For Marxist as well as for classical economists, the economy has long been considered as a separate arena governed by its own logic. As a consequence, research in this area has concerned global economic mechanisms or focused on specific economic entities such as firms. On the one hand, the succession from one mode of production to another was once a key topic for Marxist historians. This has, however, been abandoned as the Marxist paradigm has fallen into crisis more generally. On the other hand, the paradigm of rational actors is still an important approach among historians and economists. However, since the 1980s, the presumption of rational actors and an easily bounded sphere of economic activity have both been questioned, leading researchers to try to unravel the social and cultural dimensions behind economic relationships [Zelizer Reference Zelizer1979; Barber 1998; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1997]. Along those lines, one of the first fields of inquiry has been to question credit relationships and, with them, the diversity of economic practices [Fontaine Reference Fontaine1988; Reference Fontaine, Fontaine, Postel-Vinay, Rosenthal and Servais1997; Reference Fontaine2014; Muldrew Reference Muldrew1998].
These historians of credit have shown, through the study of notarial archives, inventories after death, and portfolios of debts, that creditors—noble, bourgeois, or peasant—were not all operating in the same way. Extending these results, they have reopened the old Marxist question on the mode of production, showing that there was not a clear distinction between feudalism and capitalism and that, in fact, both have coexisted, fought and also merged over time.
This essay argues that the categorization of passions was a weapon in the struggle between the two political economies––that of the aristocracy and that of the market––which coexisted in early modern Europe. More precisely, categorizing passions was a tool used by the two first orders (the clergy and the nobles) to fight against the expansion of the market. After having described what was at stake behind this fight, I shall outline the three main periods of the battle: the foundation of Western monasticism (10-14th centuries); the fight led by certain monks from the 15th century onwards to promote credit over charity; and, lastly, appearing in the last quarter of the 17th century, the will of certain philosophers and thinkers to circumvent the language of passions in order to promote the market. Since the two political economies carried opposite sets of values, I would like, in a second part, to highlight those values and investigate how they were lived by the people of the time and in what measure the categorization of passion was an efficient weapon.
Sources
Approaching these questions is a difficult task due to the lack of sources that could be easily accessed by historians. However, the staging of avarice and prodigality, the two passions that were in conflict at the time, was quite a popular subject in theatre plays between the 16th and 17th centuries, the periods in which the expansion of capitalism provoked the strongest resistance. Historians are not in the habit of using theatre as a source, loath as they are to venture out of the archives. Yet, theater is a product of its time. To keep its audiences engaged, it must speak to them about their problems and emotions with references they understand. In this sense works that connect with their audiences tell us about those audiences, their interrogations in the face of a changing society, and the tensions and contradictions confronting them. This “community of interpretation” [Greenblatt Reference Greenblatt2000[1998]] between an author and his or her audience is what makes literary works an invaluable aid in understanding the questions agitating society in a manner not possible through other sources: if plays do not straightforwardly reflect contemporary societies, through their conditions of production, their performances and their reception, they do tell us much about them [Chartier Reference Chartier1994].
I have chosen therefore to analyse some of the plays that were written at the time. Two of these draw from real-life situations: Johnson’s Volpone (1605-6) and Molière’s The Miser (1668). Two of Shakespeare’s plays, meanwhile, describe the antagonism between the two economic cultures in a more complex way: Timon of Athens (1623) and the Merchant of Venice (1599?). Contrary to the other chosen plays, Timon was never staged during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The play has been the subject of much commentary and several interpretations, but a historical reading sees in it a critique of early capitalism at the turn of the 17th century. The play, moreover, is part of a greater trend in English literature at the time in which greed and brazen and ruinous pomp, along with all the attendant naivety and duplicity, are recurring themes [Oliver Reference Oliver1959]. Some have pointed more directly to the similarity in the behaviour of James I and Timon, even concluding that it would have been impossible to stage the play before the King, because he would have found intolerable the mirror it held out to him. A more recent reading attempts to combine feminism and psychoanalysis in order to provide a critique of masculine subjectivity, coupling it with “new historicism” interested in studying cultural practices and literary texts and their links with political structures and the social world [Kahn 1997].Footnote 1 My reading fits into this current, which sees in the play an exploration of the cultural forms of patronage in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras and a confrontation between the culture of the gift and that of credit, their ambivalence, and their relationship with power. This reading appears to be supported by contemporaneous evidence from lived experience. Indeed, as I will show, the passions put on stage with the emotions that they involved, are equally to be found in the memoirs of the time as well as in the archives concerned with minor events like the death of a provincial treasurer under Louis 14th’s reign or traumatic episodes in France’s history such as the major social upheaval of 1720 following Law’s bankruptcy.
