Nature's Evil

Quesnay was Louis XV’s physician, and he treated Madame de Pompadour, the king’s official mistress. It was the moment when the ladies of the beau monde took a great interest in agriculture, particularly in dairy farming. The marquise de Pompadour had several pavilions – hermitages – where well-groomed farmers kept their cows on Italian marble floors and stored cheese in Chinese porcelain. Quesnay prescribed fresh milk and promenades as a cure for the marquise’s fevers, hysteria and frigidity. Together, they held a ‘salon’ for physiocrat economists and enlightened philosophers. Their shared interest in the problems of grain production was akin to the interest that the ladies of the court took in dairies. The philosophers and the favourites discussed agricultural improvements, the rotation of crops, fertilisers and grain prices. 1 Disillusionment with colonial adventures led them to switch their interest from sugar to wheat and from coffee to milk. This was the early Versailles version of going back to one’s roots. But romantic contemplation did not prevent the colonial adventures continuing.

The physiocrats were very familiar with the disaster in the French West Indies. Some of them contributed to Raynal’s History of the Two Indies . The chevalier de Mirabeau, the younger brother of the more famous marquis, served as the governor of Guadeloupe during the Seven Years’ War. Not subject to common law, the French West Indies were ruled directly by the minister for the navy. The exclusif mercantile regime meant that planters could transport their sugar only on French ships and only to France. In the quarter century after the Seven Years’ War the black population of the French West Indies doubled: in 1789 there were as many slaves on these islands as in the whole of the American states. In that revolutionary year the French treasury received an eighth of its revenue from the plantations, a sum comparable to the poll tax paid by all the peasants in France. Created by distant slaves, this income stream reduced the dependence of the king on his peasants – a goal of every autocrat since the time of Gilgamesh. But smuggling and piracy flourished on the islands. The price of sugar was already falling. The planters, many of them Huguenots who had fled from France, were moving to the American continent. Both Mirabeau brothers believed that the root of evil was to be found at Versailles. While the younger Mirabeau was serving as governor in Guadeloupe, the elder one languished in a Paris prison because of his writings. Then the governor returned to France and shared his bitter experiences with the Quesnay circle. 2

The most important institution in the mercantile regime was customs – the direct source of governmental revenue connecting the Treasury with the colonies. It so happened that some of the leading intellectuals of the Enlightenment doubled as customs officials, and this service provided them with material for their critical theories. The father of English philosophy, John Locke, began his career in their majesties’ customs service, as secretary of the board of trade and plantations. Charles Davenant wrote his books on trade, war and colonies while employed over three decades as a senior excise officer. Adam Smith, a propagandist for free trade, served as a member of the Scottish Customs Commission. The father of Russian political thought, Alexander Radishchev, served as the head of customs in St Petersburg. Leaving us an apt summary of the complexity of the job, he wrote: ‘My satisfaction was transformed into indignation such as I feel when in summer time I walk down the customs pier and look at the ships that bring us the surplus of America and its precious products such as sugar, coffee, dyes and other things, not yet dry from the sweat, tears and blood that bathed them in their production.’ 3