Sewell. The Empire of Fashion and The Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France

THE EMPIRE OF FASHION AND
THE RISE OF CAPITALISM IN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE*
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In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, France — and more
particularly Paris — became the universally recognized arbiter of
fashion in the European world. Most observers have attributed
the consolidation of French fashion leadership to the sartorial
splendour of Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, which captured
the imagination of aristocrats all over Europe and set off a tide
of emulation.1 French fashion leadership certainly enhanced the
glory of Louis and his court. But it increasingly became an im-
portant asset of the French economy as well. Louis-Antoine
Caraccioli, an astute observer of fashionable society, wrote in
1777:
There is no court in Europe where French fabrics are not à la mode. They
flatter the vanity of the great, the frivolity of women; they shine on gala
days. A dress that has not been fabricated in Lyon, a diamond that has not
been mounted in Paris, a fan that was not made there, are insipid in the
eyes of foreigners. They are embraced only when they are seen as samples
of French genius.2
As a contemporary Italian observer noted, ‘this very word ‘‘fash-
ion’’ is an enormous and long-lasting treasure for France, and is
considered by the French as . . . highly-precious capital’. The
‘empire of fashion’, he also remarked, was for France what
Potosi, the seemingly inexhaustible Mexican silver mine, had
once been for Spain.3 In fact, fashion has been a much more
* I would like to thank Paul Cheney, Jan Goldstein, Manu Goswami, Michael
Kwass, William Reddy, John Shovlin and Jay Smith for their comments on earlier
versions of this article. My research has been generously supported by a Florence
Gould Foundation Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North
Carolina and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
1
For a recent argument to this effect, see Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the
French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
(New York, 2005).
2
[Louis-Antoine Caraccioli], Paris, le modèle des nations étrangères: ou, L’Europe
françoise (Venice and Paris, 1777), 56. In fact, the most elegant dresses were made
in Paris of Lyonnais silks, not in Lyon itself.
3
Carlo Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production: The Strategies of the Lyons Silk
Merchants in the Eighteenth Century’, trans. Patrick Leech, in Charles F. Sabel
and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in
(cont. on p. 82)
Past and Present, no. 206 (Feb. 2010) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2010
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtp044
82 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 206
enduring treasure for the French than Potosi was for the Spanish.
Luxury goods have been a leading sector of the French economy
ever since the glory days of Versailles, and Paris has remained the
world capital of fashion right up to the present.
Economic historians working on the eighteenth century have
tended to see luxury industries, which were overwhelmingly

based on craft skills, as technologically stagnant and hence as
irrelevant to the great issue of the origins of the industrial revo-
lution. But over the past two decades an outpouring of work, most
of it focused on Britain, has challenged this once dominant view.
Steadily accumulating research into the design, production and
sale of fashionable consumer goods has demonstrated that the
dynamism of the eighteenth-century British economy, even its
technical dynamism, depended to a hitherto unexpected degree
on burgeoning markets for fashionable consumer goods —
including woollen and cotton textiles, pottery, and small metal
wares such as buttons, buckles, candlesticks and cutlery.4
(n. 3 cont.)
Western Industrialization (Cambridge, 1997), 44, quoting Antonio Zanon, Dell’agri-
coltura, dell’arti e del commercio in quanto unite contribuiscono alla felicità degli stati, iii
(Venice, 1764), 263–4; ii (Venice, 1763), 123–4.
4
Much of this work is focused on the problematic of consumption. The key early
publication was Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a
Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London,
1982), in which McKendrick hailed a ‘consumer revolution’ parallel to the industrial
revolution. An important anthology on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century con-
sumption that also includes work on the American colonies, France and the
Netherlands is John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of
Goods (London and New York, 1993). Maxine Berg has published extensively on
fashionable consumption goods: see, for example, her ‘Commerce and Creativity in
Eighteenth-Century Birmingham’, in Maxine Berg (ed.), Markets and Manufacture in
Early Industrial Europe (London and New York, 1991); Maxine Berg, ‘Product
Innovation in Core Consumer Industries in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Maxine
Berg and Kristina Bruland (eds.), Technical Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspec-
tives (Cheltenham, 1998); Maxine Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating
Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., lv (2002);
Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in
the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 182 (Feb. 2004); Maxine Berg, Luxury
and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005); Maxine Berg and Helen
Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850
(Manchester, 1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the
Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003). Other
important works include S. D. Chapman and S. Chassagne, European Textile Printers in
the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf (London, 1981); Beverly Lemire,
Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford,
1991); Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade
(cont. on p. 83)
THE EMPIRE OF FASHION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM 83
Although research on the production and consumption of
French consumer goods is less abundant than research on
England, it also demonstrates the existence of a burgeoning con-
sumer marketplace in the eighteenth century. Studies by Daniel
Roche, Cissie Fairchilds and others have demonstrated that the
market for fashionable goods of all sorts expanded by the late

eighteenth century far beyond aristocratic circles to encompass
not just wealthy bourgeois and professionals but even artisans,
shopkeepers, servants and manual workers. The goods involved
included stylish textiles and clothing, and also fashion accessories
like wigs, fans, snuff boxes, canes, gold watches, and umbrellas;
furniture, wallpaper, crockery and decorative sculpture; and con-
sumables like coffee, chocolate and sugar.5 Nor were contempor-
aries unaware of these changes. The remarkable output of books
and pamphlets on political economy published in France in the
eighteenth century was dominated by a fierce debate about the
new luxury consumption, which some bemoaned as a sign of
(n. 4 cont.)
before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997); John Styles, ‘Manufacturing,
Consumption, and Design in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Brewer and Porter
(eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods; John Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early
Modern London’, Past and Present, no. 168 (Aug. 2000); John Styles, The Dress of the
People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2007); John
Smail, Merchants, Markets, and Manufacture: The English Wool Textile Industry in the
Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999). Recently, Jan de Vries has argued that the
emergence of an ‘actively seeking consumer’ was at the core of what he calls an
‘industrious revolution’, a reordering of family labour and consumption patterns
that powered economic growth throughout north-western Europe and North
America during the ‘long eighteenth century’ from 1650 to 1850: Jan de Vries, The
Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present (Cambridge, 2008).
5
Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’,
trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1994); Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things:
The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge,
2000); Cissie Fairchilds, ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in
Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World
of Goods; Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in
Early Modern Paris, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Cambridge, 1991); Madeleine Ferrières, Le
Bien des pauvres: la consommation populaire en Avignon, 1600–1800 (Seyssel, 2004);
Michel Figeac, La Douceur des Lumières: noblesse et art de vivre en Guyenne au XVIII e
siècle (Bordeaux, 2001); Michael Kwass, ‘Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption
in Eighteenth-Century France’, Amer. Hist. Rev., cxi (2006); Colin Jones and
Rebecca Spang, ‘Sans-culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of Necessity
and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Berg and Clifford (eds.), Consumers
and Luxury.
decadence and effeminacy and others praised as productive of
comfort, politeness and wealth.6
I believe that the complex of manufacture, marketing and con-
sumption of fashionable goods that emerged between the late
seventeenth and the late eighteenth century should be seen as
crucial to the rise and triumph of capitalism in France — less

spectacular, perhaps, than the industrial revolution that spread
there in the early nineteenth century, but nonetheless indica-
tive of and instrumental in the emergence of a new socio-
economic order. For most economic historians, capitalism is
merely a descriptive term for modern competitive economies
based on private enterprise; their real interest is not in ‘the rise
of capitalism’ but in the emergence of sustained economic growth
— defined as an increase in real incomes per head. My argument
is closer to the Marxist tradition, which emphasizes the institu-
tional and cultural discontinuity between capitalism and previous
forms of economic life. To pose the problem of the rise of cap-
italism implies seeking out the historical crystallization of new
socio-economic logics that contribute to capitalism’s distinctive
dynamics, to what Marx called the endless accumulation of cap-
ital. This article argues that the new pattern of production and
consumption of fashionable goods was an essential component of
the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century — that it put into
place an indefinitely reproducible and expandable recipe for
enhanced capital accumulation, one that restructured enterprise,
social relations and consciousness. Although here I examine only
the French case, there is reason to believe that the dynamic man-
ifested in France was actually quite general in the eighteenth-
century Atlantic world.7
6
John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of
the French Revolution (Ithaca, 2006); Michael Kwass, ‘Consumption and the World of
Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau’,
Eighteenth Century Studies, xxxvii (2004); Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering the World of
Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-
Century France’, Representations, lxxxii (2003). The prominence of works on political
economy in this period is demonstrated by Shovlin’s calculation that between 1760
and the Revolution more works on political economy were published in France than
novels — this in the century in which the novel emerged as a major literary form:
Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, 2.
7
In addition to the works cited above, see, for example, T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of
Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Jl Brit. Studies, xxv
(1986); T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence (Oxford, 2004).
My analysis in this article departs from that of Marx — both in
the sense of taking Marx as its starting point and in the sense of
moving beyond that starting point. Marx, as is well known, saw
capital accumulation as arising out of the exploitation of labour
through the production of surplus value. When the labourer sells
his or her labour-power to the capitalist, the capitalist gains a

surplus. This happens because the labourer produces greater
value than his or her own cost of production (that is, the cost of
everything necessary for the labourer to continue working and to
rear enough children to reproduce the workforce), yet the cap-
italist, following the economic laws that govern all commodity
exchange, pays the labourer a wage equal only to his or her cost
of production. In Marx’s scheme, it is this difference between the
wage paid and the value the labourer produces that is the capital-
ist’s perennial source of profit. Under capitalism, the extraction of
surplus value takes place through formally voluntary market
transactions — the wage labour contract — to which the labourer
submits only because he or she has been stripped of ownership of
the means of production and is compelled to work for wages in
order to survive. Labour is, as a consequence, subsumed under
capital; in other words, it is harnessed by the capitalist to the
production of surplus value.
In the eighteenth century, most subsumption of labour was
what Marx called formal rather than real. That is to say, most
eighteenth-century industrial entrepreneurs did not transform
the pre-existing labour process or means of production in their
industries but rather subjected the organization, financing and
marketing of industrial production to their systematic control.
Some form of ‘putting-out’, or what contemporary scholars call
‘protoindustrialization’, was the most common model for
increasing industrial production in the eighteenth century. I
believe that Marx, whose analysis was based on the case of
nineteenth-century English factory industry — what he called
the locus classicus of ‘the capitalist mode of production’ —
seriously underestimated the transformative power of this
formal subsumption of labour under capital.8 He tended to be
dismissive of mercantile activity, which he saw as parasitic on
8
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, intro. Ernest Mandel, trans.
Ben Fowkes (New York, 1977), 90.
other modes of production — feudalism, slavery, simple com-
modity production and industrial capital alike. Yet, as we shall
see, in the eighteenth century the largest and most dynamic
industries were usually based primarily on circulating capital
and were organized under mercantile forms. It was above all by
means of mercantile techniques — through mechanisms of pur-

