Luxury

Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (b. Saumur, 1843–d. Paris, 1916) was a scion of an old Norman family who had initially styled themselves “Le Roy, sieurs de Beaulieu.” His father, Pierre, and grandfather, François, had both been mayors of Lisieux and served as conservative/monarchist deputies for the département of Calvados through stormy, revolutionary times. While Paul’s father appears to have died peacefully, his grandfather had been assassinated by Republican troops in 1799 at his manor house in the Norman village of Saint-Martin-de-Fresnay. Under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, Paul’s father, Pierre, was deputy for Calvados between February 1852 and September 1857, being defeated only when the government decided to drop him as its official candidate on account of his Orleanist sympathies.Paul’s elder brother, Anatole, was a prolific writer on political and economic questions. In 1881 he was elected professor of contemporary history and Eastern affairs at the École libre des sciences politiques, the forerunner of the present-day Institut d’études politiques de Paris (more commonly known as “Sciences po”). In 1906, he succeeded Albert Sorel as director of that institution.Paul himself was educated at the lycée imperial Bonaparte (now lycée Condorcet) and the École de Droit in Paris, before going on to further study at Bonn and Berlin. He made a reputation as a prize-winning essayist and a regular contributor to such publications as Le Temps, La Revue nationale, and La Revue contemporaine and in 1872 was appointed the first professor of finance at the aforementioned École libre des sciences politiques. A year later, he assumed the editorship of the weekly magazine L’Économiste français. In 1880, he succeeded to the chair of political economy at the prestigious Collège de France,1 and the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) describes him as “the leading representative in France of orthodox political economy, and the most pronounced opponent of protectionist and collectivist doctrines.”2The text translated here, the full title of which is “Luxury, The Function of Wealth. Part I: The Character and Variety of Wealth, Its Economic Role,” is the fifth and final section (94–100) of the first part of a study of luxury published in La Revue des deux mondes (The Review of the Two [“Old” and “New”] Worlds).3 While this particular section requires little in the way of exegesis, it may perhaps be useful to summarize briefly the general argument of Leroy-Beaulieu’s article.He begins by noting that the question of luxury has largely been monopolized by moralists: “The question of luxury cannot . . . be abandoned solely to the professors of moral science. Economists must maintain their interest in it” (72). Luxury is not, he contends, a matter “solely of precepts and rules for the edifying conduct of life” but one that concerns the production and distribution of wealth. Without directly charging Henri Baudrillart (the late professor of economic history at the Collège de France) with such moralism, it is noteworthy that Leroy-Beaulieu chooses this point to allude to his former colleague’s four-volume study of the history of luxury.4Having established the right of economists to rule on the subject, Leroy-Beaulieu essays a definition of luxury. In his view, it “consists in that part of the superfluous which exceeds what the broad mass of a country’s population considers essential, not only for the needs of existence but for the decency and agreeableness of life” (73). He stresses the relativity of the concept, arguing, in particular, that today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s “decencies,” adopting the English loanword specifically to emphasize the significance of an accepted social minimum that is pitched above the level of mere necessity (79). There is a form of trickle-down theory here: restricted luxury items are merely harbingers of a more general future prosperity; they are tokens of an economic progress that has not yet spread itself to the mass of the population but will inevitably do so.Allied to this argument is a contention (to which Leroy-Beaulieu devotes most of the third and fourth sections of his article [84–94]) that luxury as a phenomenon of the modern world is different from—and, in its disposition, far superior to—luxury as experienced in earlier societies: where more primitive peoples practiced ostentatious display for unproductive purposes of power and prestige, modern “civilized” luxury is conducive to economic advance, an increase in general comfort, and a flourishing of both industry and art. “There is no doubt a kind of crude, arrogant, absurd usage of luxury: it is that usage which seeks merely to dazzle the masses with sumptuousness and even to humiliate them. . .. The luxury of mere ostentation, such as a great display of useless valets, deserves to incur the wrath of public opinion.” However, the modern practice of luxury, which is not intended for the public sphere but is discreet and reserved and “does not create division between the various human classes,” is a thing of “good taste and good sense” and cannot properly be condemned by a “judicious man” (91).While Leroy-Beaulieu’s argument depends mainly on a shift of focus from a “moral” to an “economic” perspective, he nonetheless addresses the “political” critique of luxury directly. Here, two decades after the Paris Commune and France’s defeat by Prussia, he finds he has two criticisms to answer: first, that luxury increases inequality and intensifies class differences and, second, that it “softens” the population and hence exposes the state to danger. To the first contention, he replies that class divisions are actually diminishing, and in any case, inequality is not entirely a bad thing (“it is both the product and stimulant of civilization” [76]). And he counters the idea that human beings must inevitably be physically weakened by luxury with the observation that “in almost all the countries of Europe, insofar as physical exercise and acts of courage are concerned, the young men of the most aristocratic classes exhibit at least as much vigor and resolve as the men of other social strata.” With this he attempts to turn the tables—albeit in rather coded fashion—on left-wing critics, writing that “if civilization is threatened, it is so much less by the taste for an elegant life than by the poison of certain doctrines, by the intellectual and moral dilettantism which, among its practitioners, stands in no necessary relation to the enlightened taste for objects of luxury” (76).Strands of all these arguments reappear in the final section of the article, though the debate is shifted to a more “technical” level. Early in his piece, Leroy-Beaulieu had taken to task the Belgian socialist writer Émile de Laveleye (also recently deceased, and a prominent contributor, in an earlier period, to La Revue des deux mondes) for attempting to justify Rousseau’s dictum that “if there were no luxury, there would be no poor” by citing the example of the happy, egalitarian “valleys of Norway.” “If he had been a bit better versed in statistics,” wrote the French economist, “Laveleye would have seen that Norway is precisely one of the countries where indigence is proportionally most widespread” (78). Thus with statistics, “sound common sense,” and what perhaps seems a rather Whiggish view of history, Leroy-Beaulieu confidently confronts the “false arguments” and “gross economic errors” of earlier writers.Many economists, in their severe disapproval of luxury, have advanced quite false arguments and committed gross economic errors.The first of these, and by far the most widespread, is the following. The assumption is made, as it is by Rousseau and Montesquieu in the passages reproduced at the beginning of this article, that, if luxury did not exist, society would be far better provided with useful objects.5 If we did not consume a billion francs’ worth of luxury objects, the argument runs, then we could have a billion francs’ worth more of corn or potatoes or plain clothing. If some were not rich, then none would be poor. This reasoning is mistaken on two counts:This material was first published as section 5 of “Le Luxe. La Fonction de la Richesse. I. Caractère et variété du luxe. Son rôle économique” (“Luxury, The Function of Wealth. Part I: The Character and Variety of Wealth, Its Economic Role”), in La Revue des deux mondes (The Review of the Two [“Old” and “New”] Worlds), vol. 126 (1894): 72–100. Page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this article

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