Chapter Sixteen
Textile Furies – the French state and the retail and consumption of Asian cottons 1686-1759
16
[i]
Felicia Gottmann
A raid is about to take place in the southern French city of Aix. After a tip-off about a secret stash at her home, officers arrive at the house of a woman known simply La Vigne, and demand to search her premises. They know that she is a dealer and has most of her supplies stored in a system of underground cellars that connect several houses. And yet, before they can seize any of the illegal goods, she manages to throw all of the sacs currently at her home out of the window into the property of a neighbouring upper-class official, for whom the officers of course have no warrant. They have failed yet again and have to leave empty handed.[ii]
A twenty-first century drugs raid? By no means: a 1730s attempt to stop the sale of Asian fabrics in France. The textiles in question, toiles peintes and indiennes, ‘Indians’, were printed and/or painted Asian cottons, which had first arrived in France from India and the Levant in the Sixteenth Century and had become hugely fashionable by the mid Seventeenth Century. Together with similarly popular white cottons goods such as fine muslins, they were the most important import of the French East India Company both in quantitative and in value terms.[iii] Imitations were soon produced in Europe, including in France itself, and, together with printed cottons from the Levant imported via Marseille, their striking colours and motifs, as well as the broad variety of qualities and prices, ensured that they met with ready demand right across the social spectrum. They ranged from fine hand-painted fabrics used for furnishing or clothing (Figs 5.5.1 and 5.5.4) respectively, to more affordable painted and dyed kerchiefs with sprigged floral patterns, particularly popular in France (Fig. 5.5.2), to very cheap block printed rough cottons worn by the working classes of the Mediterranean ports. Their success was such that the state feared for its own textile industries, its world-famous Lyonnais silks and also its woollen and linen sectors. Legislation was passed first prohibiting the production, importation, and sale of any printed or painted textiles in 1686, including painted silks be they of European or of Chinese origin (Fig. 5.5.3). Within a few years of its passing, this legislation came to extend also to the wearing and use of such textiles.[iv]
The implementation of this legislation was largely the task of the commis des fermes, tax and customs officials, whose job it was to stop any smuggling, production, selling, and wearing of such fabrics, to seize them, and to draw up official reports which could then be used in the legal proceedings against the individuals involved. Retailing and wearing was one of the aspects the state particularly encouraged them to clamp down upon, and it is therefore also one of the best opportunities for a survey of the difficulties the French administration faced in trying to enforce the ban on these textiles. This chapter thus has a dual purpose: to investigate how the retail of such goods functioned in practical terms, and to analyse the challenges that these goods from the East posed for the French state.
Selling in shops, or: exploiting legal loopholes
A wide variety of shops catered to the whole variety of fabrics and customers. In documented cases from 1693 and 1697, tax officials caught several marchands merciers, who, selling only finished wares, usually exotic and luxury goods, often catered to a more distinguished clientele.[v] Serving the most noble of all customers—and hence probably selling the authentic Indian painted fabrics, like the skirt in Figure 15.1—was a marchand mercier whose stash of goods was discovered in 1705. He kept a shop in Paris, but was also reputed to have another one in Versailles and was doing great business very much in the open when the royal court was in residence at Fontainebleau.[vi]
At the other end of the shop-keeping spectrum were the fripiers, the guild of remakers and resellers of second-hand clothing. In 1697, they had already been subject to a specific order from the King, having continued to sell printed and painted textiles by trying to argue that, since they were not new, they would not fall under the ban.[vii] They continued to sell for quite a while, however, and were subject to a new order in 1710. [viii] Disregard of that law seemed endemic, however, as the Intendant of Brittany imposed weekly searches of all fripiers’ premises in Nantes two years later.[ix]
The example of the 1697 order concerning the fripiers is typical of a wider phenomenon: canny shopkeepers tried to find all possible loopholes in the legislation which would allow them to circumvent the ban. Thus, in a ruling of March 1693, the state council was forced to note that several merchants and retailers had continued to produce printed fabrics which they sold after having turned them into finished garments, soft furnishings, or upholstery, claiming that this was perfectly legal, since the legislation had not specifically mentioned those finished items.[x] Similarly, several individuals continued to print on hemp and linens claiming that this was legal since the legislation had not specifically mentioned printing on new linens—or, in exactly the opposite case, on old ones.[xi]
This was not something the state could ignore, for the holdings of those who continued to sell illegally in the early years could be substantial. The goods found and seized on the premises of a merchant by the name of Bourrier in 1697 comprised 329 robes de chambre or banyans of fabrics printed and painted in Paris, five more of fabrics painted in India, 40 sheets of calicos printed in Paris and four pieces and 70 coupons of similar fabrics.[xii]
Though it ought to be said that to a certain extent shopkeepers were indeed faced with a very ambiguous legal situation during the early period of the prohibition, when lobbying for total prohibition by the manufacturers was often overruled by the need of the French East India Company—another important state concern—to sell its goods. Thus, when a ruling was finally passed on 24 August 1706 ordering that all sales of Asian cottons and other printed fabrics cease immediately, and that all those remaining be brought forward to be sent for sale abroad, Parisian merchants complained bitterly in a petition to the King. The merchants in question had after all, they claimed, only conducted legal trade in goods officially and legally sold by the French East India Company, which had previously been specifically encouraged by the King, and permitted by several rulings which they cited.[xiii] However, all in all the official line was unambiguous, and these were simply post-facto excuses: the problem was not so much unclear legislation as a lack of enforcement. The sellers counted on not being caught, and came up with apparent loopholes if they were caught.
