prior probability

On Tuesday, March 25, Adam Smith’s pupils Duke Henry and Hew Campbell Scott most likely visited a porcelain manufactory in Sèvres, a small town located west of Paris, for Horace Walpole’s journal entry for that day reads: “To manufacture at Sevè with Lady George, Mrs Ker, Duke of Buccleuch and Mr Scot.”[1] (The reference to the “manufacture at Sevè” must be to the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres (pictured below), a royal workshop established by Louis XV in the 1750s,[2] while “Lady George, Mrs Ker” must refer to Lady Louisa Kerr, the wife of Lord George Lennox. For their parts, “Duke of Buccleuch and Mr Scot” refer to Smith’s pupils, Duke Henry and Hew Campbell Scott, the duke’s younger brother.)

Did Adam Smith visit this porcelain manufactory as well? Either way, a number of world-famous workshops in 18th-century France enjoyed royal monopolies to produce luxury goods, including jewelry, furniture, snuff boxes, watches, porcelain, carpets, silverware, mirrors, and tapestries, among other things. The crown directly oversaw several royal manufacturers, including those of fine dishes (Sèvres), tapestries (Gobelins and Beauvais), and carpets (Savonnerie manufactory).[3] The manufactory at Sèvres was thus not just any commercial enterprise; it was a world-famous workshop with a royal monopoly to produce fine dishes and other porcelain goods. [See generally Préaud & Scherf 2015; see also Battie 1990.]

The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory was originally founded in Vincennes in 1740 and then moved to Sèvres in 1756, after a new manufactory was built between 1753 and 1756 by the architect Laurent Lindet. [See generally Lechevallier-Chevignard 2013; see also Zarucchi 2016.] This new building was 130 meters long and four floors high. The ground floor contained clay reserves and storerooms of raw materials, and the first (second) floor contained the ovens and the workshops of the moulders, plasterers, sculptors, and engravers. Sculptors, turners, repairers, and packers worked on the second (third) floor, and the painters, gilders, and makers of animals and figures worked in the loft of the building. There was also a central pavilion surmounted by a pediment with a clock from the old royal glass-makers on the fourth level, with two long wings terminating in corner pavilions at each end. In front of the pavilion was a public courtyard, which was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. This courtyard was decorated twice a month to entertain visitors to the building.

Although Smith was apparently not among the members of Walpole’s party to visit Sèvres on March 25, one aspect of Paris that must have caught the moral philosopher’s attention was the market in luxury goods, a growing market with political and moral implications.[4] By way of example, the word “luxury” appears only six times in Smith’s 1759 treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments; by contrast, “luxury” or “luxuries” appear over 60 times in The Wealth of Nations. Moreover, Adam Smith devotes considerable space to monopolies and luxury goods in different parts of The Wealth of Nations. Book 1 of his magnum opus contains an extended analysis of monopolies, while Book 5 adopts a broad definition of luxury goods. Smith also defends the imposition of taxes on luxury goods in Book 5. Perhaps his time in Paris, the capital of luxury, in some small part led to Smith’s transformation from a moral philosopher to a political economist.

Horace Walpole’s journal entry for Monday, March 24 reads: “Dined at Duke of Buccleuch’s with several English.” [Lewis 1939, p. 309.]

The Duke of Buccleuch here refers to Smith’s pupil, Duke Henry, the future 3d Duke of Buccleuch, whose portrait is pictured below. At the time, Adam Smith was serving as Duke Henry’s private tutor and chaperone, a position that Smith had held since January of 1764, when they first set off for France on their grand tour. But why had Smith given up the tranquility of the University of Glasgow, where he held the Chair of Moral Philosophy, to serve as a “mere” tutor to a junior nobleman? As it happens, the position of tutor, at least in this particular case, was perhaps an even more prestigious posting, for Duke Henry, a direct descendant of King Charles II of England and King Henry IV of France, was not just any nobleman; he was born into one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families in Scotland, and upon coming of age in September of 1767, Smith’s pupil would become one of Scotland’s largest landowners. [For an in-depth biography of the Third Duke of Buccleuch, as well as a portrait and family tree, see Alcouffe & Massot-Bordenave 2020, pp. 28-34; for a short biography of Duke Henry, see Valentine 1970, Vol. 2, p. 773.]

