Status and merchant political culture: the Toulouse Bourse in the eighteenth century

摘要

Revisionism has noted, but not always elaborated upon, the importance of status as a motive for action and an organizing principle for social life. This article, combining institutional history and discourse analysis, offers a fresh account of the importance of status in late eighteenth-century French political culture. It unveils the status sensitivity of the merchant judges of Toulouse, both in their changing patterns of recruitment and in their series of annual speeches. It situates them within their local culture and charts their entry into an emerging public sphere. It traces the development of a robust sense of the public importance of commerce to France and the world, as well as the tension between an assertive and a submissive expression of this public role, bred by the monarchy's contradictory emphases upon local corporate privilege and uniform national policy.