Abstract and embodied: the political economy of the French Revolution

The political economy of the French Revolution struggled to reconcile the promises of economic abstraction and the challenges of embodying wealth. In their attempts to realize these dual aims, revolutionaries drew not only on Enlightenment ideas about laissez-faire but also on an economic theology of money and consumption with roots in alchemy and the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. Both strains of thought had radicalizing effects. Proponents of laissez-faire cast society as a self-regulating field of reciprocal exchanges, thereby obviating the need for fiscal redistribution and frustrating those demanding social welfare and manufacturing subsidies. When the anticipated prosperity of laissez-faire failed to materialize, revolutionaries put their hopes in the new paper currency, the assignat, believing that it would generate wealth ad infinitum and circulate it justly. Breaking with laissez-faire but still committed to economic theology, radicals such as Jacques Roux and Maximilien Robespierre joined the Parisian popular movement in justifying government oversight to ensure the satisfaction of an ever-expanding panoply of needs. Whereas historians now tend to explain the Terror as the outcome of ideological, psychological and institutional contingencies, the fate of laissez-faire suggests that political radicalization was intimately linked to revolutionaries’ abstract economic principles and beliefs.