prior probability

Horace Walpole’s journal entry for Monday, February 17 (1766) provides a glimpse of the ancien regime; it reads: “At night to Prince of Conti’s public night, great concert, Jéliotte and Mlle Fel sung. 4 great tables at supper, served by his guards, pharaoh, biribis, whisk, and berlan.”[1] Who was this prince, and did either Smith or Duke Henry attend his lavish soiree on the 17th?

The Prince of Conti, Louis François de Bourbon (1717–1776), was one of the most affluent and well-connected noblemen of the metropolis, a kind of aristocratic Gatsby in the last years of the Old Regime. Ernest Campbell Mossner (1980, pp. 458-459) describes the Prince of Conti thus: “Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, was a remarkable man. A brave and skilful [sic] generalissimo of the French Army in Italy, he had won the battle of Coni in 1744 and retired from the Army three years later. He held the confidence of Louis XV in maintaining secret diplomatic missions throughout Europe until 1755, when he was ousted by the intrigues of Mme de Pompadour. Immediately he assumed the leadership of the opposition and earned the King’s appellation of ‘my cousin the advocate.’”[3] In his personal life, the Prince of Conti was a “handsome man” who “lived handsomely and lavishly,”[4] and “his reputation as a libertine was almost unapproaced; but he permitted himself only one principal mistress at a time.”[5]

According to Mossner, it was on Mondays that the Prince of Conti hosted sumptuous suppers for up to 50 to 100 people at his luxurious place of residence, a compound called the Temple, an old fortress dating back to the 13th century.[2] Located in the Marais district of the French metropolis, the Temple was one of the most opulent and palatial private compounds in all of Paris (see map below). In the words of Mossner again (1980, p. 459): “As Grand Prior of Malta, the Prince of Conti maintained as his Paris residence the Temple, situated north of the Seine in the eastern extremity of the old city. Within the fortified walls of the spacious enclosure, the original thirteenth-century square and turreted edifice of the Knights Templars was surrounded by more modern buildings. One of the smaller of these, facing north on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth and with a simple garden on the south, was assigned to [his mistress] Mme de Boufflers. An elegant and spacious town-house, elevated somewhat above the others, was reserved for the Prince himself.”[6]

Furthermore, it was at the Temple that the Prince of Conti “entertained, on a scale rivalling that of the Royal Palace, with theatre-parties, grand assemblies, and intimate soirees. For the Temple had its own theatre, its grand assembly room, and its small salon. All were decorated with white wainscoting, with facings and casings of pressed copper, and with high glass windows offering a vivid contrast to the austerity of the ancient fortress.”[7] The Prince of Conti also maintained a vast and celebrated art collection, housed in a special gallery at the Temple, which he had amassed during the last twenty years of his life. Among other works of art, his collection included the 1764 painting English Tea Served in the Salon des Glaces at the Palais du Temple by Michel Barthélemy Ollivier, showing the infant Mozart at the clavichord.[8]

In short, if Smith and Duke Henry had already arrived in Paris on Saturday, February 15, then this “public night” and “great concert” at the “Prince of Conti’s” was a social call that they would surely have not wanted to miss.

Either way, the Temple would later play an important role in the French Revolution, as the fortress in this Temple complex was converted into a prison during the French Revolution. [See, e.g., Curzon 1888.] In fact, the most prominent members of the French royal family were all jailed at the Temple during the Revolution, including King Louis XVI, who was imprisoned at the Temple from 13 August 13, 1792 until January 21, 1793, the day he was guillotined at the Place de la Révolution, and Marie Antoinette, who was imprisoned in the Temple’s tower from August 13, 1792 to 1 August 1, 1793.[9] Today, a garden known as the Square du Temple is located on the site of the old Temple complex in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.[10]

Did Adam Smith himself see what was coming, a world-changing revolution that would destroy the old order? In fairness to Smith, it is unlikely that anyone saw a revolution coming in 1766, but at the same time, how could the glaring contrast between the many unemployed or hungry workers of the poorer quarters of Paris and the lavish lifestyle of aristocrats like the Prince of Conti have escaped Smith’s notice?

