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THE BODY and SOCIETY in EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Joseph D. Bryan a Dissertation Submitted To View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository DAZZLED, BLINDED, & NUMB: THE BODY AND SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Joseph D. Bryan A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Jay M. Smith Kathleen DuVal Lloyd S. Kramer Terence V. McIntosh Donald M. Reid ©2016 Joseph D. Bryan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Joseph D. Bryan: Dazzled, Blinded, & Numb: The Body and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Under the direction of Jay M. Smith) One of the defining features of eighteenth-century France was a pervasive anxiety over the possible collapse of the hierarchical and corporate social order. Although influenced by a variety of political and cultural crises, contemporaries often channeled blame for the tenuous state of society to the increase in commercial activity and the effects of luxury. While historians have recently used this anxiety as a key to explore innovative social thinking, they have often neglected two fundamental aspects of eighteenth-century culture. First, opponents of luxury did not simply put forward abstract moral critiques; their criticisms stemmed from the increasing availability of “superfluous” material goods, the noticeable expansion of social activities, such as public leisure and shopping, and new understandings of social interaction through practices of civility, taste, and refinement. The attention given to unprecedented forms of behavior is indicative of a larger point: the notion of society itself as a realm of human independence and interdependence was being invented. Religious and political boundaries circumscribing the "social" had been loosened. Commerce challenged the foundations of Old Regime society, luxury confused the symbols that represented the Old Regime socio-political hierarchy, and a wide range of writers envisioned new roots for society based either on the harmonizing capacity of individual interests, the innate human quality of sociability, or the vague concept of social utility. iii Second, and more important, historians have neglected the critical physiological aspect of contemporary confrontations with the increasingly-unsteady social order. There is a marked presence of physiological language in eighteenth-century socio-political writing; science, however, was more than a convenient idiom. In attempting to understand novel human interaction, writers appropriated evidence about the passions, the sensibility of nerves, and the organisation of the body. I propose that it was through the body, and the body’s capacity to “feel,” that many thinkers understood, argued over, and ultimately constructed new social institutions and forms of social interaction. Explaining the relationship between bodies—human bodies, material goods, specks of matter—became the key to understanding society. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I planted the roots of this dissertation at N.C. State University under the guidance of K. Steven Vincent, Anthony La Vopa, William Kimler, and Keith Luria. Through conversations ranging from Roger Chartier to Roger Federer, punk rock to Nicholas Malebranche, they nourished my intellectual interests and prepared me for the rigors of a PhD program. At UNC, Jay Smith took up the task of four individuals and has been an unending source of inspiration. I cannot imagine holding another individual in higher esteem. His tireless efforts as an advisor, historian, and critic of his own university have set an admirable standard for resilience, brilliance, and robust character. I would like to also thank the members of my dissertation committee: Lloyd Kramer, Don Reid, Kathleen DuVal, and Terry McIntosh. Their insight and encouragement have taught me what it means to be a thoughtful and respectable academic. Dr. Kramer and Dr. Reid both kindly wrote letters of recommendation at various stages of the dissertation process and served as mentors for two of my three comprehensive exams. