Credit, Fashion, Sex

Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France by Clare Haru Crowston. Durhum, Duke University Press, 2013. xvii, 424 pp. $27.95 US (paper). Clare Crowston's ambitious, multifaceted study takes as its point of departure the centrality and polyvalence of a single tenn, within the society and culture of Old Regime France. Credit is hardly irrelevant to our own culture, of course, but its casual, non-financial meanings (I give him for trying) have little social resonance. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, by contrast, credit was ubiquitous in discussions of both and social life, especially among the elites. A nascent consumer economy hung in a delicate balance between debtors and creditors while at court and in (higher) society at large observers carefully tracked credit's circulation: who had it, lacked it, who was losing, gaining, or squandering it. In a telling detail, Crowston cites the Abbe Prevosfs 1743 translation of Samuel Richardson's Pamela which renders the phrase My poor parents are so low in the world as Mes parens sont si pauvres et ont si peu de dans le monde (p. 40): where the English text identifies social location punctually, the French version defines lowliness as a lack of interpersonal connections and resources. Crowston argues, convincingly, that the many meanings of deserve our attention because they direct us to the ways in which the economy and society of early modern France actually functioned, often in opposition to official values and hierarchies. While failure to pay one's debts was officially frowned upon, constituted a normal state of affairs in a culture where commercial exchange was not a singular transaction but a process extending over time (p. 175). And in spite of rigid official hierarchies, credit (a reputation for style, charisma, and significant social capital) allowed for the deployment of individual virtuosity by marginal figures such as women and social upstarts. Historiographically, Credit, Fashion, Sex represents an exercise in breaking down barriers. Tracking, through the term the importance of reputation, belief and information in the exercise of socio-economic power, Crowston seeks to bring together domains of early modern French history usually studied in isolation from each other: court culture, artisanal practices, business history, fashion and style. Methodologically, the author also takes on a central challenge facing cultural historians since the 1990s, that of connecting cultural concepts and practices within the same study. The result is mostly convincing, and, even when it involves some big leaps in subject matter, always fascinating. The book's opening chapters range widely over seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts to establish both the meaning of and the attacks directed at it. Precisely because it did not map onto conventional social hierarchies--not all members of the royal family enjoyed an abundance of it--credit was obsessively tracked by the likes of the Duke of Saint-Simon and other court chroniclers and simultaneously denounced by critics of high society. To have great credit, wrote the Baron d'Holbach in 1773, ... is to be able to do wrong and insolently flaunt justice and law (p. 56). Some, like Charles Pinot Duclos objected to because its operation reinforced existing hierarchies; others objected because it allowed illegitimate actors such as women access to the levers of power

Casual · Creditor · Debt · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law