, and intellectual influence. The exchange rates of this creditsystem were constantly subject to negotiation that could be friendly or fiercelycompetitive. A focus on credit thus highlights the inextricability of the economicfrom the social, cultural, or political in this period. For the writers Ianalyze below, these domains constantly overlapped and individual and collectivestrategies for advancement necessarily operated simultaneously acrossregisters. They found credit so useful and pervasive as a form of currency preciselybecause they could make use of it in so many different transactions.

This chapter guides the reader through distinct milieus in which contemporarysources—ranging from memoirs to letters, plays, sermons, almanacs, andnovels—showcase the use of credit as a form of influence and power. Througha series of case studies—of the royal court, of law courts, of the intellectualworld, of missionary work, and of marriage and courtship—we examine howcontemporaries understood credit in its nonmaterial guises, how they describedthemselves and others making use of it, and how they imagined creditacross political, social, and economic life. To add more concrete depth to thisbroad overview, we turn to a focus on the multiple and overlapping meaningsof credit in the writings of two well-known late seventeenth-century writers,Bussy-Rabutin and Madame de Sévigné. This affords a closer understanding ofthe way two individuals—elite and educated—experienced interwoven strandsof credit running through their own lives. They also underline a central themeof this chapter: women's capacity to wield credit in its multiple forms. Finally,we turn our attention from the elites to the common people. While credit mightappear to be the monopoly of the well connected and wealthy, a number ofsources suggest that similar dynamics were at work among commoners andthat ordinary people were equally familiar with the nonmaterial meanings ofcredit.

It should be noted at the outset that my analysis does not consider any ofthe documents it addresses, even those purporting to be true reports of dailyevents (such as letters or memoirs), as transparent depictions of an empiricallyexisting entity called "credit." Instead, I am interested in how contemporariesconceived of a range of forms of influence and power they subsumed underthe category of "credit" and their descriptions of behaviors and attitudes theyexplained as being motivated by struggles to obtain and manage it. I am alsonot able, in covering such a broad terrain, to accord full attention to the complexityof each text or its place in the author's overall oeuvre or the genre andperiod to which it belongs. It is thus not the empirical truth of credit that I seekto reconstruct, or its contextualization within a close reading of a text or set oftexts, but the beliefs and behaviors that the authors, mostly elite, of these textsfound to be credibly associated with this concept, whether in texts written inthe guise of factual accounts, those openly declaring themselves as fictions, orthose (perhaps the most common category) that straddled the line betweenwhat we now recognize as fiction and nonfiction.

Credit and Court Patronage

The secondary literature on noneconomic forms of credit focuses primarilyon the court and noble patronage. Scholars such as Arlette Jouanna, SharonKettering, Jay Smith, and Jonathan Dewald have all noted aristocrats' use ofthe term "credit" to describe the exchange of influence and power within thepatronage system. These historians tend to agree that the reign of Louis XIVmarked a turning point within this system. Arlette Jouanna, for example, arguesthat as Louis XIV claimed ever-greater control of the distribution of resourceshe also seized the reins of social credit, displacing the local connectionsthat had formed the basis of noble credibility. For their part, JonathanDewald and Jay Smith emphasize the growing monetization of French societyfrom Louis XIV onward. Jonathan Dewald claims that Louis's intensified fiscality—theengine of both state making and dynastic war—contributed significantlyto the rise of a money economy and a concomitant expansion ofeconomic credit. These changes did not, however, lead to a sharp break withtraditional values. Instead, the monarchy harnessed money as another tool ofcontrol: "Money was as likely to be an element of political power and social deferenceas of economic exchange.... It functioned less as a challenge to establishedpatterns of power and subordination than as a newly effective implementfor their exercise." It is these circumstances, Dewald suggests, that madecredit "a central metaphor of seventeenth-century public life."

Smith makes a similar case, arguing that the term credit usefully highlightsthe intertwining of "interest" and "values" in seventeenth-century noble worldviewsand thus provides a solution for historiographical debates on the sincerityof the flowery language of patronage. For Smith, nobles' frequent use ofthe word underlines the mixture of economic and moral calculation in theireveryday lives: "Debts were moral as much as they were monetary; obligationsfound expression through proofs of selflessness; rewards took the form of coinbut also of honors, status, and other markers of respect; credit stood for all ofthe moral and financial resources one's reputation could command." Based onchanging dictionary definitions of the word, Smith argues that over the courseof the eighteenth century the financial sense of the term "credit" graduallyeclipsed its nonmaterial ones, serving as testimony—he argues—of the growingautonomy of the economic sphere.

A numerical count of the frequency of the word crédit (per ten thousandwords of text) by fifty-year periods on the database of the Project for Americanand French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL)confirms these historians' sense that the importance of credit as a conceptualcategory peaked in the Old Regime. The top five chronological periods forusage in order were: 1700–1749 (0.81), 1550–1599 (0.75) (mostly in the worksof Montaigne and Jean Bodin), 1600–1649 (0.56), 1750–1799 (0.56), and 1650–1699(0.44). The top ten users of the word (per ten thousand words of text),two of whom were women, were also situated in the Old Regime. They were, inorder: Jean-Claude Fernier, Pierre Berthelot (d. 1615), Jean Rotrou (1609–1650),Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, the marquisd'Argenson (1694–1757), the Abbé de Vertot (1655–1735), Madame de Villedieu(d. 1683), Guy Patin (1601–1672), and Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653). The contextsin which these and other authors used the word crédit varied a great deal,as we see below, but references to the financial sense of the term constituted aminority of cases.

