How a “Collective Madness” in 18th Century France Led to Financial Ruin and a Scheme to Lock Up Women and Ship Them Into Exile

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In Paris, the year 1719 was characterized by what a prominent aristocrat who lived through it all described as “delirium,” sheer “madness,” a veritable carnival of money and speculation. In an attempt to indicate how widespread that “delirium” became, Voltaire, who experienced the collective madness firsthand, called it “a contagious disease, an epidemic.” As the “contagious disease” of 1719 spread like wildfire through French society, Parisians went mad for money and windfall profits. And because this sickness was founded on France’s colonial ambitions, money madness sealed the fate of the women who were deemed “fit for the islands.”

The individual who engineered this money madness, Scotsman John Law, was many things: a speculator, a gambler, a charlatan to some, a visionary theoretician of money and finance to others. He lived a life as flamboyant as his theories. In London, Law was convicted of murder after killing his opponent in a duel. He escaped from prison, fled England, and, adopting a series of aliases, flitted through Europe, bouncing from capital to capital, trying to launch various financial schemes, and seeking in particular a prince or a government willing to experiment with the introduction of paper currency and with the use of stock as what Law called “a new type of money, perhaps better than gold and silver.” Law had long cherished the dream of using the relatively conservative French economy as a proving ground for his most revolutionary theories, but Louis XIV and his ministers had repeatedly rejected his proposals. Then, after the Sun King’s death in 1715, Law at last began amassing influence in France, as it became openly acknowledged that recent wars had saddled the country with a catastrophic public debt, estimated at 750 million livres. (Debt and financial transactions were calculated in a money of account for which there was no equivalent coin: the livre tournois, called simply the livre. Livre means “pound”; to avoid confusion with the pound sterling, I’ll use livre.) In an attempt to eliminate that debt, over the course of the next four years Law was given free rein to transform every aspect of French economic life.

The Regent Philippe d’Orléans believed in Law’s ideas for reducing the national debt and encouraged his financial experiments. On May 20, 1716, Law was granted permission to establish France’s first banking institution, the privately owned Banque Générale or General Bank. On April 10, 1717, its banknotes began to be accepted as currency.

The individual who engineered this money madness, Scotsman John Law, was many things: a speculator, a gambler, a charlatan to some, a visionary theoretician of money and finance to others…

In August 1717, the monopoly on commerce with France’s largest overseas colony, Louisiana, was granted to a new trading company also governed by Law, the Compagnie d’Occident or Company of the West. Law vowed to make France for the first time a major power in maritime commerce and the equal of its English and Dutch rivals. He pledged that trade with Louisiana would save the country from looming financial disaster.

On December 4, 1718, at Law’s request the General Bank was nationalized and renamed Banque Royale, the Royal Bank. Now a central bank overtly linked to the French monarchy, the Royal Bank was also controlled by John Law. Ten days later, the Company of the West absorbed the Senegal Company, which had enjoyed a monopoly over the slave trade between West Africa and the French West Indies. The following January 10, the Company of the West continued its expansion by incorporating the Ferme du Tabac or Tobacco Farm, the entity that regulated the sale of tobacco in France. Both these mergers were crucial to Law’s dream of transforming Louisiana’s status as a colony by introducing a new commodity—tobacco—and the slave labor he considered essential for making tobacco profitable.

On March 27, 1719, at the inaugural meeting of the directors of the Company of the West, Law explained that these recent takeovers would assure the success of his grand design for rebuilding the French economy. In 1719, France imported well over six million pounds of tobacco annually from English colonies near the Chesapeake Bay at a cost of roughly 2.5 million livres. Law pledged that Louisiana tobacco would be of superior quality and fetch a higher price; the directors were guaranteed a million livres a month in profits. The sum Law promised was colossal, fully worthy of his grandiosity. At the very moment when he dangled the possibility of 12 million a year in earnings, Louisiana was being run on the cheap. The colony’s chief financial officer had been pleading (until then unsuccessfully) for a meager 14,861 livres per annum to clothe all the military personnel stationed there—and for 2,550 livres, the paltry sum necessary to provide salt pork for the colony. During the more than dozen years of its stewardship over Louisiana, the Indies Company spent a total of only 20 million livres—and the sum covered everything from shipbuilding to salaries, from supplies for the colony’s inhabitants to ammunition for its soldiers.

