prior probability

My next set of “Smith and the City” posts will follow Horace Walpole’s Paris journal to retrace some of Adam Smith’s footsteps during the first eight weeks of Smith’s residency in Paris, i.e. until Walpole’s departure on April 17, 1766.[1] (As I mentioned in my previous post, Walpole had arrived in the French capital on September 13, 1765,[2] several months before Smith’s arrival.) In summary, Adam Smith or his pupil Duke Henry are mentioned by name in Walpole’s travel journal no less than 20 times. The dates and substance of these journal entries are catalogued in chronological fashion in the table below:

As you can see from this table, Adam Smith and his pupil Duke Henry are mentioned with great regularity and frequency in Walpole’s journal–no less than 20 times–but there is a significant gap early on, a gap consisting of two weeks, between Feb. 15, 1766, when Walpole mentions Smith by name for the first time, and March 2, 1766, the second time in which Smith is mentioned in Walpole’s journal.

The first entry to mention Smith is dated Saturday, February 15, and it tells us that “Dr Smith came,” presumably to the the Parc-Royal, the hotel where Walpole was also residing, though it is unclear whether Smith accompanied Walpole to the “auction of prints” or to the whirlwind of social visits that Walpole made that same day. Either way, though, this entry provides a revealing glimpse and “who’s who” of the salons of ancien régime Paris.[3] But then, a period of two-weeks elapses before Smith is mentioned again in Walpole’s journal. What was Smith doing during this time? As we shall see, if Smith was in Paris in February, it’s very likely that he visited two Paris landmarks during this time, the Temple and Notre Dame Cathedral. I shall explain why in my next two posts …

One man who Adam Smith must have befriended and spent a lot of time with–at least during the first phase of his prolonged Paris residency from February to April 1766–was Horace Walpole (1717–1797). Why do I say this? Because Walpole meticulously kept a daily journal during his seven month sojourn in Paris,[1] the first of many visits Walpole would make to the City of Lights,[2] and the names of Adam Smith or his pupil Duke Henry appear over 20 times in Walpole’s private papers.

But, who was Horace Walpole, and is he a reliable source? Among other things, Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel, operated his own printing press at his Strawberry Hill villa, and was a member of the House of Commons for three decades (1741 to 1768). He was also the son of Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), the 1st Earl of Orford, who is regarded by most historians as the de facto first Prime Minister of Great Britain.[3] Horace Walpole was thus a man of many talents and interests–a prolific letter writer,[4] a best-selling author, and a popular politician–he is, quite possibly, one the most fascinating men of letters of his era. But at the time of Horace Walpole’s 1765/66 visit to Paris, which coincided with the first part of Smith’s stay in Paris (February to April, 1766), Walpole’s greatest claim to fame was his popular novel The Castle of Otranto, which was first published in 1764 and which is considered the first Gothic novel.[5]

Walpole was thus an important literary and cultural figure in his own right, and his Paris journal will help us retrace some of Adam Smith’s footsteps during the first eight weeks of Smith’s residency in Paris, i.e. until Walpole’s departure on April 17, 1766.[6] (Walpole had arrived in the French capital on September 13, 1765,[7] several months before Smith’s arrival.) I shall summarize the relevant parts of Walpole’s journal in my next post.

My previous three posts have described some of the features of the 18th-Century “Saint Germain” neighborhood of Paris, the Faubourg Saint Germain, the quarter where Smith stayed for most of 1766, but I forgot to mention one of this faubourg’s most famous attractions: the Café Procope.

