Newtonian Science, Commercial Republicanism, and the Cult of Great Men in La Beaumelle’s Pensées

Newtonian Science, Commercial Republicanism, and the Cult of Great Men in La Beaumelle’s Pensées (1752)

Mircea Platon

Recent historiography has paid a lot of attention to the rise of the cult of great men in eighteenth-century France. The focus of the debate has been on whether the cult subverted or actually strengthened the monarchy. Jean-Claude Bonnet (1998) argues that, with its eulogies of ancient repub-lican virtues and civil religion, the cult of great men had subversive con-notations. Yet David A. Bell (2001, 107–39) reminds us that, sponsored by the French Academy and part of a propaganda campaign aiming to increase the national sentiment in France, the cult of great men strengthened the monarchy by associating with the king some of the officially touted vir-tues of the great Frenchmen (Smith 2005, 143–81).

The academic discourses, the official panegyrics, and the descrip-tions of the civil-religious ceremonies of the French Revolution used as primary sources by Bonnet, Bell, and Smith (among others) have grounded the debate in the civic humanist tradition. Yet, science and scientific think-ing deeply affected eighteenth-century political philosophy and state administration (King [1949] 1972; Martin 1992; Jacob and Stewart 2004). The scientist was a “great man,” but science influenced the definition of a “great man” itself. Starting with Newton, scientists were hailed as bene-factors of humanity alongside classical heroes and modern philosophers:

History of Political Economy 43:3 DOI 10.1215/00182702-1346833 Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

Correspondence may be addressed to [email protected]. I am grateful for the helpful comments of Dale K. Van Kley and two anonymous referees. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

554 History of Political Economy 43:3 (2011)

they were praised as “Plutarchian heroes,” “Arcadian shepherds,” and “Stoic sages” (Paul 1980, 86–98; Feingold 2004, 168–91). The scientist was ready for public service, but his quest for the “truth” made him incom-patible with the mendacious ways of the court. The scientist’s public experiments and search for natural laws were contrary to the “king’s secret” (Paul 1980, 58–59). If the cult of great men helped transform the monarch from a patriarchal judge into a classical Greek or Roman legisla-tor (Wisner 1997), this transformation was not independent from the newly discovered, formulated, and popularized scientific laws of nature and from an increasingly systematic interest in the science of political economy as both governmental practice and oppositional discourse.

La Beaumelle published Mes pensées ou le qu’en dira-t-on in Copenha-gen in 1751 and one year later in Frankfurt, in a revised edition (La Beau-melle [1752] 1997). La Beaumelle’s book was republished, pirated, and translated numerous times in the decade following its initial publication (La Beaumelle 1753). If the first part of the 1750s gave birth to a flow of publications on economic topics, the second part of the decade witnessed the emergence of the physiocratic movement in opposition to the mer-cantilist ideas and monopolies entrenched at the French court (Meysson-nier 1989; Steiner 2003). French political and intellectual elites saw the events of the Austrian War of Succession (1740–48) and of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) as proving the superiority of countries with an improved (England and Prussia) or extensive (Russia) agriculture and the decline of such mercantile economies, centered on manufacture and trade, as Holland’s (Zuidema 1992, 29–35; Smith 2005, 67–142; Shovlin 2006, 49–54). The desire to regenerate France spurred both an agromanie and the cult of great men, academically enshrined in 1758, when the philoso-phes introduced the eulogy of great men as part of the French Academy’s eloquence competition.

The success of La Beaumelle’s Pensées was due to the fact that his book announced or participated in all these debates, denouncing “lux-ury” and arguing for the importance of agriculture as well as free trade, as the physiocrats were just about starting to do. Mes pensées also sketched a science of politics based on what Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, La Beaumelle’s close friend, would contribute to classical political econ-omy as the principle of utility maximization (Coleman 1995, 44–48). La Beaumelle also crafted a conception about “great men” that discarded Christian and pagan virtues in order to make place for what we might call technocratic skills. As an embodiment of his great-man ideal, La

Platon / The Cult of Great Men in La Beaumelle’s Pensées 555

Beaumelle offered, shortly before the physiocrats would confer iconic status on him, Sully (1559–1641), Henry IV’s minister of finance (Avezou 2001, 201–303).

These early intimations of soon-to-be-popular physiocratic themes might indicate that La Beaumelle was a “forerunner.” From this teleologi-cal perspective, his importance for the history of political economy might be that of a “missing link,” of a thinker who introduced new themes or advanced newly emerging causes that would achieve their full expression in the classical political economy of Adam Smith. But La Beaumelle’s book should be read by historians of political economy because it is an early and complex example of the ways in which theological, philosophi-cal, and scientific thinking converged in the early to mid-eighteenth cen-tury to give birth to a new anthropology and to a new political economy offered by La Beaumelle as a solution to specific problems such as reli-gious intolerance (Faccarello 1999, 1–57). For La Beaumelle, Homo economicus was not the opposite of a “great man” but one of his avatars. People were driven by self-interest or self-love, and society was kept together not by people’s virtues and reason but by their needs and weak-nesses that forced them to depend on each other. Therefore, La Beaumelle argued that a great political man would try to devise political machines, or systems, to accommodate this Augustinian social contract. La Beau-melle’s Pensées advanced the cause of politics as a “science of passions” (Rosanvallon 1979, 11–15).

Born in 1726, in the Cevennes, from a Huguenot father and a Catholic mother, Laurent Angliviel (the real name of La Beaumelle) was educated in Catholic schools, became interested in ecclesiastical history, and stud-ied in Geneva as a fervent Calvinist between 1745 and 1747. Between 1747 and 1752 he lived in exile in Denmark and Prussia. While in Denmark, as tutor of Count de Gram’s son, La Beaumelle lived in close contact with the Danish Lutheran court aristocracy. This allowed him to study the way in which political absolutism and court factions shaped politics. La Beau-melle also tried and failed to become the governor of either the king of Denmark’s or the king of Sweden’s elder son (Lauriol 1978, 2003). Both his court experience and his failed ambitions as a governor would shape Mes pensées, the work of a moralist whose aim was to give counsel to kings and castigate court factions. In 1752, after a short stay in Berlin where he failed to arouse the interest of Frederick II but gained the enmity of Voltaire and the friendship of Maupertuis, La Beaumelle returned to Paris, where he died in 1773.


La Beaumelle’s writings were influenced by Montesquieu, whom he praised openly and whose ideas regarding a political science based on the empirical study of man were writ large in his Pensées (Lauriol 1996, 3–43; Susong 1996, 95–110; Lauriol 1997, 151–62; Susong 2002, 127–34). Claude Lauriol and Gilles Susong have shown that La Beaumelle’s debt to Montesquieu also included his “Anglomania,” his consideration for parlia-ments, and his belief that people should be able to buy offices. But La Beaumelle was more radical than Montesquieu, using his own blend of political science to make a stinging denunciation of court nobility and the Catholic Church (Susong 1996, 101–3; Israel 2006, 335). La Beaumelle’s opposition to Louis XIV’s “despotism” was hardened by a Huguenot iden-tity that made him find Montesquieu soft on autocratic rule. If, as Gilles Susong (1996, 105) has argued, La Beaumelle wrote about liberty at the confluence of the domains of two questions, namely, those of “civic tolera-tion” and “natural law,” pitting Bayle or Burlamaqui against Montesquieu, this essay argues that La Beaumelle also understood the potential of polit-ical economy to supplant social-contract theories and to offer a way out of insoluble political problems. Therefore, La Beaumelle advocated the natu-ral harmony of political economy where social-contract theories had failed (Rosanvallon 1979, 6). Unlike Montesquieu, who argued that a commer-cial nobility was not desirable in a monarchy such as France, based as it was on honor, La Beaumelle embraced without reservations the language and the consequences of an economic commerce intimated by Montes-quieu (Howse 2006).

It is precisely this radicalism, unencumbered by academic restraints or parliamentarian esprit de corps, that allows us to better observe how sci-ence, changing the understanding of the nature of the state, changed the understanding of what a great man would be. Therefore in this article I will use La Beaumelle’s Pensées to take a closer look at the ways in which this transformation occurred. I suggest that science and its nascent myths (such as the mad genius) participated in intimate ways in this transforma-tion, a transformation that had something to do not only with a revamped civic humanist discourse in the eighteenth century, but with the realities of trade (Cheney 2010), foreign policy, and war, with the development of a new anthropology that naturalized morals (Aspromourgos 2001; Cole-man 2001; De Marchi 2001; Groenewegen 2001; Thomson 2008), and with the growth of the modern state (Raeff 1983; Clark 2007; Kaiser and Van Kley 2011).