chase and sale, lubricated by credit — that the subsumption of
labour by capital progressed most spectacularly in eighteenth-
century France.
This was particularly true of textiles, which, in France, as in
nearly all pre-industrial societies, constituted by far the largest
industrial sector. But the advance of capitalist textile production
took place in close symbiosis with a dynamic market for consumer
products. The subsumption of desire under capital, we might say,
was tightly intertwined with the subsumption of labour under
capital. The entrepreneurial capitalists in the textile industry
were themselves merchants whose success depended simulta-
neously on co-ordinating production and providing goods that
had consumer appeal, especially in Paris — the ultimate urban
marketplace of this era. New bright and elaborately patterned
fabrics, especially silk brocades and printed cottons, were par-
ticularly desirable, and tended to displace linen and woollens.
Patterned silks and cottons owed much of their appeal to the
craze for colourful Indian cotton textiles that the Dutch, British
and French East India Companies made increasingly available in
the second half of the seventeenth century. The new French silks
and cottons were, in a sense, domestic substitutes for exotic lux-
uries, but the French producers quickly moved beyond mere imi-
tation to create their own distinctive designs.9 Their ingenuity
helped to create the highly volatile fashion-driven character of
the Parisian market, in which design sense, the continual produc-
tion of novelty, and the ability to adapt quickly to the market’s
whims were keys to success. We cannot understand the capitalist
dynamics of the eighteenth-century textile industry if we treat the
manufacture and the consumption of textiles as two separate
processes, joined only contingently by a market in cloth. The
evolution of consumer taste reached back into the mode of
9
Maxine Berg has demonstrated that this process of creative substitution for Asian
luxuries was an important feature of industrial growth in eighteenth-century Britain:
Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention’; Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’; Berg, Luxury and
Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
producing cloth, and the merchants who directed production also
did their utmost to shape tastes.
Indeed, the value of the product in these industries was created
not only in production itself, but also by securing an added fash-
ion value in the market. A bolt of fashionable cloth that contained
a hundred hours of labour had a higher value than a bolt of ordi-

nary cloth containing the same number of hours of labour. This
implies that enhancing consumer desire without increasing
the labour expended on the product was an indirect means of
increasing the productivity of labour; it enabled a given quantity
of labour to produce more value without increasing labour input.
It is therefore arguable that enhancing consumer desire creates a
kind of surplus value.10 Moreover, profit created through more
effective design or better marketing, no less than that created
through technological change, can set off a competitive spiral
that places upward pressure on productivity — particularly qual-
ity enhancement and improvements in design and marketing — in
the industry as a whole. In fashion goods industries, surplus value
is created both in the process of production and in the process of
desire enhancement.
I
THE SILK INDUSTRY OF LYON
This claim can be made more plausible by examining the
Lyonnais silk industry. Because of its economic prominence
and because of the beauty of the fabrics it produced in the eight-
eenth century, the Lyonnais silk industry, its products and its
commercial practices have been particularly well studied; the
account I offer here depends almost entirely on this rich scholar-
ship.11 The silk industry of Lyon stood at the apex of European
10
This is one point where I clearly depart from a strict Marxist analysis, which
would define the value of a product as equivalent to the necessary labour time that
went into its production and would insist that surplus value can be produced only in
the wage–labour relationship.
11
Particularly useful to me have been Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’; Peter
Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks (London, 1965); Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-
Paris: Dialogue in the Design and Distribution of Patterned Silks in the 18th Century’,
in Robert Fox and Anthony Turner (eds.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien
Régime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce (Aldershot, 1998); Carolyn
Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-
Century Paris (London, 1996); Carolyn Sargentson, ‘The Manufacture and
(cont. on p. 88)
silk industries and was also the most innovative of the
eighteenth-century French textile industries in design, marketing
and technology. In terms of value of product, it was easily the most
important industrial complex in eighteenth-century France. As
early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, a powerfully
expansive nexus of design, marketing, and consumer desire

emerged in this industry — what, in the title of this article, I call
the empire of fashion. Because this nexus has proved to be indef-
initely expansible across a wide range of consumer products, it
deserves to be recognized as an important instance of endless
accumulation; as Carlo Poni has argued before me, it contributed
a permanent source of dynamism to the emerging social form of
capitalism.12 It powered and continues to power the French fash-
ion industry, which, from the late seventeenth century to the
present, has been the most reliably profitable and internationally
competitive sector of the French capitalist economy. Meanwhile,
as early as the middle of the eighteenth century, its logics were
spreading outward into the production and marketing of a much
wider band of consumer goods, a spread that has continued ever
since. The subsumption of desire under capital by means of dis-
tinctive design and astute marketing has had a long and distin-
guished career in the subsequent history of capitalism.
The pre-eminence of the silks of Lyon dates to the final decade
or so of the seventeenth century, when they displaced Italian silks
as the most prestigious fabrics in the court society at Louis XIV’s
Versailles — a maelstrom of sartorial competition which, by then,
had spilled over into Paris, and which, crucially, came to set the
clothing fashions for polite society all over Europe. The Lyonnais
producers were acutely aware of the importance of court patron-
age. According to a tract written in 1731, consumption of silks
at court, ‘which is only of the most beautiful, the most perfect,
(n. 11 cont.)
Marketing of Luxury Goods: The Marchands Merciers of Late 17th- and 18th-
Century Paris’, in Fox and Turner (eds.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien
Régime Paris; Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1970); Justin
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie: monographie du tisseur lyonnais. Étude historique, économique et
sociale (1899; Geneva, 1976).
12
In his immensely stimulating article, Carlo Poni argues that the Lyonnais industry
‘was a protagonist of the ‘‘great transformation’’ proposed by Karl Polanyi, even if its
role in the ‘‘modern world system’’ as a promoter of profound social changes has as yet
gone unrecognized’: Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 41–2.
and the newest’ fabrics, was the ‘principal object of this com-
merce . . . The court by its decisions about taste and about
styles authorizes novelties that without its authority would never
have gained favour’. The approval of the court was important not
only because courtiers themselves made substantial purchases,
but because their consumption was imitated both by foreign

courts and ‘by Paris, which in its turn is imitated by the prov-
inces’. This imitation, the tract went on, extended ‘all the way
down to the smallest petite bourgeoisie’. By, for example, scru-
pulously wearing black crêpe to observe the periods of mourning
prescribed for the court, the bourgeoisie acted as if it ‘had the
honour of being related to the crowned heads and the princes to
whose memories the court pays tribute’.13 The implications of
these observations are fascinating on more than one count. For
the silk producer, of course, imitation meant expanded markets;
by gaining favour of the mighty at court, the silk producers not
only won lucrative custom there, but also gained sales with lesser
nobles and French commoners as well as in foreign courts. Yet
there was also something disconcerting about this scrupulous
imitation of the highest nobility by the most mediocre bourgeois;
the imitation seemed to be claiming a kind of honour that the
bourgeois had no right to aspire to. The spread of fashion, as
this text intimates, had potentially unsettling social and moral
implications.
But for the producers, court patronage and widespread imi-
tation was a welcome opportunity for profits. The key to the
desirability of the Lyonnais fabrics that conquered the court
was the subtlety and novelty of their floral-patterned designs
( façonnées).14 The previously dominant Italian silk textiles —
Genoese velvets, Venetian damasks, Bolognese crêpes or Floren-
tine satins — tended to be monochromatic and relatively heavy.
The Lyonnais fabrics were light, had superior sheen, brighter
colours, and featured ever varying, often multicoloured floral
motifs that gave them immediate visual distinction. Jockey-
ing for place with one another and seeking to distinguish their
cloth from the imitations that soon were brought out in other
European silk-making centres, the Lyonnais producers, as early
13
Quoted from a ‘Mémoire générale sur la manufacture des étoffes de soye or et
argent qui se fabriquent dans la ville de Lyon, 1731’ (Bibliothèque Nationale
Manuscripts, fr. 11855), by Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 104.
14
On Lyonnais silk designs, see esp. Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks.
as the beginning of the eighteenth century, began to introduce
new designs every year, in fact twice a year, since there were spring
fashions and winter fashions. This practice of systematic annual
product differentiation through design effectively relegated for-
eign imitators to second place.15 The superiority of the Lyonnais
in design was so complete that by the early eighteenth century the

other centres had all begun to produce imitations of Lyonnais
cloths. The English producers, for example, would dutifully
copy the latest Lyonnais designs, but then had to worry that ‘a
New Fashion should come from France, and render ours de-
spicable’.16 The French were quite aware of this dynamic. As
one Lyonnais silk merchant put it, because it took foreigners a
year to copy designs and put them into production,
we need only replace [one year’s designs] by others, so that the old ones
will have lost the merit of novelty. While the foreigner is busy copying ours,
we will mount new ones and he will only make in one season what we will
have made the previous one.17
By bringing out new designs every year, something none of the
rival silk-manufacturing centres could match, the Lyonnais pro-
ducers defined fashion and therefore, as a contemporary English
observer complained, could take the ‘first of the market’, leaving
to others ‘the Fag-End’.18 This Lyonnais domination of the very
lucrative high end of the European (and transatlantic) silk market,
it should be pointed out, lasted right through the eighteenth
century and through most of the nineteenth as well.19
One effect of the emphasis on continually changing design was
that the durability of the fabrics produced in Lyon tended to
decline over the course of the eighteenth century. One Italian
commentator remarked of Lyonnais silks:
It is true that they have little body, that they wear out in a short time, but
one wants them for hardly more than a season. Styles change and for the
15
Ibid., 18–20.
16
The Case of the Silk Weavers Humbly Offered to the Consideration of Both Houses of
Parliament ([London], [1713]), quoted in Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 42.
17
Adamoli, Fils, Négociant de Lyon, ‘Lettre sur l’envoi des échantillons’, Journal de
commerce (Dec. 1761), 82.
18
Case of the Silk Weavers, 42. Leslie Ellis Miller and Carolyn Sargentson estimate
that the value of a fabric declined by about a quarter the season after it first hit the
market: Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 159; Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets,
105.
19
On the nineteenth-century Lyonnais industry, see Alain Cottereau, ‘The Fate of
Collective Manufactures in the Industrial World: The Silk Industries of Lyons and
London, 1800–1850’, in Sabel and Zeitlin (eds.), World of Possibilities.
same amount of money it is easy to have two dresses or two new suits. All
of this favours the French manufactures.20
Indeed, the Lyonnais produced both higher- and lower-quality
goods intended for different market segments.21 Hence, it is
hardly surprising that silk goods began to be purchased by classes
far below the court society. Already in 1700, nearly 10 per cent of