Gift, market and hierarchy
Let us begin with the observation that if the market is a central stake in the dynamics of status societies it is also part of the survival strategies of the poor [Fontaine Reference Fontaine2014]. In a status society such as that of early modern Europe, the development of the market threatened social hierarchies. This was due to the fact that aristocratic societies were structured around giving and taking as a means of asserting status differences, whereas markets implied negotiation between at least nominal equals [Fontaine Reference Fontaine2014]. Indeed, the first definition of the word “market” (marché), then called “marchié,” provided by the dictionary of old French and its dialects, had only one meaning: vente, achat à un prix débattu Footnote 2 sale, purchase at a negotiated price). Later, dictionary definitions incorporated the historically constructed space for market exchange.Footnote 3 The encounter between a status society and the market involved the confrontation between radically antagonistic conceptions of society—aristocratic authority, on the one hand, and egalitarian discussion among those with equal rights, on the other. Thus, status societies rightly recognized the emergence of the market as a mortal threat and sought to resist it.
The rise of markets seemed so threatening to the aristocratic order not only because of how market exchange itself threatened the older status hierarchy. The very possession of new sources of wealth also seemed to threaten their status, which was based on political or religious power: they did not want to see a new class of individuals emerge whose monetary wealth was likely to surpass their own. Furthermore, those who owned money also had the capacity to offer work and, with it, the freedom to consume new products and acquire new objects. In this process, a new model of society began to take shape, based on values that clashed with those of the traditional elite: work versus leisure, the market versus the gift, and credit versus charity. This new model allowed for the expression of individual desires and, in so doing, sowed the seeds of the yearning for freedom. Max Weber quotes the traditional adage, Stadtluft macht frei (the air of the city sets free), that points at a historical reality. It refers back to the time when masters disposed of slaves and serfs as a kind of investment, allowing them to work, as a form of tax payment, in the commerce and crafts of certain towns. However, the right of the master over the work of their slaves and serfs in town was a short-lived one [Weber Reference Weber1982[1921]: 52-53].
In light of the market’s direct threat to the aristocratic status order, priests and warriors developed religious, legal and moral strategies to counter capital accumulation and interest-bearing loans, which they saw as central to capitalism. They first defined money as a good, which, like food, lessened in exchange [Fontaine, Reference Fontaine2014[1998]: 186-187], a definition which, as a consequence, implied prohibiting money-lending and stigmatizing all behavior serving the accumulation of money. Avarice (avaricia), one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and usury (usura), which was punished by excommunication, were the closely-linked moral weapons used to exclude those from the community who hoarded money or who charged interest on loans, however small.
These strategies of exclusion drew from the teachings of the Old Testament, which forbids the lending of money on interest to one’s brothers, but allows it in the case of foreigners. The Laws of Moses state: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything else but to a foreigner” [Deuteronomy 23: 19-20] and on Luke’s injunction: “Lend hoping nothing thereby” [Fontaine 2014[1998]: 185-187]. These texts, in the Church’s interpretation, express aversion for exchange, the central pillar of the market and, more generally, of all economic life. But whereas greed, the disease of market exchange, was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins, prodigality, which lies at the heart of aristocratic exchange, was considered one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues.
This legal and moral fight between the aristocratic status society and the market progressed through three important periods. First, the foundation of Western monasticism, which represented an immense effort to codify all practices, including economic ones, that circulated in Europe at that time and formed the basis of future thinkingFootnote 4 [Todeschini Reference Todeschini2002]. These rules all expressed an opposition between the world of the clergy (spiritales) and that of the laymen (saeculares), and drew a crucial distinction regarding avaricia between men of the spirit incarnated by the monks and those of the flesh attached to wealth. However, Saint Benedict not only refused greed (avarice), but also extravagant spending (prodigality), thereby positioning his monks against the two other orders of society: the nobility which had to be prodigal to maintain the large number of people dependent on it, and those who worked (the Third Estate) and practiced avarice. In chapter 31 of his Rule, Saint Benedict describes the way the cellarer of the monastery, the man responsible for its provisioning and catering, ought to behave: “Let him neglect nothing and let him not give way to avarice, nor let him be wasteful and a squanderer of the goods of the monastery; but let him do all things in due measure and according to the bidding of his Abbot.”Footnote 5 By advocating moderation and temperance, Saint Benedict thus placed the monastic institution above the two social groups that could possibly have challenged its pre-eminence: the nobles and the merchants, whose accumulated wealth eventually became a source of concern.
In their denunciation of avaricia, the monks made no distinction between the different groups which constituted the Third Estate. Saint Benedict condemned the small group whom the market had helped to grow rich and who accumulated property with avaricia in order to establish and develop their businesses. But this neglected the much larger portion of the Third Estate, for whom labor was their sole source of livelihood and who were thus forced to avaricia as a means of safeguarding against unforeseen circumstances.
If religious doctrine set monastic practices against both aristocratic status and market norms during this first period, legislation followed the logic of status societies much more closely. That is to say, laws made exceptions for certain groups or certain categories of individuals and not in accordance with the principle of universal decision making in democratic societies. It is in this light that we must understand the exceptions the Church gradually made to its original view of market activity.
