Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution

by Michael Sonenscher

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge , Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.


In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself.



Before the Deluge examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution.

Genres: History, Economics, French Revolution, France, Politics

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution; Works and Wages: Nature Law, Politics and the Eighteen-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

Reviews

[JR Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second time reading this brilliant but immensely complicated book.

Presaging Whatmore's "End of Enlightenment," the starting point of this book are the many predictions of public debt-fueled catastrophe and revolution that were a regular feature of 18th century discourse. However, Sonenscher draws attention to a problem all of these predictions face - unsustainable public debt was widely expected to cause a social revolution, but no one expected that a debt crisis would be the occasion for transforming a monarchy into a free state - a political revolution.

This is the central question of Sonenscher's book - why did the technical crisis of debt management cause French intellectuals to rethink the entire basis of French politics, giving rise to many of the core features of modern republics today? The French Revolution is often treated as the birth of modern politics, but Sonenscher is keen to use this question to render its political theory strange again - rather than reading 19th century political and intellectual vocabulary backwards into the causes and divisions of the Revolution, Sonenscher wants to treat the Revolution as fundamentally a series of attempts to solve an 18th century problem that has fallen out of view - namely how to prevent spiraling public debts generated by the logics of power politics and standing armies from destroying the nation.

In attempting to solve these problems, figuring out to whom exactly the public debt belonged and how to design a government capable of managing and maintaining public faith without in turn being captured by the monied interest, that French thinkers stumbled toward the foundations of modern politics. By starting with Abbe Sieyes and the representative system he tried and failed to establish in France, Sonenscher surveys the wide-range of attempts in 18th century France to grapple with these problems, from Montesquieu's ideas of monarchy, to the many permutations of physiocracy, and Rousseau's legacy. Many of these thinkers and ideas are familiar, but by placing their thought in the context of attempts to solve 18th century debt crises Sonenscher generates immensely surprising and rewarding interpretations. One ends the book with an immense sense of the gulf between the intellectual worlds of the 18th and 19th centuries. The radicalism of 1789, far from being pregnant with the Terror, was in a sense a last-ditch attempt to avoid the long predicted debt-fueled social revolution by designing a government capable of preserving both the public good and the nation's credit. The Jacobin solution, a rejection of public debt in favor of republic austerity and morality was by 1793 deeply anachronistic - a return to a Fenelonian vision that most thinkers had rejected by 1789.

But if on the one hand this book lays bare the deep gulf between the intellectual worlds of the 18th and 19th centuries (one exacerbated by the fact that the French Revolution and the dynamics of public debt confounded expectations), it also sheds new light on the emergence of some of the foundational ideas of modern politics, especially representation, the division of labor, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty. What Sonenscher reveals is rather than being abstract concepts that were the subject of philosophic contemplation, these concepts were introduced, refined, and made plausible by the dilemmas of public debt management. The most farsighted of the thinkers he traces (Sieyes especially) recognized the potential that a modern society organized by the division of labor (of which political representation is a subset) had to overcome the existential problems of a vast public debt by generating widespread economic prosperity and political stability.

These remarks do very little justice to the richness and depths of this book, but suffice to say it is impossible to look at the French Revolution (and 18th century intellectual history) the same after reading it.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be an extremely useful book if he weren't a terrible writer. As it is, I greatly appreciate his commitment to reading old texts by lesser-known authors, using these to contextualize the more famous works (eg. by Montesquieu and Rousseau), all while connecting their economic and political visions. Nevertheless, it's still frequently overwhelming, repetitive, & confusing.

[Yalaxie Vanilam]

intellectual history of public debt, inequality, credits and how they generated the conditions for the french revolution.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Almost, but not quite, entirely incomprehensible. An intriguing thesis poorly supported. Terms undefined. Words. Words.

Here's what I suspect Sonenscher is trying to say: The "modern idea of representative government," which was developed mainly by the abbé Sieyès, results from the eighteenth century's pervasive fear of public debt. European thinkers expected the growing public debt -- and the armies and bureaucrats that went with it -- to create military despotism (the déluge that so famously was going to be après). On the other hand, public credit was unavoidable; the alternative was a weak, defenseless state. So how could a state maintain modern credit without losing its virtue and freedom, or keep its virtue and freedom without losing its stability? Sieyès proposed a system of "representation" that supported social diversity but left sovereignty undivided. In this system, society could be meritocratic and divided, but administration need not be. Unlike eighteenth-century ideas about mixed government, Sieyès' proposal supposedly allowed for unity sovereignty; unlike absolutist or purely democratic theories, on the other hand, it allowed for systematic political limits.

That's pretty much all from the introduction. I have no idea what the rest of the book is on about.