1. In the citations to La Beaumelle’s Pensées ([1752] 1997), the Roman numerals refer to the numbers La Beaumelle assigned to each of his pensées or “fragments”; the Arabic numerals refer to the pages in the 1997 edition of his Pensées edited by Claude Lauriol and published by Droz.

1. The State

According to La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, LXXIII, 57), the state was a “machine,” a “system,” or an “orchestra.”1 The notion of a “system” had come to be commonly used in the sciences and metaphysics in the late seventeenth century (Pellegrin 2006, 11) only to be widely rejected as an ontological temptation by the eighteenth-century philosophers starting with Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and his Traité des systèmes (1749) (Hine 1979, 22–47; Schwegman 2010). The metaphor of the “state machine” was widely used in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Europe, a testament thus to the success and political relevance of the new mechan-ical philosophy (Stollberg-Rilinger 1986; Mayr 1989; Wootton 2006). In France it was Charles-Irenée de Saint-Pierre who wrote in a heavily sys-tematic way about a state machine, assembled and operated from the outside by a monarch or a prime minister who would know its “springs” and could “construct a little society with so much artifice that it could conserve itself” (Keohane 1980, 371). Assisted by experts, the ruler would create a system in which it would be the interest of everyone to do what was useful for the common good.

As is perhaps not well known, La Beaumelle was influenced quite significantly by the abbé de Saint-Pierre, as evidenced by the number of pages on which he writes in terms inflected by Saint-Pierre—see, for example, pages 35, 71, 72, 100, 132, 137, 164, 188, 252, and 357 in the Pen-sées. He was also heavily indebted to Montesquieu, who in L’esprit des lois (1748) wrote about political laws as an expression of a rationality determined by the “nature of things” (“la nature des choses”) (Spector 2004, 8–10; Courtois 1999, 17–103). If the abbé de Saint-Pierre talked about building a state machine, it was Montesquieu who indicated a way to arrive at the anthropological understanding necessary to accomplish such a task. Montesquieu’s practice of the empirical method allowed him to gain the historical and environmental knowledge necessary to develop an anthropology that was scientific in that it both accounted for the origins of political institutions and understood any social order on its own terms (Goyard-Fabre 1973, 46–68). While the abbé de Saint-Pierre wrote about


the state machine, his politics were still cast in a Christian-Stoic anthropo-logical mold. This mold was rejected by the mechanist neo-Epicurean contemporaries of La Beaumelle such as Helvétius, who was determined to become a Newton of morals by “treating morals as any other science, and by making from morals an experimental physics,” and from ethics a science based on mathematically calculated laws (Helvétius 1758, 1:13; Martin 1994, 7–107). Montesquieu, on the other hand, while taking “polit-ical virtue” out of the realm of Christian morality and into that of natural explanation, rejected both the Newtonian mathematization of physics and what he saw as the Newtonian “esprit de système” (Kiernan 1968, 156–63). Montesquieu was accompanied in his rejection of the Newto-nian mathematization of physics by his friend Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who argued based on the naturalist nominalism of the life sci-ences against the mathematical (mostly geometrical) generalizations of the mechanical sciences. In fact, both Montesquieu and Buffon were inter-ested in the experimental method and in the empiricism of the new sci-ence, but argued that Newtonian physical mathematics tended to become less a description of reality than a scholastic mathematical confirmation of some abstract premises that yielded the bare confirmation of certain arti-ficial truths instead of any real knowledge of life (Wohl 1960; Kiernan 1968, 155–62, 190–91).

La Beaumelle, who was introduced to Buffon by Montesquieu in the summer of 1750 and who counted the two men among the greatest spirits of the age (Lauriol 1978, 210; La Beaumelle 1752, 118), inherited from them and solved in his own way this ambivalent attitude toward Newton. Although acknowledging with Buffon that there are certain “revolutions” that “change the face of everything,” thus weakening or making obsolete the mainspring of any political machine (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, XLI, 42–43; XC, 70–71), these revolutions came more rarely due to the emer-gence of a new, liberal, commercial order based on a combination of self-interest, mutual dependence, and trust (Clark 2007, 90–94). Being unpre-dictable, they could not be part of human science or human prudence. As such, La Beaumelle’s political science would still be built on Newton’s unchanging laws of nature. In the political world, these would correspond to the constitution, to the basic laws of a certain society. These fundamen-tal laws would be apprehended by La Beaumelle in the empirical manner of Montesquieu’s “sociology” and Buffon’s natural history as developed in the first three volumes of his Histoire naturelle (1749). By taking over Montesquieu’s sociology, La Beaumelle inherited Montesquieu’s tension


2. See, for example, La Beaumelle’s (1752, 78–79) use of the example of Ethiopia, a king-dom that, situated in a climate favorable to “despotism” and polygamy, avoided them because it was a Christian country.

between a physical constitution (the climate, for example) that was fixed and acted as a precondition that limited the political options of any soci-ety, and man’s moral liberty, which helped him escape to a certain extent this geographical determinism.2 The new political science would then for-mulate positive laws that could help make the best of these fundamental limitations, which were acknowledged but not surrendered to. We are born with certain characteristics, but it is through our use of reason that we acquire our virtues, wrote La Beaumelle (1752, 141). As a writer dedicated to fighting atheism and determinism, which he considered to be the main philosophical consequence of atheism, La Beaumelle tried to come up with a scientifically built political machine that could free us from bio-logical determinism while taking it into account.

La Beaumelle believed, like Montesquieu, that politics could and should be boiled down to certain “maximes,” to certain laws based on a profound knowledge of man and his environment (Lauriol 1978, 167–211). Unen-cumbered by any patriotic or religious bias, this knowledge had to be based on empirical observation impartially collected on the horizontal of space and on the vertical of time (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, II, 27). A great political philosopher such as Montesquieu was cosmopolitan in his philanthropy and in his projects: “He would not disregard brothers that he cannot see for the benefit of brothers that he can see: his heart seeks all the virtues, and his projects embrace the whole world” (XLII, 43). The result of this new political science would be a mechanical politics similar to the mechanical philosophy. The politician had to conceive a “project,” a “plan both wide and deep” (CLXV, 95). If the Tory neo-Epicurean David Hume ([1752] 1994a, 57) wrote in those same years that “of all mankind, there are none so pernicious as political projectors,” La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCLVII, 134; CCXCIII–CCCII, 144–46) related social progress to the existence of people who would come up with policy models. These policy makers or social engineers would be able to build a social engine upon one single principle, serving the mathematically calculated common good (XLI, 42–43; XC, 70–71).

In fact, La Beaumelle’s great political man was similar to Buffon’s nat-uralist, whose “true knowledge of Nature and natural laws would emerge only gradually, through repeated observation which at the same time would develop remarkable qualities within the individual, such as ‘force


3. For the “optimist” brand of Calvinism taught in La Beaumelle’s Geneva, see Rosenblatt 1997, 46–158.

4. For a good discussion of Geneva as a capital of modern economics, where the Leibniz-ian “science of happiness” met a proto-physiocratic celebration of agriculture, see Brühlmeier 1995, 53–71. As Claude Lauriol (1978, 72–72) showed, while in Geneva, La Beaumelle read with much enthusiasm at least Burlamaqui, in manuscript.

of genius,’ ‘courage,’ ‘taste’; the opposing abilities to grasp everything ‘at a glance’ and to attend to minutiae with painstaking labour” (Spary 2000, 25). La Beaumelle’s ([1752] 1997, I, 26) great political man had to develop through careful social observation an ability to grasp at a glance how to “make people happy.”3 Although built upon natural characteristics and inclinations, happiness was a product of politics; it was not “natural.” It was only positive laws that could “compel us to be happy” (I, 26). While the natural-law school talked about an unattainable virtue, positive laws could be enforced, thus making people fear punishment of some kind. Like Grotius Pufendorf and Burlamaqui before him, La Beaumelle (1752, 123) acknowledged the existence of natural laws.4 But like Hobbes or Nicole, La Beaumelle talked about self-preservation and the “fear of death” as the “first tie of civil society” (Van Kley 1987; Force 2003, 76–78). Thus, La Beaumelle embraced the neo-Augustinian argument that for a fallen, sinful human being, self-love and the pursuit of its enlightened self-interest would be more efficient as a social incentive than the rewards of virtue. But if Jansenists still talked about la charité, or if Rousseau still talked about “compassion” (Linton 2001, 22–128), La Beaumelle wrote only about the “sociability” springing from individual self-interest (Spellman 1998, 177–81). La Beaumelle argued that the desire to reform society was a “passion” as beneficial as any other. Therefore, poor people’s self-interest was a legitimate incentive to come up with a “plan”: “Abundance develops, helps grow the seeds, but it seems that only poverty gives birth to these seeds” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, XXXI, 39).