It was Duke Henry’s stepfather, Charles Townshend, a prominent political figure in Britain until his death in 1767, who had offered the position of Duke Henry’s private tutor to Adam Smith as early as 1759, shortly after the publication Smith’s first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The plan was for Smith to accompany Duke Henry on a grand tour of Europe as soon as the young duke completed his studies at Eton, and Townshend offered Smith a lifetime salary of £300 per annum, more than double Smith’s salary as a Glasgow professor. Simply put, it was an offer Smith could not refuse. Smith himself did not hesitate in accepting Townshend’s offer.

In finally setting off for France in January of 1764, the father of modern economics and the young duke were following a well-established tradition, for the “Grand Tour” was a rite of passage of the sons of elite British families, “the ‘crown’ of [their] education.” [See Cohen 2001, p. 129; see also Brodsky-Porges 1981, p. 178, quoting Ogilvie 1939.] Michèle Cohen (1992, 2001) has explored the educational and cultural ideals of the “Grand Tour” and has identified many deep “contradictions and ambiguities” of these European tours by young British aristocrats, and the sexual aspect of these tours should also not go unnoticed. [See, e.g., Chapter 5 of Black 2011, which is titled “Love, Sex, Gambling, and Drinking.” See also Black 1981, p. 660 & p. 666, n.7; Black 1983, pp. 413-414; Cohen 1992, pp. 255-256.]

Perhaps it was these many contradictions and ambiguities of these grand tours that turned Smith against this aristocratic tradition. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, for example, in the subsection titled “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Education of Youth,” Smith delivers a scathing indictment of this institution:

"In England it becomes every day more and more the custom to send young people to travel in foreign countries immediately upon their leaving school, and without sending them to any university. Our young people, itis said, generally return home much improved by their travels. A young man who goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen, and returns home at one and twenty, returns three or four years older than he was when he went abroad; and at that age it is very difficult not to improve a good deal in three or four years. In the course of his travels he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or to business than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and control of his parents and relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts of his education might have had some tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted and confirmed, is almost necessarily either weakened or effaced. Nothing but the discredit into which the universities are allowing themselves to fall could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice as that of travelling at this early period of life. By sending his son abroad, a father delivers himself at least for some time, from so disagreeable an object as that of a son unemployed, neglected, and going to ruin before his eyes." [The Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition, pp. 773-773 (para. 36).]

Given these dangers and temptations, how did Smith or counteract them? Perhaps this was the main reason why Smith had chosen to begin Duke Henry’s grand tour in Toulouse–a small provincial town in the south of France where they ended up spending 18 months–instead of a more cosmopolitan metropolis like Paris or Rome. [See generally Alcouffe & Massot-Bordenave 2020.] So, what did Smith do to counteract these dangers and temptations, especially during the Paris phase of Duke Henry’s grand tour. Smith and his pupils now found themselves in Paris, the capital of luxury.

Horace Walpole’s journal for Saturday, March 22 reads: “With Lady [Louisa Kerr] and Lord George [Lennox], Mr and Mrs Carr, Duke of Buccleuch, Mr Scot, and Mr Nicholson to the Foire St-Germain, and supped afterwards at Lord George’s.”[1]

Did Walpole leave out Adam Smith? Or did Smith leave his pupils, Duke Henry [“Duke of Buccleuch”] and the duke’s younger brother Hew Campbell Scot [“Mr Scot”], under the care of Walpole to attend the Foire St-Germain? Either way, the fair of Saint-Germain (pictured below), along with the fairs of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Ovide, were the principal centers of popular entertainment in Paris throughout most of the eighteenth century.[2] These fairs were originally begun in the Middle Ages by monks to accommodate pilgrims who were congregating on certain feast days to honor relics; the monks then rented stalls to merchants to sell food and wares and eventually permitted entertainers to perform.[3] The Saint-Germain fair, however, was the oldest and most “fashionable” of the three major fairs.[4]