Thus, since the 13th century, exceptions were made for money for dowries and for merchants. The dowry exception points to the attempt to alleviate the female poverty intrinsic to patriarchal societies. In contrast, the merchant exception acknowledges the emergence of this new social group that emerged alongside the priests and the warriors. Indeed, discourse and institutions tell us a great deal about the will to control merchants as a social group and clearly demarcate its boundaries. Accordingly, lending with interest was tolerated, albeit only as an aspect of merchant activity, because it seemed to contribute to the circulation of goods. In this way, the merchants’ money, which circulated for the common good, stood in sharp contrast to the unproductive money of the usurers, which was accumulated without risk and at the same time used up time belonging to God alone [Le Goff, Reference Le Goff1986].
Drawing the boundary and stigma of usury around the lending of money at interest, that is, when this action had no direct involvement in the circulation of goods, thus seemed to target the merchants. However, it profoundly affected the common people: local finance was part of a set of survival strategies at a time when the slightest economic crisis could trigger immediate poverty for the majority of the population. During crises, people were forced to borrow at all costs; as usury was illegal, networks of informal finance sprang up everywhere [Fontaine 2014[2008]: chap. 4]. What becomes apparent is that small and big alike were affected by the condemnation of usury. Accordingly, in 1335, the government of Siena solemnly denounced the crime of usury committed on the sly by the mass of servants, poor widows, small artisans and foreigners (viles et abiectae personae)Footnote 6. Now, this condemnation of the poor who were simply struggling to survive a crisis may seem severe indeed. However, it becomes understandable when placed in the context of a medieval society where everyone had to keep their place, and where giving to the poor was considered the sacred duty of the first orders. By showing initiative and participating in informal finance, and by implicitly turning away from the prohibition against lending at interest, artisans, servants, and widows were not only making money; they seemed to tamper with the social order ordained by God.
If the first period of confrontation between the aristocratic status order and the market was dominated by religious and legislative prohibitions on market activity with only limited exceptions, the second period, beginning in the 15th century, began when certain Récollets and Franciscans began to think otherwise. They sought to show that access to credit was of more use to the poor than charity. Meanwhile it did not escape their attention that, if money made from credit could help the most fragile families to overcome crises, it could also help the popular classes to grow rich. This is why Bernardine of Siena denounced four types of economic behavior: that of the Jewish usurers, of women who consumed luxury goods, of businessmen who sold goods without importing or transforming them, and that of parasites and the idle happy who lived off the charity of others [Todeschini Reference Todeschini2008[2004]: 225]. The critique of luxury shored up the social borders by regulating the conspicuous consumption of the hierarchies born out of the market.
Curiously enough, at the same time as pawnshops were being established in Italy, in the last quarter of the 15th century, laws against luxury and conspicuous consumption were being promulgated. In this way, the Church was expressing its desire to regulate the social dynamics that the first breach in laws attempting to curb the free development of capitalism was poised to accentuate: more precisely, the nouveaux riches had to be brought back into the fold of the common people and a veil had to be drawn over the social transformations under way. Thus, in Bologna, the pawnshop was founded in 1473, and in 1474 a law against women’s luxury was promulgated to protect many families—and indeed the social hierarchy itself—from ruin and disruption from rampant conspicuous consumption. Consequently, this law defined what each group had the right to wear [Todeschini op. cit. : 245-249]. Since the enrichment of “undignified,” upwardly-mobile men could not be regulated, social legislation instead sought to dictate the appearance of different status groups. Similar rules and regulations were enacted all across early modern Europe. In France, no less than 18 edicts were promulgated between 1485 and 1660 to protect nobiliary appearance.
To sum up, this second period shows that what we might term “the categorization of the passions” is a central element in the struggle between aristocratic and market political economies. And since the moral significance of the passions proved to be such an important stake in this conflict, as the market developed, voices could be heard calling for a change in the definitions of good and bad passions themselves.
This struggle to re-categorize passions dominated the third period of conflict between the two political economies. This period began in the 17th and 18th centuries when money-making was transformed from avarice to “interest,” as Albert O. Hirschman has clearly shown:
In the numerous treatises on the passions that appeared in the seventeenth century, no change whatever can be found in the assessment of avarice as the “foulest of them all” or in the position as the deadliest Deadly Sin that it had come to occupy toward the end of the Middle Ages. But once money-making wore the label of “interest” and reentered in this disguise the competition with the other passions, it was suddenly acclaimed and even given the task of holding back those passions that had long been thought to be much less reprehensible [Hirschman Reference Hirschman1977: 41-42].