garments owned by wage workers and domestic servants in Paris
who had sufficient goods to be inventoried after their death were
made of silk; by the 1780s, despite the much greater availability of
cheaper printed cotton cloth, the proportion of silk among all
garments owned by these occupational categories increased still
further. And since the sheer number of garments owned by wage
workers and domestics seems to have more than doubled over this
period, their overall consumption of silks must have at least
tripled.22
The ability of the Lyonnais to establish and maintain their
advantage in design required close co-ordination between the
world of fashion in Paris and the production of silks in Lyon.
This was not a trivial problem, given that Lyon is some 350 kilo-
metres to the south, a distance that, in the middle of the eight-
eenth century, required five or six days of travel by coach and
three days for rapid postal delivery.23 The key link between the
two cities was the professional designer (dessinateur), whose
prominence within the industry had no parallel elsewhere. By
the later eighteenth century there were perhaps as many as two
hundred designers in the Lyonnais industry, some working
freelance, others employed directly by a firm, some in partner-
ship with a merchant manufacturer (a marchand de soie) — the
capitalist entrepreneurs who dominated the industry.24 These
designers underwent thorough training. In addition to a rudi-
mentary apprenticeship in weaving, they studied drawing and
flower-painting, sometimes in Paris. Once the young designer
20
From I[saac] de Pinto, Traité de la circulation et du credit (Amsterdam, 1771), 26,
quoted in Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 62.
21
Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 97; Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible
Production’, 58–63.
22
See the tables in Roche, Culture of Clothing, 127, 138. Roche notes that the
number of garments possessed by male workers and domestic servants rose by 150
to 200 per cent between 1700 and 1789 (p. 136). He gives no comparable figure for
women, but implies that their consumption rose similarly.
23
Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 149.
24
Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks, 18; Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 146.
found employment with one of the merchant manufacturers, he
would spend some months every year in Paris, where he was to
keep up with all aspects of the art and fashion world. According to
Joubert de l’Hiberderie, a designer and merchant manufacturer
who wrote a small treatise on silk design in 1764, the designer
should avail himself of the many artistic resources of Paris and its

region, including the Versailles gardens, the Gobelins tapestry
works, the Sèvres porcelain works, the displays of shells and but-
terflies at the Jardin des Plantes, menageries, museums, art gal-
leries, theatres and churches. In addition, the designer would also
visit the shops of the most exclusive mercers, where he could
examine the most up-to-date furnishings and accessories for the
fashionable household. Indeed, it was in the specialized silk shops
of Paris ‘that the most marvellous of Lyon’s productions over the
years are piled up every day’.25 Paradoxically, it was only by going
to Paris, the leading centre of sales, that a Lyonnais could get
access to the full range of designs being produced in his own city.
On the basis of this Parisian experience, which imparted both
knowledge of what designs were selling well, a sense of general
fashion trends, and considerable artistic stimulation, he would
write reports back to Lyon and would prepare a set of new
designs. Most of the new designs, to be sure, would be variations
on those currently in vogue in Paris. As one contemporary report
put it, the designers typically ‘take what is most likely to please
from that which has already appeared and correct whatever
defects may be found there’.26 But some of the designs were
more adventurous efforts to anticipate or to set fashion trends.
Back in Lyon, the designs would be copied onto squared paper
and the designer would work in co-operation with a weaver and
specialized technicians to transfer the designs from paper to loom
before they were put out to the weavers who would produce them
in substantial quantities.27 Designers, who were the key link
between Lyonnais production and the Parisian market, were
highly sought after and well paid; on the tax rolls of 1758–9
25
[Antoine-Nicolas] Joubert de l’Hiberderie, Le Dessinateur pour les fabriques
d’étoffes d’or, d’argent et de soie, new edn (Paris, 1774), 86. The original edition was
in 1765 and the preface is dated 1764.
26
Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 163. This is my translation of a quotation left in
French by Miller. Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 109, quotes the same
passage but translates it differently.
27
Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 64–8; Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 147;
Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks, 32.
their assessments were similar to those of all but the upper level of
the silk merchants, and many of them eventually became partners
in leading silk firms.28
The designers were not, however, the sole link between Lyon
and the Paris market. The silk merchants themselves made occa-
sional voyages. They also sent samples of their work to mercers

and wholesalers and maintained regular relations with commissio-
naires who relayed orders from customers and mercers, hawked
new cloth to retailers, and sent samples of successful new silk
designs and other relevant news to Lyon. Finally, the Parisian
mercers, whose shops were the great emporia of fashionable life
in Paris and the chief purveyors of fashionable goods to Versailles
as well, corresponded regularly with their Lyonnais suppliers
and made suggestions or specifications about designs and col-
ours. The mercers also produced dolls dressed in their latest
wares that they sent to correspondents in all the capitals of
Europe, thereby stimulating international demand for the latest
Lyonnais fabrics.29
In short, the relationship between silk production in Lyon and
the evolving fashions in Paris was complexly reciprocal. The
Lyonnais made a considerable investment in the production of
new designs that continued to set the pace in the Parisian luxury
market and through it the European luxury market more gener-
ally. But as the constant movement of letters, sketches, orders,
samples and personnel back and forth between the two cities
makes clear, the Lyonnais producers were also constantly scour-
ing the Parisian art and fashion scene to get new ideas for their
products. They were also, of course, in constant competition with
one another. They maintained substantial archives of their past
designs, to which they could return some years later or which they
could modify by recombining, simplifying, elaborating, enlarging
or diminishing elements, by varying colours, adding stripes and
so on.30 A substantial part of the very considerable profits that the
Lyonnais silk industry produced in the eighteenth century arose
28
Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 146.
29
On the mercers, see Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 97–112;
Sargentson, ‘Manufacture and Marketing of Luxury Goods’; Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-
Paris’, 149–52, 157. On fashion dolls, see DeJean, Essence of Style, 63–7.
30
Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 109; Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’,
162–4.
from silk merchants’ unique ability both to influence and to learn
from the evolving taste of the Parisian luxury market. Their key
advantage was in what we would today call information — that is,
their stocks of designs; the talents of their designers; the well-
managed flow of news, design details and knowledge of Parisian
market conditions that was produced by their complex mer-

cantile activities; and the extraordinary flexibility or nimbleness
with which they used this information to respond to changing
market conditions.
This exquisitely responsive relationship between Parisian taste
and Lyonnais production would not have been possible without a
highly skilled and effectively managed labour force. Known aptly
as ‘La Grande Fabrique’, the Lyonnais silk industry was, by the
standards of the day, a huge industrial and commercial complex:
it employed about 14,000 adult men and perhaps as many as
20,000 women and children in the 1780s, in a city with a total
population of about 150,000.31 This was nearly a quarter of the
entire population of the city and probably accounted for some 40
per cent of the active labour force. These men, women and chil-
dren worked at the behest of perhaps 350 to 450 merchants.32 It
was the silk merchant firms that organized the industry and
reaped the profits. The merchants bought the (extremely valu-
able) raw materials, mainly from Italy, but also from southern
France; determined the colours, designs and quantities of the
cloths to be woven; and put out the raw materials to be woven
up by, or under the supervision of, master weavers. This industry
was, in Marx’s terminology, a particularly sophisticated example
of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. The master
weavers were located exclusively in Lyon or the immediately adja-
cent suburbs, not in the surrounding countryside. This urban
location made it easier for the merchants to maintain surveillance
over weavers — an important matter, given the great value of the
silk yarns consigned to them. Master weavers generally worked in
their own homes, where they would have one to three looms — at
any given time, one loom might be employed by the master
weaver, another by a journeyman or apprentice, while on a
third a new warp was being mounted by the weaver’s wife. The
master weavers were not wage labourers but subcontractors who
31
Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 317–18. For the population of the city, see pp. 34, 39.
32
The figure for merchants is from Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 26.
possessed their own small capital (principally their looms) and
hired and supervised their own journeymen. They would negoti-
ate a prix de façon (literally, a price for fabrication) with the mer-
chant for each job, and when the job was completed the merchant
would weigh, measure and inspect the cloth — making deduc-
tions from the payment if there were any flaws. The master weaver

would then pay his journeyman and any other assistants he might
have hired, retaining the rest as his share. He, too, although on a
minuscule scale, was formally something of a capitalist. Because
his payment would be reduced for flawed work, the master weaver
had every reason to work very carefully and according to the
specifications given to him by the merchant. He also had a
powerful incentive to supervise the work of his journeymen or
apprentices and to pass any deductions from the prix de façon
on to his own employees if they were responsible for the flaws.
By this mechanism, the merchant exercised strong, if indirect,
quality control over the labour process.33
Division of labour was advanced. There were two distinct cat-
egories of weavers who worked on different sorts of looms: those
working en plein, who made plain silks, and those working à la tire,
who produced patterned cloths. As of 1768 there were about
equal numbers of weavers working in these two categories.34
Both types of weavers required assistants. There were, to begin
with, specialized workers, commonly the weavers’ wives, who
prepared the warp for the weaver and mounted it on the loom.
In the case of weaving à la tire, the weaver was assisted by a tireuse
(a puller), whose job was to pull, in order, the series of cords (lacs)
affixed to specific warp threads in order to lift them up — and to
call out to the weaver which colour of weft yarn should be passed
through the shed to form the desired multicoloured design. This
job was often performed by weavers’ daughters, but in addition
many young women from the surrounding countryside migrated
into Lyon to be so employed.35 Finally, the complex design had to
be read into the harness that selectively lifted the warp threads by
33
For the best description of the production process, see ibid., chs. 3–7. See also
Adamoli, Fils, ‘Lettre sur l’envoi des échantillons’, 76.
34
Miller, ‘Paris-Lyon-Paris’, 146; Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 280.
35
Daryl M. Hafter, ‘Women Who Wove in the Eighteenth-Century Silk Industry
of Lyon’, in Daryl M. Hafter (ed.), European Women and Preindustrial Craft
(Bloomington, 1995).
a highly skilled (usually female) liseuse de dessins (reader of de-
signs), who was assisted by a faiseuse de lacs who tied the cords
to the appropriate warp threads.36 These jobs had to be per-
formed every time the weaver switched from one design to
another. Normally, of course, weavers would produce several
pieces of cloth of a given design before re-rigging the harness.37

