Collecting State Contents: Territory and Value in France c.1700–1850

Abstract

Around 1700, the French administration had few tools for understanding its domain. Expenses from constant war incited the regime to develop new representational means of conveying knowledge about state contents and extents across geographic distances, in order to assess available resources and productivity. This article argues that administrators formulated the state based on technologies for enumerating the land and subjects it comprised. Two documents exhibit this consolidation by collecting information: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s taxation proposal, which included a comprehensive census; and a series of physical models of towns, or plan-reliefs, which amalgamated skills of builders, engineers, geographers, geologists, surveyors, and craftspeople to create material visualizations of territorial possession. Both relied on recursive processes: diffusion to gather information, collation, then returning to the field. In combination, these two artifacts demonstrate the ways in which a still-inchoate state developed spatial instruments for government according to incipient theories of political economy.

Keywords:

• collecting
• surveying
• architectural models
• taxation
• territory
• political economy
• values

Notes

1. Joseph Konvitz, “The Nation-State, Paris and Cartography in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Historical Geography 16, no. 1 (1990): 7.

2. Jean Gottman, The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1973), 75; Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013). Robert Scafe, “The Measure of Greatness: War, Wealth, and Population in the Political Thought of the Marshall Vauban,” Stanford University Libraries Digital Stacks, 17 April 2004, https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:km127hr5322/scafe.pdf (accessed September 19, 2020); Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, La Correspondance de Vauban Relative au Canada, ed. Louise Dechêne (Quebec: Ministère des Affaires Culturelles, 1968).

3. Chandra Mukerji, “The Unintended State,” in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2010), 99.

4. Konvitz, “The Nation-State, Paris and Cartography in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France,” 7.

5. Ross Exo Adams, “Landscapes of Post-History,” in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, ed. Ed Wall and Tim Waterman (London: Routledge, 2017), 11.

6. Richard Cantillon, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General [2001, 1932], trans. Henry Higgs (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). Robert F. Hébert, “Richard Cantillon’s Early Contributions to Spatial Economics,” Economica 48, no. 189 (February 1981): 71–77; Anthony Brewer, “Cantillon and Mercantilism,” History of Political Economy 20, no. 3 (1988): 447–460; Mark Thornton, “Was Richard Cantillon a Mercantilist?” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 29, no. 4 (December 2007): 417–435.

7. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Projet d'une dixme royale (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, Rés. R-1556, 1707), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k105092d (accessed September 19, 2020). A Project for a Royal Tythe (London: John Matthews, 1708). Elden, The Birth of Territory, 31–37. On the plan-reliefs see Antoine de Roux, Nicolas Faucherre, and Guillaume Monsaingeon, Les Plans en Relief des Place du Roy (Paris: Adam Biro, 1989).

8. Richard Westfall, “The Background to the Mathematization of Nature,” in Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 328.

9. Matthew C. Hunter, “Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 62.

10. Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (April 1999): 374.

11. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick (Jai Press, 1986), vol. VI: 1–40.

12. Seventeen models were kept in Lille for administrative reasons. Isabelle Warmoes, Les Plans en Relief: Des Places Fortes du Nord dans les Collections du Palais des Beaux-Ats de Lille (Paris: Somogy, 2006).

13. Jean Dethier, “Model Cities,” The Architectural Review 187, no. 1119 (May 1990): 92.

14. Jean Gérard, Grandes éphémérides de l'Hôtel Impérial des Invalides (Paris: Henri Plon, 1862); Albert du Casse, Visite a l'Hôtel des Invalides (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863), 166–193.

15. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology [1967, 1984], ed. James Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1994), 175–185.

16. Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, “France: 6.2, Forest Maps” and “France: 6.3, Taxation 'Cadasters' in France before the Eighteenth Century,” The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 210–213.

17. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 12–13.

18. Chandra Mukerji, “The Great Forestry Survey of 1669–1671: The Use of Archives for Political Reform,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 2 (April 2007): esp. 230; 246; and Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20–22. On taxes, see Philip T. Hoffman, “Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: 1550–1730,” The Journal of Economic History 46, no. 1 (March 1986): 37–55.

19. Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1840: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 93–95.

20. Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” 6, 27.

21. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 130, 159–168. Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 9–13.

22. Jamel Ostwald, Vauban Under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007), 72, 82.

23. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1840, 92.

24. Ostwald, Vauban Under Siege, 70; and Henry Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 72–90.

25. David Buisseret, “Modeling Cities in Early Modern Europe,” in Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography, ed. Buisseret (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 129; Isabelle Warmoes, “Histoire de la Collection,” Le musée des Plans-Reliefs: Maquettes historiques de villes fortifiées (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 1997), 11–12, 17–18.

26. Cantillon, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, 62–66.

27. Hébert, “Richard Cantillon's Early Contributions to Spatial Economics.”

28. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 101.

29. This is a point of historiographical contention between Mukerji and Janis Langins. Compare Mukerji, Impossible Engineering, 213 and 32, 273, against Janis Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment. French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 48 as well as 41: 439, and 105: 443.

30. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontant, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 143–144. Scafe, “The Measure of Greatness.”

31. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 113.

32. Ibid., 48, 2. Martin Wolfe’s assessment of Vauban as an “anti-mercantilist” in “French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime,” The Journal of Economic History 26 (December 1966): 482.

33. “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them penetrable at one and the same time.” Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 183.

34. Cf. Jean-Pierre Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past & Present 140, no. 1 (August 1993): 85.

35. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 83.

36. Ibid., 105.

37. Mukerji, “The Unintended State,” 97–98.

38. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 71–72.

39. Ibid., 148.

40. Ibid., 85.

41. Warmoes, “Histoire de la Collection,” 19.

42. Musée des Plans-Reliefs. http://www.museedesplansreliefs.culture.fr. (accessed October 18, 2020).

43. George A. Rothrock, “The Musée des Plans-Reliefs,” French Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1969), 254.

44. Allain Manesson Mallet, Les Travaux du Mars, ou l'Art de la guerre, Tome Premier (Paris, Thierry, 1685), 173.

45. Manesson Mallet, Les Travaux du Mars, Tome Premier, 155–171, 50–71.

46. Hunter, “Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” 48–49.

47. Guido Beltramini, Andrea Palladio and the Architecture of Battle (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2009), and Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, eds, Palladio (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008), 342–355.

48. Manesson Mallet, Les Travaux du Mars, Tome Premier, 125–127.

49. Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, “6 Octobre 1695. — Vauban a Le Peletier. — De Brest.,” Sa famille et ses écrits: Ses oisivetés et sa correspondence: Analyses et extraits, Tome II, ed. Albert de Rochas d'Aiglun (Paris: Berger-Levrault C^ie, 1910), 440–441.

50. Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and, relatedly on tables, Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

51. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 96–110.

52. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 62, 17–18.

53. Vauban, Project for a Royal Tythe, 160. For segmentation of the population, see the preceding pages, 159–160.

54. “Verdun – Documents d’archives,” Musée des Plans Reliefs. http://www.museedesplansreliefs.culture.fr/collections-numerisees/_app/viualisation.php?id=408&fichier=APN03_20117500076A3A (accessed October 18, 2020).

55. de Roux, Faucherre, and Monsaingeon, Les Plans en Relief des Places du Roy, 157.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonah Rowen

Jonah Rowen is an architectural historian whose work focuses on the intersections between architectural technics and construction, economics, environments, materials and commodities, and labor. He received his Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Planning and Preservation, with a Certificate from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. There, he wrote a dissertation on building design and production, figured as technologies of risk management and security, in the context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean colonialism and exchanges. His research for that project was based on documents from archives in the Caribbean and the U.K. He holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University, and has taught at Rice University, the Parsons School of Design, the Cooper Union School of Architecture, Columbia University and Barnard College, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Among his publications are essays in Grey Room, Log, and Pidgin, and he was a founding editor of Project: A Journal for Architecture.