The most important consequence of this approach was that La Beau-melle embraced a radical democratic political philosophy. In order to do this he had to add to Montesquieu’s empirical nominalism Newtonian mathematical generalizations. Indeed, La Beaumelle argued that, since it would be impossible to make everybody happy, a wise prince should just act knowing that some parts have to be sacrificed for the sake of the whole. Society could not survive without crimes and unhappiness, “the salts that arrest decay” (CCL, 132). Hence, a wise ruler would have to engage in calculations to find out exactly how many people he would


5. I could not find any evidence that La Beaumelle read William Petty or Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s pioneering works on political arithmetic. On the other hand, La Beaumelle wrote about Bernoulli’s and Maupertuis’s theories in his Vie de Maupertuis, written between 1759–60 (La Beaumelle 1856, 17, 82, 100, 105, 124–25, 198).

have to make unhappy in order to have in his kingdom the greatest possi-ble number of happy people (IV, 28; XCV, 72–73). Similarly to the argu-ments about the “utility-maximizing man” advanced by the Genevan mathematician Daniel Bernoulli in 1731 and by the French scientist Mau-pertuis in 1749 (Coleman 1995, 40–49),5 La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, V, 29) argued that the best politician was “the best calculator,” a person who understood that “the huge machine of the state” rested, at least in the case of most of continental Europe, on the shoulders of peasants, on the “farmer” so despised by the small and frivolous elites at the top. Demo-graphic statistics could be used to support a new political contract or to reinforce a new moral code in which court favoritism, monopolies, pen-sions, and sinecures played no role (Dockes 1969, 132–57; Perrot 1992, 128–236; Brian 1994; Spary 2000, 33; Blum 2002, 110–12).

La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, IV, 29) opposed to absolutist monarchies and their pension- and monopoly-dependent court aristocracies the exam-ple of England, a trading power whose commercial elites were perfectly suited to make the necessary political calculations and to take advantage of any accident or “revolution” in order to craft a coherent political system with an economic balance and not more than the necessary and sufficient number of unhappy people. The English political system was like a big, old tree “with as many roots as branches. It is the result of chance and circumstances, but it looks like the fruit of the most profound meditation and of the meditation of only one person” (CCCXV, 149). England pros-pered on the basis of its own fundamental laws and institutional frame-work because they corresponded to the “spirit” of the English people (CCCXX, 150). Any new English law would just have to align itself to the constitutional order already in place (CCCXXI, 150). The great political mechanism functioned exactly like the Newtonian system, proving itself capable of absorbing even the shock of political revolutions, compared by La Beaumelle with comets putting the system in motion: “Its consti-tution resembles that of the planetary system which, according to New-ton, needs from time to time some comets to restore its initial vigor and to wind up the whole nature” (CCCXXIII, 150).

In offering England as an example, La Beaumelle (1752, 127–28) did not have to depart from his mechanicism since around the middle of the


eighteenth century there was no significant difference between organic and artificial machinery (Lassen 2009, 103). Moreover, if there was some-thing “accidental” and “organic” in the “revolutions” of English history, there was something scientific in the way in which English men of state and philosophers interpreted and used these upheavals. The consistency of the English constitution could be explained precisely by the consistency of the “method” used by those who crafted it over the centuries. Thomas Hobbes ([1640] 1994, 19) wrote about the consistency and uniformity of mathematics, an argument that would be revived by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in the eighteenth century. Bossuet wrote about the unity and consistency of Catholic dogma as opposed to the variations of the Protes-tant churches (Jacob 1976; Porter 2000, 130–55). La Beaumelle argued that the great political men were consistent in their approach and in their results over the centuries. Political experiments, like scientific experi-ments, could thus be duplicated, over time, with the same results, by dif-ferent rulers of equal genius: “Look at how slowly emerged that system of equilibrium, so sensible, so simple. It was unknown to the ancients. Only Hannibal had any idea. . . . Hannibal, Elizabeth, Henry IV, Richelieu, all thought along the same lines. The great geniuses’ ideas are uniform” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCCCXIII, 170; CCCCXXI, CCCCXXII, 176–78). Only someone who planned and executed a legal and moral reform that survived him was a great man. That was why, for La Beau-melle, Solon, who lived longer than his own laws, was not as great as Lycur-gus, who was not as great as the Chinese emperor Kang Hi (CCIV, 116).

According to La Beaumelle, a good constitution could be merely a “nat-ural” thing, the result of a good environment; but in order to last, a good constitution had to be the result not only of nature but of political revolu-tions, historical accidents, a lucky combination of crimes and virtues, and, above all, great rulers who knew how to harness all these circumstances in order to improve the order already in place at their accession to power (CCCCXXIII, 178). This progressive nature of the new science of govern-ment made La Beaumelle take a nuanced stance in the famous quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, by writing that the modern writers might be greater than the ancient ones, but that the ancient “heroes” were certainly greater than the modern ones (CCCCXXXIII–CCCCXXXIV, 180–81). The inferiority of the moderns was not of an insurmountable nature. It was not an ontological Fall but an epistemological fault that was keeping mod-ern rulers prisoners of dated metaphysical models (La Beaumelle 1752, 75–76). For La Beaumelle tradition was harmful if it confused age with an


authority that only nature and reason could offer. La Beaumelle made a distinction between the longevity of traditional monarchies and that of “natural,” and thus rational, political machines. The first were just primi-tive survivals owing their longevity to superstition. They fed on the defects of human beings, not on their virtues. From kings, who just managed prejudices and abused reason, humankind went to the age of legislators, who tried to create a world according to reason: “The kings preceded the legislators. . . . The abuse of reason came before the use of reason” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCII, 116). Indeed, monarchies and empires came naturally to people, while republics were the creation of men. As in the case of positive laws versus natural laws, what was manmade was, in La Beaumelle’s eyes, superior to what was “natural.” A rational system, a political contraption built from scraps, was better than any “ancient” or “sacred” order, because it was created according to men’s own specifica-tions: “The monarchical government is as old as the world, and the patri-archal empire is the first form of empire. All the other forms of govern-ment are just remnants of monarchy, bits and pieces that our need gathers, our common sense reassembles, and our industry reinforces” (CCV, 117). In this case, the premeditated republics were superior to the “natural” monarchies because they corresponded not to men’s natural vices, wors-ened by religions like Christianity for example, but to men’s natural goals: enlightenment, happiness, virtue. And these goals could be pursued through hard, methodical work.

If politics was a science, La Beaumelle believed in the superiority of good men of state over good scientists. Politics was, according to La Beaumelle and following Montesquieu’s concern with the “disorder” of human affairs (Binoche 1998, 8–14), a more difficult science than natu-ral science. A great ruler or political scientist was a better scientist than the natural philosopher because he had to succeed while working with more volatile elements and under more unstable conditions than the nat-ural scientist. The political man or the political philosopher did not work in the controlled surroundings of a laboratory, but with societies, with restless human beings: “Political genius is, even according to geometers, far superior to the geometrical spirit. There are one hundred Eulers and Newtons for each Colbert, and there are one thousand Colberts for a single Montesquieu. . . . The political calculator works with complex and ever changing beings, while the geometer has to do with simple and invari-able entities” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, VI, 29–30; see also Melon [1734] 1847, 809).


Similarly to Montesquieu (1964, 957), who poured scorn on mathemat-ical dynasties such as the Bernoullis who seemed to transform geometry into a family affair, La Beaumelle took the increasingly socialized forms of scientific life—academies, scientific journals, public experiments—at their face value and considered that, once a scientific “truth” had been discovered, scientists merely followed in their predecessors’ path and built upon each other’s arguments (Jacob and Stewart 2004, 37–42; Gaukroger 2007, 455–90). What had been, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a scientific revolution became, by the middle of the eighteenth century, an established tradition (Lux 1991, 23–24). La Beaumelle argued that politics needed a revolution similar to the scientific one, one that would establish politics on a true, empirical, science of human nature. The quantitative additions to that science would allow the qualitative tinkering of the polit-ical machines.

The new science postulated that human nature could be “described by a mechanistic science of causes” such as the clime, the soil, the environment (Malcolm 2002, 155). Elucidating, as Montesquieu did, the relationship between, for example, despotism, polygamy, Islam, and a warm climate, a great political scientist or practitioner of the new science of politics could predict the future, could wind up political springs that would influence things even after his death, could work at a distance for the benefit of his human brothers whom he did not see but who were still part of his cosmo-politan projects and beneficiaries of his laws (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, VI, 30). “Binding” the future by discovering the natural laws and putting them to work through the state for the benefit of society, a good political scientist would be just like a natural philosopher in the seventeenth cen-tury: someone who made “magic” normal (Goldish 2004, 19–27).

