Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde and the problematic nature of Indian-European exchange in the
later eighteenth century
The concepts of ‘interconnected’ or ‘global’ history have made significant inroads into several
historical disciplines, including amongst others economic, social, and material history, history of
science and the history of consumption. They have not yet, however, significantly impacted on the
history of ideas, and are, save for the odd exception, rarely considered in the realm of political
economy.1 This paper aims to provide a step towards achieving this by presenting a case study that
proves the crucial importance of India in the later eighteenth-century French evaluation of
commerce.
It is a general consensus amongst scholars of French eighteenth-century political economy to posit a
caesura around mid-century, after which a younger generation of lumières, philosophes, or
enlightened men of letters were said to have taken over. Some mark it with the publication of
Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1748, some with Rousseau’s first discourse of 1750, and it generally
coincides with a period of intensified warfare in Europe and abroad in the guise of the War of the
Austrian Succession, the Carnatic Wars, and the Seven Years War. It is usually depicted as marking a
transition from a period of general optimism amongst the Enlightened elite about the beneficial
powers of commerce and luxury to a more nuanced and sceptical one, or from a period of a
theoretical defence of trade and consumption, to a more critical interest in its practical
implementation.2
One very prolific writer however, spans both sides of the divide: Voltaire’s first publications on the
subject of commerce date from the 1720s, his last from the mid-1770s. His intervention and India’s
role within it, will be the subject of this paper.
Together with Melon and the young Montesquieu, Voltaire was one of the first authors to propagate
the Whiggish defence of commerce in France. Inspired by his stay in England, his contacts with the
merchant community there and his readings of Mandeville and the Spectator, he openly extolled
luxury and commerce from the 1730s onwards, and his optimism about their beneficial impact
explicitly included India on several occasions: see for instance quotes 1 & 2 on the handout.
In his increasingly sophisticated defence of luxury and trade he shared the views of several
Enlightenment political economists on both sides of the Channel. They can be classed into roughly
four interlinked arguments. Firstly, following Mandeville, almost all defenders of luxury adopted his
assertion that there can be no clear and stable definition of what constitutes luxury; that it cannot
be clearly differentiated from the necessary and is historically relative.3 Secondly, they link
commerce to man’s original sociability, so that commerce, sociability, and mutual benefit become
inseparable from each other.4 Thirdly commerce is associated with peace, prosperity, and progress,
with greater liberty, both political and personal, with urbanity, softer manners, taste, and a general
defence of modernity. It is opposed to barbarism, violence, bloodshed, and poverty, and thus, in
some writers, especially in Voltaire, becomes almost interchangeable with the concepts of
civilisation and Enlightenment.5 Finally, with the advent of the ‘caesura’ or the ‘second generation’,
we also see a greater nuancing, in the form of a widely-accepted differentiation between a ‘good’
1
A notable recent exception is for instance Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: globalization and the
French monarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
2
Sonenscher, Meysonnier, Shovlin, Clark, Hont
3
See Volt, Melon, Hume also Berry
4
Article forthcoming.
5
Karen O’B, Pomeau (histories)
and a ‘bad’ kind of luxury. This is best known in the writings of Hume and in Saint-Lambert’s
Encyclopédie article ‘luxe’, but Voltaire also developed this view and, especially in his great histories,
the Essai sur les moeurs and the Siècle de Louis XIV, he differentiated between a positive, ‘bourgeois’
type of luxury, and a noxious, ‘feudal’ type. The latter was associated with ostentation and a type of
society in which the luxury of the few was paid for by the misery of the masses. The modern kind of
luxury however, was associated with private, bourgeois consumption and based on personal
enjoyment and good taste. It was seen as giving employment to the masses and therefore leading to
general prosperity. It had all the connotations the defenders of luxury praised and that Albert O.
Hirschman has summarised as the ‘doux commerce’ thesis: refinement, urbanity, better taste and
manners improved by increased sociability and especially the influence of women, and on the
international level, peace and co-operation.6 Voltaire’s concept of modern, bourgeois commerce
thus became central to his depictions of progress, civilisation, and Enlightenment.7
India figures in these texts, as in quotations one and two on the handout, but it is never central to
the argument. There is however one text in which European trade with India is one of the main
preoccupations: the Fragments sur l’Inde et sur le général Lally. Written and published in 1773-1774,
they bring together, apparently unlinked, remarks on the European powers in India; Indian culture,
history, and religions; and a defence of the French general Lally, who, after an unsuccessful
campaign in India during the Seven Years War, was brutally executed on trumped-up charges of high
treason in 1766.