Before Law’s tenure, French authorities had refused to develop slavery on the Gulf Coast and in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In early 1719, there were at most a dozen enslaved Africans in the entire expanse of this vast French territory. When Law made tobacco central to his vision for the colony, realizing that enslaved Africans had become an essential part of the labor force in the Chesapeake Bay, he promised to send three thousand enslaved Africans to Louisiana. Law then used his new powers to redirect the French slave trade, and already on June 6, 1719, the first slave ships arrived in Louisiana. This one decision made on John Law’s authority had momentous consequences: it ultimately rewrote the destiny of this country’s second coast.

Law’s pitch to his principal financial backers focused on tobacco. To rope in small investors, he devised a very different marketing strategy: using newspapers to promote the territory as a new land of milk and honey. Because Law counted on the irresistible attraction for these shareholders of what he termed “the craving for profits,” he consistently stressed above all the colony’s potential for quick returns on every investment. Many prominent European papers were blatantly pro-Law, and none more so than the most widely read French periodical, the Parisian monthly Le Nouveau Mercure Galant. The issue for March 1719 featured a letter from a Frenchman newly arrived in Louisiana and sending news home for the first time. The account described the colony as “an enchanted land, where every seed one sows multiplies a hundredfold,” “a place laden with gold and silver mines.” In July, the Mercure announced the discovery of gold mines in the colony. Gazettes also reported that a sample of Louisiana silver had been tested at the Paris Mint and found to have silver content even higher than that of the fabled Potosí lode in Bolivia that had been a foundation of Spanish colonial wealth.

In December 1717, when Law’s takeover of the French economy began, Louisiana’s population, military personnel included, was likely only 550. Making Louisiana the rival of England’s tobacco-rich settlements would require many new colonists, as John Law knew well. Already in September 1717, Law had promised, as the London periodical the Post Man revealed, to “transport into the Louisiana 6,000” settlers, but it was only beginning in March 1719 that he at last began to fulfill that pledge.

That month, at the inaugural meeting of Law’s Company of the West, its directors were informed that the company’s first objective was “to promote the value and the safety of the colony of Louisiana by sending new recruits to live there.” That objective immediately became the law of the land when, later the same month, a royal decree announced unprecedented policing policies in Paris: “The need that we have of inhabitants for our colonies has made us regard as a great good for our state . . . the arrest of paupers and the homeless who will be transported to our colonies and put to work there.” When patrolling the streets of Paris, the officers of the guet, the watch, could and did detain anyone found in the capital who was unable to produce on the spot proof of identity and employment. They were even able to detain those merely denounced by passersby. Parisians shared tales of the imprisonment of “upstanding citizens” and declared that such arrests were often inspired by “the basest jealousy,” a claim borne out by the stories of many women who found themselves in the Salpêtrière and selected for deportation.

By May 12, the day that Indies Company stock was initially offered, a new rumor was circulating: the king had given the Indies Company permission to take from Parisian prisons and orphanages “young people of both sexes.” Pancatelin’s decision to compile a list of women for deportation attests to her realization that, as 1719 unfolded and John Law saw that it was proving far more difficult to find colonists for Louisiana than enslaved Africans, the company’s all-powerful director was willing to authorize any means that would help him fulfill his promise to send six thousand French settlers.

The list is marked as having been “arrêtée,” or officially approved, on June 27, 1719. On July 9, Pancatelin wrote Lieutenant Général Machault, begging him to “honor her” with a visit to the Salpêtrière so that they could “share a morsel.” Explaining that she had already begun preparations for the women’s departure and that she hoped to expand her list, she asked him to bring the original copy with the regent’s signature when he came to dine. Machault warned her that “because there was opposition, the departure of the women was still not certain.”

Pancatelin knew why Machault was likely to be sympathetic to her scheme. Beginning in 1708, he had served as intendant du commerce, intendant of commerce, and as a member of the Conseil du Commerce, the Council of Commerce, the regulatory group that advised the Crown on matters of business and trade. After Louis XIV’s death, the council focused on trade with France’s overseas colonies as a means of dealing with the nation’s gigantic debt, and all through 1717 it had debated Law’s policies. When Machault took on the administration of the Parisian police in January 1718, he did not relinquish his other administrative posts. The individual in control of the fates of all women arrested in Paris and all women incarcerated in the Parisian prison system had therefore a personal stake in the success of Law’s projects.

As soon as stock market fever took hold, all official opposition to the women’s deportation disappeared.

As soon as stock market fever took hold, all official opposition to the women’s deportation disappeared. After Pancatelin got her green light, Machault proved just how valuable an ally he could be. In August and September 1719, officers under Machault’s control arrested women at a rate so disproportionally higher than in previous or subsequent years that it seems all but certain that the officers on the beat had been encouraged to lock up women—however and whenever possible.

