Apres Moi le Deluge Intellectual History Blogging

Re: Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.

The book begins:

The phrase après moi le deluge... by... Mme. de Pompadour... and the various attitudes toward impending disaster it might have been intended to express... have often been associated with the French Revolution.... [T]he phrase was current... before 1789... applied to public debt. This... was how it was used... by Victor Requeti, Marquis de Mirabeau.... Mirabeau applied the phrase to... government borrowing and, more particularly, to the practice of using life annuities to fund the costs of government debt. Life annuities, he wrote, were the quintessence of what he called "that misanthropic sentiment [ce sentiment ennemi] après moi le deluge."... [T]hey were a way of drawing bills on posterity. Like all forms of public credit... consumed wealth before it was produced... leaving a state... having to face the future without the accumulted assets... to maintain its long- term domestic prosperity and external security... could... destroy... "civilization."

I am going to have to go read Mirabeau pere's Etretiens d'un Jeune Prince avec Son Governeur. It sounds to me that the phrase is applied by Mirabeau pere to describe not a feckless government that borrows long (to fund wars, canals, or harbors) but rather a feckless father who invests the family wealth in annuities that end on his death. After all, from the viewpoint of long-run governmental fiscal prudence, life annuities are not the quintessence of badness--they are, in fact, vastly preferable to consols. It is only from the viewpoint of the dynastic family that life annuities are especially bad.

Is this a good thing to do at the very opening of a book that presents itself as deriving new insights from close readings of old texts?...

Comments

[alexandre delaigue]

On this subject, an exceptionnal read is James MacDonald's "a free nation deep in debt" :

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Nation-Deep-Debt-Financial/dp/0374171432

[James Wimberley]

Mirabeau *père*; après moi *le* déluge. (Handy list of accented characters in extended ASCII at http://www.imagiforce.com/foreign_language_characters.htm).
Orthography aside, your analysis is penetrating.

[andres]

Hmm. I am by no means an expert on the French Revolution, but what little I have read indicates that France's increasing debt and fiscal deficits was not the main culprit of the Revolution itself. If the debt was all that was at stake, the only thing that would have happened is a bloodless coup in which the Estates General permanently took over the French finances and the monarchy became Hanoverian-constitutionalist rather than Bourbon-absolutist.

From what little I've read, the French Revolution (ie, the abolition of the monarchy /nobility) was really caused by the festering inequality in the French body economic (accentuated but not caused by France's tax system) combined with the spark of rising food prices in the major cities in the late 1780's.

I don't think Sonencher's book will address this argument, though I could be wrong. For something as cataclysmic as a social revolution, I lean towards materialism in the sense that intellectual origins are simply insufficient.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Festering anything doesn't lead to revolt, though it may lead to collapse. What leads to revolt is a spark in a situation of slackening repression, because then there is hope - the last evil Pandora released. This is not a new observation.

[rea]

"Mme. de Pimpadour..."

Surely Mme. de Pompadour? Appropriate as the other name might be . . .

[Maurice Lanselle]

"... Mme. de Pimpadour... " -- I second rea's comment. Is it sloppy re-typing, a defective cut/paste on Macs, or really the way the book begins?

[wood turtle]

"...close readings of old texts?"

Yes, I suppose there's a lot of that going on right now.

[Michael Sonenscher]

I noticed your remarks about my book and hope that you have now had time to read a bit of Mirabeau. As you will have seen, Mirabeau's concerns were about the eighteenth-century conundrum that I have tried to describe in my book, namely that constitutional government was good for public debt, but that public debt was bad for constitutional government. My book is about what some interesting eighteenth-century thinkers wrote about this conundrum, and the light that what they wrote throws both on the politics of the French Revolution of 1789 and, more broadly, on how we think about modern democracy.

Michael Sonenscher