In the text commerce is still depicted as a central and crucial force for change. ‘It is merchants,’
Voltaire writes, ‘who have changed the face of the world.’ However the work also represents a
complete rejection of all of the assertions about commerce outlined before, which for decades had
been central to Voltaire’s concepts of Enlightenment and civilisation.
Whereas before commerce was claimed to promote peace, prosperity and happiness, as well as
liberty and thus human dignity, it was now linked to war, carnage and misery. The work opens with
the following remarkable passage, marked as quotation three on your handout:
As soon as India became a little known to the barbarians of the West and the North, she became the object of
her greed, and this became even more marked when these barbarians had become polished and industrious and
created new needs for themselves.
It is well known that hardly had we left the seas surrounding south and east Africa, we fought twenty Indian
nations of whose existence we had only just learnt. The Albuquerques and their successors only managed to
bring pepper and cloth to Europe by carnage. Our European nations only discovered America to devastate it and
to soak it in blood, in return for which they got cocoa, indigo, and sugar.
The condemnation seems an echo of that expressed by the mutilated Negro slave in Candide, who
pays the price for the Europeans' enjoyment of sugar. Together with the classic example of sugar,
the objects in questions are typical of the international luxury trade at the time. They link the fate of
India and the East Indies to that of America and the West Indies in one sweep: at this time most of
the cocoa and sugar consumed in Europe came from Central and South America and the West
Indies, whilst indigo, spices, pepper in particular, as well as fine fabrics, silks and calicoes, high-
6
Hirschman Cf Berry and Sekora
See John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), in which he argues that that 'the intellectual coherence of the Enlightenment may still
be found [...] in the commitment to understanding and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of
human betterment in this world' (p. 28). He identifies three strands in this endeavour, firstly the attempt to
understand and define human nature; secondly, questions of material betterment and political economy, so
much so in fact that 'political economy was the key to what the Enlightenment explicitly thought of as 'the
progress of society'; and thirdly the study of the progress and development of societies, the process of
civilisation (p. 29).
7
quality printed and painted cottons, were imported from India and the East Indies.8 What links all
these places is that they suffer so that Europe can enjoy. The stress is not laid on the pleasures and
sophistication resulting from luxury, but instead on the pain it causes, on greed and violence. The
suffering caused is gratuitous in the double sense. Luxury objects are not gained by commerce but
by war, the produce in question is 'bought' by devastation and bloodshed, Europe receives its
pleasures without giving back benefits of any form, they obtain them gratuitously. Trade is no longer
a ‘heureux échange’ as in the Mondain, it is no longer based on sociable mutuality and mutually
beneficial. The injustice is exacerbated by the fact that these are 'nouveaux besoins', they are not
necessary for survival, only sought out of greed, which makes the suffering itself gratuitous. Human
life and happiness are 'traded in' for trivial consumer goods, the barbarity of which is underlined by
the contrast of blood and devastation with sugar and cocoa.
The blame for this does not lie with the few 'Albuquerques' of this world, it lies squarely with those
who benefit from luxury, either through the profits from selling it, or through desiring and enjoying
it (this is quotation four on your handout): ‘Almost all these vast domains, these costly
establishments, all these wars undertaken to maintain them, were the fruit of the effeminacy of our
cities and the greed of our merchants, even more so than of the ambition of the princes.’. The
condemnation falls on the same bourgeois luxury with its traditional links to merchants urbanity, the
Mondain’s 'mollesse' which is best translated as effeminacy, which Voltaire had previously extolled.
In what seems a complete volte face of Voltaire's earlier position, the merchant no longer
contributes to the happiness of the world' as he had done in the Lettres philosophiques. Instead his
greed immediately contributes to global misery. Trade now results in war, devastation and
enslavement. This is quotation five on your handout: ‘The successors to the brahmins, to these
inventors of so many arts, to these lovers and arbiters of peace, have become our manufacturers,
our mercenary negotiators. We have devastated their land, doused it in our blood. [...] Our European
nations have destroyed one another in this same land to which we only came to look for money, and
where the first Greeks only travelled for learning.’ Unlike in the earlier defences of commerce,
where it was seen to foster peace, liberty, and the arts and sciences, it is now divorced from all
three, indeed directly opposed to them: Luxury and trade, here in the guise of money, are explicitly
contrasted to the arts and sciences or progress towards enlightenment, here summarised as
‘learning’. The successors of the bracmanes have to give up the arts and love of peace to accept a
position of servitude in commerce, and engaging in commercial activities, which Voltaire had
advocated as a certain way to personal independence and development during his English years, had
turned into the very opposite.
