ILLICIT CONSUMPTION, SMUGGLING, AND THE FRENCH STATE: TOILES PEINTES AND ASIAN
TEXTILES 1680-1760
Slide 1
To start
 Thanks for invitation / org
 Acknowledgements: Part of Europe’s Asian Centuries... funded by ERC (hence logos)
 Paper is based on part of book : Global Trade, Smuggling, & the Making of Economic
Liberalism: Asian Textiles in F 1680-1760, hence would appreciate any feedback
The Paper
 ‘Illicit consumption, Smuggling, and the F state: toiles peintes and Asian textiles and,
1680-1760’ very much does what it says on the tin: Slide 2
o I.Introduction will briefly introduce the problem, namely The French State or
more precisely: the rise of Economic Liberalism within its own administration;
Part II. Asian Textiles; III. Smuggling; IV. Illicit Consumption; V. Conclusion or:
The French State and Economic Liberalism (again)
Part I: The French state, or more precisely: the rise of Economic Liberalism, or even more
precisely: the Gournay circle
Recent decades: change in narrative of rise of Economic Liberalism
 Used to be: real starting point was Adam Smith with his one important precursor,
the physiocrats
 Now: addition of Gournay circle as precursor and alternative to physiocrats in midC18 France
Gournay circle Slide 3 – here are some of its members
 No unified doctrine or sys, but geared towards practical action.
 Group of people loosely gathered around Vincent de Gournay, intendant of
Commerce who worked in close cooperation with Trudaine, leading reformer and
administrator.
 Gournay more of animator than leader: group read and translated GB texts on pol
econ and added their own to lobby - both within the royal administration, in the Rep
of Letters, and in wider public sphere - for greater freedom and status of French
trade and industry
 First great success both in terms of publicity and in effecting fundamental change in
government policy, was when in 1759 the group was instrumental in reversing the
ban on the importation, production, retail, and usage of Asian and Asian-style
printed and painted textiles which had been in place for over 70 years. -> This first
victory of Econ Lib in F = what this paper is about -> how did they manage to win the
argument that the ban be repealed? Or: What role did Asian trade play in this first
victory of Economic liberalism
1
The ban in question
 After the so-called ‘callico craze’ of the later C17, France was not unique in imposing
a ban on these Indian fabrics that had proved so popular with consumers that they
threatened already established woollen, linen, and silk industries. Between the
1680s and the 1720s several European countries, Britain and F most notably
amongst them, imposed full or partial import bans. BUT: France was the only one to
impose such a total ban, which included also the production in France itself of any
printed or painted textile, known there as toiles peintes or, due to their Indian origin,
as indiennes. And in regular petitions the F silk lobby in partic made sure that the gov
new how important this total ban was to their survival
 Now that we know what this ban was – question is: how did the liberals manage to
get rid of it -> two parts to this question: Why they could do so; and How they
managed to do it
o Why they could so = again twofold question
 What were the specific characteristics of these textiles that made
them so desirable as to make the prohib useless?
 How was the culture of smuggling and consumption of these textiles
different from those of other smuggled global goods?
o How they could do so: again two sides to answer
 State’s success effort to get both codified knowledge and actual
workers versed in the production processes that made the textiles so
unique
 Successful public relations campaign
Focus in this paper = on why they could do so, i.e. on the nature of these textiles and on the
characteristics of their smuggling and consumption in F
Part II: Asian textiles Slide 4
They liberals’ heaviest weapon in their public relations campaign was Abbé André Morellet,
who in his Réflexions Sur Les Avantages de La Libre Fabrication Et de L'Usage Des Toiles
Peintes En France set out why the prohibition had to be repealed.
Propose in this paper to find out what his arguments were and, more importantly whether
they were actually true.
He was right in his explanation for the popularity of these kinds of printed textiles.
According to him: two reasons
 Good value (very cheap to buy even for the poorest members of society AND: unlike
anything Europeans could produce, Indian and Levantine printed and painted textiles
had bright colours that resisted fading in sunlight and were washable)
 Fashion: example set by the ladies of the court
Seems contradictory, but wasn’t: India produced for very wide market:
 Top end: very fine hand-painted see here
2

Lowest end: Slide 5 : Indian cheap, Levantine cheap, cheap European imitations (still
bright and colourful, cheap to buy and therefore also allowed buyers to replace
them more often and thus to follow changing fashions - Riello)
This explains why people continued to want them and, as Morellet pointed out, as long as
there was demand, there would be smuggling, and indeed there was.
Part III: Smuggling
Won’t go into the details and mechanisms of the smuggling of these textiles into France
here, suffice it to say that when Morellet said that ‘Smuggling was constant across all of
France’s borders’ he was right:
 Textiles were smuggled out of the French East India Company’s warehouses,
smuggled off-board their ships, or indeed landed secretly by smaller vessels all along
Frances northern and eastern sea-borders.
 They were smuggled out of the regions which for peculiar political reasons were
actually permitted to produce such goods, in particular Avignon, Orange, and
Marseille, as well as, towards the end of the period, Mulhouse.
