Michael Kwass recounts the brief, violent career of Louis Mandrin, a petty notable from the small Dauphiné town of Saint-Etienne-de Saint-Geoirs. Described on the dust jacket, with a little exaggeration, as “a Gallic Robin Hood,” he earned a reputation that aroused fear and sneaking admiration, comparable in its day, to the fame of North American bootleggers and gangsters of the 1920s. When his merchant father died prematurely in 1743, Mandrin, at the age of 17, had to take responsibility as head of the family. With the help of some loans, he set up in 1748 as a small-time war contractor, leading a 97-mule supply train in Provence. But peace and livestock disease broke out, leaving him badly in debt, and unable to get compensation for his losses. He blamed the French General Farm, a private tax-collecting consortium closely integrated into French state and financial elites, which was ultimately responsible for the supply operation. Worse followed. Mandrin joined a counterfeiting operation with a younger brother and also killed a man in a local feud. When a royal court condemned him, in absentia, to death by breaking on the wheel, Mandrin set up outside France, in nearby Savoy, and turned to organizing heavily armed bands smuggling calico and tobacco into France. His national renown dated from four major smuggling expeditions into southeastern France during the summer of 1755. These were commercial operations, but they also constituted revenge: he had no scruples about killing the Farm's personnel and their family members. Eventually a special squad from the royal army arrested him in a covert cross-border raid and brought him to trial and brutal execution in Valence. On 26 May 1755, Mandrin made a good Christian end, expressing his regrets for his deeds and his loyalty to King Louis XV. This tale is retold well by Kwass, who has a lively style marred only by a penchant for the underworld slang (“nabbed,” “busted,” “stunt”) beloved of crime reporters.

As Kwass admits, Mandrin's story, the subject of many biographies, notably that of Frantz Funck- Brentano (1908, many re-editions), is well known. The novelty is the way the author uses it as microhistory alongside a vast array of recent articles and monographs to paint a total picture of the economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and political context of the smuggling economy of eighteenth-century France and its revolutionary implications. This interest follows naturally out of Kwass's valuable earlier study of the consequences of eighteenth-century taxation, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (2000). There are useful and delightful treasures in this vast survey, both in the text and in the full and judicious bibliographical notes—a boon to, among others, graduate students preparing their comprehensive examinations and professors who have to set them.

Readers of this Journal will want to know about the economic aspects of the tableau. Here, Kwass argues that it was the state's devices for skimming revenue from expanding international trade and the burgeoning consumer economy that allowed France's smuggler economy to grow and prosper. The Farm bought Chesapeake tobacco from British merchants who had imported it to Great Britain and sold it at monopoly prices in France: smugglers could bring a cheaper product from foreign countries and their colonies, or from areas in France like Alsace, outside the zone subject to the Farm's monopoly. Kwass sees parallels here to the contemporary “war on drugs” in developed countries, but in the eighteenth century tobacco was thought to be salubrious, unlike the dubious or clearly dangerous objects of today's drug trade. State industrial policy towards the cotton industry was designed, initially, to protect the French Indies Company's calico imports and, by Mandrin's time, heavily-taxed cotton goods produced domestically. Here was another chance to supply clandestine imports or illegally-produced domestic cloth to the markets.

The state leased out these and other monopolies and indirect taxes to revenue farms, of which the biggest was the General Farm; the Farm enforced its hold by maintaining a small army of officials and armed guards plus its own special courts, backed occasionally by the mounted police and the royal army. Mandrin fell foul of these people and their harsh justice because he wanted to trade illegally, wholesale, in tobacco and calico. Tobacco appears to have been Mandrin's preferred commodity. He invented an original marketing technique: when he and his men invaded a town, he forced the General Farm's wholesalers to buy tobacco directly from him on the spot, in bulk, leaving the petty worries and profits of retail distribution mostly to other folk. Under mortal threat, the wholesalers borrowed cash from local friends and notables; Mandrin gave receipts to the victims of his extortion so they could claim compensation from their superiors, thereby (as Kwass puts it) sticking it to the Farm. It might have been worth exploring what the demobilization of militiamen and soldiers from France's huge army, in a frontier province like Dauphiné did to expand smuggler labor supply; maybe it was no coincidence that it was precisely during the brief peace of 1749–1755 that Mandrin enjoyed his moment of glory.

So much, in any event, for the supply side. The demand side, according to Kwass's synthesis of recent research, was driven, in the absence of rising real wages, by harder-working masses and the prospering middle ranks of society, lured into spending by new marketing techniques, new fashions and new attitudes to consumption. The argument works for tobacco, whose consumption seems to have risen everywhere in France—although national consumption levels were relatively modest compared to other European countries’. It appears to hold for calico in towns, even in the small-to-middling places that Mandrin raided. Cotton consumption was less in the village market: while the handful of studies on rural consumption currently available seem to show a modest increase in the quantity and range of clothing, patterned and colored cotton was only a part of this and probably a modest one.

Kwass builds up a complex argument linking the activities of Mandrin and others like him to early globalization, the Enlightenment and general resentment towards state demands, leading to the outbreak of Revolution in 1789. Links there surely were, but applying Occam's razor to the argument would doubtless take these items out of the equation long before the main threads of causality were touched. Nobody liked the Farm, but its status as a private concern, disliked by virtually all levels of society, shielded the King from direct criticism for its activities and heavy-handed methods. Jacob Price's classic France and the Chesapeake (1975) as well as more recent work by Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff on the cahiers de doléances (the lists of grievances submitted to the Estates-General in 1789) show that among the Farm's activities the tobacco and calico monopolies were minor irritants, coming a long way behind two very much older and bigger revenue streams, the salt and drink monopolies, and—surprisingly—even farther behind the taxation of notarized acts. These three activities had little to do with Mandrin and, with the possible exception of drink taxes, little to do with the rise of consumerism, world trade, etc. As for the Enlightenment, the Farm was useful as an occasional whipping boy, but the thinkers and writers hardly needed Mandrin to develop their main arguments. Nevertheless these questions are worth asking, particularly when done in such a well-informed and compelling way.