As such, the ideal ruler would not be a patriarchal king or even a saintly king. For La Beaumelle a great ruler was above all defined by his under-standing of the laws of nature and society, not by his defense of outmoded traditions or by his private virtues, about which La Beaumelle had La Rochefoucauldian misgivings. If a great man was someone who increased the happiness of others, then a man who pursued his own enlightened self-interest was more beneficial to society than a saint or a hero who, in look-ing not for happiness but for virtue, smacked of “enthusiasm” and “fanati-cism” (La Beaumelle 1752, 90–92). A perceptive citizen with a “sensitive heart” was more fit to rule than a fiery hero (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXIII, 55). Lacking a sense of nuance, the hero was not a sociable man. He was not interested in “commerce,” understood as both trade and socia-


bility. Embracing the neo-Augustinian/neo-Epicurean understanding of human nature, La Beaumelle saw self-interest as the only foundation of society, at least in an eighteenth century in which there was a clear link between commerce and political power: “Is it not true that the real king of the world is the one who is running the world’s trade?” (CCCCXV, 174).

Here, La Beaumelle made variations on a theme sketched by Mon-tesquieu, who, in the Lettres persanes ([1721] 1964, 118), described self-interest as the “the greatest king on earth.” However, La Beaumelle main-tained that Montesquieu’s theory of monarchy, democracy, and despotism failed to account for the way in which self-interest functioned. In eigh-teenth-century Europe, argued La Beaumelle, self-interest did not express itself through honor, virtue, or fear, but only through trade, through sheer accumulation: “Interest is the mainspring of all the states. . . . Commerce is the supreme legislator” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXIV, 55). There-fore, La Beaumelle’s ideal ruler would be a social scientist or even a banker who understood the importance and the mechanism of a good economic system: “Most of the states should have a good banker as their king” (CCLXXXIV, 142). And, in keeping with the “Montesquieu-Steuart doc-trine” (Force 2003, 240–44), La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCCII, 146) maintained against the neo-Stoics that the ruler, spurred by the same self-interest, would consent to work for the public good in order to grow richer.

Yet, La Beaumelle was more a neo-Augustinian than a neo-Epicurean. He cautioned, like Montesquieu, against the “luxury” supported by such neo-Epicureans as Jean-François Melon, in his Essai politique sur le com-merce ([1734] 1847), or David Hume, according to whom “the ambition of the sovereign must entrench on the luxury of individuals, so the lux-ury of the individuals must diminish the force, and check the ambition of the sovereign” (Hume [1752] 1994b, 96). La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCCCVII, 167) acknowledged the beneficial effects of trade, but wanted to put a stop to both the “esprit de finance” and luxury. The “esprit de finance,” or the thirst for money, was widely decried by the supporters of “commerce” (Pocock [1975] 2003, 423–505; Galliani 1989, 118–247; Smith 2005, 67–142). From D’Holbach to Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, from physiocrats such as François Véron de Forbonnais or Louis Joseph Plumard de Dangeul to the trade-savvy Pierre Augustin Caron de Beau-marchais, “la passion des richesses” was considered harmful to the “esprit de commerce” because it confused the signifier (money) with the signi-fied (real wealth) and it fostered a society of greedy speculators and monop-olists, of “fermiers,” instead of a society of people engaged in trading


(D’Holbach [1773] 1969, 3:62–86; Condillac 1795, 373; Beaumarchais 1961, 59; Damiron 1851, 94–95; Decroix 2006, 37, 120, 164–75; Shovlin 2006, 46–48). Both the “esprit de finance” and luxury were symptoms of a proliferation of false standards according to which people could mea-sure economic and human worth. The “esprit de finance” neglected the fact that only agriculture and manufacturing produced real wealth. Lux-ury disregarded the fact that the real worth of a person consisted in his moral, intellectual, commercial, and military virtues. The accumulation of money spurred conspicuous consumption. And conspicuous consump-tion allowed social imposture. Fake wealth produced a fake social order and as such both luxury and the “esprit de finance” were not natural.

Therefore, luxury could ruin a state such as it had ruined the Dutch republic, forcing it to change the “ressort” of its constitution (La Beau-melle [1752] 1997, CCCCXIV, 17; 1752, 145–46). A bad ruler would encour-age luxury because corrupt citizens, too preoccupied with their posses-sions, their wigs, or their pets, would not stand for their liberties, quarrel with ministers, or argue about taxes (CCLXI, 135). But this growth of the ruler’s power on behalf of the diminishing power of a greedy and corrupt citizenry would lead to despotism. In the end, a prince trying to accumu-late political power by corrupting his subjects would actually act against his own enlightened self-interest by trading real power over a prosperous country engaged in commerce for empty political power over a decaying country. If, for Montesquieu, despotism destroyed value by “creating” it artificially, by a king’s decree, for La Beaumelle luxury destroyed lib-erty by giving birth to sloth and license. For Montesquieu, commerce could be dangerous by fostering luxury in republics based on virtue and by encouraging a certain spirit of equality in monarchies based on honor (Larrère 2001, 337–38). Therefore, Montesquieu encouraged sumptuary laws in republics and discouraged a commercial nobility in monarchies (Clark 2007, 109–43). La Beaumelle shunned only the luxury or the inequality brought by trade, while fully embracing the equalitarian con-sequences of a commerce that would foster sociability, moderation, fru-gality, and thrift.

That was why La Beaumelle’s new aristocracy was a trading aristoc-racy (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCCCXXXVIII, 182). In approving this rise of a commercial aristocracy, La Beaumelle betrayed himself to be a more typical representative of that commercial republicanism discovered by Henry C. Clark (2007, vi, and chapters 2, 7, 9) in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu stressed the necessity of a noncom-mercial nobility for the balance of the state (Sonenscher 2007, 104–5).


6. A “scelerat” for La Beaumelle was one who acted or wrote in a larger-than-life, extreme manner. See CIX, CCCXCV, 76, 164, about the “scelerat” Machiavelli.

By arguing for a nobility that would not be the corporate embodiment of a political-military virtue such as honor, but of commercial values and of enlightened self-interest, La Beaumelle announced the discourse of the patriotic renewal of la noblesse commerçante popularized during the 1750s by the debate around works such as the abbé Gabriel-François Coyer’s La noblesse commerçante (1756) and Développement et défense du système de la noblesse commerçante (1757) (Shovlin 2006, 58–79; Kessler 2007, 271–76; De Dijn 2008, 33–34). Sense and sensibility went hand in hand, and trade made people, if less heroic, more peaceful and more aware of the presence and needs of other people (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXV, 55). Sensibility was not the later romantic disease of a genius isolated from society. Sensibility was akin to philanthropy and sympathy. And sympathy, springing from self-interest, was both a com-mercial and a civic virtue because it helped nations and individuals come together (CCCCIX, 169; see also Haskell 1985; Ashworth 1987; Dwyer 1987; and Mullan 1988).

2. The Ideal Republic

So effective was self-interest as a social incentive that, according to La Beaumelle, if a ruler followed the example of Philip of Macedon and gath-ered all the criminals of his kingdom in one city, that city would fare bet-ter than conventional moralists expected because the self-interest of its murderous citizens would keep it from becoming a tyranny: “They have to evolve into a democracy: because who would like to play the despot . . . in a country where a knife stab does not cost anything? . . . A society made up of other societies’ first-class scelerats is bound to produce a people of wise men, of conquerors, and of heroes” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXXXIII, 63).6 As long as they could live by stealing from and oppressing the virtuous, lawless people, given their self-interest, would not reform themselves. Therefore, La Beaumelle maintained that the first duty of any ideal legislator would be to gather in the same city all the virtuous, enlight-ened, vigorous people in order to create a “stable” of genetically superior people: “This city would be a nursery of great men. Princes have horse stables; they should also have man stables. Once we manage to prevent the blending of races, we could count on the same degree of quality in people as in horses” (LXXXIV, 64).