 And, most importantly, they were smuggled across Frances eastern land-borders,
especially in the wooded and Alpine regions.
This could be the explanation for why the liberals managed to overturn the ban -> to stop
huge amount of smuggling which often involved armed gangs and, even when it didn’t
resulted in many hundreds of small-scale smugglers wasting their lives in the galleys.
However: whilst no doubt that there was a huge amount of smuggling: smuggling was
endemic in ancien régime France anyway -> so the question is, how important was this
textile smuggling compared to other commonly smuggled goods, namely tobacco and salt?
 Morellet: those fabrics in themselves and on their own as important as salt and
tobacco -> beautifully ambiguously phrased as not to be clear whether as imp as salt
and tobacco together or as each.
 Important argument in his work is loss and waste of hundreds of lives: of smugglers
who end up dead or in the galleys and of the employés des fermes, the paramilitary
organisation of tax and customs officials who policed France’s borders and who
could instead, according to Morellet, be employed in a manner more beneficial to
the country and the economy.
 Turns out, however, that Morellet’s argument was wrong: Slide 6
Table:
 Source: Convictions of the most important of the tribunals specially set up by the F
gov to deal with cross-border smuggling in the East of France, the Commission de
Valence.
 Archives dép du Drôme hold: 326 posters of printed judgements, usually of one
verdict of one or more smugglers each, though sometimes these posters could list
more than one verdict. They cover the period from 1733, date of the Comissions's
creation to 1771, but are most dense for the first 10 years of the Commission's
existence (199 cover the period September 1733-September 1743 = over 60%),
hence sample here. Tribunal delivered reprimands, fines, and verdicts of whipping,
3


exile, galleys, hanging and death on the wheel. In total it delivered 631
condemnations to galleys, 135 death sentences. First 199 folios selected here total =
380 condemnations
What categories mean: Legislation: Declaration du Roi 2 August 1729: 5+ & armed =
death and all possessions confiscated; fewer than 5 and no arms: 5 yr galleys and
1000 lt as fine; violence towards authorities etc even if fewer than 5: death;
employés des fermes, i.e. the border force of tax officials who were to stop
smuggling, who coop with smugglers and let them pass: death. if they are found with
smuggled goods: 5 yrs galleys and fine. Women get whipped, branded with fleur de
lis and/or exiled but not executed. If village doesn't ring tocsin when smugglers go
past, 500 livres d'amende. (and there was a case of a whole village being fined in
May 1743.
Armed smuggling, really did mean violence – and that violence was sometimes on an
almost epic scale, with several dozen, and sometimes several hundreds of smugglers
on horseback battling the brigades of the fermes.
What these numbers reveal, however, contradicts Morellet’s assertion of the importance of
these textiles in smuggling
 They show: textiles were negligible: only turned up, on their own or smuggled
together with other items, in 3% of all cases, as opposed to the most important:
Tobacco which cropped up in almost 80% of all cases or Salt, which still made up for
a more substantial 14%.
 Nor were they in any way associated with more violent forms of smuggling, that
might indicate that they were more a threat to law and order than other goods
smuggled.
So it can’t have been the extent of smuggling that made it possible for the liberals to win the
argument -> I would suggest that the answer instead lay in the nature of the consumption of
these fabrics
Part IV Consumption
Two things differentiated printed and painted textiles from other smuggled goods:
1) their consumption was immediately obvious: one would need to check to verify
whether the tobacco, salt, or wine somebody was consuming in a caberet or at
home was smuggled or not -> not so with these textiles: since all printed and painted
textiles were illegal, offenders were easy to spot
2) their consumption took place very much in the public eye: they were being worn,
not at home and in secret but out on the street, and they were being worn there
almost exclusively by the weaker sex and nothing, not repeated legislation, not
arrests, not fines, not prison sentences seemed capable of stopping them.
And they were arrested in their droves:
 The imposition and policing of the ban on the import, production, retail and wearing
of such fabrics was the largely responsibility of the employees of the Fermes, the
private tax and customs collecting authorities who also had the monopoly over all
4



tobacco imports and sales and imposed the salt tax. (exceptions but then became
their repsonsibil)
They were stationed not only at France’s external and internal borders but sedentary
brigades were stationed in the major towns and cities where they controlled entries
and exits at the city gates and mobile brigades patrolled cities and countryside and
visited houses or workshops usually after tip-offs.
When they did patrol the streets, they stopped people wearing these fabrics, wrote
an official report, or procès-verbal, which would form the basis for their eventual
conviction by the Parisian chief of Police or the Intendants of the provinces.
Pour encourager les autres these convictions were then often printed on posters,
which were displayed prominently and read out to the sounds of trumpets. -> didn’t
stop anybody, but they survived in archives and are a great source for a bit of
quantitative work, namely for this table:
This table reveals the strongly gendered nature of the problem as well as its persistence
over time Slide 7
 In the majority of cases the data is extracted from printed Ordonnances, which,
based on the official police reports or ‘procès verbaux’ that lead to the conviction,
list the convicted offenders, giving names and details of their crime, i.e. of the illegal
textile item in question, and usually also note their occupation and address.