To the point, the main reason why Adam Smith may have stayed in the Hotel du Parc-Royal in the Faubourg Saint Germain was its proximity to the Café Procope. The Procope, the oldest café of Paris in continuous operation,[1] was located on the Rue des Fosses Saint-Germain, not far from the Parc-Royal and the Rue du Colombier.[2] A Sicilian chef, Procopio Cutò, had opened a coffee house on this location in 1686, 80 years prior to Smith’s sojourn in Paris.[3] After the Comédie-Française opened its doors in 1689 across the street from his café,[4] Procopio’s establishment began to attract actors, writers, musicians, poets, philosophers, statesmen, scientists, dramatists, stage artists, playwrights, and literary critics.[5] Later, Cutò changed his name to the gallicized François Procope and renamed his business the Café Procope in 1702, the name by which it is still known today.[6]

Although I have no direct evidence that Adam Smith frequented the Procope, given its fame and proximity to the Parc-Royal, I imagine he paid a visit. Perhaps he even met the leading economistes of his day there. At the time of Adam Smith’s visit to Paris, the Café Procope was a hub of the artistic and literary community. The birthplace of the Encyclopédie, the compendium of knowledge co-edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, is said to have been conceived at Café Procope,[7] and throughout the 18th century, the Procope was the meeting place of the intellectual establishment. Not all patrons of the Procope drank forty cups of coffee a day like Voltaire, who mixed his with chocolate, but they all met at Café Procope, as did future revolutionaries like Robespierre, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.[8]

Alternative Title: The Street Lamps of the City of Lights

The Faubourg Saint-Germain, the quarter of Paris where Adam Smith resided for most of 1766, not only enjoyed a daily system of garbage collection (see my previous post), this neighborhood was also a well-lit one. In fact, Paris was nicknamed La Ville-Lumière (“The City of Lights”) because she was one of the first European cities to adopt comprehensive street lighting. An ordinance of Louis XIV in 1667 increased the number of lamps in the streets of the metropolis and ordered that they should be lit even in moonlight from November 1 until March 1.[1] Initially, the lamps were hung from ropes that stretched across the cobblestone streets and were contained in iron-framed glass boxes with tallow candles.[2] The cost of lighting the city eventually became a part of the police budget in 1704, and soon thereafter, the police of Paris installed lanterns on almost every main street.

At the time of Adam Smith’s stay in Paris in 1766, over 6,500 lanterns hung above the streets of the French capital.[3] In order that the entire city might be wholly illuminated within half an hour, each individual lamplighter had charge of no more than fifteen lanterns, and given this limitation on the work of a single lamplighter, it must have taken a corps consisting of over 400 men to light Paris in 1766.[4] The lighting of Paris, like her system of daily garbage collection, was thus a major logistical operation, one that also poses a fascinating problem of political economy, a theoretical question that Smith himself addresses in The Wealth of Nations: who should pay for these public works, the people of France as a whole or the people of Paris locally, who, after all, are the direct beneficiaries of these police services?

Specifically, in Chapter 1 of Book V of The Wealth of Nations, in the subsection titled “Of the Expense of Public Works and Public Institutions,” Smith poses the broader question of whether local public works–i.e. public goods whose benefits are confined to a local area–should be financed at the local or national level, and he uses the example of street lamps to make his point:

“Even those public works which are of such a nature that they cannot afford any revenue for maintaining themselves, but of which the conveniency is nearly confined to some particular place or district, are always better maintained by a local or provincial revenue, under the management of a local or provincial administration, than by the general revenue of the state, of which the executive power must always have the management. Were the streets of London to be lighted and paved at the expense of the treasury, is there any probability that they would be so well lighted and paved as they are at present, or even at so small an expense? The expense, besides, instead of being raised by a local tax upon the inhabitants of each particular street, parish, or district in London, would, in this case, be defrayed out of the general revenue of the state, and would consequently be raised by a tax upon all the inhabitants of the kingdom, of whom the greater part derive no sort of benefit from the lighting and paving of the streets of London.”

In the case of Paris, however, what Smith may not have been aware of was that the labor required to light the street lamps of the city was unpaid at the time. Although the cost of this pervasive Parisian infrastructure–candles, glass, iron–had been a part of the police budget since 1704, and was thus financed by the crown at the national level, the labor required to light the lamps was a public service that was exacted without remuneration.[5]

But in fairness to Smith, he was not in Paris to study her methods of garbage collection or lamp lighting. Instead, he was in the middle of Duke Henry’s “Grand Tour” and was thus responsible for his pupil’s moral formation and education during their travels. So, what was Smith doing in Paris during this time? What people did he spend time with, and what places did he visit? Stay tuned. These are the very questions I shall address in my remaining blog posts in this series.