The weaver working à la tire, thus, required more assistants than
the weaver en plein. Mounting the pattern on the loom was a par-
ticularly time-consuming task.
It should be noted that this elaborate and sophisticated means
of preparing the loom and carrying out the weaving task, made
possible by a meticulously organized ‘reading’ of the design onto
the loom, provided the context out of which the Jacquard loom,
patented in 1801, eventually arose. The Jacquard loom auto-
mated the reading of the design by means of perforated paper
cards, analogous to the perforated cards used in early computers.
It was the end point of considerable work on looms for façonné
silks over the course of the eighteenth century: indeed, perforated
cards had been used in programming designs on looms as early
as 1770.38 These developments had probably already improved
the efficiency of the Lyonnais industry well before Jacquard took
out his patent, further increasing its competitive advantage.
The achievement of Jacquard’s labour-saving breakthrough in
the Lyonnais silk industry at the very end of the century confirms
the capitalistic rationalization and technological dynamism
already proceeding earlier.39
This advanced division of labour in the silk industry was under-
taken and supervised not by the merchant but by the master
weaver, who, whenever possible, assigned the various auxiliary
tasks to members of his own family. This minimized his cash
outlay for wages, since his wife and children (or other live-in rel-
atives) would be part of his household and would live from his
earnings. The division of labour, of course, increased the produc-
tivity of labour. But in this case, the master weaver, who was in
direct competition with hundreds of other master weavers for
36
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 66–74.
37
Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks, 23.
38
Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 66–7.
39
On the invention of the Jacquard loom, see Charles Ballot, L’Introduction
du machinisme dans l’industrie française, ed. Claude Gével (1923; Geneva, 1978),
334–82; Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks, 44.
commissions from the merchants, was probably able to claim only
a small fraction of the incremental value created by the division
of labour. The merchant simply paid the weaver, his subcontrac-
tor, enough to keep his family unit going. The merchant was not
obliged to pay separately for the distinct work performed by the
various family members or the value added by their joint effi-

ciently divided labour. The merchant regularly collected surplus
value from the exploited master weavers and, indirectly, from the
family members he exploited in his turn. This double exploitation
accounted for much of the silk merchants’ very substantial
profits.
But production of surplus value was obtained not only through
reducing unit cost by means of division of labour. It was also
obtained through enhancing the quality (or at least the desirabil-
ity), and therefore the value, of the product without increasing the
cost of labour. Without the skills of the weavers and their families,
the high quality and continual novelty of design that gave the silks
of Lyon their special value would have been impossible to sustain.
It was the weavers’ community that developed the skills and
passed them on to the next generation. The technical training
of weavers took place in the master weaver’s workshop, where
he taught the tricks of the trade to apprentices and supervised
the work of journeymen who had already completed their appren-
ticeships and had every expectation of becoming masters in their
turn. The costs of training were undertaken by the apprentice,
who had to work for his room and board without pay for five years
and whose family had to pay a fee to the master and furnish the
apprentice’s clothing.40 The skills of the women who prepared
the warps and read the designs onto the looms were presumably
passed on within the family and between female friends. The
merchants were able to profit from the skills of the weavers and
their female and juvenile auxiliaries without having to pay the cost
of training them.41 Gaining the benefits of training (in improved
quality and therefore enhanced value of product) without having
to shoulder the costs of training was another source of the silk
merchants’ surplus value.
40
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 118–24.
41
However, some of the costs of upgrading skills — when new types of designs were
introduced, for example — must have been borne by the merchants, whose designers
had to work with weavers to be sure that the designs were actually feasible and to be
sure that the weavers were producing them properly.
The history of the silk-weaving guild shows that the master
weavers were aware of their exploitation by the merchants. It
was originally founded in 1554, but its statutes were amended
numerous times in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The guild was unusual because it was a composite body made up
not only of master weavers but also of silk merchants whose work

was commercial in character, who put out weaving jobs to the
masters, and who usually had not themselves been trained as
weavers. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a sizeable
minority of master weavers worked on their own account, either
entirely independently of the merchants or, more commonly, as
a supplement to weaving yarn put out to them by merchants.
The eighteenth century was marked by tensions and struggles
between these categories. From the beginning of the century
there was a clear offensive by the merchants against the weavers’
rights. The guild statutes of 1667 made no distinction between
different classes of masters, but in 1702 a decree required that
four of the six maı̂tres gardes (the officers who administered the
guild) be merchants and that the choice of the two who were
master weavers be controlled by the municipality (a body in
which the silk merchants had considerable influence). In 1707,
masters who wished to work on their own account were required
to pay the rather modest sum of 12 livres per year. But in 1711 the
annual charge for the right to work on one’s own account rose to
300 livres, sharply restricting the number of master weavers who
could do so. A decree of 1731 actually made it illegal to work
simultaneously on one’s own account and as a putting-out
worker.42 The merchants’ opposition to the independent master
weavers seems to have been motivated by the fact that the latter
commonly produced copied designs — just as weavers in Eng-
land or Italy were doing at this time. The merchants, who had
paid for production of the designs, claimed that the indepen-
dent masters were stealing them to undercut their profits. The
existence of the independent master weavers had posed no major
problems for the silk merchants in the seventeenth century,
before the system of annual design changes came into effect.
But as soon as the silk industry became design-intensive —
became an integral element in an emerging empire of fashion —
the relations between the social categories that had made up the
42
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 89–92; Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 572–5.
industry were transformed. The subsumption of desire under
capital acted back on the subsumption of labour under capital,
rendering the interests of the merchants and independent masters
newly incompatible.43
The master weavers were outraged by the decree of 1731 and
mounted a furious and briefly successful campaign against it. In

1737 the municipality suppressed the decree of 1731 and issued a
new statute according half the positions as maı̂tres gardes to mer-
chants and half to master weavers, who were also granted the right
to select their own candidates. This victory, which preserved at
least the illusion that master weavers might aspire to a position as
independent artisan producers, was, however, short-lived. In
1744 a new statute stripped the weavers of any right to participate
in the government of the guild and again squeezed out the inde-
pendent master weavers. Although the weavers continued to agi-
tate for restoration of the statutes of 1737 for many years, 1744
marked the merchants’ definitive victory.44 When, in 1786, the
weavers launched a new offensive against the merchants, their
goals — indeed their mental map of the industry — had changed
completely. As Maurice Garden puts it in his massive study of
eighteenth-century Lyon, in 1737 or 1744 the master weavers
had been struggling to gain the possibility of an ‘independence
as workers who were also merchants’. By 1786 the hope for inde-
pendent mastership ‘no longer made sense to Lyonnais silk work-
ers’. They recognized their common position of dependence on
the merchants and organized a strike movement to obtain an
agreed minimum price for work put out to them, ‘fixed in
advance, for all possible cloths, to which the merchant would be
obliged to conform’. Although the strike movement failed, the
struggle marked the end of an ideal of obtaining a ‘mediocre hap-
piness’ as independent masters. Rather, the weavers now recog-
nized that their only hope was to force the merchants to grant
them ‘more decent conditions of life’ as dependent workers.45
43
Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 48–9.
44
Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 575–80.
45
Ibid., 580. Here it is worth noting that in the 1830s the Lyonnais silk workers,
toiling in an industry organized much as it had been in the 1780s, were in the vanguard
of the newly emerging class-conscious workers’ movement. Indeed, it was the
Lyonnais silk workers’ insurrection of 1831 that inspired the young Karl Marx to
develop his theory of workers’ revolution. On Lyonnais workers in the 1830s, see
Fernand Rude, Le Mouvement ouvrier à Lyon de 1827 à 1832 (Paris, 1944); Robert J.
(cont. on p. 100)
This history of struggles bears witness to the consolidation of an
increasingly open exploitative relationship between the mer-
chants and the master weavers over the course of the eighteenth
century, and hence to the maturation of thoroughly capitalist
relations in silk manufacture.
It is not easy to determine the extent and rhythms of growth of

this thriving but fractious industry over the course of the eight-
eenth century. I have found no figures for the number of pieces of
cloth produced, let alone estimates of the value of production.
There are scattered figures for the number of silk looms in Lyon
and some estimates of the changing size of the labour force. These
give us a sense of the industry’s pattern of growth, although in no
case are there figures for the very beginning of the century. There
were just over 5,000 silk looms in Lyon in 1720. The number of
looms rose briskly to 8,331 in 1739 and had reached 14,777 in
1788.46 The number of master weavers rose from 3,299 in 1739
to 7,000 in 1786. And the number of silk workers (masters and
journeymen combined) who married in Lyon rose from 452 in
1728–30 to 570 in 1749–51 and to 977 in 1786–8.47 Both of these
figures for the size of the labour force indicate somewhat more
than a doubling from the 1730s to the 1780s. The figures for
looms, which go back further, indicate almost a tripling since
1720.48 This growth, however, was far from even. There was
rapid growth between 1720 and the 1750s, a fall-off during the
Seven Years War (1756–63), another rise between the mid 1760s
and the mid 1770s, followed by a decline during the War of
American Independence. Between the mid 1770s and the mid
1780s there was a major boom.49 In the later 1780s, however, the
industry was gripped by a particularly severe crisis, and was in a
dire condition at the beginning of the Revolution.50 In spite of the
(n. 45 cont.)
Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July
Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
46
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 26.
47
Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 282.
48
Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 26.
49
These fluctuations can be discerned best in Godart’s figures for the number of
looms, but his figures for the number of masters in the industry show the same rough
pattern: ibid. The series are not detailed enough to show year-to-year or season-to-
season fluctuations, which must have been substantial in the typically volatile fashion
sector.
50
The crisis in the 1780s had multiple causes. There was a change in taste, led by the
court, which began to favour simplicity over magnificence. This was the period when
(cont. on p. 101)
fluctuations, the overall trend in the eighteenth century was
clearly upward. From the beginning of the century to the
1780s, it would appear that production probably at least tripled.
This growth in the silk industry was an index of the accumula-
tion of capital by the silk merchants. A major source of the mer-
chants’ profits was their intensified exploitation of the master

