Analysing vulgarisation: when a fact is a clue

When Fontenelle wrote the Dialogues on the plurality of worlds, he was working in the libertine tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac and in the heretic tradition of Bruno.

By his own account, he was bringing the new philosophy down from the level of abstraction (and mathematics) in which it was couched, in order to make it understandable for those, for instance, adored novels such as the Princess de Cleves.

And on the account of historians who study the early enlightenment, Fontenelle was a ‘vulgarizer’ or ‘popularizer’ – terms which have been applied to him at least since Emma Marie Sioli’s book on Fontenelle in 1910. In order to answer the question of motive and audience, historians often have recourse to a sort of warmed over classical economics explanation – it is the consumer that did it. That is, there was a ‘demand’ for books on natural philosophy. Sometimes this is expanded into the idea that there was, somehow, more leisure for reading. Or it is mixed with the idea that this consumer class of readers was female. The latter actually does suggest something a bit more sociologically complex, since it links the demand story to education. Women were excluded from academies and colleges of the type that were open to males of a certain class. But they were not illiterate. And so, if we take the demand story a step further, we could link it to the way knowledge was manufactured, and where it was manufactured.
In other words, we can step out of the magic wand model, in which demand is waved in the air, and things simply appear, into another world in which demand is mediated through the division of labor, and division of labor is mediated by organizational settings.

When La Bruyère makes his cutting remark about Fontenelle’s appeal to the “bourgeoisie’ and the ‘provincials’, his idea is that the bel-esprit vulgarization is a matter of cheapening cultural goods, and distributing them among people who don’t know any better. Although one might turn the tables on this characterization – for even as La Bruyère wrote in the confidence that he knew the eternal place of the Ville and the Court, the centralizing politics of Louis XIV and Colbert were producing changes that would quickly undermine the place of those two eternities – his assumption is used even now in defining popularization.

In Marie-Francoise Mortureux’s essay on the formal linguistic properties of ‘vulgarization’ – which the French prefer to popularization – she quotes a definition proposed by Jacobi and Shninn: ‘… to consider the results of research, the objects of knowledge produced by science and to identify the strategies of actors in view of assuring their diffusion among peers and outside the circle of specialists.”

Mortureux makes a sharp eyed assessment of the implications of this definition, among which is the fact that “the evaluation of its effects does not give us any institutional procedure (contrary to teaching beginning classes, and even continual [educational] formation).”

In Gadda’s mystery, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, his police detective, Francesco Ingravallo, thinks, privately, that the usual police procedure of matching an effect to a cause is, in fact, a misunderstanding of our causal cosmos:

“He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed.”

I belong to the Ingravallian sect myself, and take it that in examining the unforeseen catastrophes that dot the weather system of history, one has to look for points of depression or attraction in which multiple causes are involved. In understanding the production of knowledge outside of the institutionalization of its assessment – in other words, being ‘well informed’ – we have to look at a more complex picture then is given to us by the idea of the ‘rise’ of such and such a class and the ‘demand’ for such and such a commodity. This is my rule of thumb in studying the formation of character under capitalism. We have to be on watch, then, for changes in unexpected regions, of which we have only, in retrospect, blurry pictures taken by, as it were, our satellites, our witnesses, our writers, our surveyors working on quite opposite premises for purposes of their own. We have to understand the fact as a clue – and thus always half imaginary.

– Using this method, surely, surely, on those starry nights in that parc belonging to the country estate in Normandy where Fontenelle teases and instructs and is gently rebuffed by his ravishing hostess, the blonde marquise de G***., what is happening, unbeknownst to both players, is the development of one of those depressions in the weather system of the ancien regime.

division of labor and the writer

In describing the ‘workshop’ of the bel-esprit, La Bruyère is, unconsciously, positioning the writer, the quintessentializing writer, within the factory system. It is a rather fascinating coincidence that a decade after Fontenelle is satirized for being a mere producer, with a p.r. advance man and a bag of rhetorical tricks, we have accounts, for the first time, of how skilled labor – for instance, in the making of ships or watches – can be distributed among workmen so as to make the ships and watches more precise and the output speedier. In the light of that development, La Bruyère’s Characters already looks retrospectively obsolete. Or rather, it looks like an ideological investment in the obsolete: in a classical steady state political economy and order, founded ultimately on preserving Nemesis as the limit of growth.

