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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Sonenscher, Michael;
(2007)
French Economists and Bernese Agrarians: The Marquis de Mirabeau and the Economic Society of Berne
(/isis/citation/CBB000760679/)
Article
Odile-Bernez, Marie;
(2014)
Comfort, the Acceptable Face of Luxury: An Eighteenth-Century Cultural Etymology
(/isis/citation/CBB001421600/)
Thesis
Guilderson, Hugh L.;
(1994)
From the state of nature to the empire of reason: Civilisation in Buffon, Mirabeau, and Raynal
(/isis/citation/CBB001564736/)
Article
MacKenzie, Scott R.;
(2014)
Sexual Arithmetic: Appetite and Consumption in The Way of the World
(/isis/citation/CBB001201791/)
Thesis
Alexander Lee Arnold;
(2017)
Rethinking Economics in Modern France
(/isis/citation/CBB135548088/)
Article
Trevor Jackson;
(2020)
Between Independence and Impunity: The Theory of Proto-Central Banking After the Crisis of 1720
(/isis/citation/CBB536726846/)
Article
Charles, Loïc;
Théré, Christine;
(2011)
From Versailles to Paris: The Creative Communities of the Physiocratic Movement.
(/isis/citation/CBB001451779/)
Article
Paola Rudan;
(2016)
Society as a Code: Bentham and the Fabric of Order
(/isis/citation/CBB678087108/)
Article
Rowland Weston;
(2017)
Chivalry, Commerce, and Generosity: Godwin on Economic Equality
(/isis/citation/CBB395426089/)
Chapter
Vardi, Liana;
(2010)
Physiocratic Visions
(/isis/citation/CBB001023310/)
Article
Loïc Charles;
Christine Théré;
(2022)
Les femmes économistes: the place of women in the physiocratic community
(/isis/citation/CBB123459936/)
Article
Garritt Van Dyk;
(2021)
A Tale of Two Boycotts: Riot, Reform, and Sugar Consumption in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(/isis/citation/CBB574317716/)
Chapter
Spary, E. C.;
(2003)
“Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked”: Natural History, Natural Resources, and the Natural Economy in France
(/isis/citation/CBB000501260/)
Book
Faith Evelyn Beasley;
(2011)
Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers
(/isis/citation/CBB136489330/)
Chapter
Raus, Rachele;
(2012)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters in France: Between Ideological Turn and Women's Writing
(/isis/citation/CBB001202021/)
Book
Guedj, Denis;
(2001)
The Measure of the World: A Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB000102624/)
Book
Perovic, Sanja;
(2012)
The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB001451173/)
Thesis
Hartendorf-Wallach, Bregtje;
(2011)
“Le Spectacle de la Nature, or, Nature Display'd”: The Spectacularization of Nature in Eighteenth-Century France and England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567329/)
Article
Patrice Bret;
(2016)
The Letter, the Dictionary and the Laboratory: Translating Chemistry and Mineralogy in Eighteenth-Century France
(/isis/citation/CBB794185144/)
Book
Lise Dumasy-Queffélec;
Hélène Spengler;
(2014)
Médecine, sciences de la vie et littérature en France et en Europe de la révolution à nos jours
(/isis/citation/CBB263680135/)
Be the first to comment!