weavers, an exploitation against which the weavers struggled
unsuccessfully. But the silk merchants also secured enhanced
profits from the design and marketing efforts carried out by them-
selves, their designers, and the Parisian mercers who promoted
their wares among the fashionable clientele of the Rue Faubourg
Saint-Honoré. By capturing and repeatedly inciting the desires of
the wealthy (and even the not-so-wealthy) for social distinction
and refinement, the Lyonnais merchants increased the value of
their merchandise. This could not be done without incurring
costs: the designers, who possessed scarce skills, surely captured
a good share of the value they added to Lyonnais silks. But the
attractiveness and novelty of the designs enhanced the value of
the labour of silk weavers and their families without requiring
the merchants to pay anything more for that labour. Whatever
portion of this enhancement of value that was not captured by
the designers was profit for the merchants. Thus, elevated profits
were obtained through enhancing the desirability of the product
to consumers, which increased the value of what the weavers
produced.
This ability of the designers and merchants (aided by the mer-
cers) to enhance the value of their goods by harnessing the desire
of consumers, and to do so in a way that was sustained and renew-
able, is what I call the subsumption of desire under capital. The
question of harnessing desire to the ends of capital has, in various
ways, been noted in studies of twentieth-century consumer cap-
italism, with its huge advertising budgets, but has not figured
(n. 50 cont.)
Queen Marie-Antoinette played at being a shepherdess, and her wearing of white
cotton muslins made them the pinnacle of style. Although demand for plain or striped
taffetas held up, the façonné trade was devastated. To make matters worse, the financial
and political crisis of 1786–9 that led up to the Revolution sharply reduced demand for
luxuries in general and in the winter of 1786–7 the mulberry trees of southern France
froze, sharply reducing the supply of silk and raising its price. It was not until after
Thermidor that the silk industry recovered. See E. Leroudier, ‘La Décadence de la
fabrique lyonnaise à la fin du 18 e siècle’, Revue d’histoire de Lyon, x (1911), 343–61,
415–44.
much in accounts of capitalism’s origins.51 The case of the
Lyonnais silk industry shows that the importance of desire cre-
ation goes back very far into capitalism’s history. As early as the
dawning years of the eighteenth century, it was the fashion-driven
desire for novelty that made possible the rise to dominance and
the continuing prosperity of this great Lyonnais mercantile-

industrial complex. It does not seem to be the Lyonnais them-
selves who initially set in motion the fashion dynamic from
which they profited so handsomely. Rather, the initiative seems
to have come from the royal court at Versailles, where Louis XIV’s
own fashion leadership and the extraordinary concentration of
wealthy nobles seeking social distinction and access to power
gave rise to a fierce sartorial competition among courtiers — and,
notably, among their wives and daughters as well.52 The suppliers
of luxury goods were primarily located not in Versailles but in
Paris, where there were many skilled artisans and clever shop-
keepers. It was the Parisian mercers who dominated the trade
in luxury goods. By the beginning of the eighteenth century
they had begun to set up mirror-lined, elaborately decorated
shops, especially along the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, that
carried the latest in fabrics, fashion accessories and furnishings.53
The Lyonnais were among the most important suppliers of silk
fabrics to the mercers in the late seventeenth century, but initially
Lyonnais goods were sold under Italian names — essentially as
counterfeits. It was around the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury that the practice of annual changes in design became regu-
larized and that the Lyonnais themselves were acclaimed as the
most fashionable producers in the Paris market and hence in
Europe as a whole.54 The emergence of the practices of densely
mediated co-ordination between Lyon and Paris and between
production and consumption seems to have coincided with the
51
See, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of
Advertising in America (New York, 1994); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The
Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Sharon Zukin, Point
of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (New York, 2004). Works that
explore this theme in earlier periods are Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and
Society, 1750–1980 (London, 1986), and Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-
Century Britain.
52
The best discussion of the sartorial aspect of this competition and its stimulation
of the production of luxury goods is in DeJean, Essence of Style.
53
Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 18–20.
54
Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 41–2, 69–70.
spread of the taste for continual novelty outward from the court
proper — initially to foreign courts and to nobles and wealthy
commoners who lived in Paris, but eventually to the rest of
France, to well-to-do commoners elsewhere in Europe, and to
less opulent classes. The expansion of the market and the quick-
ened pace of innovation in design went hand in hand.

It is important to recognize that the fashion market, with its
characteristic demand for novelty and its steady expansion geo-
graphically outward and socially downward, had a dynamic of its
own, one the Lyonnais silk merchants and other luxury producers
could tap into but had not initiated and could not control. We
shall never understand the rise of the Lyonnais silk industry or
many other consumer goods industries in the eighteenth century
without grasping the peculiar and novel role of consumers them-
selves in the social construction of fashion in this era. What was
new in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the
pronounced taste for novelty itself and the gradual democratiza-
tion of status competition through consumption. In earlier times
and in other places in the world, clothes that marked status in
one generation could generally be passed down to the next
without having declined in status value. In the new European,
Paris-centred fashion system, old clothing and accessories lost
value quickly: fashion-conscious consumers wished to have new,
up-to-the-minute styles. This meant that they had to replenish
their wardrobes much more quickly and that they would pass
out-of-date clothing along to poorer consumers, especially to
their servants, who would thereby enter into the lower levels of
the fashion system themselves.55 This eighteenth-century fashion
system overwhelmed an older sartorial system, one indexed by
now moribund sumptuary laws, which had specified the distinct
garments to be worn by people of different social categories. By
the mid eighteenth century it was becoming difficult to read posi-
tion in the social hierarchy from public bodily adornment. The
unceasing novelty and volatility of the emerging sartorial regime
also meant that consumers had to put much more effort into
assembling their wardrobes. They tended to accumulate more
clothes from which to choose and had to be ever alert about
their outfits’ appropriateness for the occasion. They had to
become informed shoppers, who spent many hours critically
55
See also Roche, Culture of Clothing, 344–63, on the second-hand market.
observing and discussing the outfits of others at public and pri-
vate events, reading the emerging fashion press, discriminating
between the trendsetters and the hapless, and making visits to
shops where new goods were displayed. Increasingly, it was
women who became the great specialists in fashionable con-
sumption.56

The fashionable consumer was of course important to those in
the business of producing and marketing silk and other fashion-
able goods as the buyer who enabled them to realize the value of
the capital they had invested. But the capitalist also gained an
additional increment of profit from the unpaid, volunteer
labour expended by the fashionable consumer whose increasingly
assiduous efforts were the condition of possibility for the dyna-
mism of the fashion system. Consumer labour, no less than the
labour of the producers, created value. Aesthetically knowledge-
able consumers displayed the new goods they had purchased on
their persons — on promenades, in salons, at parties, in the new
cafés, when shopping — thereby arousing the curiosity and envy
of other potential consumers. Elegantly turned-out consumers
served, in effect, as voluntary living advertisements for fashion
goods and thus as spurs to further consumption by those who
noticed and envied them. By keeping informed about style, by
conversing about new fabrics or designs with acquaintances, by
educating their children in the ways of fashion, they reproduced
the restless desires that are fashion’s defining psychological char-
acteristic, indeed, a defining feature of capitalist culture in gen-
eral.57 The dedicated pursuit of fashion also drew in ever wider
social circles, steadily expanding the market for silks and other
fashion goods. Servants, educated in the taste of their masters,
were a particularly potent vector for the diffusion of fashion into
the lower orders.58
In short, merchants like the Lyonnais silk producers gained
enhanced profits by what can aptly be termed the subsumption
of consumer desire under capital — by inducing consumers to
engage in unpaid labour that increased the value of their goods.
56
DeJean, Essence of Style, esp. 35–69; Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing la Mode: Gender,
Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford and New York, 2004),
115–16, 141–8.
57
See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York, 1982).
58
Roche, Culture of Clothing, 78, 106, 144, 173.
The unpaid labour was freely performed by the consumers, who
were pursuing goals of their own, such as esteem, status enhance-
ment, career advancement, aesthetic value or pure diversion. But
theirs was real labour, sustained and time-consuming human
effort, with its share of tedium, routine and anxiety. It was, more-
over, imposed on those who undertook it by powerful social

pressures. The labour of consumers was thus in a formal sense
exploited by the silk merchants — that is, harnessed to the goal
of making profits, as we can speak of the exploitation of a mine or a
field.59 In order to benefit from unpaid consumer labour, the silk
merchants and their allies the mercers had to spend considerable
sums on design, marketing and close monitoring of changing
tastes. They had to prime the pump of fashion by coming up
with new designs that would keep their customers’ desires, pur-
chases and unpaid desire-generating labour flowing. But the
assiduous labour of consumers, performed voluntarily in civil
society rather than in workshops or counting houses, was the
secret to the peculiar dynamism of the silk industry — and of
French fashion industries in general. The ‘empire of fashion’
was built not only on the unpaid surplus labour of direct pro-
ducers, but on the unpaid labour of consumers as well.
II
OTHER TEXTILES
Silk was, of course, something of a special case. It was by far the
most expensive of textiles, a luxury commodity long in demand at
the royal court. No other textile trade was so tightly organized by
the merchant manufacturers from top to bottom, and rarely was
there such continuous and dynamic feedback between design,
marketing and manufacture. Yet the general outlines of the argu-
ment about the silk industry apply to the cotton and woollen
industries as well. These were handicraft industries organized
on a putting-out basis and co-ordinated by mercantile tech-
niques, and they expanded their output in the eighteenth century.
In both cases, there was an enhancement of manufacturing skills
59
By using this term I intend no moral claims about harsh or inhumane treatment
of the ‘exploited’. Indeed, whatever pains may have been imposed by consumer
labour were probably exceeded by the concomitant pleasures.
and consequently in quality of product over the course of the
century but it was primarily the merchant manufacturers who
profited from this increased productivity, not the direct pro-
ducers. The manufacturers gained from the burgeoning fashion
market, did their best to enhance their position within it, and
profited from the consumers’ ardent but unpaid labour.60