Addison and Steele were exactly the kind of atelier writers that La Bruyère was warning against. They were very consciously writing for the ‘bourgeoisie’, or the commercial class; they were both involved in Whiggish commercial schemes; and they included, in the Spectator, certain remarks in defense of free trade and commerce that were the exact negation of the ideal monarchical order which underlies La Bruyère’s idea of both the writer and of the plurality of characters.

In this respect, I would like to read the remarks about the character of the bel esprit against Number 232 of the Spectator, which appeared on November 26, 1711. It is still a scholarly puzzle as to who exactly wrote this number – although nobody disputes that the ideas behind it belonged to Richard Steele’s friend, Henry Martyn, one of the obscure who issued a pamphlet defending the East India trade in terms that would have done Adam Smith proud. In other words, one of those figures who always seem to precede more important figures, as though a different sun ruled the sphere of intelligence, where shadows precede substance.

Henry Martyn made plainer the connection between free trade and the increased productivity that comes from well ordered manufacture – or what Smith was to call division of labour – in his pamphlet on the East Indian trade, but it is likely that many more people, even at the time, read his argument – if not his genuine writing of it – in the Spectator. That the signature of an essay about the dispersion of worker responsibility in the assembling of a product is, even now, in dispute is one of those mysterious communications between logical levels that Derrida loved so much. The text is attributed to a fictional character – Sir Andrew Freeport – who combines the leisure of the nobility in his weekend rural retreat with the commerce of the City, as a merchant. The essay gives voice to Freeport after a scene in which his unnamed companion and Freeport are ‘assaulted’ by beggars as they are going from the city to the country,and buy them off with alms. It is the state of the poor that quickly brings us to the state of the nation:

“But of all Men living, we Merchants, who live by Buying and Selling, ought never to encourage Beggars. The Goods which we export are indeed the Product of the lands, but much the greatest Part of their Value is the Labour of the People: but how much of these People's Labour shall we export whilst we hire them to sit still? The very Alms they receive from us, are the Wages of Idleness. I have often thought that no Man should be permitted to take Relief from the Parish, or to ask it in the Street, till he has first purchased as much as possible of his own Livelihood by the Labour of his own Hands; and then the Publick ought only to be taxed to make good the Deficiency. If this Rule was strictly observed, we should see every where such a Multitude of new Labourers, as would in all probability reduce the Prices of all our Manufactures. It is the very Life of Merchandise to buy cheap and sell dear. The Merchant ought to make his Outset as cheap as possible, that he may find the greater Profit upon his Returns; and nothing will enable him to do this like the Reduction of the Price of Labour upon all our Manufactures.”
Andrew Freeport evidently sees things in terms of a system. The system – capitalism – will accomplish things that are accounted as miracles under the old system: giving the unemployed employment; raising wages while diminishing the cost of labor; and encouraging world trade as a means of exploiting the even cheaper labor available elsewhere to make the nation prosperous. His companion shows some astonishment at these propositions, but Freeport has read his William Petty:

“It may seem, says he, a Paradox, that the Price of Labour should be reduced without an Abatement of Wages, or that Wages can be abated without any Inconvenience to the Labourer, and yet nothing is more certain than that both those Things may happen. The Wages of the Labourers make the greatest Part of the Price of every Thing that is useful; and if in Proportion with the Wages the Prices of all other Things should be abated, every Labourer with less Wages would be still able to purchase as many Necessaries of Life; where then would be the Inconvenience? But the Price of Labour may be reduced by the Addition of more Hands to a Manufacture, and yet the Wages of Persons remain as high as ever. The admirable Sir William Petty2 has given Examples of this in some of his Writings: One of them, as I remember, is that of a Watch, which I shall endeavour to explain so as shall suit my present Purpose. It is certain that a single Watch could not be made so cheap in Proportion by one only Man, as a hundred Watches by a hundred; for as there is vast Variety in the Work, no one Person could equally suit himself to all the Parts of it; the Manufacture would be tedious, and at last but clumsily performed: But if an hundred Watches were to be made by a hundred Men, the Cases may be assigned to one, the Dials to another, the Wheels to another, the Springs to another, and every other Part to a proper Artist; as there would be no need of perplexing any one Person with too much Variety, every one would be able to perform his single Part with greater Skill and Expedition; and the hundred Watches would be finished in one fourth Part of the Time of the first one, and every one of them at one fourth Part of the Cost, tho' the Wages of every Man were equal. The Reduction of the Price of the Manufacture would increase the Demand of it, all the same Hands would be still employed and as well paid. The same Rule will hold in the Clothing, the Shipping, and all the other Trades whatsoever. And thus an Addition of Hands to our Manufactures will only reduce the Price of them; the Labourer will still have as much Wages, and will consequently be enabled to purchase more Conveniencies of Life; so that every Interest in the Nation would receive a Benefit from the Increase of our Working People.”