In this utopian city, selective breeding would make most laws useless, since all citizens would be hereditarily inclined to be virtuous. The state would care for children from their conception, prescribing to their moth-ers a certain way of life suitable to their temperaments and to the well-being of the children they carried, and whom they would, once born, breastfeed (LXXXIV, 64). Once he uttered his first sounds, the child would start his education (Williams 2007, 172–74). Masters both “virtu-ous and learned” would watch over the child and teach him the delights of the arts and the satisfactions of duties and physical education (LXXXIV, 65). Later, the great man in formation would be “united” with a “lovable virgin” (LXXXIV, 65). In fact, one of the main duties of the “legislator” would be precisely to watch over marriages and, without intruding, to manipulate citizens of both sexes (“l’amener avec adresse”) so that in mar-rying he would choose someone good for the entire society: “Convinced that he makes his own choice for his own sake, he would actually choose for the sake of the whole society, and as society planned it, so that the hap-piness of one is to increase the safety of all” (LXXXIV, 65–66).

La Beaumelle’s utopian closed society confirms Emma Spary’s (2000, 84) observation that the empirical approach to the natural sciences as well as to politics in the eighteenth century could be read as a “concern with controlling events and people.” La Beaumelle’s ideal politics involved col-lecting information about and regulating even the most intimate details of life, from reproduction to religious observance. The legislator would be able to intervene into the private lives of citizens not only in the name of the law, but also under the cover of “religion.” This nondenominational religion would function as a system of laws (“les lois de religion”; LXXXIII, 62) regulating for the benefit of the city the “irrational” part of the citizens’ soul, the passions, and, implicitly, their sexual life (LXXXIV, 66; CCXXIV, 126). Family and religion could not be allowed to become autonomous centers of authority, and the “religious revelation” had to serve the “civil revelation” by becoming an instrument of social control and eugenics (Trousson 1998, 39–52, 115–28).

The moral policing exercised by “la religion” and the capital punish-ment inflicted on adulterers and drunks would help keep this ideal city free from any undesirables such as natural children (those born out of wedlock), designated by La Beaumelle as “monsters” whose mothers would be punished as murderers: “Because giving birth to monsters is as bad as murdering citizens” (LXXXIV, 66). In addition to natural children, there were also other categories of people unfit to live in La Beaumelle’s


man farm, as it were: “All the disabled, ill, ugly, stupid, bad people would be removed from society” (LXXXIV, 67). Among these misfits, the mag-istrates of the city would choose every ten years “the most vicious and the most misshapen” to be sent as human tribute to the king, who protected the laws of the city. This would actually be a gift, since “the most vicious citizens of this city would become the most virtuous people of other coun-tries” (LXXXIV, 67). In addition to keeping demographic growth under control and to exporting those least able to function successfully as citi-zens, the city would not suffer any immigrants lest they bring some moral or physical disease (CXXII, CXXIV, CXXVI, CXXVII, 80–82). People, like plants, could be worked upon, improved. La Beaumelle’s utopia indi-cated a way in which natural degeneracy could be kept at bay by careful selective breeding (Spary 2000, 103; Sloan 1973). Kept isolated in a cen-tury that was, according to La Beaumelle, the century of trade, sympathy, and economically beneficial immigrants (CCCLXXXVI, 162; XLVIII, 190–91; see also Williams 2007, 154), La Beaumelle’s utopian city was nothing more than a huge man farm from whence the king would levy some slice of population to graft onto the decayed social tissue of his kingdom in order to restore the “blood” of the French nation: “In one hun-dred years we would have produced a blood so pure and so beautiful that it would restore the whole nation. . . . I am so convinced that the difference of temperaments is responsible for the difference of souls, and that the qualities of the heart and of the mind are hereditary, that I do not have any doubt whatsoever that in twenty-five or thirty years I would have a race of people through whose veins would run common sense and virtue” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXXXIV, 68).

If the physiocrats stressed the importance of farmers’ accepting the authority of savants over agricultural matters, La Beaumelle stressed the importance of good political husbandry and the scientific ruler who could oppose degeneracy by enforcing virtue and by transplanting people with good genes (Spary 2000, 52, 126–28; Hoffman 1988). In stressing the role of heredity, La Beaumelle seemed to depart again not only from Montes-quieu, who stressed the importance of the environment, but from Lin-naeus’s natural science and political economy with its emphasis on unchang-ing natural forms, economic protectionism, and autarkic political systems.7

7. For Linnaeus as a “Newton of natural history” who explained all animal and vegetable life by one principle only, that of reproduction, see Paul 1980, 52–54. For Linnaeus’s political opinions, see Limoges 1974. For Buffon as a supporter, between 1746 and 1756, of Linnaeus’s theories regarding the immutability of species, see Gregory 2008, 15.


But La Beaumelle’s utopia was not meant to challenge or replace the vir-tues of the commercial civilization but to fuel them. La Beaumelle’s ideal city would function as part of a larger political machine, not as a millenar-ian utopia. La Beaumelle did not argue for a complete reformation of man, and his Platonism did not go so far as to advocate owning property and women in common. His utopia aimed at indicating certain ways in which French Catholics and Protestants could live together and have commerce. La Beaumelle’s “micro-harmony” (Nemoianu 1977) was akin to Rous-seau’s later agrarian-pietist utopian “small society” of Clarens, complete with its manipulation and hidden violence (Racault 1991, 692–729). La Beaumelle’s main aim was to argue against the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and for religious toleration, even if it meant having a two-tiered society in which a Huguenot republic would serve as a man farm for a Catholic kingdom. The small utopian Huguenot city and the large Catho-lic kingdom could meet on the level of self-interest and demographics. La Beaumelle’s utopian city was just a political arithmetic solution, based on self-interest, to a theologico-political conflict.

La Beaumelle’s utopia, together with his enthusiasm for Peter the Great (which we will discuss later), were two of his most underestimated depar-tures from Montesquieu’s ideas. While Montesquieu’s aim was to instruct the princes by his descriptive science, La Beaumelle’s book was mostly a prescriptive one. He used Montesquieu’s method in order to craft his own political “machine,” one that would solve the conflict between French Catholics and Protestants. Montesquieu was accused of not being con-cerned with the “right” or “wrong” of the state of affairs described in his L’esprit des lois (Carrithers 2001, 8–9, 12–15). Montesquieu’s taxonomy obscured his axiology. In fact, his axiology depended on his taxonomy: the value of a political system depended on its capacity to embody and to represent the various threads that made up the character of a nation. By reducing all these principles to a self-interest that would function, in New-tonian fashion, as a principle of social attraction (Spector 2004, 17 n. 1), La Beaumelle put himself in a position to wield an axiological weapon against religiously intolerant kingdoms such as France. La Beaumelle abandoned Montesquieu’s basically political and sociological approach, according to which self-interest could find an expression in honor for example, for a political-economic take acknowledging only the commer-cial expression of self-interest.

As Catherine Larrère has most sharply showed, Montesquieu was not ready to deliver liberty to self-regulating, “natural” economic processes


alone (Larrère 2001, 336, 344–47): “Montesquieu never treated com-merce as completely autonomous” but as a politically “embedded” activity (Plamenatz 1992, 2:48). While, for example, Montesquieu talked about churches as a bulwark against despotism, La Beaumelle, we will see, was skeptical about this, pointing out that Protestants had more to fear from this allegedly “moderating” institution than from the state. Failing to find any solution at the social-contract level, La Beaumelle argued for religious toleration from a political-economic standpoint, using an alternative lan-guage that accentuated the importance of natural harmonization through self-interest and a utilitarianism that would not avoid religious corpora-tions. Thus, if Montesquieu’s political liberalism had to accommodate cer-tain forms of economic illiberalism, such as a purely military, noncom-mercial nobility, La Beaumelle’s economic liberalism could accommodate certain forms of political illiberalism, such as his utopian “polis” and Peter the Great’s engineered reforms in Russia. In fact, what both Montesquieu and La Beaumelle had in common was a shared awareness that any politi-cally liberal system has to be based on certain noncommercial values and corporate bodies, and that any economically liberal system has to be based on certain politically authoritarian societies that could replenish the work-force of the larger system. Facing renewed persecution against the Calvin-ist community in his native France, La Beaumelle was ready to take the second road in order to ensure the civil toleration of his co-religionists.

Since La Beaumelle wrote in 1751 that Catholicism led to monarchy while Protestantism led to republics (La Beaumelle 1752, 114–15) we might indeed advance the idea that his ideal city was meant to be a Huguenot city in a Catholic kingdom such as France. One of the main arguments in favor of this reading would be that La Beaumelle’s previous utopian writing, L’asiatique tolérant (1748), was a blistering attack on the religious policy of the French absolutist monarchy and an appeal against the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. La Beaumelle’s Catholic contemporaries accused him of harboring Calvinist republican ideas and forced La Beaumelle to strongly reject such accusations and to protest his loyalty to the king of France (Weil 1997, 141–150), although his enthusiasm for the equalitarian virtues of commerce indicated he was a “commercial republican.” But it is important to remember that La Beaumelle’s city republic would actually be part of a larger kingdom that the utopian city was supposed to transform by internal forced migration (transplantations of population).

