A good deed is never forgotten: Crédit and mutual exchange in seventeenth-century France

Description

Historians have argued that early modern "patron-client" relations revolved around fidelity, a value many of them contrast to personal interest. My dissertation rejects the self-interest paradigm as an anachronistic interpolation. More broadly, my thesis rejects the application to early modern societies of paradigms, such as rational choice theory, drawn from analyses of contemporary Western societies. Relying instead on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social capital, which suggests that individuals accumulate the material and social capital necessary in different fields of power, one can broaden the definition of profit and analyze a logic of practice that escapes the "rationality" of capitalism. Focusing on France in the decades leading up to the Estates General of 1614, my dissertation examines issues of reciprocity within a range of fields of power, using archival and published sources: letters, financial documents, political pamphlets, memoirs, courtesy books, literature, political philosophy, moral and religious treatises, and material evidence such as architecture and art. The dissertation focuses, in part, on the Brulart de Sillery family, the only one of the great ministerial families of the early seventeenth century to have been ignored by historians. The Sillery family provides a particular case of the shift away from the traditional belief that posited a unity between private interest and common interest in civil life. From the early seventeenth century, this ideal was contested in relations of power wherein the duty and obligation shifted from the bien publique to interests either more particular or more state-centered. The mutual exchange of benefits operated as a moral economy in which individuals accrued social capital (crédit ) in civil society, as circles of "citoyens" bound by mutual benefits and obligations. The expectation of reward for a "bienfait" did not obviate the moral rectitude of the gift, reciprocity structured the political system, social relationships, and religious life within the framework of the existing Judea-Christian and Classical ethical traditions.