Of all the textile industries in eighteenth-century Europe,
cotton was the most dynamic. At the beginning of the century,
cotton cloths were only beginning to be produced in Europe; by
the end of the century, mechanized production on a hitherto
unimaginable scale had been attained in Britain and was begin-
ning to spread to France and other continental European coun-
tries. Cotton textiles, which used a fibre produced mainly outside
Europe, were originally exotic imports from India that became
wildly popular, initially in elite circles. In English, printed cottons
were known as ‘calicoes’, a corruption of Calicut, the western
Indian city from which they were exported. In French they were
simply called indiennes. Imported Indian cottons were light, much
less expensive than silks, and were printed or painted in bright
floral patterns. In France, indiennes were initially employed above
all for informal daywear, what the French called déshabillé
(‘undress’), particularly in the form of dressing gowns to be
worn indoors. But over the course of the century, these déshabillé
60
The linen industry appears to have been the exception. Roche’s figures on fabrics
in Parisian wardrobes demonstrate that linen fabrics were largely displaced by cotton
over the course of the eighteenth century: Roche, Culture of Clothing, 127, 138; see
Table below. Although literature on the linen industry is sparse, we know that in
Normandy, a major production centre in the seventeenth century, former linen spin-
ners and weavers moved massively into cotton in the eighteenth century: Serge
Chassagne, ‘La Diffusion rurale de l’industrie cotonnière en France (1750–1850)’,
Revue du Nord, lxi, 240 (1979); Serge Chassagne, Le Coton et ses patrons: France, 1760–
1840 (Paris, 1991). By contrast, output nearly doubled in the northern region of high-
quality production surrounding Valenciennes, Cambrais and Saint-Quentin: Philippe
Guignet, ‘Adaptations, mutations et survivances proto-industrielles dans le textile du
Cambrésis et du Valenciennois du XVIII e siècle’, Revue du Nord, lxi, 240 (1979), 34.
Linen production tended to move upmarket in the eighteenth century, but this seems
to have resulted as much from the devastation of linen by cotton in areas of low-quality
production as from any sustained entrepreneurial efforts to upgrade in the higher-
quality regions. On the northern linen industry, see ibid., passim; Philippe Guignet,
Mines, manufactures et ouvriers du Valenciennois: contribution à l’histoire du travail dans
l’ancienne France (New York, 1977); Didier Terrier, Les Deux Âges de la proto-industrie:
les tisserands du Cambrésis et du Saint-Quentinois, 1730–1880 (Paris, 1996). On the
geography of linen manufacture, see Gérard Béaur, Philippe Minard and Alexandra
Laclau (eds.), Atlas de la Révolution française, x, Économie (Paris, 1997), 74.
fashions were worn outside as well as within the house, and cotton
was soon in demand for curtains and upholstery, for shirts and
undergarments, for waistcoats and dresses. By the 1780s, white
muslin cotton dresses, in the bucolic style made famous by Marie-
Antoinette, became the height of fashion.61
Because they were less expensive than silk or wool, the demand

for fashionable cottons was particularly democratic.62 The
market for cotton textiles spanned the gamut from highly fash-
ionable and exquisitely printed cloths to rough and cheap fustians
worn by the poor. Roche’s figures on the consumption of clothing
in Paris show that cotton progressed dramatically in the ward-
robes of all social categories over the course of the eighteenth
century. The expansion of cotton consumption cut dramatically
into consumption of linen at all levels of the social hierarchy,
as cotton shirts and undergarments triumphed. But among the
poorest categories — domestic servants and wage earners —
cotton also massively displaced woollens, which had made up
about three-fifths of their wardrobes in 1700 but amounted to
only between a quarter and a third in 1789 (see Table). Cotton
was increasingly used for workaday breeches, trousers, kerchiefs,
smocks, skirts and aprons for the poorer classes. The cotton
industry was, thus, extremely varied, with its products ranging
from fine muslins to heavy fustians and from plain or simple
checked or striped fabrics to elaborate domestically produced
indiennes.
In the case of cotton, demand tended to outstrip supply from
the first introduction of Indian textiles in the mid seventeenth
century to the very end of the eighteenth. Alarmed by the popu-
larity of indiennes, silk, linen and woollen-cloth producers per-
suaded the French government at the end of the seventeenth
century to outlaw both the importation of printed cloth from
India and the production of printed cotton, linen or woollen
cloths in France; it even criminalized the wearing of such fab-
rics.63 These prohibitions were widely evaded; indeed, indiennes
were worn openly in courtly circles at the very time when it was
61
Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
(New York, 2006).
62
The research of Beverly Lemire and John Styles make this clear in the British case:
see esp. Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce; Styles, Dress of the People.
63
Serge Chassagne, Oberkampf: un entrepreneur capitaliste au Siècle des Lumières
(Paris, 1980), 10.
officially illegal to do so.64 Clandestine cotton-printing opera-
tions went on continuously and smuggling of indiennes was a big
business until the prohibitions were suppressed in 1759 — after a
vigorous campaign on the part of laissez-faire political econo-
mists. From this time onward, the production of indiennes in
France grew vertiginously. The cotton printers, who were the

large-scale producers and the leading capitalists in this industry,
obtained their plain cotton cloth from wherever they could find it.
For a long time, the best-quality white cottons were made in
India, but domestic production was under way in many different
rural districts in France from early in the eighteenth century, with
the area around Rouen in the lead. Much of this cloth, however,
was too poor in quality to be of interest to the cotton printers.
Raw cotton, unlike silk, was a relatively cheap commodity. In
the silk industry, the merchant manufacturers maintained close
surveillance over weavers’ use of yarns within the urban space of
Lyon — because weavers could potentially make substantial prof-
its by filching some portion of the yarn put out to them. The
cotton trade, by contrast, was wide open, with many independent
spinners and weavers scattered all over the countryside in many
different areas of France. Raw cotton or cotton yarns were some-
times distributed by putters-out, sometimes sold in urban mar-
kets, and sometimes hawked about the countryside to spinners or
weavers by pedlars. The merchants’ control over the producers
was usually purely mercantile: high-quality cloth, fine or tightly
woven and with an even texture and few broken threads, fetched a
higher price. The subsumption of labour under capital in cotton
manufacture was, thus, strictly formal. Indeed, some of the direct
producers of cotton yarns and cotton cloth were independent
petty commodity producers not formally ensnared in putting-out
relations. But because they were deeply dependent on the mer-
chants as purchasers of their goods, they were forced by the pres-
sures of the market to improve the quality and therefore the value
of their products. Given the abundant supply of underemployed
rural men and women who could become cotton weavers and
spinners, the benefits of this increase in skill and quality accrued
mainly to the merchants. There was, in other words, a steady rise
64
This was pointed out by the abbé Morellet in one of many pamphlets written
against the prohibition: [André Morellet], Réfexions sur les avantages de la libre fabrica-
tion et de l’usage des toiles peintes en France: pour servir de réponse aux divers mémoires des
fabriquans de Paris, Lyon, Tours, Rouen, &c. sur cette matière (Geneva, 1758), 39–41.
FABRICS IN WARDROBES OF PARISIANS OF DIFFERENT CLASSES IN 1700 AND 1789 (%)*
Nobles Professionals Artisans and Domestics Wage earners

shopkeepers
5
5
5
5
5
1700 1789 Change 1700 1789 Change 1700 1789 Change 1700 1789 Change 1700 1789 Change
Silk 17 38 þ21 17 31 þ14 13 21 þ8 9 12 þ3 9 15 þ6
Wool 8 18 þ10 22 23 þ1 23 23 0 60 26 34 58 33 25
Linen 46 17 29 37 13 24 42 12 30 16 8 8 14 12 2
Cotton 7 25 þ18 3 20 þ17 8 39 þ31 7 40 þ33 7 38 þ31
Miscellaneous 22 2 20 21 13 8 14 5 9 8 14 þ6 12 2 10
* Source: Adapted from Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1994),
127, 138.