These results (which draw on a sample of about three thousand canonicalFrench publications) suggest that the period from 1550 to 1800 represented ahigh point in the cultural saliency of credit, particularly with regard to nonmaterialuses of the word. It was thus not the reign of Louis XIV itself thatgave rise to the category of credit as a form of power and influence. This periodizationsuggests instead that the political instability of the Wars of Religion,followed by the slow rise in royal power (with the significant, disruptive interludeof the Fronde), raised new questions about how authority was generatedand power was exercised, while at the same time the expansion of financialcredit in public and private life provided new ways of framing and expressingbonds of obligation and reciprocity. It would not do, however, to place toomuch emphasis on the chronological origins of the nonmaterial usage of theterm as the relatively few sources in the ARTFL database prior to 1600 excludethe possibility of definite conclusions about origins. The fact that the singlethirteenth-century source in the database, by the trouvère Rutebeuf, containsten references to credit in its nonmaterial form suggests that this was a tropeof long-standing in French culture. This chapter accordingly focuses on a synchronic,rather than a diachronic, reading of credit, leaving chapter 2 to addressthe issue of change from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries.

The subjects treated by the top ten authors reveal that the court was but onearena for the exchange of credit. The court of Louis XIV at Versailles nonethelessprovides an apt starting place for this chapter not only because of theexisting historiography on courtly credit but also because the author in theARTFL database who used the word the most was Louis de Rouvroy, duc deSaint-Simon. Saint-Simon and other commentators on court culture providea number of insights into how observers and participants understood the circulationof credit. In their writings the court is a forum for ostentatious, competitivedisplay, a small and centralized milieu in which displaying and witnessingfunctioned as modes for assessing value and transmitting judgments.The sources also show that individuals at court—including women—lavishlypraised their superiors' credit and candidly discussed their own and others'credit standing. Credit may have been informal, but it was not illicit or secret.The myriad forms of royal payout described by Dewald generated tremendousfinancial credit; they also fostered the accumulation of cultural credit(in the form of a lavish lifestyle, fashionable clothing, courtly poise, and soon) and social credit (in the form of dowries for good marriages, hosting importantpersonages, and so forth) that could be transformed, through carefulmaneuvering, into political credit. Because credit traversed these domains, avery broad—if highly unequal—array of materials was available to individuals,families, and coteries seeking to increase their credit. These consisted of, mostimportantly, social rank, offices, kin networks, social connections, property,and wealth in addition to honorary positions, individual talent, experience andskill, ostentatious consumption, and possession of valued information. Someof these possessions could be transmitted over generations, but many werecontingent on external circumstances and individual aptitudes.

A young courtier would have found an invaluable, if embittered, guide inthe duc de Saint-Simon. His aristocratic pride and his opposition to Louis'spolitical innovations led him to keep close track of the fluctuations in the privilegeand power of others, and his cynicism attributed many types of exchangeto trafficking in credit. For example, he explained that the Secretary of Statefor War François-Michel Le Tellier's advocacy of the Dutch War in 1673 wasan attempt to undo Jean-Baptiste Colbert's influence by a decisive victory overProtestants inside and outside of France. As he states, "Le Tellier and his sonLouvois, who had the Department of War, trembled at the success and credit ofColbert and had no difficulty putting a new war into the king's head." Accordingto Saint-Simon, the ministers and their entourages explicitly used the wordcredit to describe their power. He recounts, for example, that an intimate friendonce asked Le Tellier to solicit a favor from the king on a matter that would bedecided in his private meetings with the monarch. In response, Le Tellier toldhim simply that he would try his best. The friend took offense at this modestreply and told him "frankly that, with the place and credit [Le Tellier] had," heexpected more from him.

For Saint-Simon, the only rival to the ministers' credit was Françoised'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and, from 1683,secret wife. According to Saint-Simon, "for three quarters of the favors andthe choices, and a further three quarters of the fourth quarter of what passedthrough the ministers' work in her quarters, it was she who disposed of them....It was almost the same for accentuating or diminishing offences, making goodon letters and services, or letting them go, and thus preparing a fall or a fortune."Both mistress and ministers owed their influence to their personal tiesto the king; their common interest in controlling Louis led them, according tothe duke, to form a secret conspiracy to direct his decisions. Before their workingmeetings with the king, he tells us, Madame de Maintenon would summonministers to a private meeting in which she indicated her choices for the beneficesto be discussed with Louis. They would then enact an elaborate charade tomaintain the illusion that the king was making his own choices. Saint-Simonresentfully concluded that "among them [was] a circle of reciprocal needs andservices, which the king never suspected at all."

Failure to please the royal consort, Saint-Simon claimed, could result indisaster, even for the highly placed. Her power over the lives of more humbleindividuals was even greater: "If the ministers, and the most accredited, were inthis situation with Madame de Maintenon, one can judge what she was capableof with regard to all other sorts of people who were much less able to defendthemselves. Many people thus had their necks broken without being able toimagine the cause and gave themselves a great deal of trouble to discover andremedy it, and without effect." Thus, even while participating in mutuallybeneficial exchanges of credit with favored ministers, she also used her superiorcredit to crush those beneath her. The only branch of government thatescaped her control, according to Saint-Simon, was foreign affairs, which werediscussed in Council of State meetings that she did not attend.
(Continues...)Excerpted from CREDIT, Fashion, SEX by CLARE HARU CROWSTON. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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