The anti-luxury argument is made most strongly in quotation six on your handout:
It’s to furnish the tables of the citizens of Paris, London and other large cities with more spices
than used to be eaten at the tables of princes; it’s to decorate simple townswomen with more
diamonds than queens used to wear for their coronation; it is constantly to infect one’s nostrils
with a disgusting powder, to fill oneself, following one’s fancy, with useless liquids unknown to our
forefathers, that an immense commerce has been established [...].We have always complained
about taxes, and often most justly so, but we have never considered that the biggest and harshest
of all taxes is the one we impose upon ourselves with our new delicacies which have become
necessities, and which in reality are ruinous luxury, even if we do not call them luxuries’
Luxury and commerce had been given critical connotations before, in the Essai sur les moeurs for
instance, but previously that was always because they were the wrong type of luxury, the ‘bad’,
feudal kind, not the beneficial, bourgeois luxury of enjoyment which spread universal opulence. This
is not the case here. For the very first time Voltaire attacked the very type of bourgeois, progressive
8 On this see for instance J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth
Century (London: Cardinal, 1974), pp. 59-61, 66-70, 92-100 and 374.
luxury which he had extolled for over four decades: the kind that, in the developments outlined in
the Essai sur les moeurs and the Siècle de Louis XIV, had passed from the exclusive domain of
'princes' and 'queens' to precisely those 'bourgeois', those ‘townswomen’ and ‘citizens’ mentioned
here. And even though some of it, such as jewellery, is perhaps ostentatious luxury, some is clearly
the luxury of comfort and enjoyment: condiments, tobacco, tea and coffee, the type that should
engender both sensual pleasure, refined taste, and immense commercial activity; just what Voltaire
had applauded in the Mondain.
Indian commerce is thus highly problematic. Colonial trade, involving slavery and forced labour had
not been considered true commerce by Voltaire, and thus, whilst despicable, did not threaten his
thought on commerce as civilisation. India however, as an old civilisation, a sovereign power which
had traded internationally for centuries, ought to have been an illustration of the benefits of
commerce as pointed to in the histories, the Mondain and the Lettres philosophiques. Instead, it
nullifies all four arguments that had marked the optimistic thought on commerce: Luxury now exists
as its own category and is to be condemned; this condemnation is comprehensive: there is no longer
any differentiation between an advantageous and a noxious kind of luxury; commerce is now
divorced from mutuality, sociability, peace and liberty; instead of promoting the arts and sciences,
civilisation and Enlightenment it is now a force for their opposite: debasement, violence, and
barbarity.
This utterly destroyed decades of Voltaire’s own arguments about commerce which had made it
absolutely central to his view of society, civilisation, and ultimately of ‘Enlightenment’. So the
obvious question is why? Why did he threaten his entire edifice of Enlightenment social thought?
I would suggest that the answer to this puzzle lies in the very nature of his Enlightenment project; in
its focus not only on political economy but also on a genuine cosmopolitanism, or, to put it into
contemporary slang, in its ‘globalism’. And to begin to solve the puzzle, the Fragments need to be
seen in their historical context.
A study of contemporary French writings reveals that Voltaire’s Fragments combine two current
debates in later eighteenth-century France, enlarging, however, both their horizons. Contemporaries
were preoccupied with the double problem of Indian trade on the one hand, and the link between
modern warfare and commerce on the other. In France, there were lively debates about both.
However, they were frequently considered as separate and treated from a Eurocentric if not
straightforwardly French point of view. The relative novelty of the Fragments consists in their
combination and in their extension towards a more cosmopolitan point of view.
The first consists of the more nuanced and critical attitude towards commerce and luxury adopted
after the above-mentioned caesura of the mid-century. Several distinguished scholars have analysed
the increasing French preoccupation with the worrying link between international commerce, state
debt, and warfare, which launched an acute desire for reform, especially after France’s dismal
performance in the Seven Years War (1756-63). Michael Sonenscher has pointed to the various
attempts by French eighteenth-century intellectuals to reconfigure the French and European
economy in order to solve the war-debt nexus.9 Like Istvan Hont, John Shovlin has pointed to an
increasing preoccupation with patriotism and agrarianism that went hand in hand with a rejection of
luxury-based commerce;10 and in his neo-Tocquevillian account, Henry Clark also points out how a
more positive view of the British-inspired model of commercial society endorsed by Melon, Voltaire,
and the Gournay circle amongst others, came, by the end of the Seven Years War, to be rejected in
favour of a more agrarian-based solution to the nation’s need for reform, as advocated by the
9
Sonenscher
10
physiocratic movement amongst others.11 Would-be reformers did indeed seek to recalibrate the
French economy and the role of international trade within it, and their preoccupation did, as in
Voltaire’s Fragments, often centre on the devastating effect of international warfare, but their focus
on this was the regeneration of France, not the situation of either of the two Indies. Traditionally,
starting with the abbé de Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual piece, and the eighteenth-century
revival of hopes for a Henry IV-style Grand Design,12 such reform programmes would include
solutions, economic or political, for a lasting European peace and balance of powers, but even in
those cases, more often than not, the perspective remained firmly Eurocentric.