The watchmaker and the shipbuilder and, indeed, implicitly the writer all fall under this beneficent rule. Technology, which one thinks of as a matter of individual invention, is here given a structure. Although it may seem odd to think of the bel-esprit in correspondence to this vision of the ultimate meta-technology, in fact it is historically accurate.

The origin of the new, the origin of the writer

In the preface to his Characters, La Bruyère advises the reader to always keep his title in mind when reading the work. The title (Les Caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siècle) is, as it were, a monitory ghost that haunts every line of the text.

What can we say about that ghost? Firstly, that we are not dealing with character, but with characters. The plural is significant. As we have seen in tracing the etymology and use of character in rhetoric, there is a divergence between character as a stamp on the psyche and the character mask, or the proliferation of many characters. The former is the ground of moral seriousness, and a perpetual reference for the orator or politician; the latter is the ground of farce, and a continual reference for the satirist or dramatist. Secondly, there is that substituting ‘or’. The or here does not give us a disjunction so much as a renaming. La Bruyère’s characters, between them, embody the ‘manners’ of ‘this century’. That distinctive ‘this” roots the book entirely in its time. And yet, it contains no conjectural history. This is not a project like Voltaire’s essay on the Moeurs et les esprits des nations, or Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. The century, a diachronic reference, is, in fact, made into a synchronic entity, a sort of horizontal stage upon which the characters appear. At the same time, it has another connotation characteristic of moralizing satire – this century is always a fallen time, in comparison to some other time. La Bruyère was one of the partisans of the ancients in the quarrel between the moderns and the ancients, and the silent partner to which ‘this’ century is compared is antiquity, or – most probably – the ideal time of Rome.

And so the title, that monitory spirit, is a framing, within which, firstly, a number of characters are assembled and their traits enumerated, and secondly, within which a historico-mythic claim is made.

That claim is made on behalf of the whole project. La Bruyère, in his preface, consciously locates himself with relation to the moralist tradition. “These are not, besides, maxims that I wanted to write: they are like the laws of morality; and I admit that I don’t have enough authority, enough genius, to play [faire] the legislator.”

But if La Bruyère calls attention himself to his violation of the maxim form, he still sees what he is doing within the general pattern of the orator or public man. That is, he sees his writing, and in fact all true writing, as an attempt to instruct and correct: “The orator and the writer can’t defeat the joy that they have in being applauded; but they ought to blush at themselves if they have only sought, by their discourses or by the writing, to be praised: in addition to the fact that the most sure and the least equivocal is the change of manners and the reformation of those who read or listen to them.” [2 – my translations]

La Bruyère is blindly groping towards the function of the writer, here. It is a tatonnement which goes on to the present day. The writer or orator has a function different from the poet or the philosopher, but what is it? It is here that the Theophrastian tradition of the character seems to come in handy, for it mixes the delight in description with the principle of correction – based on the idea that the writer who holds up a mirror to vice reveals it to the infected person, who can then reform him or herself. It is a peculiarity of La Bruyère’s static mind set to see vice, or the obsessions which mark and distinguish character, as a set that is established in antiquity, and can be applied to this century. But beneath La Bruyère’s sense of the legitimacy conferred by antiquity, there is a strong sense of the contemporaneity of what he is describing. A good example is precisely the character of the writer. In a famous passage in the chapter on Society and conversation, La Bruyère presents a furious attack on the emancipated writer, the modern. Under the name Cydias, he portrays, it is generally agreed, Fontenelle. The energy of the dislike for this kind of writer will not be lost on those, in the eighteenth century, who again and again attack the philosophe. Even at this stage of the early ‘enlightenment’, one sees the motifs of the counter-enlightenment gather.