 They frequently also mention where the offenders were spotted – on the street, in
their shop, at a window – and tend to give a fairly detailed description of the item or
items in question, noting colours, motifs, and sometimes quality. Thus the
Ordonnance from Paris of 17 May 1730 lists amongst other: ‘the Demoiselle la
Genne, seen at the butchers dressed in an all new casaquin of white background
with large brown flowers and red stripes; the servant girl of Mr Dumaille,
winemerchand in the Rue Coquiliere, seen by the door of the shop dressed in a
casaquin of toile peinte with white background and red flowers; and the wife of Mr
Boite, employee of the Compagnie des Indes, domiciled at the Carrefour de l’Ecole,
seen by the window dressed in new Toile peinte.’
 The largest data set however, that of the Provence from 1743 and 1759, is of a
slightly different type. It is extracted from a single document, a hand-written
compilation of over a dozen Etats, which had been drawn up to suggest moderations
to the fines imposed on the convicted individuals and were successively sent to the
Controller General for approval between 1743-59. They list the name, place, date,
and details of the offence, often also included remarks to justify the proposed
moderation.
The numbers are crystal clear on one thing: women made up for the vast majority of those
arrested for infraction of the textile ban. There is a threefold explanation for this.
1) Men don’t wear these textiles in the street: When men wore printed and painted
fabrics they, like their counterparts across the Channel, generally did so in the form
of banyans, housecoats or robes de chambre. These would, as the name implied,
generally be worn as a form of déshabillé at home, and whilst women sometimes left
the house in what officially counted as déshabillé, men would rarely do so. And since
the tax officials usually only entered homes on specific assignments, men were more
5
rarely caught. Accordingly, fifteen out of the eighteen men charged in Ingrandes
were indicted for ownership of a robe de chambre, two of the remaining having
owned furnishing items, namely a courte-pointe or quilt, as well as one unmade-up
piece. The many male arrests in Ingrandes are however very unusual. They seem to
stem from a systematic search of the possessions of military officers passing through
– very few of them were locals. This one unusual instance means that the overall
figures for the north have a stronger representation of men than usual. They are
nevertheless are representative, however, in that the male ownership itself consists
in the vast majority of the very typical robes de chambre.
2) Men do retail as much as women, but retail was generally considered a different
offence and was hence recorded and judged differently: All but one of the men
convicted in Paris, had been found wearing a robe de chambre. The exception was
one man who had been caught with a suitcase containing female garments made out
of printed or painted fabrics. And whilst he may have been innocent of actually
seeking to sell these, such was nevertheless the second category of men found in
possession of illicit fabrics. These account for the vast majority of male offenders in
the Provence: they were not wearing Asian textiles but were caught with varying
amounts of fabrics in bales or pieces. This is however exceptional: in earlier years
and in the whole of France, those found guilty of retail and production rather than
just of wearing and possession were convicted separately and hence do not figure in
these statistics.
3) Finally, the third type of male ownership of those textiles, namely for the purpose of
furnishing is also underrepresented in the records. They only mention very few
furnishing items, only a handful of couvertures or courtes-pointes, and just one single
case of a tour de lit or bed valance. The reason for this is the same as that for the
underrepresentation of male garment ownership: officials would only enter houses
when they had a specific reason to do so, usually only when they had been informed
of retail or production activities. There was a clear reticence on the part of the
authorities to do more than that, and for good reason: policing and seizing illicit
goods regularly led to violent resistance that could easily draw a crowd and become
life-threatening to the officials involved.
So it was women who were arrested, because women wore these textiles out in the open
for the world to see.
The female body became a site of resistance to authority and a visible reminder thatthe
prohibition did not work, that the weaker sex was stronger than the King’s will - A very
visible reminder given how cheerful and brightly coloured these garments were.
This is, I believe why the liberals could ultimately win the debate: the failure of the ban was
– quite literally – visible and therefore undeniable, even by those who would keep it at all
costs.
To conclude (very briefly)
As indicated in introduction: there were other factors that contributed to the liberals being
able to score this victory:
 They were able to demonstrate that France had the technological know-how to
produce these textiles themselves
6


Just having the right arguments is usually not enough: They were able to present the
arguments and gain a lot of publicity for them in the veritable pamphlet war that
ensued.
Even winning the public opinion wouldn’t have been enough if they did not also have
personnel in the highest echelons of the royal admin who were willing to listen and
be convinced – or indeed who were convinced members of the Gournay circle to
start with and helped gather the knowledge and sponsor the public relations
campaign
However, even with these additional factors, it is clear that the perhaps most important
ingredient to this victory was the nature of these fabrics themselves, which made them so
desirable to the French public that women in their thousands risked arrest by wearing them.
Thus it is not unreasonable to claim that it was Global trade and the superiority of the Asian
manufacturing sector that led to the first major victory of the Enlightenment Economic
Liberals in France, which in turn helped pave the way for the type of economic discourse
that defines us to this day.
7