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous Jeanne Marandon Fellowship sponsored by the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique, which afforded me two research trips to France in 2011 and 2012. To become embedded in French intellectual culture through the Archives nationales and Bibliothèque nationale de France was exciting and edifying. North Carolina is virtually equidistant from France and Billings, Montana, where I now live and work. For the first thirty years of my life, I was raised and educated between Henderson, Wilmington, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, NC. North Carolina will always be home and v Paris will always be Paris, but I am lucky to be able to call Billings, Montana home as well. The transition has been made easier by the Lynn family, especially Lorrie and Richard Lynn and Jessica and Zac Rodne. I wrote the entirety of this dissertation in Montana, employed as a part- time instructor and now University Lecturer at Montana State University Billings. While Dr. Smith has shepherded me through this process from afar, Dr. Keith Edgerton has become a guide and a friend. Whether canoeing down the Missouri River, reading bloated chapters on the Physiocrats, or acting as a surrogate father to my wife at our wedding, Keith has welcomed me into the university, the city, and the vast expanses of the state. Lenette Kosovich has filled my belly too many times to count. Together, Keith and Lenette are amazing human beings and have cultivated an enduring home for my wife and me. Thanks to the many friends who read various facets of this dissertation and helped give shape to my thoughts: Jenifer Parks, Tim Lehman, Danell Jones, Ana Diaz, Tom Nurmi, Greg Mole, Julia Osman, George Gerolimatos, Laura Sims, Brad Proctor, Chris Wood, Spencer Delbridge, and Todd Frei. Todd, I am not sure if you know this, but you were the person I needed in 1999. Thanks for demonstrating to me that the library is more important than Pabst Blue Ribbon and that Lockean conceptions of primary and secondary qualities are worth discussing. Every day my wife Jen Lynn serves as a model of academic integrity and humane goodness. Urbane and silly, sharp and witty, she is exactly the person I want to be. She provides confidence when mine is flagging and sketches depicting the mundane when I am humorless. Most importantly, she constantly assures me that snakes cannot jump, climb trees, or thrive in winter. Whether real or metaphorical snakes, I like my chances with her. To my parents, who believed in me unconditionally, I finally got my mind right. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 From Metaphor to Ontology: The Bodies of Eighteenth-Century France………………...1 Bodies Beyond Metaphor…………………………………………………………………2 Challenges to the Corporate Social Order: Commerce and “Society”……………………5 The Primacy of the Corporeal………………………………………………....................11 PART I: EMBODYING SOCIETY: FROM SOCIAL STRUCTURE TO SOCIAL BODIES…22 CHAPTER ONE: THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY AND THE BODY POLITIC…………...25 The Social Structure of Early-Modern France…………………………………………...25 The Human Body and the Body Politic………………………………………………….30 CHAPTER TWO: INVENTING AND EMBODYING SOCIETY……………………………..54 Inventing Society………………………………………………………………………...55 The Language of the Body and the Senses………………………………………………69 Embodying Society: Diderot, the Blind, and Natural Law………………………………80 CHAPTER THREE: THE NATURAL LAW OF FEELING BEINGS…………………………87 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SOCIAL IMAGINATION…………………………………………..107 The Corporate Body Unravels: Abolition of the Guilds (1776)………………………..108 Corporeal Concerns and Public Health…………………………………………………117 PART II: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CORPOREAL CRITIQUE OF LUXURY….127 CHAPTER FIVE: THE FRENCH ECONOMY AND CONSUMER CULTURE…………….130 The Political Economy of France………………………………………………………131 vii The Culture of Consumption…………………………………………………………...142 CHAPTER SIX: THE CORPOREAL CRITIQUE OF LUXURY……………………………..152 La Querelle du Luxe…………………………………………………………………….154 The Corporeal Critique of Luxury……………………………………………………...168 Effeminacy and la Mollesse…………………………………………………….170 The Problem of Représentation………………………………………………...179 The Processes of Corporeal Decay……………………………………………..189 CHAPTER SEVEN: “CET ÉTAT D’ÉTOURDISSEMENT CONTINUEL”: (DIS)EMBODYING SOCIETY IN PHYSIOCRACY…………………………………212 Physiocratic Political Economy………………………………………………………...215 Marquis de Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes (1756-1758)………………………………..222 “Notre molle urbanité”: Mirabeau and Quesnay’s “Traité de la monarchie”…………..238 Physiocracy, or (Dis)embodying Society………………………………………………250 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………273 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………286 viii Introduction From Metaphor to Ontology: the Bodies of Eighteenth-Century France In 1789, the anonymous author of Principles of Government simplified and reduced to seven natural units, conditions for a good Constitution reimagined French politics through a body-politic metaphor: What we call the constitution of the human body is the totality, the intimate union of all the parts; they say that a man is ‘well-constituted’ when he enjoys a healthy, vigorous organization, without deformity...It must be the same for a political body. But the human body has only one head to watch over the preservation of all its limbs…Thus it is the nation, which created the head that it has
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