in the weavers’ and spinners’ productivity, a productivity rise that
served as a source of surplus value to merchants.65
Progress in the production of plain cotton cloth was, however,
primarily extensive rather than intensive: cotton production grew
rapidly by spreading out into many different rural regions and
recruiting more and more workers in each region. Intensive devel-

opment occurred mainly at the final stage — printing, which
required a greater capital outlay, market awareness and invest-
ment in design. In this design-intensive branch of the cotton
industry, the French were actually out-producing the British as
late as 1785.66 Serge Chassagne has located the records of some
fifty sizeable cotton-printing enterprises, scattered over much
of the national territory, founded between 1759 and 1789.67
A printing establishment like that of Christoffe-Philippe Ober-
kampf, founded in Jouy, a village near Paris, in 1760, immedi-
ately after cotton printing became legal in France, eventually
employed several hundred workers at a time, meticulously mon-
itored by clerks and foremen. Oberkampf employed chemists to
perfect his dyes and contracted with noted Parisian artists to
design his prints, but most of the fabrication was done by
hand.68 Oberkampf’s firm accumulated capital at a rapid pace
and benefited massively from the production of surplus value —
through improvements in skills that he did not remunerate in full,
through cost-saving divisions of labour, and through technical
innovation. Yet the financial structure of the enterprise was
more commercial than industrial, since less than 10 per cent of
the firm’s assets consisted of fixed capital.69 And it was Ober-
kampf’s consistently shrewd ability at what he himself called
‘the creation of new taste’ that assured the success of his firm.
Although he began by making uncannily accurate copies of
65
On the organization of the cotton industry, see Chassagne, ‘La Diffusion rurale de
l’industrie cotonnière en France’; Chassagne, Le Coton et ses patrons, 25–38; William
M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900
(Cambridge, 1984), ch. 1; Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural
Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750–1850 (Cambridge,
1986); Tessie P. Liu, The Weaver’s Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family
Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914 (Ithaca, 1994).
66
In that year, the French produced 16 million metres of printed cotton cloth as
against 12.4 million by the British. Chapman and Chassagne, European Textile
Printers, 8.
67
Chassagne, Le Coton et ses patrons, 102–3.
68
Chapman and Chassagne, European Textile Printers, 170–82.
69
Ibid., 138.
Indian designs, by the 1780s he was printing large cameo designs
in rococo style from copper plates, depicting outdoor or hunting
scenes or celebrating popular events of the day, with titles such as
‘American Independence’ and ‘the Marriage of Figaro’.70 Like
the Lyonnais silk merchants, Oberkampf took full advantage
of the dynamic Parisian consumer market and its seemingly end-

less supply of volunteer labour, which engaged, effectively, in
advertising his goods via competitive display. On the eve of the
French Revolution, the consumer-driven cotton-printing indus-
try remained outstandingly lucrative.
As for woollen cloth, it had been manufactured in France for
centuries. Given its already extensive implantation, the woollen
industry grew much more slowly than its new and exotic rival the
cotton industry in the eighteenth century. The woollen industry
was closely regulated by the state and royal inspectors of manu-
factures drew up production figures in all France’s provinces; for
this reason, we have much more exact knowledge about the pro-
duction of woollens in the eighteenth century than about other
textiles. Tihomir Markovitch’s detailed quantitative study of the
industry shows a pattern of steady growth. The number of pieces
of woollen cloth produced in France rose modestly, by 41 per
cent, from 1716–18 to 1786–8. But the total volume of cloth,
measured by surface area, increased more rapidly, by 76 per
cent, and the total value of the cloth produced rose more rapidly
still, roughly doubling over these seventy years.71 There was
much less innovation in design in woollens than in the silk and
cotton industries, although there were innovations in dyeing that
greatly increased the range of available colours. But woollen
manufacturers paid close attention to fashion and changing pat-
terns of demand. During the eighteenth century, production of
low-quality cloths stagnated, but this was more than offset by
rising production of finer woollen goods, whether these were
the draps (broadcloths) of Sedan, Elbeuf or Reims, the super-light
70
Ibid., 147–8.
71
Tihomir J. Markovitch, Histoire des industries françaises: les industries lainières de
Colbert à la Révolution (Geneva, 1976), 494–5, found that the value of woollen produc-
tion rose by 163 per cent, but about 60 per cent of this increase was probably due to
inflation in the value of the livre. I take the inflation figure from François Crouzet,
‘England and France in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Analysis of Two
Economic Growths’, in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution
in England (London, 1967).
sayetterie of Roubaix or the étamines (fine woollen muslins) of Le
Mans. French woollen producers succeeded in the eighteenth
century by moving upmarket.
One indication of why they did so can be inferred from Roche’s
statistics about clothing inventoried in eighteenth-century Paris.
The most obvious shifts over the century were the displacement

of linen by cottons and the substantial rise in consumption of silks
among all classes of the population. But the pattern for woollens
varied sharply by class, with the proportion of clothing made of
wool actually rising among nobles and remaining constant among
shopkeepers, office-holders and professionals, while woollen
cloth was massively displaced by cotton among domestic servants
and wage earners (see Table). These figures suggest that compe-
tition from cheap cotton goods devastated the low end of the
woollen trade, but that the manufacturers were agile enough to
more than overcome these losses by specializing in the highest-
quality goods, which retained or expanded their market position.
Entrepreneurs in the woollen industry made relatively quick and
shrewd adjustments to changes in the market; they were well
aware of changes in fashion and supplied goods desirable to the
prosperous classes.
The woollen industry was widely dispersed: there were
major centres in Flanders (Lille–Roubaix–Tourcoing), Picardy
(Amiens), Normandy (Elbeuf ), Champagne (Reims and Sedan),
Maine (Le Mans) and Languedoc (Lodève and Montauban),
and minor centres spread all over the country.72 The exact organ-
ization of production varied from centre to centre, although
putting-out was virtually universal. The spinning networks gen-
erally spread far out into the countryside; weaving, particularly
72
Besides Markovitch, Histoire des industries françaises, see Reddy, Rise of Market
Culture; Charles Engrand, ‘Concurrences et complémentarités des villes et des cam-
pagnes: les manufactures picardes de 1780 à 1815’, and Pierre Deyon, ‘La Diffusion
rurale des industries textiles en Flandre française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début
du XIX e siècle’, both in Revue du Nord, lxi, 240 (1979); Jeffry Kaplow, Elbeuf during the
Revolutionary Period: History and Social Structure (Baltimore, 1964); Gérard Gayot, Les
Draps de Sedan, 1646–1870 (Paris, 1998); Gérard Gayot, ‘Dispersion et concentration
de la draperie sedanaise au XVIIIème siècle: l’entreprise des Poupart de Neuflize’,
Revue du Nord, lxi, 240 (1979); Lynn Avery Hunt, Revolution and Urban Politics in
Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 1786–1790 (Stanford, 1978); François Dornic,
L’Industrie textile dans le Maine et ses débouchés internationaux, 1650–1815 (Le Mans,
1955); J. K. J. Thomson, Clermont-de-Lodève, 1633–1789: Fluctuations in the Prosperity
of a Languedocian Cloth-Making Town (Cambridge, 1982); Christopher H. Johnson,
The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920 (New York, 1995).
of the finer varieties of cloth, was commonly done by urban
workers, or by weavers inhabiting the suburbs or the immediate
countryside. Moreover, the initial washing and carding and the
finishing operations (dyeing, bleaching, tentering, shearing,
sizing and pressing) were usually done in town, under the close
supervision of merchant manufacturers, some of whom had large

factory-like buildings for the purpose. In nearly all the woollen
centres, the merchants managed to impose ever higher standards
of skill on their weavers and spinners without having to increase
their remuneration.
Gérard Gayot’s splendid study of the woollen industry in Sedan
shows how the top end of the French woollen industry prospered
in the eighteenth century. Sedan, which specialized in the highest-
quality broadcloths, was the most dynamic centre of woollen pro-
duction in the country. The number of cloths produced roughly
doubled from the 1720s to the 1780s and the value of the product
nearly quadrupled in the same period. This general rise was
accompanied by a growing concentration of capital: the value of
cloth turned out by the average firm rose about tenfold over these
six decades.73 This decrease in the number of firms and big
increase in their size was the result of continuous competition,
but while the manufacturers were assiduous about monitoring
costs, competition was as much about quality as about cost.
The labour of manufacturing broadcloths was finely divided, typ-
ically beginning in centralized washing and carding operations,
followed by spinning put out to an ever widening circle of rural
women, followed by centralized preparation of the warps, which
were put out once again to male weavers, both urban and rural.
The finishing was carried out in centralized facilities under the
exacting eye of the manufacturer and his foremen. Labour disci-
pline depended on incentives built into the pay structures, which
could be very effective without requiring the continuous gaze of
the manufacturer and his agents.74
The Sedan industry was a ‘Royal Manufactory’, which
involved both privileges and a tight regime of inspections. From
the beginning, the industry produced for the top of the market,
one initially dominated by demand for black cloth for suits and
coats and the ubiquitous robes of the clergy and judicial officers.
73
Gayot, Les Draps de Sedan, 313–14.
74
Ibid., 97–140, 135.
Unlike the Lyonnais silk producers, who saw the sale of their
bright striped or floral cloths plunge whenever a period of mourn-
ing was declared, the death of one of the grands de France was a
great blessing for the drapers of Sedan. But over the course of the
century, more coloured dyes were used, both for civilian dress and
for the army, each of whose regiments had its own colours.75

Royal inspectors increasingly clashed with manufacturers who
felt constrained by the inspectors’ inflexibility. As one manufac-
turer put it, ‘the tastes of consumers vary at every moment, either
as a result of society, or because clever competitors have changed
them by means of fortunate inventions’. The proper goal of the
manufacturers should therefore be ‘to follow or to anticipate the
taste of consumers’.76 Over time, pressure from the more pro-
gressive merchants forced the inspectors to relax their standards.
However, the merchants continued to value the seal that identi-
fied their cloths as coming from the Sedan Royal Manufactory,
which, according to Gayot, increasingly served more as a brand
than as any guarantee of the precise quality of the cloth.77
III
THE WIDER EMPIRE OF FASHION
The textile industries were particularly large and important, but
they were far from the only ones affected by the capitalist dynamic
I have delineated in this article. Paris was the home of many trades
that thrived in the eighteenth century in a nexus between fash-
ionable consumption and innovations in production. We get
glimpses of these sectors in Carolyn Sargentson’s discussion of
the role of mercers in designing products and co-ordinating the
work of the artisans who produced stylish rococo furniture and
furnishings in Paris; in Clare Crowston’s study of Parisian dress-
makers; in Michael Sonenscher’s work on the Martin brothers,
whose celebrated chinoiserie lacquering decorated the finest
coaches, snuff boxes, toilettes (dressing tables) and cabinets in
eighteenth-century Paris; in Steven Kaplan’s and Alain Thillay’s
work on the faux ouvriers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; or in
Michael Kwass’s study of the production and consumption of
75
Ibid., 33–4.
76
Ibid., 78, 82.
77
Ibid., 66–7, 83.
wigs.78 As Cissie Fairchilds points out, the ‘luxury’ trades catered
not only for a wealthy clientele, but increasingly also found ways
to make what she calls ‘populuxe’ goods — umbrellas, canes,
snuff boxes, furniture, watches, fans, coffee pots and the like —
available to a broad consuming public.79 The number of cafés,
a new type of commercial establishment initially introduced in