The Saint-Germain fair ran from February 3 until Palm Sunday.[5] In 1766, Palm Sunday fell on March 23, so Walpole and his party visited the fair on its next-to-last day. What did they see there? Historian Robert M. Isherwood (1981, p. 25, footnotes omitted) describes the Saint-Germain fair thus:

"It comprised two huge markets 130 steps long and 100 wide, covered by a magnificent timbered roof built in the sixteenth century at the instigation of the abbe of Saint-Germain. The composer Charles Favart called this roof 'one of the marvels of Paris.' Beneath it a series of nine unpaved streets, lined with boutiques, crisscrossed the fair. Established on the site of the old hotel of the kings of Navarre, the whole terrain was sunken, forming what one observer called 'a mere hole in the middle of the faubourg....' The ground, much lower than it is today, was in some places six to eight feet deeper than the surrounding land. Visitors complained about the narrow passageways that had to be crossed to gain access to the fair. The danger of being hit by carriages descending into what Louis-Sebastien Mercier called 'this narrow gorge' did not deter thousands of people from attending the fair every day."[6]

Moreover, the fairs attracted people from all walks of life and all social orders. According to Isherwood (1981, p. 27, footnotes omitted), for example:

"Typically, the fairs were clogged with soldiers, beggars, guardsmen, prostitutes, clerks, lackeys, students, shopkeepers, porters, and petits-maîtres. Everyone mingled in a jangling din of shouts, insults, and banter amid a cacaphony of whistles, tambourines, flutes, and street cries. 'It was a continual ebb and flow of people who pushed each other from one side to the other,' wrote Charles Sorel. 'It seemed that that day had been chosen by all the people of low rank in Paris to come there. . .  One heard those who suffered from the discomfort screaming from every direction, and in vain pregnant women imagined that they would be more spared than others; one could not have lightened their burden if one had wished to.' For Joachim Nemeitz, who wrote an instructional guide for visitors to Paris, everyone at Saint-Germain moved 'helter-skelter, masters with valets and lackeys, thieves with honest people. The most refined courtesans, the prettiest girls, the subtlest pickpockets are as if intertwined together. The whole fair teems with people from the beginning to the end.'"[7]

If Adam Smith did visit the Saint-Germain fair and rub shoulders against this mix of humanity, he would have seen a wide variety of foods and merchants. In the words of Isherwood (1981, pp. 25-26, footnotes omitted):

“A sumptuous array of food products was sold at Saint-Germain including pastry, spiced breads, jams, waffles, fruit, candy, wine, liqueur, tisane, beer, and eau de vie. The merchants who had stalls in the fair, some from Paris but many from Amiens, Rheims, Beauvais, and other communities, included wigmakers, engravers, linen sellers, cask makers, coopers, druggists, cabinetmakers, and locksmiths. The seventeenth-century writer Charles Sorel declared that the fair 'was a place of joy and even debauchery where one must certainly sell merchandise which would serve intemperance and vanity.'”[8]

Also, among the many popular forms of entertainment on display at these fairs were games of chance. According to Isherwood (1981, p. 26, footnote omitted), for example: “Although ordinances were issued repeatedly against it, gambling also provided merchants with a source of revenue. A few at Saint-Germain earned several hundred livres a day by running dice games, lotteries, spinning wheels, cards, and skittles in their boutiques.”[9] Moreover, since the boutiques with gambling were usually packed with people, “they were favorite haunts of pickpockets who were adept at cutting off the backs of men’s coats or women’s dresses.”[10]

Although Adam Smith does not mention any of the fairs of Paris by name in The Wealth of Nations, he does discuss the psychology of lotteries in Chapter 10 of Book 1 of his magnum opus, anticipating the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman by three centuries:

"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities is an ancient evil remarked by the philosophers and moralists of all ages. Their absurd presumption in their own good fortune has been less taken notice of. It is, however, if possible, still more universal. There is no man living who, when in tolerable health and spirits, has not some share of it. The chance of gain is by every man more or less overvalued and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued, and by scarce any man, who is in tolerable health and spirits, valued more than it is worth.

