The Debate over la noblesse commerçante in Ancien Regime France : How can Nobles be Useful Citizens?

ショウニン キゾクロン ノ シャテイ : キゾク ワ ユウヨウナ シミン カ

　In 1756 a heated debate was provoked by the publication of Abbé Coyer’s La noblesse commerçante, which exhorted the French nobles to practice commerce. In the early Seventeenth-Century, the French government relaxed the derogation law which prohibited commerce on the part of nobles, and Coyer was not the fi rst author to have demanded the abolition of this law. In this sense, his publication did not raise any new questions. Why then did the work of Coyer attract such public attention? 　By the middle of the Eighteenth-Century, the general public had started to become critical of poor nobles who, because of venality, namely the sale of offi ces, were prevented from becoming offi cers in the army or judges in the courts. These poor nobles were regarded as useless citizens and as a burden on society. Coyer recommended that they engage in commerce as a means of escaping poverty, and that by so doing they could make a useful contribution to economic development. His purpose was to establish "usefulness" as the only criterion of social value and to reject the value of family lineage on which the nobility was founded. The society proposed by Coyer was opposed to the traditional society of order that assigned each order to its proper function, for example, the nobility to military affairs and the Third Estate to productive activity. 　In the same period, the Bureau of Commerce was examining a plan for a new edict, which would confi rm the ones of 1669 and 1701, to promote commerce by the nobles. The discussion of deputies of commerce in this Bureau, who represented the interests of the principal commercial towns in France, shows that infl uential merchants had formulated a plan of social reorganization similar to Coyer’s one. 　The adversaries of Coyer were obliged to legitimize the nobility and its privilege by asserting that the nobles were the most useful citizens in the nation. If the nobles failed to prove their usefulness, then they would be forced into a more diffi cult position. The debate over the noblesse commerçante foretold the antinobility discourses in pre-revolutionary France.