Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

This article explores the democratizing effects of early capitalist development on cultural assumptions in eighteenth-century France. It argues that an expanding fashion industry and new forms of commercialized leisure transformed the nature of the Parisian promenade over the course of the century. Especially on the newly popular boulevards, people of the most diverse classes intermingled anonymously under a tacit suspension of standard status protocols. This expanding leisure realm provided a limited space of de facto civic equality, a kind of existential objective correlative of the notions of abstract social and political equality being developed in the same years by the philosophes. The article argues that the new promenade practices were one example of the abstracting tendency of eighteenth-century commercial capitalist development in France, a tendency that made increasingly thinkable the abstract civic equality embraced in the early years of the French Revolution.

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