Contraband

Michael Kwass

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369641
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la France

Louis Mandrin led a gang of bandits who brazenly smuggled contraband into eighteenth-century France. Michael Kwass brings new life to the legend of this Gallic Robin Hood and the thriving underworld he helped to create. Decades before the storming of the Bastille, surging world trade excited a revolution in consumption that transformed the French kingdom. Contraband exposes the dark side of this early phase of globalization, revealing hidden connections between illicit commerce, criminality, and popular revolt.France's economic system was tailor-made for an enterprising outlaw like Mandrin. As French subjects began to crave colonial products, Louis XIV lined the royal coffers by imposing a state monopoly on tobacco from America and an embargo on brilliantly colored calico cloth from India. Vigorous black markets arose through which traffickers fed these exotic goods to eager French consumers. Flouting the law with unparalleled panache, Mandrin captured widespread public attention to become a symbol of a defiant underground.This furtive economy generated violent clashes between gangs of smugglers and customs agents in the borderlands. Eventually, Mandrin was captured by French troops and put to death in a brutal public execution intended to demonstrate the king's absolute authority. But the spectacle only cemented Mandrin's status as a rebel folk hero in an age of mounting discontent. Amid cycles of underground rebellion and agonizing penal repression, the memory of Mandrin inspired ordinary subjects and Enlightenment philosophers alike to challenge royal power and forge a movement for radical political change.

1

The Globalization of European Consumption

THE YEAR: 1745. CARTER’S GROVE, VIRGINIA. Marcellus toils in a low-lying field on the banks of the James River. Captured in West Africa, shipped across the Atlantic, and purchased by a wealthy colonial planter, he and some twenty other slaves labor ceaselessly to cultivate tobacco. Under the watchful eye of an overseer whose salary rises and falls with the harvest, they clear land, prepare seedbeds, transplant seedlings, weed, prune, and reap, producing thousands of pounds of sweetly scented leaf each year. The product of their grueling labor is packed into large wooden hogsheads that are wedged into ships and sailed downriver to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, before reaching the open Atlantic. After arriving in the British Isles, the tobacco will probably be reexported to France, where consumers grind it into powder and snort it.¹

1 November 1739. Pondicherry, India. Some 8,600 miles from Carter’s Grove, Ananda Ranga Pillai sits in his home on the Coromandel coast, scribbling in his diary. Having distinguished himself as an entrepreneur, he is now the chief agent for the French East Indies Company at Pondicherry. A fastidious chronicler, Pillai notes the day’s events: two company ships—the Fleury and the Triton—set sail for France laden with hundreds of bales of cloth produced by highly skilled Indian weavers. The fabric is of astounding variety; silky muslins are packed next to brilliant calicoes and yards of blue and white Guinea cloth. Slipping from Pondicherry, the ships will ply the deep waters of the Indian Ocean before rounding the Cape of Good Hope and heading north to the Atlantic port of Lorient on the rocky Breton coast of France. There, some fabric will be unloaded, sold at auction, and ultimately hawked to fashion-conscious Europeans. The rest will be taken to the west coast of Africa where, not far from Marcellus’s birthplace, it will be exchanged for slaves, who will in turn be jammed into cargo holds and transported across the Atlantic to the Americas.²

22 June 1754. Millau, France. Louis Mandrin and a score of heavily armed smugglers ride into a small town in the southern province of Languedoc. To the astonishment of the subdelegate, the only representative of royal authority in town, they occupy the market square and, in broad daylight, peddle contraband tobacco and Indian cloth “more publicly than one sells spangles and rosary beads.” After taking in more than a thousand écus, they treat the town to a military review and promptly decamp, leaving villagers craving more. One local catches up with the gang in the next town to ask for another four louis’ worth of cloth, but he is too late. The stock is depleted, so he settles for some cheap weed instead.³

At first glance, it may not be apparent how these three men—Marcellus, a slave on the western edge of the Atlantic; Pillai, a merchant on the east coast of the Indian subcontinent; and Mandrin, a smuggler from a landlocked province in France—are related. But their lives and those of countless others were linked by trade in two new global commodities: tobacco and calico.⁴ Although the tobacco that Mandrin smuggled was not entirely Virginian and the Indian cloth his band peddled was not in fact from India, the underground economy on which he thrived was an unintended creation of the French monarchy’s interventions in the rapidly expanding markets of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. As Mandrin crossed the smuggler-infested borderlands of France, Savoy, and Switzerland, he was participating in a world economy that stretched from the shores of the Chesapeake to the Bay of Bengal. He was also participating in a European consumer culture that was fast incorporating colonial goods from distant continents. To understand how this young smuggler from rural Dauphiné came to challenge one of the most powerful regimes in the world, we first need to know how his underground dealings were connected to a fast-rising global economy that spurred new consumer practices in the heart of Europe.