To account for this reversal, Hirschman explains that it is not enough to point to the neutrality of the new term. Rather, the term interest carries “a positive and curative connotation deriving from its recent close association with the idea of a more enlightened way of conducting human affairs, private as well as public.” [Hirschman op. cit.: 49-50]. To think of the world no longer in terms of passions but in terms of interest bestows upon it transparency and predictability [Hirschman op. cit.: 48]; both notions totally foreign to the way government was conducted on the basis of le bon plaisir of princes and other privileged stakeholders. In this way, interest had a transformative influence when it was transposed from the realm of domestic politics to economic activities undertaken by an individual in a market. It was soon associated with the gentleness (douceur) of commerce first mentioned in Jacques Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant, the 17th century textbook for businessmen. He emphasized that Divine Providence “has dispersed its gift so that men would trade together and so that the mutual need which they have to help one another would establish ties of friendship among them. This continuous exchange of all the comforts of life constitutes commerce and this commerce makes for all the gentleness of life” [Savary 1675[1713]: 1]Footnote 7. And Montesquieu helped spread a similar notion in France and beyond through his sweet trade (doux commerce) thesis that market activity helped instill gentle manners [Hirschman Reference Hirschman1977: 59-60].
Even in the face of these three periods of struggle and accommodation between an aristocratic order based on status and a market economy, the contradiction between the will to preserve the existing social order and the will to provide cheap credit to the poor—defined in contemporary dictionaries as “those who have nothing other than their work to live”—so they could survive economic crises, was never really resolved before the fall of the Ancien Regime.
Emotions and the staging of greed and prodigality
If emotion is the weapon of politics, it is the fruit of the meeting between moral structures and those individuals who internalize themFootnote 8. Contemporary theatre, with its misers and spendthrifts, is a perfect place to hear echoes of the struggles between the antagonistic values in society, and to follow the way in which individuals reacted to the conflicts that these struggles provoked. Certain playwrights, such as Shakespeare, described these conflicting values side by side while others, such as Ben Johnson or Molière, showed how greed threatened to destroy the most sacred bonds of traditional society.
In Johnson’s Volpone, first produced in 1605-6, Volpone, a rich aristocratic Venetian, assisted by his faithful yet parasitic servant Mosca, acts to uncover the terrible extremes to which greed reduces those who give in to it. Pretending to be dying, the rich Volpone offers to make an elderly aristocrat, a merchant, and a lawyer his heirs. The three then compete for Volpone’s inheritance by offering him gifts. But Volpone is not content with accumulating favors and riches while doing nothing, neither honest work “Nor usure private” [I,1, 30-39]. He also wants to show how far the thirst for gold will lead, without giving himself away. Invoking the silent god who allows all things, including souls, to have their price, in Scene One Volpone salutes his gold and the piles of silver and jewels, which make up his treasure trove.
Riches, the dumb god, that giv’st all men tongues,
That canst do nought, and yet makest men do all things ;
The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot,
I made Worth heaven. Thou art virtue, fame,
Honour, and all things else. Who can get thee,
He shall be noble, valiant, honest, Wise [I, 1, 22-27] [Ben Jonson Reference Jonson2012].
As the play unfolds, greed drives the elderly aristocrat to disinherit his only son, the jealous merchant to offer his wife’s honor, and the lawyer to plead unjust cases against the innocent. The situation grows more complicated when the disinherited son of the aristocrat catches Volpone attempting to seduce the wife of the merchant, and Volpone is brought to court. There, a fourth aspirant for Volpone’s fortune, the adventuress Lady Would-Be, provides false evidence to save Volpone as the lawyer argues his case. In the last act, Johnson hammers a final nail into the coffin: once Mosca has taken possession of Volpone’s fortune due to Volpone’s insatiable need to study the ravages of greed, one of the four judges smells a good alliance, and hastens towards Mosca to ask if he is married!
For his part Molière, in The Miser, first performed in 1668, described the miser in the urban bourgeois setting of the 17th century. He showed how Harpagon increased his fortune by usury and how avarice (avaritia) and cupidity (cupiditas) destroyed both social connections and human beings. Furthermore, the words used to describe avarice––“tyranny” [I-2 -177], “diabolical”, [I-3-188], “plague” [I-3-244, 248; II-1-688], “the most inhuman of humans” [II-5-790]––suggest that avarice destroys everything from government to religion and even life itself. In the play, the miser is always confronted by virtue, prodigality and charity: “he (Harpagon) loves money more than his reputation his honour or his virtue” [II-5-804-5], says a servant. In contrast, Harpagon’s son Cleante describes the joys of giving when he speaks about his love, Marianne, and her mother:
I have discovered, without their knowing it, that they are not in very good circumstances, […]. Can you imagine, [...]what happiness it must be to improve the condition of those we love; skilfully to bring about some relief to the modest wants of a virtuous family? And think what grief it is for me to find myself deprived of this great joy through the avarice of a father, and for it to be impossible for me to give any proof of my love to her who is all in all to me [I-2].Footnote 9
In order to continue to live according to the virtues which he had undertaken to practice, Cleante is prepared to bankrupt himself by accepting a usurious loan from his father, without either character being aware of who the other person is. When they discover one another, both are consumed by anger:
—Harpagon: It is you who are ruining yourself by loans so greatly to be condemned!
—Cléante: So it is you who seek to enrich yourself by such criminal usury!
