History

From the Sumptuary Laws to the Birth of Modern Consumption

The beginning of the modern age of consumption can be traced back to the eighteenth century when the social and material framework of the consumption processes changed. The overcoming of the ancient regime of consumption allowed for the birth of new consumption cultures. Sumptuary laws pursued two goals: an ethical concern that descended from a Christian conception according to which consumption had to be linked to social rank, and an economic philosophy that saw luxury as a cause of the impoverishment of nations, requiring the enforcement of strict social boundaries related to it. The controversy surrounding luxury in eighteenth-century Europe had strategic significance for the political debate because of the dangers of extending previously prerogative consumption by the aristocracy to wider social strata.

Thus, sumptuary laws provided a tool for disciplining consumption and therefore setting a symbolic social order. While the enforcement of these regulations was difficult with engendered resistances and protests, they were continuously reiterated in order to reassert the hierarchical structure within society and to eliminate symbolic challenges appearing from the lower classes (Hunt 1996).

The success of The Fable of the Bees (1704) by Bernard de Mandeville presents proof of the profound transformation that was taking place in the eighteenth century within the concepts of consumption. Mandeville maintained the complementarities of private vices and public virtues, reappraising the role of luxury, which became the cornerstone of individual satisfaction as well as the wealth of [Page 723]the nations. Thus, in eighteenth-century Europe, a wide intellectual debate led to a new appreciation of consumption as a factor in civilization endorsing individual desires to pursue a more comfortable life and aesthetic pleasantness. One supporter of luxury was Voltaire, while one of its detractors was Rousseau, who gave the Roman empire as a case in point for historical decline that was brought about by a degeneration of morals caused by luxury and by the pursuits of immediate pleasure. Inside the works found in the Encyclopédie, as well as within the Scottish Enlightenment, recognition of the economic importance of luxury was associated with the necessity to temper it with equity, moderation, and propriety. This definition of luxury was very different from the competitive luxury of court society, notes Norbert Elias, because it did not comply with the custom of climbing social hierarchy through conspicuous consumption but instead, according to Phillippe Perrot, helped to improve material life and comfort. This was the direction in which the nineteenth-century middle-class ethic of consumption developed, resulting in the growth of markets, the widespread acceptance of new consumptions, and the conservation of social distinctions that permitted luxury to become domesticated and associated social dangers to be restrained.

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