Consumer Revolution

Scarcity was the norm in medieval and early modern Europe. Apart from monarchs, nobles, and wealthy merchants, who dined on game, wore fine apparel, and lived in relative comfort, most people—whether rural peasants or urban artisans and laborers—lived precarious lives. Many struggled just to survive, eating little more than bread and gruel, covering themselves with coarse woolen clothes, and taking shelter in simple cottages or single rooms. Thriving towns did exist, of course, but until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their trade had only a limited effect on the overall agrarian economy, which grew at a glacial pace when it grew at all. At bottom, this was a peasant society in which only the privileged few had access to anything beyond what we would consider the barest essentials.

And yet, historians have discovered that from about 1650 to 1800, before the coming of the Industrial Revolution, ordinary western Europeans began to acquire goods on an unprecedented scale. Not only did the nobility increase its already prodigious consumption but also middling professionals, wholesale merchants, skilled artisans, better-off farmers, and domestic servants began to consume a wider variety of commodities. They filled their homes with wooden furniture (beds, chairs, dressers, and wardrobes) and decorative housewares (cookware, pottery, clocks, mirrors, and curtains). They bought more clothes (coats, suits, shirts, breeches, gowns, and stockings) and sported novel accessories (umbrellas, snuffboxes, and pocket watches). They ingested more food and drink (white bread, sugar, brandy) and splurged on cultural objects and events (books, paintings, the theater). During the last century of preindustrial Europe’s long history, the material world of middling and, to some extent, lower classes gradually filled.⁵

Society had not become so saturated with goods as to warrant the term “mass consumption,” for a sizable group of the desperately poor and chronically undernourished remained excluded from the efflorescence of consumption.⁶ But the material world had certainly become full enough to give many people the impression that they were living in a new age. Indeed, the proliferation of consumer products at many levels of society prompted a vigorous debate over the moral and political implications of “luxury,” a word subject to intense scrutiny in the eighteenth century. On one side, moralists worried about the violation of Christian interdicts against the pursuit of earthly pleasure, the usurpation of social status by commoners who consumed above their station, and the corruption of civic virtue that seemed to always follow in the destructive wake of luxury. On the other side, apologists of luxury claimed that its spread was merely the benign effect of long-term material progress. What moralists condemned as dangerous luxuries were, according to apologists, reasonable conveniences that would be perceived as simple necessities by future generations.⁷

Why levels of consumption began to rise in the first place is a perplexing question. Consumer growth cannot be attributed to the Industrial Revolution, since mechanized factory production began to appear only at the tail end of the period. If anything, the consumer revolution and the global trade that sustained it helped produce its better-known successor, not the reverse.⁸ More plausibly, a combination of multiple cultural and economic factors produced the surge in consumption. First, fashion became increasingly commercialized as the proliferation of newspaper advertisements, fashion journals, retail shops, and peddlers stoked the desire to consume.⁹ Second, although wages were not rising in this period, households seem to have been working harder. Men toiled longer and more intensively, while women and children entered the labor market in droves. The resulting rise in the supply of market labor may have offset stagnant wages to increase family purchasing power. Although some families worked harder just to stay afloat, others seem to have deliberately taken on more paid labor in order to buy more things.¹⁰ Third, trade and manufacturing within Europe expanded. Agriculture became increasingly specialized and oriented to the market, towns grew faster than the rate of population growth to boost urban demand, and commercial transport within and between countries markedly improved.