Whilst Voltaire rejected such a nationalist perspective, he came to accept the link between greed,
speculation, trade, international rivalry, and warfare, and hence came to be much more critical in his
evaluation of both commerce and luxury. In line with contemporary fashion he adopted a much
more positive stance towards agriculture and began to style himself a ‘cultivateur’.13
However, there was a second ingredient to the stance espoused in the Fragments. There was
another, albeit partly linked, debate raging in France immediately preceding the publication of the
Fragments: a debate about French-Indian trade, or to be precise, about the nature and fate of the
French East India Company. Again we see Voltaire making use of some of the arguments brought
forward there, but again modifying them and expanding them to give them a more cosmopolitan
aspect.
The French East India Company had become nearly extinct after the Seven Years War and the
government considered abolishing its monopoly. To justify this, the then controller general, Maynon
d’Inveau, asked the philosophe and economist André Morellet to write a treatise against the
monopoly in 1769, which he duly did. The Mémoire sur la situation actuelle de la Compagnie des
Indes was written in the tradition of the Gournay circle to which Morellet belonged, and even
contained an essay by Gournay himself as an annexe. It provoked myriad responses and contributed
to the abolition of the Company’s monopoly in the same year, revealing widespread dissatisfaction
with the Company. When Morellet’s intervention came under fire, the physiocrat Dupont de
Nemours wrote to support the pro-abolition stance. His Du Commerce et de la Compagnie des Indes
which was also published in 1769 argues for France to cease all direct trade with India.
Voltaire was a friend of Morellet and applauded the Mémoire which he saw has having justly killed
off the company.14 Moreover, despite his general rejection of the Physiocratic movement, Voltaire
maintained a friendship with the physiocrat Dupont de Nemours whose views and works he openly
admired.15 Of undoubted importance for Voltaire’s Fragments was the clear link they established
between company trade and warfare. However, neither Morellet nor Dupont went as far as Voltaire.
Both their arguments were about the nature of the trade, in Morellet’s case the fact that it was
conducted under a monopoly, in Dupont de Nemours’ that it was conducted directly, whilst he
considered it best conducted indirectly by France, suggesting international commerce be best left to
trading nations such as Holland who would become the intermediaries for agricultural nations such
as France. Neither Dupont nor Morellet ever condemn all European-Indian trade as Voltaire had
done. Instead they considered it as bringing legitimate enjoyments to Europeans and as beneficial to
both parties involved, both having a mutual need of it.16
11
12
On this see for instance Sonenscher
13
14
Q Letters Copy in Library, annotations.
15
16
Morellet P. 186 Q, Dupont P. 20
Like perhaps only Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and unlike any of the above, Voltaire adopted a
genuinely cosmopolitan point of view. He took the arguments about the link between international
trade and warfare from the first debate and combined it with the analysis of the French-Indian trade
brought forward in the debate about the French East India Company. Voltaire, however, moved
away from a Eurocentric focus. If the effect of international commerce was war, it was no use to
build up France to a position to win those wars, be it through agriculturalism or through other
means, as the French reformist thinkers hoped to do. If another region, in this case India, would
suffer from international commerce, this commerce would remain immoral. Voltaire rejected a
patriotic point of view – if trade with India benefitted France it was to be continued – in favour of a
genuinely cosmopolitan or Enlightened one: if trade was harmful to either party it was in
contravention of the principles of mutuality, peace, and progress of civilisation that should mark true
commerce. Regardless of whether the injured party was one’s patrie or not, such trade must be
condemned.
The role of India in Voltaire’s philosophy of commerce thus proves two arguments at once. John
Robertson’s case about the centrality of political economy to the Enlightenment project, and Karen
O’Brien’s argument about the strongly cosmopolitan character of the Enlightenment.17 As such
Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde demonstrate the importance of a ‘global’ or indeed ‘interconnected’
approach to the study of the history of ideas in general and of political economy in particular.
17