Alternate Title: The Garbage Collectors of Paris

The collection of garbage was one of the many public works under the wide-ranging jurisdiction of the police of Paris. (In addition to public safety, the police of Paris at the time also oversaw all the public markets of the city, regulated the provision of grain, and operated the prisons, among many other things.[1] Beginning in 1704, the cost of removing rubbish from the city was paid out of funds allocated to the police, and by 1780, the total funds allocated for garbage collection amounted to 260,307 livres.[2])

The collection of garbage in Old Regime Paris was an impressive undertaking by any measure, especially for its time. Once a week early in the century, and daily by 1770, two-wheeled carts rolled through the streets of the French capital. In 1766, the year Smith lived in Paris, about 120 carts and 240 men were at work cleaning the City of Lights.[3] The men engaged in this work were mostly farmers (laboureurs) or small landowners who worked their own land near Paris, but the garbage collectors were not poor peasants, since they owned their own horses and carts and were paid approximately 2000 livres per year for their services.[4]

Each morning, the attendants manning these carts collected the refuse that residents had amassed in front of their homes.[5] One half hour before the carts arrived (between 8:00 and 9:00 A.M. in winter and 7:00 and 8:00 A.M. in summer), 20 employees of the police passed throughout each quarter sounding a small bell. The bell warned residents that they were to begin assembling waste and dirt in neat piles for the garbage collectors. These piles were then loaded by the two men who attended each cart–one working with a shovel, the other with a broom–and the rubbish was then transported directly to refuse dumps outside the city.[6]

(As an aside, these dumps were originally located outside the city gates and often grew into small hills. See Barles 2014, p. 202. In Paris, these mounds have been completely integrated into the urban landscape; the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes, for example, are on the remnants of a historical dumpsite that is still visible today. Ibid.)

Alas, I can find no reference to the essential function of garbage collection in The Wealth of Nations. Either Smith failed to take notice of the trash collectors of Paris, or he did not find this essential public work sufficiently noteworthy to comment on in his second magnum opus.[7] But what Smith could not have missed–indeed, what no visitor to the “City of Lights” at the time could have failed to observe and appreciate–was the lighting of Paris by night. (I will write about the street lamps of the French capital in my next post.)

Credit: Eugène Atget (circa 1899), via Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project)

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I mentioned in my previous “Smith in the City” post (see here) that Adam Smith’s principal residence in Paris in 1766, the Hotel du Parc Royal, was located in the historic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Originally, this faubourg or “suburb” was an agricultural area located beyond the old city walls of early medieval Paris. By the time of Adam Smith’s residency in Paris (1766), however, this quiet quarter, still far less populated and polluted than the other parts of this growing metropolis, was becoming one of the most exclusive and fashionable parts of the City of Lights.

Two great monuments marked the outer boundaries of this up-and-coming district. On one end was the Invalides, a grandiose hospital and retirement community for aged soldiers built in the 1670s, nine decades prior to Smith’s visit.[1] On the other, next to the oldest part of old city wall of Paris, the Wall of Philip Augustus, stood the thousand-year-old abbey complex of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the burial place of Saint Germanus and of King Childebert and other Merovingian kings and one of the oldest churches in Paris. Pictured delow is a fragment of the 1615 Merian map of Paris (available here), which shows the original abbey complex (bottom center) and old city wall (top left) as well as the Rue du Colombier (bottom center):

The name of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was founded by Childebert I during the Middle Ages (6th century), derives from Saint Germanus, the bishop of Paris during Childebert’s reign (511–558) and the fact that it was originally built on a meadow, prés in French.[2] The north side of the abbey complex faced the Rue du Colombier, which ran parallel to the River Seine and was where the Hôtel du Parc Royal was located. Under royal patronage, the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés became one of the richest in France and remained a center of intellectual life in the French Catholic church until it was disbanded during the Revolution. Today, most of the abbey complex is gone, but the original abbey church still stands as the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés.[3]

Between these two ends of Faubourg Saint-Germain were many hôtel particuliers, private gardens, the Café Procope, theatre houses, and other sights.[4] But as far as I am concerned, what must have struck Adam Smith the most about this district–and about the City of Lights overall–was the corps of garbage collectors and lamp lighters who performed their municipal tasks each day. Garbage was collected every morning, and street lamps were lit every evening. Given Smith’s keen sense of observation and attention to detail, how could he have not taken notice of the scale and efficiency of these quotidian public works?

