government and based on the idea that the world contained finite resources or wealth that should be
seized and controlled by the state through, for example, staterun monopolies, aggressive military
conflict and colonial enterprise. Voltaire, offended by Christian asceticism, saw commerce as a valuable
means of increasing social prosperity. The poem Commerce by Firmin Douin, published on the eve of the
Seven Years War, was awarded a certificate of merit by the French Academy. It asserted obsequiously
that commerce would render “the Empire of Lilies [the Bourbons] even more flourishing,/The French
happier and Louis more powerful” (cited and translated in Terjanian, 2013, 1). Other Enlightenment
thinkers made careful distinctions between good and bad types of commerce. Montesquieu felt that
commerce could both civilize and corrupt. The Histoire des deux Indes (History of the Two Indies),
edited and partwritten by Raynal, Diderot and others and published in 1770, had a massive impact on
contemporary readers, with 48 editions published between 1770 and 1795, and translations in English,
German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Hungarian. It was banned in 1772 by the
French government in response to its critical attitude to empire, which it saw as a source not only of
national glory, but also of piracy, trade monopolies and slavery.
A similar ambivalence characterized views on luxury, sometimes confused with commerce and at other
times distinguished from it, embodied in the eighteenth century through the visible increase in global trade
in coffee, chocolate, silk, fine porcelain and the decorative arts. Attitudes varied according to whether
luxury was conceived as “abundance” or “superfluity” (Terjanian, 2013, 46–51). There was a sense that
the lifestyle associated with such luxuries was new, even though ancient civilizations had previously
enjoyed similar peaks in material wealth (Terjanian, 2013, 30). The “modern” tastes of polite society
embraced the association of luxury with economic benefit and refinement, while the more conservative
saw it as potentially corrupting and unhealthily ostentatious. Colonial commerce in luxury items attracted
criticism, but was often excused in the name of a burgeoning national pride (Quilley, 2011, 145–164).
Diderot, who enjoyed, like many Enlightenment thinkers, the life of a bon viveur, distinguished between
the “good” kind of luxury derived from a soundly founded national wealth and “bad” luxury, a kind of
excess or greed that thrived in a political climate of corruption and had a pernicious effect on the arts:
... it’s this [kind of luxury] that degrades and destroys the fine arts, for their continued health and
progress require genuine opulence, whereas this brand of luxury does nothing but fatally mask a misery
that’s almost general, which it aggravates and encourages. It’s under the tyranny of this luxury that
talents are wasted or sidetracked. It’s in such circumstances that the fine arts must make do with the
dregs left to those of inferior status; it’s in such extraordinary, perverse circumstances that they’re
either subordinated to the fantasy and caprice of a handful of rich, bored, fastidious men, their taste as
corrupt as their morals, or they’re abandoned to the mercy of the indigent multitude, which strives,
with poor work in all genres, to take on some of the credit and the lustre associated with wealth. In the
present century and under the present reign the impoverished nation has framed not a single grand
enterprise, no great works, nothing that might nourish the spirit and exalt the soul. At present great
artists don’t develop at all or are compelled to endure humiliation to avoid dying of hunger. At present
there are a hundred easel paintings for every large composition, a thousand portraits for every history
painting; mediocre artists proliferate and the nation is flooded with them.
(Diderot, 1995b, 77)Rousseau, who adopted a bleak view of the ways in which civilization had corrupted nature and morality,
was also eloquent in his condemnation of this kind of luxury, which he saw as a threat to our humanity and
a source of unhealthy inequalities (Terjanian, 2013, 34–39).
In Britain and Holland, a number of moral thinkers participated in a lively debate on luxury. The Dutch
philosopher and economist Bernard Mandeville strove, in his 1705 poem The Fable of the Bees or,