Published this summer, The Politics of Utopia is a fascinating retelling of the first banking and financial collapse in eighteenth-century France. This week, we’re sharing a short excerpt from the book’s introduction.

Since the end of the seventeenth century, utopians, theologians, travelers, economists, and what Daniel Defoe called projectors—individuals who promote projects or schemes that combine public benefit and private profit, meaning the English propagandists of a grand plan of the years 1710–11—had all pointed out the vice inherent in the existence of rentes (annuities) and rentiers (annuitants) and denounced competition, greed, and taxation as forms of civil war. The solutions they proposed constituted the basis of what the System—its architecture and its goals—would become. The latter was, thus, not an accident but rather the result of an intellectual dynamic that had been initiated twenty years before and that had little to do with John Law. By studying the archives dealing with North America, on the Académie des sciences and the metallurgical experiments of some of its scholars, and on the famous Enquête du régent (Survey of the regent), dedi­cated to mines and factories, it was obvious that the French monarchy had not waited for Law to launch scientific, colonial, and commercial programs that were then continued under the System. The same was true for Louisiana, which since the seventeenth century had represented much more than just a continent to be exploited. It had occupied the French and European imagina­tion around repressed desires (of abundance, adventure, sexuality) for a very long time, and this fantasy both nourished the System and was nourished by it in a kind of self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Law was not alone in building and disseminating the System under the Regency, far from it. For a better understanding of the subject, I started from the very many printed or handwritten documents that justified or promoted the experiment, whatever their origin and form (treaties, letters, newspapers, stories, maps, engravings, poems, songs), and I sought to discover the links and relationships that united their authors. Art collectors, men of letters, and philosophers of the clan of the “Moderns,” cartographers and ecclesiastics, all constituted several networks busy in Paris, Versailles, and Louisiana. The largely unpublished and scattered archives on the colonial trade and the Com­pagnie des Indes also played an important role in understanding how the System had been deployed as a major project for controlling and directing all the productive forces of the kingdom. To this end, I examined the trade expeditions, the naval bases, the slave trade, the organization of the price sys­tem, the settlers, and the mineral exploration and its discoveries. I took the liberation of desires stated by various promoters of the experiment seriously. In the same way, I studied the (al)chemical, theological, and fabulous refer­ences, not in a metaphoric way, as they have been so far, but for their very concrete roles in the proper functioning of the System (its use of metals and the logic of expenditure).

Concerning the anti-System literature and imagery, I concentrated on un­known or unpublished sources from three main origins: the trading sphere, frightened by the birth of a protodirigiste capitalism; the Jansenists, who took a stand against an experiment they considered to be sacrilegious; and song­writers and poets, who denounced a world of illusion and the shame felt by the subjects of the kingdom of France at the end of the year 1720. As for the posterity of the System, I first studied it in the vast intertextual network of the rococo fables published between 1720 and 1750 that referred to it, then in the debate over the termination of the Compagnie des Indes at the end of the 1760s, and, finally, under the French Revolution in the debate between the moderate and the radical republicans concerning private property and the demonetization of coins. In each of these cases, this book traces the echo throughout the century of the true ambition of the System. Could the free­dom of individuals, their desires, and their property be sacrificed in a great jubilee from which would be born a new society regulated by an all-powerful authority?

Arnaud Orain is an economist and historian who is directeur d’études at the Centre des Recherches Historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Andrew Brown is a prolific translator from French to English. He has translated works by Pierre Bourdieu, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jean-François Lyotard, among many others.

The Politics of Utopia is out now, available from our website, online retailers, and your local indie bookseller.