Thus, according to La Beaumelle, Catholic kingdoms were ruined by their too many holidays, which encouraged sloth, while Protestant nations,


with their far smaller number of holidays, managed to work more, to have better productivity, and thus to eat more and to increase in numbers: demo-graphic growth fueled economic growth and vice versa (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CXXVIII, 82–83). That was why the main duty of a king was to create the conditions for demographic growth. La Beaumelle embraced this argument and entered thus the debate regarding the depopulation of France, a debate stirred not only by the economic and demographic decline of France during Louis XIV’s last two decades on the throne, but also by the attempt of the French Enlightenment to use the natalist argument against the Catholic Church. Carol Blum showed that, even while by the middle decades of the eighteenth century the population of France started to increase, the “depopulation delusion” offered the philosophes a “high moral ground from which Church and State could be denounced for weak-ening the collectivity” (Blum 2002, 5; see also Perrot 1988, 2:499–551).

Following in the footsteps of Montesquieu, who argued in his Let-tres persanes (1721) that commerce, agriculture, and demographic growth are connected, and that the Protestant, commercial countries had a more numerous population than the Catholic kingdoms (Montesquieu 1964, 124; Firth 1998), La Beaumelle saw an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the state and those of the Catholic Church. Taking an Eras-tian aim at the Catholic Church, La Beaumelle argued that the celibacy vows were completely at odds with the needs of the modern state engaged in bloody wars and in increasing productivity. Celibacy hampered the attempts of the government to harness all the resources of the state for the greater happiness of the greatest possible number: “Everything that dimin-ishes the human race diminishes the good of the state. . . . Everybody talks only about population, and they are right, because the wars have never been so bloody” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CXXXII, 85). By abolishing the monastic orders the state could transform the Church into an instru-ment of social improvement. Supported by statistics that indicated that the celibacy of the twelve apostles deprived the state of millions of useful subjects, La Beaumelle (1752, 109–10) argued that the dissolution of the monasteries would benefit the state by fueling an economic revolution not only as a result of abolishing celibacy, but also as a consequence of bring-ing the clerical lands back into the commercial circuit (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CXXX, 84; Blum 2002, 21–60). In making this last point, La Beaumelle took the same stance as Richard Cantillon, whose Essai sur la nature du commerce en général circulated in manuscript and would be


printed only in 1755 as part of the wave of economic publications spon-sored by Vincent de Gournay, and who became an “intendant du com-merce” in 1751.

The relationship between church and state was further complicated by La Beaumelle’s belief that while the raw spectacles of paganism gave birth to heroes, good citizens, and a taste for freedom, Christianity accustomed people to slavery by preaching submission (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CXCVII–CXCVIII, 114). But if La Beaumelle argued that Christianity stood in the way of happiness by preaching a sort of “slave morality,” he also deplored the lack of faith in God the Father spawned by modern skeptical philosophy: “Once all these ideas have spread, what is going to happen? Because, after all, we need some religion” (CCXVIII, 124). Like trade, the appropriate dose of religion was a harbinger of happiness and thus a matter of social utility since vice and luxury begat depopulation and thus economic decline (Everdell 1987, 109–43; Blum 2002, 50). In order to be useful, religion should unite people, argued La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCXVI, 123): “True religion conquers the heart by the power of gentleness and virtue.” While deploring the submission to the kings preached by the priests, La Beaumelle also deplored the disunity of Chris-tianity and the quarrels between Catholics and Protestants and among the various Protestant and neo-Protestant churches and sects. Noting that, in fact, “today . . . the philosophical spirit won even over theologians,” La Beaumelle argued that the ruler would do well to force the priests to preach to his subjects moral zeal and indifference regarding dogmatic matters (CCXVII, 124; CCXIX–CCXXI, 124–25).

If the “inner light” spirituality of Leszek Kolakowski’s (1969) “Chris-tians without a church” has been considered a way of opposing the ortho-doxy enforced by the early modern confessional monarchies (Sutcliffe 2005, 133–64), La Beaumelle provides us with a new way of interpreting this focus on inner spirituality as opposed to public devotion. Even though an ardent defender of religious tolerance and the Edict of Nantes, La Beau-melle questioned in Mes pensées the politico-theological value of religious disobedience by writing that the Huguenots should stay home and pray instead of continuing to violate royal edicts by gathering for their secret services (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCXIX, 124–25). Here, La Beau-melle reversed his earlier position, from 1744–46, when he embraced the “parti du désert” and when he took up his pen to denounce as fiendish “Catholics” those anonymously attacking “l’église du désert.” Indeed, in


8. For a good study of the various stages of the negotiations between the Huguenot diaspora and the Genevan and French governments, see Pauline Haour’s (1995) study on Antoine Court and the political thought of the Huguenot diaspora. Court was one of the Huguenot leaders who questioned the utility of La Beaumelle’s attacks on the French govern-ment in L’asiatique tolérant (1748).

the middle of the 1740s, realizing that a complete spiritualization of the Huguenot religious life would diminish the corporate presence of the church (and in this particular case, the Reformed Church) in society, La Beaumelle argued for the Huguenots’ right to revolt against any king who would attempt to stifle their faith. By the end of the 1740s, though, La Beaumelle seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to support the state instead of the corporate power of any church. Indeed, in February 1749 La Beaumelle wrote to his brother, Jean, arguing against Montesquieu, who saw in the corporate power of the clergy a bulwark against royal despotism. La Beaumelle argued that the despotism of the Inquisition was more fearful than that of the state (Lauriol 1978, 48–49, 71–74, 181).

La Beaumelle’s change of heart might have been triggered by his disen-chantment with religious quarrels, by his concern for the safety of his fam-ily in the context of renewed persecutions in the Cevennes, and by his development of a new discourse regarding religious toleration, a discourse grounded in political economy, not only in natural law (Lauriol 1978, 133–38).8 All these added up to La Beaumelle’s enthusiasm for a philan-thropy that was above dogmatic concerns and that stressed the importance of orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy. “The essence of religion cannot be the cult,” concluded La Beaumelle (Lauriol 1978, 80–81; see also 88–90, 99, 114–19, 143–45, 154–57). Indeed, by 1751 so complete was La Beau-melle’s disregard for religious “forms,” that he turned on its head Bayle’s famous question regarding the possibility of a republic of atheists by writ-ing that Bayle’s hypothetical republic was indeed possible since virtuous atheists would actually be Christians without a church but with a republic “if that republic would have virtue as its mainspring, equality as its aim, and truth as its principle, in a word if all its members would be worthy of being Christians” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCCLXXVIII, 161).

3. The Great Men

La Beaumelle’s (1752, 191–92) spiritualization of religion, his de-emphasis on ritual and the sacraments, was accompanied by an attack, fueled by his


readings of bitter Jansenist moralists such as La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and La Bruyère, but mostly by his desire to unmask the “imposture” of the Church Fathers, on the traditional virtues and public pieties of “great men” (94–95, 191–92). According to La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCXI, 122), any widely held belief regarding great men, like any public religious ortho-doxy, was misleading or downright impossible. He held that position in part because, unlike twentieth-century historians, he was not enthusiastic about the soundness of the public sphere: “The public is almost never doubt-ful of mediocre men, nor entirely sure about great men” (CCCCXLII, 183). For La Beaumelle it was private practice, not public devotion, that was socially beneficial, and a sensible man was more useful to society, by quietly taking his place in its organic order, than a hero who might unsettle it. This accent on private virtues confirms La Beaumelle as a republican reader of Montesquieu, who said that, in a monarchy, vices remained pri-vate, while in a republic they tended to corrupt the whole society, because a republic was founded on private virtues (Clark 2007, 121–29; Rahe 2009, 17, 24–25, 44–46). According to La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, LXXV, 58), it was then more difficult to discover true models of great men in antiquity or among the Church Fathers because historians gave us only the public man, the mask, the hero, the hagiography and rituals: “Most of the histori-ans give us a mask as the true face, the hero as the man: instead of showing they paint, they paint the profile, and sometimes they paint themselves.”