"That the chance of gain is naturally overvalued, we may learn from the universal success of lotteries. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery; or one in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss; because the undertaker could make nothing by it. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price which is paid by the original subscribers, and yet commonly sell in the market for twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty per cent advance. The vain hope of gaining some of the great prizes is the sole cause of this demand. The soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds; though they know that even that small sum is perhaps twenty or thirty per cent more than the chance is worth. In a lottery in which no prize exceeded twenty pounds, though in other respects it approached much nearer to a perfectly fair one than the common state lotteries, there would not be the same demand for tickets. In order to have a better chance for some of the great prizes, some people purchase several tickets, and others, small share in a still greater number. There is not, however, a more certain proposition in mathematics than that the more tickets you adventure upon, the more likely you are to be a loser. Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer you approach to this certainty."[11]

In other words, if Adam Smith did visit the Saint-Germain fair, he probably did not partake of any of the games of chance being offered there. Either way, Saturday, March 22 would have been the last day of the Saint-Germain fair, as the next day was Palm Sunday. How did Adam Smith spend his Sundays in Paris, at the altar of God at one of the many chapels of the metropolis or at the altar of reason at the salon of the Baron d’Holbach?

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed yesterday at a school in Texas; below are some of the victims (clockwise from top left): Irma Garcia, Xavier Lopez, Amerie Jo Garza, Eva Mireles, Uziyah Garcia, Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez.

Why aren’t the manufacturers, distributors, and sellers of firearms legally liable when their products are used to kill innocent children? Because a federal law called “The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” which is codified at 15 U.S. Code, §§ 7901–7903, and which should have never been enacted in the first place, protects gun manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. It’s time to repeal that law.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Adam Smith was in France when the infamous Stamp Act was approved in the summer of 1765 and later repealed in the spring of 1766. As it happens, Smith refers to the Stamp Act and devotes considerable space to the topic of stamp taxes in The Wealth of Nations, going as far as to acknowledge that stamp duties are one of the major sources of public revenue. In Chapter 3 of Book 5, of his magnum opus (“Of Public Debts”), for example, Smith writes: “The land-tax, the stamp-duties, and the different duties of customs and excise constitute the four principal branches of the British taxes.”[1]

The original Stamp Act, which had been enacted in 1765, was a formidable piece of tax legislation, 13,000 words in all, spread across 63 sections, each marked by a Roman numeral.[2] Nearly every piece of paper would henceforth require a tax stamp: real estate transactions, wills and other legal documents, newspapers, broadsides, almanacs, bills of sale, liquor licenses, even playing cards. The courts could not open without them nor would ships be allowed to sail. Ominously, the penalty for making counterfeit stamps was death “without benefit of clergy.” The Stamp Act, however, was enormously unpopular in Britain’s North American colonies.[3] And it would define the most fundamental issue of political economy of the era, one that would lead to the American Revolution of 1776: the role of consent in political affairs and the slogan “no taxation without representation.”[4]

Opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 was not just limited to the overseas colonies. Merchants and manufacturers in Britain also opposed the Stamp Act as matter of expedience, since trade was likely to decline due to the imposition of stamp duties on their exports to the colonies. For example, in Chapter 7 of Book 4 of The Wealth of Nations, in the subsection titled “Of the Advantages which Europe has derived from the Discovery of America, and from that of a Passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,” Smith writes:

The expectation of a rupture with the colonies, accordingly, has struck the people of Great Britain with more terror than they ever felt for a Spanish armada, or a French invasion. It was this terror, whether well or ill grounded, which rendered the repeal of the Stamp Act, among the merchants at least, a popular measure. In the total exclusion from the colony market, was it to last only for a few years, the greater part of our merchants used to fancy that they foresaw an entire stop to their trade; the greater part of our master manufacturers, the entire ruin of their business; and the greater part of our workmen, an end of their employment.[5]

In fact, a resolution to repeal the Stamp Act was introduced in the House of Commons on February 21, 1766, while Adam Smith was residing in Paris, and the repeal was eventually approved by a vote of 276 to 168.[6] At eleven o’clock on the morning of March 17, 1766, while Smith was in Paris, merchants in London approved a petition to King George III to accept Parliament’s vote repealing the Stamp Act and then boarded 50 coaches and traveled as a caravan to the House of Lords. The King gave his royal assent the next day, March 18, 1766, but the reprieve was short lived because Parliament enacted the Townshend Acts in 1767, which reiterated its right to tax the colonies. The Stamp Act was thus the beginning, not the end, of a new political and economic crisis.

For what it is worth, Smith himself recognizes this conundrum in Chapter 3 of Book 5, of The Wealth of Nations (“Of Public Debts”):

By extending the British system of taxation to all the different provinces of the empire inhabited by people of either British or European extraction, a much greater augmentation of revenue might be expected. This, however, could scarce, perhaps, be done, consistently with the principles of the British constitution, without admitting into the British Parliament … a fair and equal representation of all those different provinces, that of each province bearing the same proportion to the produce of its taxes as the representation of Great Britain might bear to the produce of the taxes levied upon Great Britain.[7]

The problem, according to Smith, was that the “private interest of many powerful individuals [and] the confirmed prejudices of great bodies of people seem, indeed, at present, to oppose to so great a change such obstacles as it may be very difficult, perhaps altogether impossible, to surmount.”[8] Nevertheless, be that as it may, Smith devotes a considerable part of Book 5 of The Wealth of Nations exploring “how far the British system of taxation might be applicable to all the different provinces of the empire, what revenue might be expected from it if so applied, and in what manner a general union of this kind might be likely to affect the happiness and prosperity of the different provinces comprehended within it.”[9] Although Smith will not “pretend[] to determine whether such a union be practicable or impracticable,”[10] for Smith “Such a speculation can at worst be regarded but as a new Utopia, less amusing certainly, but not more useless and chimerical than the old one.[11]

What other amusing speculations did Smith entertain during his sojourn in Paris?

Let’s pick up where we left off, with Horace Walpole’s journal entry for Thursday, March 20, which reads: “Mr Young, Mr Lyttelton, Duke of Buccleuch and Mr Smith came. To shops.”[1] What shops would they have visited? And where were these shops located? Also, who were “Mr Young” and “Mr Lyttelton”?

We have already mentioned Duke Henry, but who were Young and Lyttelton? Alas, there is just one reference to a “Mr. Young” in Walpole’s letters. In a letter from Walpole to “James Crawford, Esq.” dated March 6, 1766,[1] Walpole writes: “I think there is nothing else very new: Mr. Young puns and Dr Gem does not: Lorenzi blunders faster than one can repeat[;] Voltaire writes volumes faster than they can print, and I buy china faster than I can pay for it.”[2] The name “Mr Young,” however, appears nowhere else in Walpole’s journal or letters and is too common a name for me to further investigate.[3]

“Mr Lyttelton,” however, most likely refers to George Lyttelton (1709–1773), the 1st Baron Lyttelton, whose portrait is pictured below (left). Like Walpole, Lyttelton was a man of many talents and interests: a poet and prolific author,[4] a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1744), a Member of Parliament (MP) for Okehampton from 1735 to 1756,[5] and the chancellor of the Exchequer (1755–56).[6] (Lyttelton was also a patron of the arts and was a friend of Alexander Pope in the 1730s and of Henry Fielding in the 1750s. Fielding even dedicated his novel Tom Jones to Lyttelton.) Moreover, like Duke Henry, he was educated at Eton and had afterwards gone on a grand tour of Europe, visiting the continent with his tutor. It was during this time that he started publishing his early works in both poetry and prose.[7]