Cydias is a “bel esprit’ by profession. “He has a sign, a workshop, commissioned works, companions who work under him: he can give you the stanzas he promised you in less than a month… Prose, verse, what do you want? He succeeds equally in either one. Ask him for letters of consolation, or to send to someone absent, he’ll undertake the task. You can take them already completed, enter his shop, you have your choice. He has a friend who has no other task on earth than to promise him at a long date before to a certain world, and to present him in the salons as a rare man with exquisite conversational talents. … Cydias, after clearing his throat, rolls up his sleeves, extends his hand and opens his fingers and gravely pours out his quintessentialized thoughts and his sophistical arguments. … for be it in speaking or in writing, he has in view neither the true nor the false, neither the reasonable nor the ridiculous; his sole goal is to avoid presenting himself in the sense of others, and to be of somebody else’s opinion.”

In other words, the modern writer, or bel esprit, is a manufactures and prides himself on being always new. To novelty, everything is sacrificed. Such is Cydias’ – and Fontenelle’s – modernity. To sum up: “In a word he is a composite of the pedant and the precious, made for being admired by the bourgoisie and in the provinces, in whom, nevertheless, one can discover nothing of greatness save for his great opinion of himself.”

instinctive manicheanism

One is always having to remind oneself, in trying to do intellectual history, that the enunciative situation of a writer, from whence flow the texts one is continually pursuing, analyzing, using as evidence, is no mere scene dressing which easily melts in the background as we get down to the nitty gritty. It is nitty gritty all the way through. The enunciative situation is a nexus of institutionalized and non-institutionalized spaces that one forgets at one’s peril.

But even if we do try to be good historical materialists, there awaits the peril inhering in assuming a few Manichean categories to explain it all: public/private, or state sphere/private sphere, etc. I want to introduce categories as character, adventure, the total social fact, the encircling institution, the circulation agent, the writer as clerk, to snatch the real – or perhaps I should say, the everyday - from out of our instinctive Manicheanism.

dogs all the way down

Who let the dogs out?

Reading this post from Andrew Gelman, I was reminded of certain of Chamfort’s anecdotes about ancien regime society in France. For instance, this one:

“Do you know why, M. said to me, one has more integrity in France in one’s youth and just up to thirty years than past that age? It is because, after that age with us, one is undeceived – for with us one must be the hammer or the anvil; one sees clearly that the vices under which the nation trembles are irremediable. Up to then, one resembled a dog which defends the dinner of its master from the other dogs; after that age, one is like that same dog, who takes his part with the others.”

This has the stamp of the cynicism characteristic of the end of the regime. But at the end of our regime, the old democracies, giving way rapidly to plutocracies of the vilest type, one has to amend the fable, for the guard dogs in the American republic, incredibly enough, simply switch from defending the master to defending the pack of dog thieves. Their reward is to think that they are somehow, by being dogs, like the dog thieves.

Of course, they are encouraged in this belief by a rather rotten, financial unstable, but still necessary print propaganda machine. Time Magazine, through thick and thin, has assured us that the pack of dogs are the finest fellows in the world, all sprung from log cabins and making their millions by the sweat of their brows. Thus, as Gelman quotes a story in Time assuring us credulous outsider dogs who hold the mag in our earnest little paws that the top layer is made up of smarties and the most industrious:

“[Sam] Lessin is the poster boy for today's Times story on Facebook "talent acquisitions." Facebook spent several million dollars to buy Lessin's drop.io, only to shut it down and put Lessin to work on internal projects. To the Times, Lessin is an example of how "the best talent" fetches tons of money these days. "Engineers are worth half a million to one million," a Facebook executive told the paper.”

Gelman provides this gentle little corrective:

We'll let you in on a few things the Times left out: Lessin is not an engineer, but a Harvard social studies major and a former Bain consultant. His file-sharing startup drop.io was an also-ran competitor to the much more popular Dropbox, and was funded by a chum from Lessin's very rich childhood. Lessin's wealthy investment banker dad provided Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crucial access to venture capitalists in Facebook's early days. And Lessin had made a habit of wining and dining with Facebook executives for years before he finally scored a deal, including at a famous party he threw at his father's vacation home in Cyprus with girlfriend and Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro. (Lessin is well connected in media, too.) . .
It is almost Horatio Alger time in Bush-Obama America – you too can rise from the bottom if you only manage to get the keys to your dad’s vacation home in Cyprus!
However, as in ancien regime France, where Chamfort felt the undercurrents and eventually transformed himself from a disabused observer of the nobility to a very fine revolutionary writer proposing their at least collective decapitation, in ancien regime America one feels that the currents underneath are gathering against the plutocratic orgy at the top. There was a remarkable Gallup poll released a couple of weeks ago and touted by the right that showed that only 47 percent of the American people supported heavy taxation of the rich to produce an unspecified ‘redistribution’ of the wealth. I was astonished – almost half the country would support the most radical measure I can think of. Specify that ‘redistribution’ – say, instead, heavy taxes for ‘deficit reduction’ – and the numbers go way up. Pew shows that more than 40 percent of the Republicans support that. In spite of the money poured into position management (the news networks, the think tanks, the media in general), the screws are shaking loose of the machine.
Such moments are unpredictable. In 2008, the electorate thought that they were voting for change from one or the other candidate. Instead, they were voting for the continuity of Bush’s policies, with a little Romneycare thrown in for good measure – a policy that is in many ways less helpful than Bush’s much more expensive pill bill. A Republican treasury secretary and a Republican Defense secretary have been the pillars of our ‘bi-partisan’ policy. A Republican Fed chief can look back with satisfaction on a policy of loaning over 6 trillion dollars to the wealthiest Americans at 0.025 percent interest (a fact I enjoy pondering so much that I would like to include it in everything I write to the day I die) and leveraging a stock boom and a commodity futures greedorama. Which act was disguised behind TARP, so that comparatively few Americans realize how TARP was dwarfed by the free money policy. And those who do realize it are assured, in infinitely patronizing tones, that the Fed and the Obama administration only took the painful course of making the rich much, much richer because it was good for all of us – otherwise, it is laissez faire all the way!
The dogs, with their Cyprus summer homes and their Harvard pedigrees, will fight for the gigantic scraps of an economy that is still a world historical wonder for a while, while the middle class squabbles because some among them, after working twenty to forty years as public employees, actually get the pensions they were promised twenty to forty years ago. Unfair! It is squabbling dogs all the way down. But I’m thinking some of the dogs are suspecting there is no master at the table, and that the top dogs are, well, weaker than they look. Oh, let that moment come!

morning reflections on Gwinnett County

There are cities that are written into life – I was just living in one of the most extraordinary of them, Paris. Natalia Ginzburg once remarked that Turin and Pavese were one – that walking in the city that always smelled of soot and train stations was, in a sense, walking in Pavese’s state of mind.



In Atlanta, they are celebrating the 75th year of Gone with the Wind, but it is impossible to think of Margaret Mitchell when strolling through downtown Atlanta – although it is a different story perhaps with Buckhead, with its fad for white columns. In Gwinnett County, where I write this, there is no organizing principle. Forget a novelist or poet – this expanse of land lacks even a defining mapmaker. Housing developments, shopping centers and roads that name themselves after already existing roads and under false premises wander impudently into necks of the cut down woods are the norm, here. So are churches. Chaos, it turns out, is imminently Christian. Gwinnett County is the kind of place that counters the “Jimmy Carter” bestowed as an honorific on this or that piece of Georgia roadway (for the logical reason that Carter is Georgia’s one and only president) with a Ronald Reagan Highway, which then generates a plethora of Presidential shopping centers. To write Gwinnett county, the poet requires a large magic marker, and a tank full of gas in his Cherokee.



There is something odd about all this, or so I am thinking this morning. When the New World was new to the old World settler, that settler brought not only his pair of eyes but his names and promptly set to work – first with his “New”, then with the names he thought he heard coming out of the mouths of the people who were already here. But it is difficult to learn a man’s language as you are shoving him forward with blows from a blunderbuss, so the Indian words were hit or miss, a very distant approximation of the songlines that once ran in the wilderness. Gwinnett, that odd looking word, came not from some Welsh savage but from Button Gwinnett, Georgia’s signer of the Declaration. According to his biographer, William Montgomery, Button Gwinnett’s name was a fake. Button was probably Bolton, and we have simply misread his signature. As for Gwinnett, his assiduous researches – at least in 1913 – turned up no Gwinnett in England. Interestingly, it turned up a character named Gwinnett, who figures in a text by Richard Steele. As for where he hailed from – it was certainly not the territory I can see out my window. As Montgomery found, Button Gwinnett’s property is as shaky as his name – did he first appear in Charleston as a merchant in the 1770s? Or was it Savannah? Did he own property on St. Catherine’s island? The man came out of the mist. The man came out of the Transatlantic mangle, he came out of pirates and imposters, he came out of the Age of Reason and was the second signer of the Declaration of Independence, but with his ridiculous paucity of credentials, he would never have been issued a license by the Georgia Department of Drivers Services in Gwinnett County, and his signature would surely never have graced a single legal document in our age of infinitely backed up legal documents. The lady at the counter in Lawrenceville would have told him, firmly, that he had to go over his checklist and find at least a paystub. And to top it all off, Gwinnett found a way to die of a gunshot wound in the Revolution without firing a shot at the British – he died in a duel with another Georgia politcian.



