© 2019 Alice Louise Brown LES HISTOIRES FRANÇAISES D’AVARICE JUSQU’AUX TEMPS MODERNES

© 2019 Alice Louise Brown LES HISTOIRES FRANÇAISES D’AVARICE JUSQU’AUX TEMPS MODERNES BY ALICE LOUISE BROWN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Emanuel Rota, Chair Professor Nancy Blake Professor Jean-Philippe Mathy Associate Professor Eleonora Stoppino ABSTRACT This study is an intellectual and cultural history of greed with emphasis on the impact religious and political change had on the concept of avarice from the mid 15th to the beginning of the 18th century. I trace how the evolution of the thinking of crucial French writers contributed to a new categorization of the notion of avarice, translated as either greed or cupidity in the early modern era. Contextualizing greed as discussed by the canon of early modern writers enables us to understand how the concept of avarice played a crucial role in the economic and political debates in France and throughout Europe, and the impact it ultimately had on the larger Mediterranean and Atlantic world. Greed transitions from a sin of overconsumption into one of over-accumulation. This shifting paradigm is crucial to shape our understanding of the longevity of the vice in Western thought. While the concept of greed appeared to become more stable over time, its recurrence did not mean avarice maintained the same status in literature or in French society at large. My dissertation explores the notion of greed not only in terms of its moral and religious implications, but historical and anthropological ones as well. From Christine de Pizan to Michel de Montaigne and Molière, source authors provide insight into key moments in the transformation of greed when they argue religious and political justifications were permuted to condone avaricious behavior in the name of self-interest or collective societal good. A dialectical relationship emerges in which these canonical authors participate. Their literature is neither an echo of history nor a mechanical reflection of the economic and social realities to which it refers. The trajectory of this evolution was by no means linear. I examine the debate on avarice between Protestants and Catholics through the works of poets including Clément Marot and Pierre de Ronsard, though many of their conjectures remained unresolved. In my dissertation, I demonstrate how this transition from over-consumption to over-accumulation is inherently linked to the revaluation of ethics and normative changes in societal attitudes towards expressions of greed, in particular concerning the expansionist policies articulated in early modern Europe. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PROLOGUE.....................................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: LA NOTION D’AVARICE CHEZ CHRISTINE DE PIZAN..................................................8 CHAPTER 2: MAROT ET RONSARD.......................................................................................................25 CHAPTER 3: MONTAIGNE ET L’AVARICE ............................................................................................62 CHAPTER 4: LES TRANSITIONS AU SEUIL DE LA MODERNITÉ ......................................................84 EPILOGUE...................................................................................................................................................107 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................117 iii PROLOGUE Greed is described as an emotion driven by the desire to further other ends, especially in terms of wealth accumulation. I look at greed in terms of the intellectual history of capitalism but also in light of literary and cultural evolution examined by contemporary scholars, inheriting Marx and Weber’s tradition on the origins of the notion of greed and rise of capitalism. One who has greater wealth has more opportunities to show how he distributes it. The industrialist can for example “feed” others, by allowing them to work and thus generate wealth. But at the same time, he has far greater opportunities to hoard wealth, to hide that he exploits others in order to earn his wealth, and increase his personal capital through large-scale production. Through the analysis of literary sources, religious and philosophical treatises, I show how the evolution of social mores reflects the changing attitudes towards greed from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. My goal is to reconstruct how the material and the imaginary were both crucial to connect the literary and philosophical debate that links early modern literature with the transformation of the notion of greed in Europe given the often-complex causal relationship between literature and history. My thesis is that despite its inherent stability, the notion of greed was profoundly altered over time due to religious change. It is the dissolution of religious unity that exposes the notion of greed to political, economic and literary debates including the polemics between Protestants and Catholics during the Wars of Religion. The relationship of early modern authors to vice in general and greed in particular is transformed, triggered by profound religious changes over the course of the 16th century. Greed becomes a crucial element of a debate at the critical moment when the religious unity of Europe was fractured, and the very definition of avarice as one of the seven capital sins became a political weapon. I highlight authors who are both contributors and anti-contributors to the evolution of thinking about greed, and explore major discursive fractures in early modern France. These writers depict the movement from a consensus-based society that relies on a fixed notion of greed into a dynamic society where conflicts are viewed in a more positive light. Part of how empires emerge across Europe is the move away from economic and social uniformity to independent states that check one another. The formation of modern states is largely based upon the need to 1 create peace from the polemics that arise over political and social conflict, disputes often caused by wealth differentials such as property ownership and competition for resources. Hence, economic stability is replaced by a dynamic market of buyers and sellers, in which checks and balances are used to usher in the break from social unity to a more polemical climate. Potential vice will instead be embraced as something that creates dynamism. Each of my four chapters examines a step in this trajectory looking at how canonical authors inherit ideas from the past that we can use to explain the principles, myths, doctrines, and institutions of how society functions in relation to greed. Our theoretical framework is generated from the writings of Marx, Weber, and Smith to depict the advent of early capitalism and then later through Gramsci’s cultural ideology of wealth. Wealth is what drives avarice, or rather the presence of capital as termed by Marx. Money, landownership, or the possession of other commodities creates political and social influence in society through economics. By the 18th century, this perceived metamorphose of the cultural representation of wealth on the eve of the Industrial Revolution coincides with Bernard Mandeville’s observance that the engine of vice, formerly categorized as greed, would subsequently morph into self-interest. Later these ideas will be revisited through the ideology of wealth for Antonio Gramsci, working in the framework of the normative rules established by 19th century bourgeoise, and also serve as the basis for Weber’s investigation in The Protestant Ethic. Working in the Marxist tradition, and drawing on the work of Georg Zimmel, and more recently Marcel Hénaff, Jacques Le Goff, Jotham Parsons (Making Money in Sixteenth Century France, 2009) all wrote about the transformations of the money economy but not specifically avarice. In the past decade, Ryan Balot, Richard Newhauser, and Jonathan Patterson have addressed greed within certain historical periods, but restrict their chronology to a few hundred years (Ancient Greece, Latin Middle Ages, and 16th century France, respectively). My research differs from previous studies in several important ways. First it seeks to explain how greed was used as a weapon in the social dynamics of polemics between Protestants and Catholics during the Wars of Religion (whereby accusations hurled by both sides accusing the other of heresy). Condemning their opponents of heresy for their lascivious greed. This was particularly important for Calvinists who were tied to the notion of the Word as truth. Second, I look at the economic implications of greed in the social and religious dynamics between different communities, including the role of Jews as merchants, and 2 often intermediaries between Protestant and Catholic communities in the Reformation era. What factors determine the change in the economic and political landscape of Europe as the Hapsburg Empire weakened and mercantilism increasingly pressured the courts of Europe towards more protectionist stances (e.g. Spain’s turning it’s attention towards the New World beginning in the 1580s or the control of shipping lanes, ports, waterways, access in the Mediterranean)? However, while many of the attitudes towards greed

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