But what was Lyttelton doing in Paris? Perhaps he was there for the same reason Walpole was, to avoid politics. Although Lyttelton never again held office after 1757,[8] he had been invited to lead the treasury the previous year (1765), but he declined to join the new government.[9] Or perhaps Lyttelton’s presence in Paris was part of a secret campaign in defense of the Stamp Act–which had just been repealed in March of 1766–for there is evidence that he may have published a pamphlet in 1766 in support of the Stamp Act, “Protest against the bill to repeal the American stamp act, of last session,” the cover page of which is pictured below (right) and which was supposedly published at “Chez J.W. imprimeur, rue du Colombier, Fauxbourg St. Germain, à l’hotel de Saxe.”[10]

Regardless of what Lyttelton was up to in Paris at this time, it is intriguing to imagine Smith and Lyttelton meeting somewhere in the City of Lights, discussing the repeal of the Stamp Act, the most controversial piece of legislation of its time. As it happens, Smith refers to the Stamp Act and devotes considerable space to the topic of stamp taxes in The Wealth of Nations, going as far as to acknowledge that stamp duties are one of the major sources of public revenue. I shall review Adam Smith’s analysis of the original Stamp Act of 1765, the most controversial piece of legislation of its time, in my next post.

I will resume my “Smith in the City” series in the next day or two. In the meantime, check out the following description of “Paris in the 18th century” via Wikipedia (links in the original): “Paris in the 18th century was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with a population of about 600,000 people. The century saw the construction of Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the church of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon, and the founding of the Louvre Museum.” In addition, the following vignettes on that Wikipedia page also caught my attention:

Les bouillons de Paris

In about 1765 a new kind of eating establishment, called a “Bouillon”, was opened on rue des Poulies, near the Louvre, by a man named Boulanger. It had separate tables, a menu, and specialized in soups made with a base of meat and eggs, which were said to be “restaurants” or ways of restoring oneself. Dozens of bouillons soon appeared on Paris streets.” See Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris (1996), pp. 136-137.

Carriages for hire

“There was no public transportation in Paris in the 18th century; the only way for ordinary Parisians to move around the city was on foot, a difficult experience in the winding, crowded and narrow streets, especially in the rain or at night. The nobles and the wealthy traversed the city either on horseback or in chairs carried by servants. These chairs gradually were replaced by horse-drawn carriages, both private and for hire. By 1750, there were more than ten thousand carriages for hire in Paris, the first Paris taxis.” See Yvan Combeau, Histoire de Paris (2013), pp. 47-48.

Church bells

“In the 18th century, the time of day or night in Paris was largely announced by the church bells; in 1789 there were 66 churches, 92 chapels, 13 abbeys and 199 convents, all of which rang their bells for regular services and prayers; sometimes a little early, sometimes a little late. A clock had also been installed in a tower of the palace on the Île de la Cité by Charles V in about 1370, and it also sounded the hour. Wealthy and noble Parisians began to have pocket watches, and needed a way to accurately set the time, so sundials appeared around the city. The best known-sundial was in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal. In 1750, the Duke of Chartres had a cannon installed there which, following the sundial, was fired precisely at noon each day.” See Fierro (1996), p. 226.

A market in titles of nobility

Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the social hierarchy of Paris in the Le Tableau de Paris (1783): “There are in Paris eight distinct classes; the princes and great nobles (these are the least numerous); the nobles of the robe; the financiers; the traders and merchants; the artists; the craftsmen; the manual workers; the servants; and the bas peuple (lower class).” In reality, the nobility had greatly expanded under Louis XIV, who liberally awarded or sold titles to men who had served the royal government. By 1726, two-thirds of the members of the Estates-General, who largely lived in Paris, had acquired or were in the process of acquiring noble status, and wealthy merchants and financiers were often able to obtain noble status for their families by marrying daughters to members of the old nobility. See Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century (1987), p. 92.