I find this lost soul, by one of the iron laws of cartographic poetry, the perfectly appropriate symbol of this county.

From the files of the autocracy: the philosopher behind the curtain

We have an account of La Bruyère from a contemporary enemy named Vigneul-Marville. V-M took the term “characters” as an apposite plural for La Bruyère’s, who he portrays as having several. The transition from singular to plural, here, is the transition from the morally sound (or the comically obsessed) to the imposter – for it is at this point that the incision of character, its stamp on the body or the psyche, is, as it were, lifted off the counter, and becomes a mask. There is something contagious about the character mask – for instance, even as Vigneul-Marville wrote acidly about La Bruyère’s, he was writing under a pseudonym – his real name was Noël Argonne. In his Melanges, Vigneul-Marville compares La Bruyère to a succession of the great characters of the classical age – to Don Quixote, Socrates, and the Misanthrope. Each is considered from the comic point of view – that is, each is considered an imposture, a usurpation of tone. However, even among these attacks we come upon an anecdote in the Melange that has a certain clarifying Daoist simplicity, one that gives us a clue about La Bruyère and the way that the clerks have always betrayed the Great Tradition of which they are the ornament and reference – for surely La Bruyère must count among the clerks of literature who form a secret Daoist strain in the West. The features of this oppositional, skeptical character form in the absolutist bureaucracies, and of course suffer a great change within the bureaucracies of capitalist circulation, but the knowing listener can hear a distinct note – the kind of pitch struck by Josephine, the Singer of the Mouse Folk – even back in 1680.

This is Vigneul-Marville’s anecdote. At one point in his life, La Bruyère lived in a cramped apartment facing the Ile St. Louis, on the left bank. , as an evidence for, indeed, the manners of the century.
“Nothing is prettier than this character [that of the philosopher], but it must be admitted that without the interposition of an antichamber or cabinet, it was pretty easy to introduce oneself to M. de la Bruyere, before he had an apartment at the Hotel de …. There was only one door to open, and a room close to the sky, separated into two parts by a light curtain. The wind, always a good servant to Philosophers, which ran before of those who entered and returned with the movement of the door, delicately lifted the curtain and let one see the Philosopher, the laughing visage well content to have occasion to distill the elixer of his meditations in the minds and heart of his unexpected guest.”

For Vigneul-Marville, this is the scene of a mock oracle: the lifted curtain, the laughing visage of the philosopher, the gawking admirer. And of course he was writing in the era when, as Fontenelle had explained, the oracles were dead.

But it is a mistake to cut that anecdote out and impose it on the blank counter of our narrative as though it had a face value. For the man behind the curtain was more than the imposter of his enemy’s venom. He was, for instance, a functionary. The son of a Parisian bourgeois, La Bruyère, by education, was destined for the law. Apparently, however, he preferred not to. Instead, inheriting a tidy sum from a deceased bachelor uncle, he purchased into the corrupt system that had developed under Colbert, buying, for 18,000 francs, the sinecure of ‘trésorier de France au bureau des finances de Caen.” This was one of the rotten posts that the Rouen merchant Boisguilbert, in one of the earliest treatises in political economics to distinguish use and exchange value, railed against as a system of robbery. The post was another of the endless rentseeking positions through which money was siphoned from the merchants, peasant and middle landholders to the French court. The treasurer was a sort of money-lender [J. Marchand] who loaned out money at interest to his subordinates, who then sponged the money from the productive class and transferred it up the line, taking out their cut. This was a position that allowed plenty of leisure time to the functionary who had no vocational sense of his function – and La Bruyère had even less sense than most: he made one trip to Caen and then retired to Paris forever, getting his remit in the mail from the Normand bureaucrats who seemed to have objected at first to this obvious malfeasance, and then accepted it to the point that they were surprised, when La Bruyère finally sold the post to somebody else, to have to encounter a real human being who actually moved to Caen in the course of their tax business. (Magne, 1913)