Compared to the annual income of 50,000 livres that the Prince of Conti received from the Knights Templars,[11] an unskilled male worker in Paris at the time earned about twenty to thirty sous a day (there were twenty sous in a livre), while a skilled mason could earn fifty sous. For reference, in the 18th century the minimum rent for an attic room in Paris was thirty to forty livres a year, while rent for two rooms was a minimum of sixty livres, and a four-pound loaf of bread cost eight or nine sous.[12] At the time, most working-class Parisians were concentrated in the crowded maze of streets in the center of the city, the Île de la Cité,[13] just a few minutes from the Temple on foot. Many of these working-class Parisians toiled as tanners and dyers on the Left Bank of Paris, near the Bièvre River, and in thousands of small workshops and furniture shops in the eastern neighborhood of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.[14]

Whether or not Smith took notice of these disparities, thousands of unskilled men and women from the poorer regions of France would continue to flood these neighborhoods of Paris in the years before 1789. Moreover, it is this sharp contrast between the haves and have-nots, between the beggars and princes of Paris, that must have in some small way motivated Smith’s transformation from a moral philosopher to a political economist, from a mere theorist concerned with virtue to a pragmatist concerned with real world affairs.

In my previous post, we saw that the names of Adam Smith or his pupil Duke Henry appear in Horace Walpole’s Paris journal no less than 20 times, starting with Walpole’s entry for Feb. 15, 1766, but we also saw an initial two-week gap in Walpole’s journal in which neither Smith nor Duke Henry appears by name at all. So, what was Adam Smith doing in Paris during this period of time, from Feb. 15, 1766 (the first time we hear of Smith) to March 2, 1766 (the next time his name is mentioned). Among other things, it is possible that Adam Smith visited Notre Dame Cathedral during this time. By way of example, Horace Walpole’s journal entry for Wednesday, February 26 contains the following somber words (emphasis added): “To the English Benedictines, and to Notre Dame to see the catafalque for the Dauphin’s funeral oration.”[1]

Although Smith and the young Duke are not mentioned in this journal entry, it is hard to imagine they would miss such a significant and historic event, for the “Dauphin” refers to none other than Louis Ferdinand (1729–1765), the eldest and only surviving son of King Louis XV of France and Queen Marie Leszczyński and the heir apparent to the throne until his death on December 20, 1765, when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 36.[2] Also, as Walpole mentions, the Dauphin’s funeral oration was to take place at the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral. Constructed in the 12th and 13th centuries and located on the then-crowded Île de la Cité quarter of Paris, Notre Dame is still one of the most famous Gothic structures in the world and one of the most recognized symbols of the city of Paris and the nation of France.[3]

By this time (late February 1766), numerous eulogies had already been published in the Dauphin’s honor. One was by the Jesuit priest Anne Alexandre Charles Marie Lanfant.[4] Another was by a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Beaux Artes, Jean-Baptiste-Armand Cottereau.[5] But this particular funeral oration was to take place at Notre Dame, and it was to be delivered by Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse and a prominent figure of Old Regime France. Originally ordained in 1752, Brienne held a wide variety of prominent and lucrative religious titles and would later become Louis XVI’s finance minister (1787-88). In 1766, he was still the archbishop of Toulouse, the provincial town in the south of France where Smith had resided for most of 1764 and 1765.

Walpole mentions that he visited the Dauphin’s catafalque at Notre Dame Cathedral on February 26, but Brienne did not deliver his funeral oration until March 1, 1766. Although I have no evidence to confirm whether Adam Smith or Duke Henry attended the March 1 funeral oration, it is unlikely they would have missed such an important event as the funeral oration for Louis-Ferdinand, who was the next-in-line to the French throne.[6]

If Smith did attend Brienne’s funeral oration on March 1st, or if he subsequently read a published version of Brienne’s eulogy in honor of the Dauphin, he would have also had an opportunity compare the communal impact of the heir apparent’s death, “a punishment sent from Heaven and a public calamity,”[8] with the private lamentations of the Dauphin’s mother: “Her gaze was fixed on [her son’s] image … but soon the awful truth opened a wound in her heart, the lifeless image fell from her hands, leaving her sobbing and in tears.”[9]

Was Adam Smith, whose literary reputation at the time was still based on his 1759 magnum opus The Theory of Moral Sentiments, moved by these words? Either way, what else could have motivated or contributed to Smith’s transformation from a moral philosopher to a political economist? Brienne’s funeral oration also contains an allusion to the age of Enlightenment, to “the torch of sciences [that] today casts its vivid and bursting light.”[7] This reference may provide a clue to Smith’s intellectual transformation, something I shall consider further in my next post.

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.”