—Harpagon: And you dare, after that, to show yourself before me?
—Cléante: And you dare, after that, to show yourself to the world?
—Harpagon: Are you not ashamed, tell me, to descend to these wild excesses
[…]
—Cléante: Are you not ashamed of dishonouring your station by such dealings, of sacrificing honour and reputation to the insatiable desire of heaping crown upon crown, and of outdoing the most infamous devices that have ever been invented by the most notorious usurers?
—Harpagon: Get out of my sight, you reprobate; get out of my sight!
—Cléante: Who is the more criminal in your opinion: he who buys the money of which he stands in need, or he who obtains, by unfair means, money for which he has no use? [II-3-744-766].
Cleante’s anger towards his father—to the point that he wishes him dead!—violates traditional filial bonds, but it seems legitimate because greed has changed Harpagon into a tyrant and a devil.
If Molière and Johnson’s stance on the clash between market activity and an aristocratic status order is one of relatively straightforward condemnation, in Timon of Athens (1623)Footnote 10, as in the Merchant of Venice (1599?), Shakespeare describes the antagonism between the two economic cultures in a more complex manner. Timon of Athens shows the radical difference in the way of thinking and acting of the aristocratic Timon and Alcibiade as compared to other characters who, with only the exception of Timon’s servant Flavius, think and act as capitalists. Although Timon’s failure to come to terms with a changing world—he comes to ruin by giving away his fortune—unequivocally announces the end of a certain aristocratic culture, the details of the play bring to light the contradictory logics that govern the relationship with money, and reveal the emotional economy that these relations arouse.
Friendship, for Timon, is a fundamental value, and friendship, which is fed by gifts, is at the heart of the aristocratic culture. It is in the name of friendship that he gives to help and honor his friends. In keeping with this logic, when Timon becomes aware of his ruination, he believes he can count on his friends; “unwisely, but not ignobly, have I given” (II, 2, 164), he tells Flavius. This line reveals the extent to which nobility was first and foremost a question of virtueFootnote 11. Indeed, Alcibiades, the warrior, was the only one to offer him the little money he possessed; the others had long abandoned the values of Timon for market individualism. Yet, his excessive generosity and his refusal to be reimbursed by Ventidius lend themselves to ambivalence: by this gesture, Timon excludes reciprocity and places himself above the others, behaving more like a king than a peer. He defends his behavior but this excess is for many a moral fault and Apemantus loses no time in telling him so when he refuses the food Timon offers him:
I scorn thy meat. ‘Twould choke me, for I should ne’er flatter thee. O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ‘em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up, too [I, 2, 37-40].
This ambivalence—or perhaps transgression—can perhaps also be seen as a denunciation of the habits of James I.Footnote 12 Timon’s tragedy is very much in consonance with contemporary royal practices. Just as his steward Flavius seeks to warn him about the dangers of his boundless munificence, the archbishop of York perhaps echoes the fears of the king’s subjects in the face of his generosity when he gently points out that “[t]he subjects of His Majesty understand and fear that his excellent and heroic nature be excessively disposed to giving, which in a short time will exhaust the treasury of the kingdom and bring much trouble”.Footnote 13 Some critics opine that this similarity between Timon and James I, which can also be seen in their love of hunting and horses, would not have seemed respectful on stage. They argue that this was probably the reason why the play remained incomplete and was never performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime [Kahn Reference Khan1987: 55-56]. But, undoubtedly, the culture Shakespeare depicts is not merely literary: it is a moral reference for European aristocracy. When read along with other texts, in particular the memoires of Saint-Simon, a great aristocrat if there ever was one, these plays confirm the importance of the values of friendship and risk in aristocratic culture. Saint-Simon, for instance, described with emotion the end of a treasurer who spared neither his time nor his money and consequently, “many people lost heavily, Brittany had a great deal to do with it, and he remained utterly ruined.” The King gave him only life imprisonment which he endured “visited by a great number of friends and helped by many” so much his behavior reflected aristocratic values [Saint-Simon Reference Saint-Simon1983, tome 1: 664]. By and large, between the 16th and 17th centuries, any concern for riches would turn into avarice and covetousness: “It is a desire that has no non-pathological forms” in Montaigne as well as La Rochefoucauld, wrote Elster [Reference Elster2003: 152]Footnote 14.
