In 1789, the count of Mirabeau had already acquired fame as a man of letters and the author of pamphlets, essays and erotic novels. Historians rarely study his licentious writings, however; yet they deserve attention, especially if recontextualized in the polemics raging in France in the 1770s. Such is the case with Ma Conversion (1783), in which Mirabeau debated free trade under the guise of a sexual tale. The title refers to a ‘conversion’ which has little to do with religion: it represented a conversion to the laws of the market. As a provider of paid sexual services, Mirabeau’s protagonist embodied the free circulation of merchandise. Mirabeau thus expressed his views on the most important economical dispute of his time. His fondness for paradoxes was characteristic of a tradition illustrated by Mandeville. Experience and experiments, however, were at the core of his enquiry into economic theories, which he thought were inseparable from their social and moral consequences. Ma Conversion appears, in that light, as an experiment carried out in fiction in which Mirabeau set the scene for a rejection of the free trade model of economic society.
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