Adam Smith may have had an opportunity to visit David Hume’s old stomping grounds, the luxurious Hôtel de Brancas on the rue de l’Université, on Sunday, March 16, for Horace Walpole’s journal entry for that day reads: “To Hôtel de Brancas, Duke of Buccleuch etc. there.”[1] Does the “etc.” in this entry include Adam Smith, who was Duke Henry’s tutor and chaperone at this time?

At the time, the Hôtel de Brancas (pictured below) was the British ambassador’s luxurious residence in Paris. It was located on the rue de l’Université, less than two kilometers from the Hôtel du Parc Royal where Adam Smith was lodging at the time,[2] and it was built in an Italian style.[3] Its tranquil gardens extended all the way up to the banks of the Seine, and even today, the gardens of this mansion extend a few hundred yards up to the Quai d’Orsay, a busy thoroughfare on the left bank of the Seine, opposite the Place de la Concorde.  (As an aside, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, the 8th Prince of Condé, acquired the Hôtel de Brancas in 1868, but it was later confiscated by the government during the Revolution.[4] Today, the Hôtel de Brancas is the official residence of the President of the National Assembly (France’s legislature) and is located on 128 rue de l’Université.[5])

Smith would have a good reason to visit the Hôtel de Brancas, for this building was not only the official residence of the British ambassador to France, the epi-center of the English-speaking world in Paris;[6] it was also the former residence of Smith’s intellectual mentor and closest friend, David Hume, who had an apartment and worked at Hôtel de Brancas from March 1764 to November 1765, when Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford, the British ambassador.[7] (Hume became Charge d’Affaires of the embassy, the de facto ambassador, when his superior, Lord Hertford, who was then the official ambassador, left Paris in August of 1765 to attend to some private matters. Hume was Charge d’Affaires until a new ambassador, the Duke of Richmond, arrived to replace Lord Hertford in November of 1765. It was at that time that Hume moved to the Hôtel du Parc Royal.) Ernest Mossner (1980, p. 490) describes Hume’s apartment at the Hôtel de Brancas thus:

During the first of several months in Paris, Lord Hertford had resided at the Hôtel de Grimberg in the rue St Dominique, but in March 1764, he took the Hôtel de Brancas … at the junction of the rue de l’Université and the rue de Bourbon. This large mansion near the Louvre–“quite a palace” remarked Lady Sarah Bunbury–cost him L500 annually. He had some thoughts of relinquishing after a year but retained throughout his embassy. In it there was a separate apartment for David Hume, certainly the most luxurious that man of letters had ever had.”[8]

As an aside, it’s a shame that Hume and Smith did not get to see each other in Paris in 1766, for Hume departed the City of Lights on January 4, 1766, while Smith did not arrive until February 15. Imagine what their private conversations in the gardens of the Hôtel de Brancas would have been like. (This counterfactual is perhaps the greatest of the unintended consequences of the Rousseau affair, of which I shall have more to say later in this series of blog posts.) 

In any case, we don’t know if Adam Smith accompanied Walpole and Duke Henry to the ambassador’s residence on this particular day (Sunday, March 16), or if he had an opportunity to visit Hume’s old apartment there, but he must have visited this place at some point during his residency in Paris. The British ambassador not only resided and conducted his official business here; he also hosted many dinners and receptions at his residence during his tenure as ambassador, and Walpole visited here many times during his sojourn in Paris.