In August 1717, just prior to Law’s consolidation of power, thirty-two women were detained in Paris and confined to the prison administered by the Parisian police, the Grand Châtelet. At all times, many women arrested were released for lack of evidence, and indeed twenty of the women detained in 1717 were soon set free, and only six (18 percent) were sent from the Grand Châtelet to serve terms in Pancatelin’s prison. Yet in August 1719, under Machault’s watch, those numbers shot up. Fifty-three women were arrested; of those, even though thirty-three were set free, twenty (37 percent) were incarcerated in the Salpêtrière. (In August 1720, the year after the women of La Mutine were deported, arrests of women dropped to the pre-Law level, totalling thirty-seven.)

In addition, the women dispatched to the Salpêtrière in August 1719 were dispatched with alacrity. Comparing August 1717 to August 1719, the number of days that elapsed between a woman’s arrest and the date on which the order transferring her to the Salpêtrière was issued declined dramatically. During this crucial interval, officers typically interviewed witnesses and neighbors, checked out alibis, and prepared a file to be presented to the presiding official, who then pronounced judgment. In August 1717, in every case over a month was devoted to verifications. In contrast, in one case from August 1719, the entire process, from arrest to verdict, took place in only four days: on August 15, Anne Thérèse Valenciennes was brought to the Châtelet prison by officers of the watch; on August 19, Valenciennes was sent to the Salpêtrière.15 In the two months between July 29 and September 30, 1719, eleven women detained by officers of the Parisian police were judged as summarily as Valenciennes, and, like her, transferred to the Salpêtrière. All eleven were then deported—with almost dizzying speed. The last woman transferred, Marguerite Letellier, left Paris in chains on October 6, only one week after her initial arrest. Marguerite was never transferred to the Salpêtrière but instead moved directly to the deportation convoy.

Marguerite had worked as a scullery maid in the household of Marguerite Hémart, Dame de Foucaucourt. In November 1712, after Hémart accused the nine-year-old of theft, the girl was imprisoned and ordered to pay a three-livres fine. Children worked for food and shelter rather than wages, so Marguerite could never have paid. Hémart next accused Marguerite of “threatening” her, and this time, the child was fined 30 livres for “reparations.”

Marguerite was mere collateral damage in the matter that truly “threatened” Hémart’s peace of mind: her eldest, heir to the family fortune, Adrien Morel de Foucaucourt, had fallen in love with another scullery maid, Françoise Letellier (Marguerite’s sister), had had a son by her in 1711, and wanted to marry her. When Adrien’s younger brothers had him banished from France in a bid to take control of the family estate, he took Françoise with him.

The seduction of a maid by a young nobleman who promised marriage was a classic tale, but as this story indicates, aristocrats sometimes did intend to keep their word and marry mere servants. In such cases, the servant, considered a menace to the social order, was severely punished. This time, after Adrien put Françoise out of his mother’s reach, she took out her rage on another young woman. Five years later, in 1719, Adrien returned to Paris, and the family was once again up in arms. Just at that moment, Adrien’s mother lashed out once again at Marguerite, by then sixteen, and had her detained and exiled.

The last women arrested, Valenciennes and Letellier among them, were locked up by officers working in collaboration with the only female administrator in the Parisian prison system, Warden Pancatelin. They were apprehended specifically to be exiled to Louisiana and thereby curry favor with John Law. Even though none of their dossiers had been approved for deportation by the regent, all eleven names were added to the cohort of those set to leave Pancatelin’s prison and France forever.

On Friday, September 1, the alliance between Pancatelin and Law that was the foundation of the deportation scheme received official recognition. John Law himself paid a visit to the Salpêtrière, requested more women for his colony, and pledged a donation: 1 million livres, a sum worthy of the age of Mississippi millionaires and a windfall that came with no strings attached. Observers added that he promised to return on January 1, 1720, with still another reward for Pancatelin’s work on his behalf.

In the fall of 1719, a lawyer for the Parisian Parlement concluded that the dream of instant wealth had thoroughly corroded French society: “There is no longer any honor, any word of honor, any good faith.” A Parisian warned his sister living in the provinces that “Paris is no longer the city you once knew.” In this world without honor, violence was everywhere, and Paris became a city of mean streets and roaming predators. There were high-profile murders in public and broad daylight—many of them committed on or near the rue Quincampoix, where wealthy investors were knifed to death for their cash. Another prominent lawyer reported that “the police have been fishing out of the river a great quantity of arms, legs, and sawed-off slices of those who have been assassinated and cut into pieces.” He added that all Parisians knew why their city had changed: “Everyone blames the violence on the despicable speculation in paper.”

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Adapted excerpt from Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast by Joan DeJean. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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