But, as illustrated in the conclusion of Timon of Athens, the battle between the aristocratic economy and the merchant economy always results in anger and a parade of insults and violence. Once ruined and rejected by his peers, Timon offers them a last banquet in which the fine meats are replaced by stones and water. Instead of championing aristocratic values, as during the first banquet, Timon inverts them. This was tantamount to a cosmic upheaval; an upheaval similar to the overturning of values that he had witnessed with the conversion of his peers to capitalism. Addressing the gods, Timon asks them to always keep something in reserve, for fear that their divinity be scorned: if the gods had to borrow from men, men would abandon the godsFootnote 15. In his last tirade, as he tears off his clothes and leaves Athens, he pushes the logic of what he is feeling to the extreme. Because he has been a witness to the overturning of morality and values, he calls for their destruction as well as that of all social ties. He declares that children may rebel, virgins prostitute themselves, servants steal, the bankrupt cut the throats of their creditors, and his wishes rise in crescendo until he wants all social relations, including those of friendship, to be nothing more than poison.Footnote 16 He ends his diatribe by asking the gods to bring down Athens and to swell his rage against all humans for breaking the link of divine kindness. His new frame of mind is galvanized when, in his cave, he finds gold. He thanks the heavens for giving it to him, for “much of this will make/Black white, foul fair, wrong right,/base noble, old young, coward valiant” [IV, 3, 29-30].
The language of the characters in the play expresses deep cultural oppositions. Timon gives his word and seals his promise with a handshake, thereby pledging himself; the others sign contracts, do the accounts or make crosses to conclude a deal, using first and foremost material procedures. Timon has a casket with gold and jewels; the others paper money. Timon is indifferent to time and gives it freely; the others “have the date in count” [II, 2, 35], lending it instead, as one senator tells his servant when sending him to collect Timon’s overdue repayment.Footnote 17 And when Timon’s collapse is clear, just as with his previous economic transactions, Timon has only himself to give to pay back his debts. He offers his heart and his blood in two replies that integrate the economy of the human body with the economy of mathematics: “Cut my heart in sums […] Tell out my blood” [III, 4, 86, 88]. The tension and emotion of Timon’s statement suggests that Shakespeare believes the two cannot be reconciled.
For all of its stark emotional conflict between aristocratic and market orders, Timon of Athens also depicts a complicated balance between the two. Timon’s servant Flavius, for instance, provides an essential link between Timon and the capitalist economy. Flavius, after all, is the steward who manages his fortune and who has to reconcile the two economies. He must reconcile the ethos of disinterested friendship and the customary reciprocity among nobles with the merchant ethos based on the respect of contracts and payment of penalties in case of breach of commitment. The philosopher, Apemantus, appears to be an outsider, refusing to play the game of either aristocratic or market status. Furthermore, he constantly pits the two economies against each other to show that neither redeems the other and that both are flawed, for man is essentially bad and individuals are concerned only with themselves.
In another play, the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare returns to the clash between aristocratic society and the society born of the market. As in Timon of Athens, he shows the violent anger that seizes the aristocrat when these societies meet. This anger emerges in the merchant Antonio as hatred for the moneylender Shylock’s Judaism. In return, Shylock’s hatred of Antonio encompasses all Christians, because they not only refuse to accept credit but also defend their refusal.Footnote 18 Thus, more than the difference in faith, Shakespeare makes usury the driving force of Shylock’s hatred for Antonio: “I hate him for he is a Christian:/But more for that in low simplicity/He lends out money gratis, and brings down/The rate of usance here with us in Venice” [I, 3, 37-40]. Shylock adds that Antonio hates his people, “my bargains, and my well-won thrift,/Which he calls interest” [I, 3, 45-8].
Not only does Antonio act in accordance with the noble economy, but he also becomes its champion; he combats, stigmatizes, and despises the capitalist economy Shylock espouses. The dialogue between Antonio and Shylock on the subject of usury takes up the burning questions of the time. Antonio accepts to borrow for the sake of friendship: “albeit I neither lend nor borrow/By taking nor by giving of excess,/Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend/I’ll break a custom” [I, 3, 56-59].
In response to Antonio’s defense of an aristocratic order hostile to “pure” market activity, represented by lending money at interest, Shylock answers with the story of the lambs that Jacob succeeded in multiplying. Shylock concludes that Jacob was blessed for that, for “This was a way to thrive, and he was blest:/And thrift is blessing if men steal it not” [I, 3, 85]. Antonio then repeats the position of the Church, saying that Jacob ran a risk and that gold and silver were not ewes and rams. Finally, Antonio becomes heated for he cannot bear to hear Shylock quote the Scriptures, “An evil soul, producing holy witness,/Is like a villain with a smiling cheek” [I, 3, 94-5]. He stigmatizes the intention––the evil intention––condemned from now on by Protestants and Catholics alike. As in Timon of Athens, the bitter conflict between two status economies manifests itself once more in the aristocrat’s anger towards the representative of the market. In the Rialto, Antonio is in the habit of publicly insulting Shylock for the money he earns and the interest he charges. Shylock had patiently borne being treated like a dog:
Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;/You spurned me such a day; another time/You called me dog––and for these courtesies/I’ll lend you thus much moneys? [I, 3, 121-124].
Antonio assures him he is still capable of so treating him, of repelling him and spitting on him. He asks him to lend him money not as to a friend, but as to an enemy:
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not/As to thy friends, for when did friendship take/A breed for barren metal of his friend?/But lend it rather to thine enemy,/Who if he break, thou mayst with better face/Exact the penalty [I, 3, 127-132].