Combining a radical disenchantment of the heroic or sacred origins of all republics and monarchies with a mythologizing of a new sort of “hero” culled from the sensational news of the day, La Beaumelle used the look-ing glass of historical perspective to project Cartouche on a larger histori-cal canvas and to bring closer the heroes of the past. By simply changing the perspective, by treating the present as past and the past as present, La Beaumelle managed to make Cartouche more heroic, and Solon, Condé, and Romulus more familiar. The lives of all saints and heroes were exem-plary only as a whole (CXLVI–CLXIII, 90–93). In close-up, any great hero might appear as a ruffian, while any ruffian could be projected, on the huge screen of history, as a hero. But if historical perspective could play such tricks on heroes, then the history of heroes was of no use. There-fore, La Beaumelle (1856, 1–3) doubted the value of the educational pro-gram of the philosophes that would later result in their sponsorship of the cult of great men in the French Academy. He did not find much use for the works of historians such as the abbé Raynal, who wrote the Histoire du stathoudérat (1747) and a Histoire du parlement d’Angleterre (1748), the


abbé La Bletterie, who published his Vie de l’empereur Julien in 1735, or even Voltaire, with his Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751) (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXXV, 58–59). According to La Beaumelle the great heroes and the great criminals are alike (LXXXIII, 63). Cartouche resembled the great Condé: they had the same “blood.” Moreover, they both had the audac-ity and the cunning typical of founders of monarchies and republics: “I admire the force of blood; I am even convinced that, in order to be virtu-ous, it is not enough to want it; I am tempted to say that it would have been impossible for Cartouche not to be either a great scelerat or a great man!” (LXXXIII, 63).

Therefore, La Beaumelle’s great men would be those whose accomplish-ments were, like scientific experiments, public and replicable. Instead of religious zeal or heroic virtues resulting in an inappropriate rate of demo-graphic growth due to monastic chastity or to wars (La Beaumelle 1752, 89–113), La Beaumelle praised the enlightened self-interest of common-sensical citizens and of rulers capable of setting up a good and long-lasting state machine, supple enough to adapt itself to any social or economic change. There was, as we saw in La Beaumelle’s discussion of the English “constitution,” a certain scientific consistency in the way the truly great men approached the problems of their age. Among the great men admired by La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCCLXXVI, 161) were Lycurgus, Agato-cles, Socrates, Martin Luther, René Descartes, and Montesquieu; the last four he appraised as “the men humanity has to be the most thankful for.”

But perhaps the best illustration of the great man according to La Beau-melle was Peter the Great, the Russian ruler who started to Westernize his country and who transformed the Russian nobles into a state-service aris-tocracy (Mohrenschildt 1936; LeDonne 1991; Riasanovsky 1992, 3–84; Gorbatov 2006; Cracraft 2006). One of the reasons for this preference is that, much to the chagrin of the Lutheran academic establishment and some enlightened Danish intellectuals such as the scientist and playwright Ludvig Holberg, La Beaumelle saw himself spreading the influence of French language and culture in Denmark and thus pursuing in the north-ern kingdom the same kind of civilizing work that Peter the Great did in Russia. Young king Frederik V (1746–66) revolted against his pietist upbringing by reopening the theaters and by appointing La Beaumelle as “royal extraordinary professor of French language and literature” at the University of Copenhagen (Lauriol 1978, 218–19). Written in Denmark, Mes pensées was thus a sort of mirror of princes that the cosmopolitan La Beaumelle held up to the king of Denmark. In order to advance his cause


and win his fight against the Danish establishment, La Beaumelle wrote that it was more praiseworthy for a prince to make his country adopt for-eign ideas than to create its own. Thus, Peter the Great’s Westernization of Russia indicated not only the extent of his power but also the magnitude of his benevolence that made him compel his subjects to adopt the most advanced ideas of the age (La Beaumelle 1751, 3–4).

This was another signal departure from Montesquieu (1964, 606, 643–44), who considered Peter the Great a despotic ruler whose laws and decrees went against the organic laws and customs of his country. In Mon-tesquieu’s opinion, Peter the Great Westernized the Russians while isolat-ing them, reinforcing their slavery (Mohrenschildt 1936, 238–40; Clark 2007, 121). In other words, Russia’s newly acquired economic and military power and political influence on the European scene did not result in an increase of political liberty for its peoples. But La Beaumelle supported Peter the Great based on an original reading of Montesquieu. In La Beau-melle’s opinion, Peter the Great’s plan was organically tied to Russia’s particular situation and therefore good (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LVI, 50). The nature of Peter the Great’s “project” made him a great man, while such heroes as Brutus, Cassius, and the Swedish king Charles XII were disparaged precisely because their “projects” were misconceived (LIV, LV, 46–49; CXCIX, 114–15). La Beaumelle appreciated in a king not merely his executive prowess and imaginative power, but his thoughtful-ness (LVI, 49; LVII, 51). Without Peter, Russia would have been overcome by its more Westernized neighbor, Sweden (LVI, 50). The reality of inter-national politics, war, and foreign invasions (CCCLXXXVI, 162) had to be taken into consideration by the “project” of any great political man: “‘Leave the world alone,’ we hear everywhere. But the world does not go by itself; and it is not a matter of indifference what direction you are going to give to the machine, especially when you are living in the vicinity of a nation paying close attention to calculating the degrees of speed, force, and movement” (LVI, 49).

For Rousseau, as for Plato, virtue had primarily to do with knowing and mastering oneself. Therefore, Rousseau became one of the great disparag-ers of Peter the Great, noting in his Contrat social that, without actually succeeding in Westernizing the Russians, Peter the Great made Rus-sians less Russian and thus less natural, spoiling their genuine character with a smear of culture and compromising their chance to know and mas-ter themselves for the sake of learning to master some foreign identity imposed on them (Mohrenschildt 1936, 239–42). But for La Beaumelle


9. “This prince, associating in his bed and on his throne with a woman of humble origins, showed to an amazed Europe that empresses could be born in even the vilest conditions. In what princess could Peter the Great have found that resolution, that majesty, that elevation of the soul which he discovered in a peasant woman?,” wrote La Beaumelle in 1750 in La spec-tatrice danoise, III, 21, quoted in Lauriol 1978, 165.

(1752, 83), virtue had something to do with knowing and mastering the circumstances. And among those circumstances were, in the case of Peter the Great’s Russia, militarily superior and economically more advanced neighbors that Peter had to defeat by stealing their technological thunder. As indicated even by his choice of marrying a peasant and making her an empress,9 Peter the Great managed to educate, cultivate, and civilize the Russians, even though nobody could transform their temperament so much as to make them “des hommes d’esprit” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, LXXXII, 62): “There is among Russians more politeness, more honor, more decency, and therefore less corruption today. Even if the czar’s proj-ect wouldn’t have had any consequence other than the lightening of the yoke, the legitimization of the supreme power, and the weakening of the arbitrary power, it would be enough to make all tender hearts applaud. The cause of the Russian nation is the cause of humanity” (LVI, 50–51). The eighteenth century was, perhaps, the first time, before the twentieth, in which Western intellectuals such as La Beaumelle declared the cause of Russia to be the cause of all humanity (Wolff [1994] 2004, 202–34). But since La Beaumelle maintained that no great man worked only for his country, then any country led by a great man benefited all of humanity. Therefore, it became a cause of peoples everywhere, thus strengthening the links of trade with those of sympathy.

La Beaumelle found in Peter the Great a perfect embodiment of the “reason of state” approach to politics, an approach that emphasized rul-ing according to an ever changing and coldly calculated interest. La Beau-melle differed again from Montesquieu, who dismissed the reason-of-state theory and limited the power of the ruler by means of a web of corporate interests and institutional checks and balances. But the reason-of-state theory was not straining La Beaumelle’s fundamental neo-Augustinian ideas (Hirschman [1977] 1997, 31–40; Force 2003, 135–44). Indeed, noth-ing could have been more helpful for the revival of the reason-of-state theory in a non-civic-republican context than the statistical redefinition of the common good devised by La Beaumelle. Since the ruler knew that he had to make certain people unhappy in order to ensure the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, since he knew that


10. See also La Beaumelle [1752a] 1997, CXXXVI, 86–87, where La Beaumelle com-ments archly on the plans of the Marquis de Langallerie (1656–1717) to create a Jewish king-dom on the island of Cyprus.

it was in his own interest to do so, science could help him define his goal and imposture could help him achieve it.