I will describe the details of the daily garbage collection and lamp lighting operations of the police of Paris in my next two posts.

I will resume “Smith in the City” in my next post; in the meantime, here is a Coldplay song from 2008. The part of the song starting at 2’59” was my ringtone back when I had a Blackberry!

Before I resume my multi-part “Smith in the City” series (“Smith” being Adam Smith and the “City” being Paris, not London), I want to share the following quote from the 1936 paper “New Light on Adam Smith” by William Scott, a quote which serves as a perfect epigraph to my project: “The more we discover of his life, the more the fineness of his character stands out.”

I will resume my “Smith in the City” series on Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, to commemorate the 27th anniversary of World Book Day (23 April 2022), below is a listing, in no particular order, of some book reviews and book chapters that I have written over the years:

1. Review of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s book about Adam Smith, Our Great Purpose (forthcoming).
2. Review of Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert O. Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher (available here).
3. Review of Tyler Cowen’s Love Letter to Big Business (here).
4. Review of Randy Kozel’s Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent (here)
5. Review of Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, A Sheer Excess of Powers (here).
6. Review of Nate Oman’s The Dignity of Commerce (here).
7. Chapter for Economics of the Undead: “Buy or Bite?“
8. Chapter for Better Call Saul & Philosophy: “Breaking Bad Promises.”
9. Chapter for Blade Runner: memorias, vigilencia y el sujeto desechable: “El ajedrez en Blade Runner: lecciones de la Partida Inmortal” (in Spanish).

Among the best hotels or lodging houses in “Quartier S. Germain des Pres” listed in the 1770 edition of The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through France is the “Hotel du Parc Royal, from 24 to 450 livres per month.”[1] At the time, the best town houses in Paris had their own private water wells, and the best apartments in the city had their own bathtubs.[2] Alas, we don’t know much about Hôtel du Parc Royal,[3] Adam Smith’s lodgings during his nine-month residency in Paris (February to October 1766), but we do know the following:

First off, we know that both David Hume and Horace Walpole lodged there.[4] Hume relocated to the Parc Royal in November of 1765 and stayed there until his departure from Paris on January 4, 1766, while Walpole stayed at the Hôtel du Parc Royal from October 1765 until his departure from Paris in April 1766.[5] That such great men of letters as David Hume and Horace Walpole would stay at the Parc-Royal is some indication of this hotel’s quality.[6]

Secondly, we know that the Hôtel du Parc Royal was located on the Rue du Colombier, close to the original abbey complex of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Today, the Rue de Colombier is the Rue Jacob, a quiet street in the 6th arrondissement of modern-day Paris.[7] At the time of Smith’s stay, however, the Rue du Colombier and the Rue Jacob formed one long street. Writing in May of 1766, for example, the Reverend William Cole describes the Rue du Colombier thus: “This Rue du Colombier, & the Rue Jacob make one long Street from the Rue du Seine quite down to the River; & the Rue des Petits Augustins, where I lodged came into this long Street, near the Joining together of the Rue du Colombier & the Rue Jacob.”[8]

Third and most importantly, we know that the Hôtel du Parc Royal and Rue de Colombier were located in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, one of the most fashionable and aristocratic quarters of Paris at the time. I will say more about this beautiful neighborhood and how it must have appeared to Adam Smith in 1766 when I resume this series of blog posts on Monday, April 25. For now, however, below is a closeup of the Rue du Colombier from a 1739 map of Paris.