the 1670s to sell a novel colonial product in a stylish setting,
skyrocketed over the course of the eighteenth century: in Paris
there were 380 by 1728 and 1,800 by 1788.80 Coffee drinking
became so widespread that when price controls for ‘goods of the
first necessity’ were instituted during the revolutionary terror in
1793, coffee was included as a necessity.81
There were also many luxury producers who, like the Lyonnais
silk manufacturers, were located outside Paris but depended pri-
marily on the Parisian market. The Royal Manufactory of mirrors
at Saint-Gobain was one of the industrial wonders of eighteenth-
century Europe. For a long time it was the sole supplier of the
decorative mirrors that were a distinguishing mark of the most
stylish boutiques and cafés in Paris — commercial spaces that
helped define new modes of consumption and sociability in the
eighteenth century.82 Various porcelain and pottery works, of
which the Royal Manufactory at Sèvres was the most famous,
produced both imitations of Chinese and Japanese crockery
and original rococo and neoclassical designs. Books, one of the
most important and fastest-growing of consumer products, were
produced in many locations. Because of royal censorship, many of
the printing establishments producing for the French market
were located across the borders, especially in Switzerland and
78
Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 21–3, 46–56; Clare Haru Crowston,
Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC,
2001); Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-
Century French Trades (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 7; Steven Kaplan, ‘Les Corporations,
les ‘‘faux ouvriers’’, et le faubourg Saint-Antoine’, Annales ESC, xliii (1988); Alain
Thillay, Le Faubourg Saint-Antoine et ses ‘faux ouvriers’: la liberté du travail à Paris aux
XVII e et XVIII e siècles (Seyssel, 2002); Kwass, ‘Big Hair’.
79
Fairchilds, ‘Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-
Century Paris’.
80
DeJean, Essence of Style, 146.
81
Jones and Spang, ‘Sans-culottes, sans café, sans tabac’.
82
Maurice Hamon and Dominique Perrin, Au cœur du XVIII e siècle industriel: con-
dition ouvrière et tradition villageoise à Saint-Gobain ([Paris], 1993); DeJean, Essence of
Style, ch. 9.
the Netherlands.83 Supplying paper for the bourgeoning book
trade and for newspapers (another consumer innovation of the
era) gave rise to large-scale and mechanized paper-making.84
As this incomplete listing makes clear, the range of products,
services and forms of production involved in the sphere of
fashionable consumption in eighteenth-century France was ex-

tremely diverse. There were large manufactories with advanced
division of labour, as in the production of porcelain, paper,
printed cotton, or mirrors; there were trades that continued to
be organized in traditional guilds, such as goldsmithing or book-
binding; there were dispersed domestic manufactures organized
in putting-out networks, such as the production of textiles,
watches or cutlery; there were manufactures that brought
together in novel ways the labour of various distinct skilled
trades, as in carriage-making or luxury furniture and furnishings;
there were new retail establishments like cafés, restaurants, and
the shops of modistes, mercers and wigmakers; there was clandes-
tine production of cheap furniture, umbrellas, fans and canes that
were hawked in the streets to modest consumers who could not
afford the guild-produced equivalents; and across the Atlantic
there were slaves who produced sugar, coffee, indigo and tobacco
for consumption in the metropole. What is particularly impres-
sive is the sheer diversity and flexibility of forms of production and
distribution that developed in this society, still formally struc-
tured by hierarchies of estates and orders and by guild privileges.
Where consumer desires could be stimulated, there seemed
always to be entrepreneurs and workers able to find the means
of both satisfying and further stimulating those desires. This was a
commercially organized capitalism founded on a multiplicity of
methods of producing and supplying desirable goods, not on any
single dominant formula.
Fashionable consumption played a constitutive role in the
development of French capitalism not only in the eighteenth cen-
tury but also over the long term. French dominance in the
European markets for luxury goods began in the late seventeenth
century and has continued into the twenty-first. Throughout this
83
See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing
History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, 1979).
84
Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management,
Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, 2000).
period, the central role of France (and above all Paris) in setting
European style has paid handsome dividends to French capital-
ists, from the wealthy cotton printers, Sedanais drapers, Parisian
mercers and Lyonnais silk merchants to Coco Chanel, Yves
Saint-Laurent and Louis Vuitton. Probably no other national
economy has been so dominated by luxury production for so

long. Yet if there is something particularly French about the
story I have told in this article, it is by no means an exclusively
French story. Scholars are fully aware of the importance of adver-
tising, design and branding — that is, of enhancing the value of
products by desire creation — in contemporary capitalism. I have
suggested that value enhancement of this sort is not an innovation
of the twentieth century but goes very far back into capitalism’s
history. The development of fashion, with its built-in obsoles-
cence of products, its outward geographical and downward
social expansion, and its powerful harnessing of the energies —
the labour — of consumers for the creation of value was already
under way in late seventeenth-century Versailles and Paris, but
also, it seems clear, by the early eighteenth century in England
and probably by the mid seventeenth in the Netherlands.85 In the
nineteenth century, industrialization added a new dynamic to
capitalist development, one centred on the production of goods
that were what might be called ‘mere commodities’ — goods like
coal, iron, steel, steam engines, and cheap cotton and woollen
cloth — where the emphasis was not on desire enhancement
through quality and design but on cutting costs and multiplying
output through technological development. This is the capitalism
analysed so brilliantly by Karl Marx. But it is important to see this
new form of capitalism as growing out of and supplementing but
never displacing the design-intensive consumer capitalism that
flourished in the eighteenth century. Here it is important to
remember that the starting point of the industrial revolution,
the breakthrough to immensely profitable capitalist production
of mere commodities, was the British cotton industry, whose
remarkable eighteenth-century expansion was driven precisely
by the demand for bright, colourful and stylish calicoes; and
85
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb (eds.), Birth of a Consumer Society; Berg, Luxury
and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden
Age in Theory and Practice’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century;
de Vries, Industrious Revolution.
that Matthew Boulton, best known to economic history as James
Watt’s partner in the production of the steam engine, was already
famous as the manufacturer of fashionable metal buttons,
buckles and metal statuary when he made Watt’s acquaintance.86
The volunteer consumer labour that imparted a peculiar
dynamic to these industries was supplied by both men and

women, although the work of Jennifer Jones demonstrates that
consumption was increasingly gendered female as the eighteenth
century wore on.87 Thus elite women, who hardly ever partici-
pated directly in the production and marketing of goods, were
nevertheless crucial agents in the growth of capitalism in the
eighteenth century through their massive participation in the
development of a fashion culture. Their social and cultural world
was transformed by capitalism in this era, perhaps as much as that
of cotton weavers or silk merchants. A similar point can be made
about aristocratic men. For mid twentieth-century Marxist his-
tory, the key question was the relation of various classes to the
means of production. Georges Lefebvre regarded nobles as a
declining feudal class fundamentally in conflict with the bour-
geoisie.88 George V. Taylor attempted to refute this assumption
by pointing out that nobles participated significantly in heavy
metallurgical industry and in financial speculation — and by
demonstrating that most ‘bourgeois’ did not differ much from
nobles in their relation to the means of production, since they
gained much of their income from rent, offices and other ‘propri-
etary’ wealth.89 The account of eighteenth-century capitalism I
have offered here shifts the focus towards consumption, high-
lighting the important role — indeed the leading role — played
by nobles in the development of new capitalist consumption
patterns.
One implication of this article is that the current separation of
economic history from cultural and political history is positively
harmful to both. The dynamics of capitalism in this era are
86
E. Robinson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Commerce and Fashion: Matthew Boulton’s
Marketing Techniques’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xvi (1963).
87
Jones, Sexing la Mode.
88
Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R. R. Palmer
(Princeton, 1947).
89
George V. Taylor, ‘Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Eng. Hist.
Rev., lxxix (1964); George V. Taylor, ‘Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the
French Revolution’, Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxii (1967).
incomprehensible if divorced from the dynamics of fashion —
and fashion is, of course, a system of symbolic distinctions, one
complexly imbricated in other cultural systems. The ever chan-
ging symbolic distinctions of the fashion world, I have tried to
demonstrate, reached back into the marketing and production of
goods, changing the incentives and organizational possibilities

facing direct producers, entrepreneurs and suppliers. Likewise,
the output of industries producing fashionable goods changed the
range of symbolic distinctions and cultural strategies available to
marketers and consumers. The history of fashion cannot be a
purely cultural history and the interactive field of producers,
merchants and consumers that constitutes the fashion economy
was enormously productive of new cultural and social forms.
Among these new cultural and social forms in eighteenth-
century France were the café, the newspaper, the bookshop and
the public promenade, all of which were conditions of possibility
for the emergence of a new public sphere. And within this public
sphere, a passionate debate raged about the political, moral and
economic effects of luxury — that is to say, precisely about the
new patterns of consumption that made the public sphere
possible. Moreover, by inducing both nobles and wealthy com-
moners to engage in massive and very visible consumption of
fashionable goods, eighteenth-century consumer capitalism prob-
ably helped to shift conceptions of social difference from the
criterion of birth to that of wealth, from a qualitative to a quan-
titative distinction between persons. It could be argued that new
forms of consumption therefore were — perhaps paradoxically
— conducive to notions of equality of the sort specified in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789.
In the decades since the ‘revisionists’ showed that it was impos-
sible to locate a coherent bourgeois class at the head of the French
Revolution, historians of eighteenth-century France have tended
simply to ignore the question of capitalism — on the grounds that
the class conflict supposedly generated by capitalism was hardly a
major motor of revolutionary history. But the consumption-
centred capitalist dynamic I have tried to analyse in this article
suggests that socio-political effects of capitalism in the eighteenth
century may have operated more through changing cultural
frameworks of public life than through class conflict. If we con-
ceptualize eighteenth-century capitalism properly, that is, as
inextricably bound up with an ever expanding empire of fashion,
we may find that it was — after all — a key source of the era’s
epochal political and cultural transformations.90
University of Chicago William H. Sewell Jr
90
A parallel argument has been made by Colin Jones in his ‘The Great Chain of
Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the
French Revolution’, Amer. Hist. Rev., ci (1996).

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THE EMPIRE OF FASHION AND

THE RISE OF CAPITALISM IN

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Nobles Professionals Artisans and Domestics Wage earners

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University of Chicago William H. Sewell Jr

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