Thus, La Beaumelle praised, in addition to Peter the Great, the founder of the Moravian Brothers, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). La Beau-melle ([1752] 1997, CXXXVII, 87) considered Zinzendorf a benign reli-gious impostor who knew how to use religion in order to forge a “society of brothers,” demonstrating thus the social benefits of a religion defined as orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy.10 La Beaumelle, although aware of both Spinoza and the pseudo-Spinozist literature on the “three impostors” (La Beaumelle 1752, 119–20; Berti, Charles-Daubert, and Popkin 1996; Ander-son 1997), considered the self-deluded fanatic to be more harmful than the coldly calculating impostor (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCXIII, 122). Imposture might have a corrupting effect upon the intellect of the impos-tor who could degrade himself so much as to believe his own imposture and thus to become a fanatic. But imposture was less dangerous than fanaticism since it implied a rational control over a belief system. As such, imposture could be part of the ancient arcana imperii that survived into the new science of politics. The great man had to know how to use for the common good all this fanaticism, all these collective delusions, popular passions, and old beliefs: “It is dangerous to cure a people of their illu-sions, of their shortcomings, if those illusions, if those shortcomings, con-stitute the essence of their character, and that character is good. There is a certain foolishness that is more precious than wisdom” (CCXLIX, 131–32). Any great ruler had to actually be something of an impostor if he wanted to deal successfully with the fanaticism of his own subjects, whom he had to know when to despise in order to govern (CLXI, 93).

For a La Beaumelle who accepted the conventional image of Cardinal Mazarin as the highly susceptible, Machiavellian “foreigner” of the Maza-rinades (Jouhaud 1985; Treasure 1995), the cardinal was a good exam-ple of a man of state who lost his power because he could not manage to ground his government on anything else than love or hate (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCCV, 146; CLXVIII–CLXIX, 96–97; CCX, 120). On the other hand, Henry IV was a great king precisely because he knew how to use people’s imagination for their own good: “Henry IV gave an edict that forbade counting by crowns [écus] instead of pounds [livres]. . . . That


edict aimed to regulate the expenses and to moderate the luxury of private individuals. The mind was fooled by the number. Henry IV got to us, rightly, by way of our imagination” (CXLIII, 89). Any great ruler knew how to rise above the laws, how to skew and manipulate them without tearing them apart (CCCXI, 148; CCCLXXXIX, 163). Entranced by Henry IV and neglecting Montesquieu’s strictures against absolute mon-archs’ manipulating the imagination of their subjects and creating fiat “values” (Clark 2007, 88–89), La Beaumelle showed how a wise ruler could surreptitiously increase taxes by falsifying the unity of measure for time: “Finance expedient. Divide the year into fourteen months instead of twelve in countries where the taxes are paid monthly” (La Beaumelle [1752] 1997, CCCLXXX, 161).

In keeping with this technocratic approach to the social framework, La Beaumelle also praised Sully, the finance minister of Henry IV. La Beau-melle believed that Sully was a far greater minister than Colbert (CLXIV, 93–94). Colbert had good intentions but he was not a good planner and he stumbled in his first enterprises, while Sully was an all-around great man who did everything by himself (CLXIV, 94) and who put in place, like the Romans (CCVI, 117), a state machine that somehow managed to beget great men like Colbert himself (CLXIV, 94). La Beaumelle’s enthu-siasm for Sully would be shortly matched by the feverish canonization of Sully by the physiocrats, who found in the agriculturally inclined and “free market” minister of Henry IV just the statesman to oppose the mer-cantilist minister of Louis XIV (Avezou 2001, 221–51). “Sully prepared the age of Louis XIV and molded Colbert. . . . Colbert’s only glory was to have imitated Sully. . . . Colbert’s plan led to a vast and intricate machine on which we needed to continuously install new wheels; whereas Sully’s plan was simple and uniform as that of nature,” exclaimed in 1763 a La Beaumelle–sounding Antoine Léonard Thomas, the physiocrats’ academic mouthpiece (Avezou 2001, 243).

The transformation of the art of politics into the science of politics, of the medieval regimen into the early modern science of politics, was accompanied by the new prominence of the minister, who governed what the king started to merely reign over. In terms specific to early modern science, we could say that the king was a natural philosopher, a gentleman who calculated the first principles, while the minister took care of the ungentlemanly, “down and dirty” experimental part of a society lacking any transcendental finality and part of a world functioning according to mechanical laws (Senellart 1995, 25–35; Reinhard 1996, 1–2; Ribalta


1996, 20–39). That was why, among ministers, the absolutist state brought prominence to the minister of finance, such as Sully, at the expense of the favorite or the chancellor, signaling thus the transformation of the “état de justice” into an “état de finance” (Antoine 1973). If the medieval king ruled over his subjects and competed or collaborated with the Catholic Church for their salvation, the absolutist and postabsolutist minister was the technocratic administrator of the state’s material well-being (Monod 1999, 305).

4. Conclusion

Any study of the cult of great men in France must take into consideration not only the pantheonization of scientists as great men, but the way in which science influenced the definition of a great man. La Beaumelle’s writings showed us that, owing to the scientific revolution, the meaning of “man” (and thus of the “great man”), “state,” and “virtue” changed. From a being preoccupied with salvation, man was recast as a creature interested in his well-being. Therefore, virtue had less to do with Christian self-denial and ascetic athleticism than with enlightened self-interest. The ruler had to care less about his subjects’ salvation and more about their well-being. And instead of socializing private virtues, the state had to make sure its citizens internalized social virtues. Rather than enforce religious ortho-doxy, for example, the state had to promote the literacy of its citizens. Therefore, the ruler’s medieval concern with justice made room for the state’s concern with progress and reforms. Montesquieu defined laws as “the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.” Taking into account these changes, La Beaumelle proposed a politics based on a natu-ralist anthropology with eugenic overtones and on a utilitarianism that worked well with the reason-of-state doctrine. Instead of the references to historical precedents that were the backbone of patriarchal monarchies, La Beaumelle proposed a continual reference to the balance of interests in a state. As such, scientific politics would consist in scientifically assessing the needs and interests of a people in order to take steps to continually improve the machine of the state so as to better represent and respond to the concerns of the largest possible number of people. This legislation would then have national validity, similarly to Newton’s laws, which had universal validity, and would be applied by a state machine that would function only as an expression of these interests, as a defender of scientific methodology, helping the state to increase the well-being of its citizens.


If the scientific method was not delivering statements about the ulti-mate reality or goal of the self or the universe, but merely, as Hobbes ([1640] 1994, VI, 1, 194) said, “the shortest way of finding out effects by their known causes, or of causes by their known effects” (see also Fois-neau 2000, 60–68), then it followed that the scientific state was not sup-posed to have a “cause” other than its own citizens, who “explained” it. That is why La Beaumelle considered bad a constitution that did not “explain,” that did not account for the nature, meaning the interests, of the citizens of a certain state. Therefore the state and its citizens explain each other, without further recourse to a transcendental cause or teleology or goal. Memory would then become obsolete, since history would cease to be a point of reference for a state that would be about nothing else than itself and its citizens. The past would be implicit in the present, but it would cease to be a referential “golden age” as in the civic-republican tradition, always aiming for a restoration or retrieval of past virtues, insti-tutions, and wisdom. It would just be a step in the trial-and-error process leading to the present. The past would lose its autonomy; it would become only a step on the way to building the best possible government for the largest possible number of people in a scientifically assessed world.

As such, La Beaumelle’s book hinted at an age when Plutarch’s heroes would not be the models of Louis XIV’s heroes, but when the heroes of the past would be the forerunners of the future common men. If a great man was one who could ensure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number of people, La Beaumelle ([1752] 1997, CCCLXII, 158) wished to calculate if a genius was not less useful in this respect than a commonsensical man: “I would have liked to see Bernoulli calculating if it is not better to be governed by common sense than by genius.” As La Beaumelle’s cautious eulogy of heroism and skeptical appraisal of reli-gious virtue indicated, the new science of politics was prepared to con-sider the fundamental ambiguity of vice and virtue in the new world of utilitarian politics for which private crimes, lusts, or interests might benefit the public good.

In the new society, the great man was not to be the embodiment of some transcendental virtue, but of society itself. The great man was supposed to represent not an ideal, but the zeitgeist, the needs of society. La Beau-melle’s great man was one who would establish, based on a corpus of universal empirical knowledge, a political system that could do without great men. In a good society, any common man would be a great man, since society would be tailored according to his needs and his nature. The


success of Martha Skavronska’s transformation into the empress of Rus-sia, Catherine I, was proof of the success of Peter the Great’s reform of the political system in his country. She could succeed because Peter managed to create a system allowing a talented, willful, generous peasant to become an empress. Great men were answers to the accidents of history. But in a political system crafted according to the laws of nature there would be no need for such heroes because there would be far fewer accidents such as revolutions, civil wars, revolts, or famines. La Beaumelle did not propose models; he proposed a system that could create, rear, educate, and use common men as citizens of a commercial republic.

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Documents

Newtonian Science, Commercial Republicanism, and the Cult of Great Men in La Beaumelle’s Pensées