In Chapter 1 of Book 5 of The Wealth of Nations, in the subsection titled “Of the Public Works and Institutions which are necessary for facilitating particular Branches of Commerce,” Smith describes the history of embassies and explains why ambassadors are necessary public expenses:

“Among other nations, whose vigorous government will suffer no strangers to possess any fortified place within their territory, it may be necessary to maintain some ambassador, minister, or counsel, who may both decide, according to their own customs, the differences arising among his own countrymen, and, in their disputes with the natives, may, by means of his public character, interfere with more authority, and afford them a more powerful protection, than they could expect from any private man. The interests of commerce have frequently made it necessary to maintain ministers in foreign countries where the purposes, either of war or alliance, would not have required any. The commerce of the Turkey Company first occasioned the establishment of an ordinary ambassador at Constantinople. The first English embassies to Russia arose altogether from commercial interests. The constant interference which those interests necessarily occasioned between the subjects of the different states of Europe, has probably introduced the custom of keeping, in all neighbouring countries, ambassadors or ministers constantly resident even in the time of peace. This custom, unknown to ancient times, seems not to be older than the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century; that is, than the time when commerce first began to extend itself to the greater part of the nations of Europe, and when they first began to attend to its interests.”[9]

In other words, embassies in foreign nations are a necessary public expense because they help promote commerce and trade among nations.[10] But what happens when a government enacts measures that restrict trade and commerce? This was not just a theoretical question; as I shall explain in my next post, it was a real-time issue that Smith himself would confront during his stay in Paris.

Note: This blog post should have appeared before my previous one, “Jacobites in Paris.” I am posting it here, out of order, for your edification.

Horace Walpole, still recuperating from a serious eye infection, mentions two more individuals by name in his journal entry for Sunday, March 9: “Ditto. Ditto. and Duke of Buccleuch and M. Schuwalof.”[1] As an aside, the first “Ditto” most likely alludes to Walpole’s journal entry for March 7 (“Cold in my eyes”), the day Walpole’s eye became infected, while the second “Ditto” most likely refers to the people who visited him on the previous day, March 8 (“Ditto. Mme Geoffrin, Mr Smith, Mme du Deffand, Lord and Lady George came”). In other words, quite an eclectic collection of individuals visited Walpole during his three-day convalescence: the leading ladies of the salons of Paris, a professor of moral philosophy, the Secretary of the British Embassy in Paris and his beloved wife, a Scottish duke, and a Russian count.

The “Duke of Buccleuch” refers to Smith’s pupil Duke Henry, but who is “M. Schuwalof”? The entry most likely refers to Count Ivan Ivanovitch Schuwalof (1727–1797), whose portrait is pictured below, a diplomat and man of letters from Russia. Although today he is mostly remembered for his love affair with Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna,[2] Count Schuwalof was a leading figure of the Russian Enlightenment. Among other things, he was Russia’s first Minister of Education, and he maintained correspondence with the leading philosophes of France, including Helvetius, d’Alembert, Diderot, and Voltaire.[3]

Did Count Schuwalof and Adam Smith meet during this time? If so, what did they discuss? For what it is worth, Book 5 of The Wealth of Nations, in the subsection titled “Taxes upon as Profit of particular Employments” contains the following digression on Russian poll taxes:

Taxes of so much a head upon the bondmen employed in cultivation seem anciently to have been common all over Europe. There subsists at present a tax of this kind in the empire of Russia. It is probably upon this account that poll-taxes of all kinds have often been represented as badges of slavery. Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty. It denotes that he is subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master. A poll-tax upon slaves is altogether different from a poll-tax upon freemen. The latter is paid by the persons upon whom it is imposed; the former by a different set of persons. The latter is either altogether arbitrary or altogether unequal, and in most cases is both the one and the other; the former, though in some respects unequal, different slaves being of different values, is in no respect arbitrary. Every master who knows the number of his own slaves knows exactly what he has to pay. Those different taxes, however, being called by the same name, have been considered as of the same nature.[4]

Who else did Adam Smith meet during his 1766 sojourn in Paris? We know with some degree of certainty that Smith also met one “Gordon”, the long-serving Principal of the venerable Scots College in Paris. (For more information about the Scots College in Paris–and Smith’s possible motive for visiting this seminary–see my previous post, “Jacobites in Paris.” I will resume my “Smith in the City” series with Walpole’s journal entry for Sunday, March 16: “Hume’s Garden.”)