These lines express perfectly all the violence that marked the debates of the time on the question of lending with interest. They also show how much anger, already encountered in Timon, is socially unequally accepted: Antonio has every right to give in to anger, to insult and beat Shylock because he has the power and he defends the values on which that power rests. In contrast, an ordinary man has no right to express anger: Shylock can only internalize the insults, suffer the blows and continue to lend that money which is asked of him.
In Elizabethan England, those hostile to the idea of money growing over time considered the act of lending with or without interest as a social act intended either for a friend or for an enemy. Since friendship and enmity both in turn implied passionate emotion, hatred and anger became directly involved in the struggle between the two economies. The controversy was as bitter as Antonio’s violence against Shylock, both verbal and physical, was public. Like all other Venetian aristocrats, Antonio was also a merchant, but a noble one, for he obtained a yield on his money through risky sea trade, which was the only mode that could legitimize the return on capital invested [Fontaine 2014[2008]: chap. 7]. No sooner does Antonio suffer his first losses than Shylock reminds us again that the hatred between the two is born out of their conflict as to how one should make one’s wealth grow: “he was wont to call me usurer, let him look to his bond! He was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy, let him look to his bond!” [III, 1, 39-42]. Shylock adds that Antonio covered him with shame, laughed at his losses, mocked his gains, despised his race, hampered his business, dampened his friends and excited his enemies because he was a Jew.Footnote 19 When Antonio is at the mercy of Shylock, he knows he can expect no pity: “He seeks my life. His reason well I know./I oft delivered from his forfeitures/Many that have at times made moan to me./Therefore he hates me” [III, 3, 21-24].
As in Timon, the friendship that sustains the aristocratic economy is based on the gift of the self; each time he finds himself cornered, the noble literally offers his body. Like Timon who asked his creditors to take his heart and blood as payment, Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as security for his loan. Both acts push to its limit the logic of the aristocratic economy that pledges the self: it is an economy of the body and social bonds, and the currency is blood and not monies. Thus the violence of the emotions shows the scale of the stakes: the market, which is developed at the expense of noble blood, is bought with noble blood, and this attacks the very existence of the aristocratic society.
Violent passions
The violence staged on the theater scene and the unleashing of passions surrounding market speculation and the growth of money over time became a lived experience in 1720 during Law’s bankruptcy. This was a particularly traumatic episode in France’s economic history. It caused a major social upheaval, initially giving rise to frenzied speculation and huge fortunes. However, with the obligatory banknote exchange rate, it soon left in its wake only countless individuals with nothing more than worthless paper with which to clear their debts, as well as a large number of families ruined, their entire savings wiped out in a single strokeFootnote 20. Montesquieu, who witnessed these events and himself lost a great deal of money, spoke of the social violence wreaked by such speculation in his Persian Letters. In letter cxlvi, he, like Timon, inveighed against the reversal of values, the moral degradation, the ruin of the State and the upheaval of social hierarchies:
I saw suddenly spring up in all hearts an insatiable thirst for riches. I saw men form in a moment a detestable conspiracy to acquire wealth, not by honest labour and liberal industry, but by the ruin of the sovereign, of the state, and of their fellow-citizens.
I saw a respectable citizen, in these disastrous times, never retire to rest without saying, “To-day I have ruined one family, to-morrow I shall ruin another”[…]
Another said, “I find that I am prospering: it is true that when I went three days ago to make a certain payment, I left a whole family in tears; that I have squandered the portions of two well-born girls; that I have deprived a boy of the means of education--his father will die of grief, the mother pines away broken-hearted: but I have only done what the law allows me.”
What crime can be greater than that which a minister commits when he corrupts the morals of a whole nation, debases the loftiest spirits, tarnishes the lustre of rank, obscures virtue itself, and levels the highest born with the most despised?
Montesquieu wrote this letter at the very time that Law, ruined, was making his escape to the Netherlands. Montesquieu was not being overly dramatic: well-placed aristocrats, after speculating, turned to violence and plundering as soon as the bad news began emerging. For instance, Louis Armand, Prince de Conti, son of Law’s former patron, who had made enormous sums through speculation, demanded gold from the bank to the value of what his considerable holdings of paper notes were nominally worth. Law had already tried to explain that these speculations would destroy the system, but he dared not refuse and the Regent could not prevent him from taking the specie [Montgomery Hyde Reference Montgomery1969: 141-142]. The Duke d’Estrées took over the chocolates and the Duke d’Antin the textiles which were kept in the royal warehouse. Eleven people were killed and robbed in Paris alone within the space of a few days.