Nevertheless, enforcement seems to have become more successful: there is less evidence of continued selling of Asian cottons and their imitations in shops as time went on. Instances of seizures peter out over the 1710s. This does not, however, imply that overall sales of such goods decreased. Indeed, judging by the constantly repeated legislation and the many condemnations of individuals wearing Asian-style printed fabrics from the 1720s onwards, the opposite seems to have been the case. Instead, it is more likely that the sale, and perhaps more importantly, the storage, of such goods simply no longer took place in shops and moved underground to include selling methods which were more difficult to police.
Alternative retail methods had always co-existed with shops—Laurence Fontaine has amply demonstrated the importance of pedlars, who ranged from suppliers of luxury goods to itinerant semi-paupers.[xiv] Whether they also kept an actual shop or not, many of those retailing illegal fabrics did so from secure hiding places where such commerce was often tolerated, and sometimes conducted very publicly. The very privileged, moreover, could simply use their connections to avoid the retail stage altogether. Such alternative circuits were much more of a challenge for the state to control.
Alternative retail methods and alternatives to retail
For some individuals, it was possible to avoid the retail sector altogether. Amongst these counted high-ranking nobles, who could place orders directly with company officials or foreign merchants. The remaining Company archives still meticulously list the packets, parcels, and bales of goods sent on from the French East India Company’s warehouses in Lorient to high-ranking individuals of the French court and aristocracy, including the Controller General Machault, the duc d'Orléans, and Madame de Pompadour.[xv]
Should such exalted personages order any illicit goods, via the Company or from third countries, they would be able to provide dispensations for transport to their abodes or simply rely on the fact that nobody would stop them. The tactic seemed successful: when, in October 1709, the authorities stopped the muleteer of the Marquis d’Hautford and found several chintzes, the local receveur des traites decided to confiscate them. His superior in Valenciennes discovered that the fabrics had been ordered from Flanders by Madame la maréchale de Villars, but that she, not having found them to her liking, was now sending them back. The superior quickly released the fabrics, albeit ensuring that they did indeed make their way abroad. He informed the Controller General of his actions. He was clearly right: one did not want to upset the aristocracy, otherwise one might find oneself rather quickly dismissed, as did the receveur who had seized the goods in the first place.[xvi]
Though not able to face the authorities with as much assurance, others were also able to receive Asian cottons directly from abroad. These were people who had direct connections with Asia, usually through the French East India Company. At least some of the items brought back by sailors in the pacotilles studied by Eugénie Margoline-Plot were not destined for retail, which explains why Brittany, home to the vast majority of the seafaring company personnel, was so saturated with Indian cottons.[xvii]
Even ordinary Frenchmen and women could get hold of such fabrics or their imitations without connections to the Company or entering a single shop. It seems that in the later period of the prohibition, the selling of such goods moved away from retail premises and relied more on secret stashes, from which the sellers then took and carried to potential customers. The Provence is a particularly rich source of evidence which shows that these sellers seem to have spanned a fairly wide social range, though certainly not catering to the very highest echelons of society we encountered earlier in this chapter. At the lower end, we find a poverty stricken Axoise, Mademoiselle Daupiné, who went to her potential customers’ homes wearing the forbidden fabrics under her own skirts, which, as the authorities pointed out, gave her a ‘circumference which has long since served well to make her quite identifiable’.[xviii] More respectable was a merchant and pedlar from Arles who had chintz fabrics made into garments, mainly aprons, which he then sold in the surrounding countryside. In his possession were found eight pieces of indiennes and ten aprons, one of which was not yet finished.[xix] The numerous other female sellers in Aix catered to a very varied clientele. Some of them were in league with local dignitaries and their success was a thorn in the side of the central authorities.
Thanks to numerous spies and informants, the authorities were well aware of these activities and very frustrated by them. A memorandum of September 1739 lists, together with the poor Mlle Daupiné, six other women who were known to sell these fabrics.[xx] Some, especially the poorer sort such as Mlle Daupiné, sold on somebody else’s behalf, but many seemed very successful on their own. Their success largely depended on their ability to hide their stashes even more than their activities. One lady was known to sell only at night, but most were not so timid. For even when they were found guilty and charged, the effect was nil. The memorandum lists two women who had already been found guilty and even exiled in the past only to return and continue straight where they left off before their exile. One of these is well-known to us: La Vigne had already been named as a repeat offender two and a half years previously, when, together with two other particularly persistent retailers, two women called Jeanneton and Seguine, she was known by the central authorities in Paris to be amongst the most notorious sellers of forbidden textiles in Aix.[xxi]
La Vigne was not the only one who was very creative in concealing her stashes of illegal fabrics. The sellers in question knew just where to hide their wares, namely in the houses of either the nobility or in religious institutions, which would not be searched as a matter of routine. Thus, the other former exiled vendor stored her goods with two different dignitaries, whilst another was suspected of hiding hers at the local hospital. Yet another had hidden hers in a different noble household in Aix with the help of the house’s servants, but had to abandon it when the gentleman in question, a judge on the local Parlement, put his foot down. In most cases, however, there seems to have been active co-operation between the women and local office holders, usually minor nobles and members of the province’s legal institutions. And tax officials were well aware of the fact. As one of them complained to de la Tour, the intendant of the region:
You know, Monsieur, that in the whole of the province most women only wear chintzes; which is not at all surprising, for those who sell them, and who smuggle them in from Marseille, are assured asylum in the houses of the people of quality.[xxii]