Framing French consumers into citizens : a comparative discourse analysis of debates on luxury and consumption in French parliament and the press in the Age of Revolution (1789-1848)
Authors:   , De Smet Charris 
Published: December 2024

This dissertation has reconstructed and comparatively investigated French parliamentary politics of luxury consumption in three revolutionary years, i.e. 1789, 1830 and 1848. Drawing the idea that consumption became depoliticized in this period into question, it has demonstrated that consumption was an important topic of discussion under different modern French political regimes. The close reading of the parliamentary debates has revealed that the contemporary development of consumerism in France was seen as inextricably tied to broader issues of citizenship, representation, political identity and national belonging between 1789 and 1848. Therefore, these topics constituted important political questions that warranted debate in the national legislative bodies on how to harness, encourage or remodel existing consumer behaviour and commodity culture for the sake of the wellbeing of the state and its citizens. Based upon this study’s computer-assisted discourse analysis of published parliamentary transcripts and selected press articles, three “consumption regimes” can be distinguished among the three case studies characterized by differing policy decisions, shifting hierarchies between public and private consumption, fluctuating notions of consumer citizenship and alternating interpretations of the nation’s history and the French Revolution’s heritage. In 1789, debates were, overall, characterized by a sense of civic democratic consumer morality, in 1830, the discussion revolved predominantly around notions of bourgeois consumer rationality, and in 1848, ideas related to republican consumer equality became much more present in parliamentary discourses. Far from constituting monolithic systems of thought, these discourses about consumption were just like early-nineteenth-century parliamentary life, fraught with conflict and tensions. Under all three regimes, counterhegemonic ideological elements could be observed within the parliamentary speeches, reflecting the unstable and polarized political realities created in the wake of revolutionary upheaval. Rather than being marginalized, the opposition’s arguments were often somehow accommodated within the political majority’s discourses: in 1789 monarchical supporters left their mark by steering the debate towards an attack on clerical luxury consumption. In 1830, the July monarchy’s liberal establishment integrated republican notions of simplicity, virtue and popular sovereignty into government discourses to underpin royal privileges. In 1848, even during the heydays of the Provisional Government, pressing concerns about economic crisis and the treat of capital drain which risked to jeopardize both the development of a democratic and social republic and France’s colonial expansion ultimately tampered with discourses of consumer austerity and wealth redistribution. Ultimately, these parliamentary conceptualizations of consumption and consumers shed light on the complex history of the pre-1850 genealogy of the consumer.