Finally, the globalization of trade broadened the material world of Europe. Although most of the durable and semidurable goods consumed in Europe were produced there, some of the most successful commodities of the period were imported from distant overseas continents. Indeed, European practices of consumption changed dramatically after new channels of global trade were opened, as the abbé Raynal boldly proclaimed in the opening passage of his momentous Histoire philosophique et politique, des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes:

There has never been any event as important for the human race in general and for the peoples of Europe in particular, as the discovery of the new world and the passage to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope. It was then that began a revolution in commerce, in the power of nations, in the mores, industry, and government of all peoples. It was at this moment that men in the most distant countries became necessary to one another: the produce of equatorial regions were consumed by those in polar climes; northern industry was transported to the south; the cloths of the Orient dressed the west, and everywhere men exchanged their opinions, their laws, their customs, their medicines, their illnesses, their virtues and their vices. Everything has changed and must go on changing.¹¹

Raynal was exaggerating, of course. The value of intra-European and intra-Asian trade remained much higher than that of intercontinental trade throughout the early modern period. And the wealthiest Europeans had for centuries enjoyed access to South and East Asian luxuries by way of land and water routes (such as the Silk Road) that ran from as far as Java and China to the Levant in the eastern Mediterranean to southern Europe. However, after the “discovery” of the New World in 1492 and the opening of a direct sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia in 1501, long-distance maritime trade routes multiplied to encircle the globe, linking the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa as never before. “For the first time in human history regular commercial contact connected the world’s continents directly,” creating new patterns in the flow of transcontinental goods.¹²

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a truly global circuit formed after the discovery of silver deposits in what is now known as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Mined by an exploited labor force of indigenous Americans, Africans, and mixed-race Creoles, western European merchants shipped heavy cargoes of silver from Central and South America to Europe, where the precious metal added liquidity to a species-starved economy. Circumventing the Venetian and Mamluk middlemen who controlled European imports of Asian spices, merchants then transported silver from Europe to South and East Asia, where they traded it for spices, raw silk, cotton textiles, porcelain, and tea, which they sailed around the Cape of Good Hope back to Europe to sell at great profit to eager consumers.¹³ The links among continents did not stop there. Although many Asian imports were consumed in Europe, much of the Indian cotton cloth that arrived in Europe only grazed the continent’s Atlantic shores before being reexported to the west coast of Africa, where discerning African rulers, merchants, and consumers coveted it as much as their European counterparts. As a French writer observed of the African trade, “a beautiful indienne will always fetch more than another more costly cloth, either because the variety of colors is more to the taste of Negroes, or because the lightness of the cloth is more suited to these hot climates.”¹⁴ Little wonder, then, that among the many goods British and French merchants bartered for African captives at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, when some six million people were forced to leave Africa, Indian cloth was the single most valuable item, worth far more than the alcohol, guns, and trinkets so often associated with the trade.¹⁵ Purchased with calico, captive Africans were shipped to American plantations, where they were compelled to produce large quantities of tropical commodities (sugar, tobacco, chocolate, and coffee) for European consumers, who reaped the benefits of falling commodity prices that came with large-scale colonial exploitation. Based on this unprecedented forced migration, the American plantation complex assured that commerce across the Atlantic would by the eighteenth century dwarf that between Europe and Asia. To the extent that mercantile channels between the Atlantic and Indian oceans grew in number and volume, however, it is possible to speak of a process of early modern globalization in which world trade was increasingly integrated (Figure 1.1).¹⁶

We are only beginning to take the full measure of the impact of colonial goods on European consumption.¹⁷ If the trade in rare luxury products such as spices and silk dominated early Eurasian trade—indeed, it was the holy grail of Asian spices that lured Columbus to America in the first place—that of a handful of semiluxury (or even “populuxe”) commodities from Asia and the Americas outstripped their predecessors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not that precious luxury goods destined for elites disappeared from the trade, but during the later stage, huge volumes of imported goods were consumed by Europeans of all sorts. The numbers speak for themselves. By the late eighteenth cent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1. The Globalization of European Consumption
• 2. The King Intervenes
• 3. The Making of a Smuggler
• 4. The Shadow Economy
• 5. Rebel Rebel
• 6. Triumph
• 7. The Would-Be General
• 8. Captured
• 9. The Execution of Louis Mandrin
• 10. Mandrin into Print
• 11. Smuggling in the Enlightenment
• 12. Revolution
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index