The climax arrived via a sensational murder, notorious because the perpetrators were all men of aristocratic birth, one of whom was allied to several reigning houses and even claimed kinship with the Regent himself. Antoine Joseph Count de Horn belonged to a well-known Dutch family and went to Paris when the Mississippi boom was at his height, but a series of heavy losses, along with his extravagant spending, left him without money after just two months. De Horn entered into a conspiracy with the Marquis de Lestang and the Count de Mille to rob a stockjobber named Lacroix by pretending they had a large quantity of stock to sell at a low price. They arranged a meeting in a tavern near rue Quincampoix, and the three aristocrats killed and robbed Lacroix. Several thousand letters on his behalf were addressed to the Regent for his mercy but in such a climate, Law, the Controller-General had insisted that an example should be made and the Regent remained would not be moved [Montgomery Hyde Reference Montgomery1969: 146-149].
While the nobility could react violently against representatives of pure market activity, commoners in Ancien Regime France could only direct their anger and pent up rage against themselves. Thus, in December 1720, authorities found in a house “the husband hanging, his wife and three children with their throats slit and in the same room were six sous in change and 200 000 livres in bank notes” [Montesquieu, Reference Montesquieu1960 [1721]].Footnote 21 Even short of such extremes, honest community leaders could fall into poverty. For example, Jean Borne, former member of the city government of Lyon and former rector (recteur) of the Hospital, was responsible for the distribution of secret aid to individuals who were too ashamed to admit they needed help. But in 1731, ten years after Law’s bankruptcy, Borne found himself obliged to ask for secret charity. As a result, he received “12 livres 10 sols” each month until his death 12 years later. He was born in 1671 and, like his father, he used to be a merchant-banker and community leader. When he was 20 years old, he became rector (recteur) and treasurer of the Hospital de la Charité and never spared his purse: he had advanced up to 137,000 livres to the Charité in 1692. But both he and his brother were the victims of the liquidation of assets under Law’s system. In 1725, he entered into an amicable settlement with his creditors since “the greatest part of the assets left by his father Sieur Jean Borne were lost as much by the extreme poverty of its debtors as by the banknotes he had received in payment.” To deal with this situation, he had to borrow money but found himself unable to pay the sums back in good money. Despite the agreement with his creditors, in which he was to pay one-third in good money and the remaining in banknotes, his house was foreclosed four years later. Before this happened, his wife obtained a property separation. She died before her husband, and her will shows that the couple was able to survive thanks to the credit that the artisans and the suppliers of the neighborhood agreed to give them. In return for their help, she offered these creditors testamentary legates, which nevertheless did not prove sufficient to cover their debts [Gutton Reference Gutton1971: 27-28].
Conclusion
In their fight against the development of the market, the two privileged orders have used the category of passion as a powerful weapon along with the ban of usury in order to break the motor of capitalism. But if they targeted the merchants, the working classes also suffered as they had to try to save—therefore to practice avaricia—in prevision of the hard times that they would inevitably meet in the future. The poverty of the working classes had indeed led to debates within the Church, with some monks advocating credit against charity. However, nothing could seriously be done––apart from Monte di Pietà in some countries––to provide the needy with inexpensive access to credit until philosophers and writers managed to re-categorize the passions, transforming money-saving or its accumulation from avaricia to “interest.”
Taken together, these analyses suggest a radically different view of the emotions than is common in the social sciences and economic history. Rather than universal expressions of joy or suffering, in early modern Europe, avarice and profligacy, as well as other passions that grew around the market, reflected competing political economies which coexisted, conflicted and merged with each other. Along with the law, these emotions defined what good and bad passions were. Moreover, because they acted via people’s sensibilities and were thus internalized, these emotions further cemented what was considered to be right and moral in the innermost recesses of people’s sense of being. As such, emotions entered into the battle being waged between aristocratic political economy, represented by the judgment of avarice and defense of profligacy, and the market, represented by the defense of interest.
Echoes of the struggle between the two political economies using passions and emotions could be heard in the theater of the 16th and 17th centuries: comedies would please their audience with plots ridiculing and stigmatizing greed and avarice while praising the virtues of prodigality and charity; but Shakespeare would describe in a more complex manner the antagonism between the two economic cultures revealing, first, that the aristocratic value of friendship was loosing ground to a contract-based economy and, second, showing what was at stake behind the aristocrats’ violence towards merchants and money-lenders. Indeed, faced with a seemingly irreversible evolution, poised to tear aristocratic society apart, the nobles reacted with anger and violence––a violence matching the overturning of values that they were witnessing with the rampant domination of capitalism. The triumph of the market threatened their own existence, and their fight against was revealed as a battle between two currencies: the blood of the aristocrats versus the money of the market.
If Shakespeare believed that the two economies could not be reconciled since one was concerned with gift and human relations and the other with credit and individualism, with Apemantus, the philosopher in Timon of Athens, he also suggested that none of the two were redeemable and that both were flawed for man was essentially bad and selfish. In some sense, the events that followed Law’s bankruptcy in 1720 proved him right: well-placed nobles, after having speculated like vulgar merchants, broke down the doors of the banks to help themselves to gold and merchandise, while lower-ranking aristocrats helped themselves to the pockets of stockjobbers. Commoners, however, had no right to express their anger and violence, and had no choice but to do violence to themselves or else accept destitution and poverty.
