Treatments of Spartan Land Tenure in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France: From François Fénelon to Fustel de Coulanges (original) (raw)

2012, Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History, and Culture, S. Hodkinson and I. Macgregor Morris (eds.)

The goals of this essay are to trace why and how treatments of Spartan land tenure in French sources evolved over the course of the period in question and to show that they responded to contemporary political concerns and typically present convenient caricatures rather than careful analyses of historical evidence. I begin by arguing that in the first half of the eighteenth century a number of inter-related factors helped give Sparta in general, and the system of land tenure in Sparta in particular, prominent places in French thought. The erosion of the controls imposed by French monarchs, evident from the publication of Francois Fenelon's "Telemaque" in 1699, made possible overt discussion of political and economic reform. The decline in the authority of the Catholic Church that came with the Enlightenment and the concomitant replacement of Biblical models with material and precedents from classical antiquity, along with the insertion of Sparta into a long-standing debate about the merits and dangers of luxury, helped produce a general interest in Sparta. Land seizures that were occurring as part of colonialism stimulated theoretical work on the origin and justification of private property. The arrival in France of what has been called classical republicanism generated interest in the highly specific subject of the system of land tenure in Sparta, and Sparta became an example of a polity in which republican government was underpinned by an egalitarian distribution of private property and in which austerity reigned supreme. Montesquieu and Rousseau played particularly significant roles in focusing attention on the Spartan property regime. The next part of the paper centers on the second half of the eighteenth century, when an alternative view of land tenure in Sparta- that land was communally held - enjoyed considerable popularity. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably was the first to elaborate that belief, which was vociferously rejected by many of his contemporaries, such as Jean-Francois Vauvilliers. Even the most enthusiastic Laconophiles, however, were at that time not inclined to remake France in Sparta's image. The gap between ancient republic and modern monarchy appeared unbridgeable, and discussions of Spartan land tenure had a rather abstract quality. The third section examines a major shift that took place with the French Revolution, which brought republican government to France and made radical societal change seem feasible. Ancient republics no longer felt nearly as distant, and it became possible to contemplate the imposition of a communitarian property regime. During the Revolution Francois-Noel (Gracchus) Babeuf boldly proposed putting an end to private ownership of land and pointed to Sparta as an exemplar. The shift brought about by the French Revolution was subsequently reinforced by the emergence of socialism as a major political force. In the fourth section of the paper I seek to show that nineteenth-century French discussions of Spartan land tenure had a much more serious air than in previous centuries. Revolutionaries and socialists were eager to portray Sparta as a successful polity in which land was communally owned and to present Sparta as a precedent and model. Other, more conservative thinkers strongly opposed this characterization and use of Sparta. Finally, I argue that the politicization of discussions of Spartan land tenure extended into what was ostensibly purely scholarly work. This is apparent in the series of exchanges that took place in the years 1864-1889 between Fustel de Coulanges, one of the most influential ancient historians of the nineteenth century, and the Belgian economist and socialiast Emile de Laveleye. Both men wrote repeatedly on the question of land tenure Sparta; Coulanges composed a substantial treatise on that specific subject. Despite his protestations of political innocence, Coulanges consistently went out of his way to attack the socialists' conception of Sparta; and both Coulanges and Laveleye produced notably partial treatments of Sparta's property regime. After the end of the nineteenth century, Spartan land tenure rapidly became a largely academic matter. Marx and Engels evinced little interest in Sparta, and the rise of Marxism as the dominant form of European socialism meant that the question of Sparta's property regime no longer resonated with contemporary political concerns.