Professor Coleman's lecture traces the surprising influence of sacramental theology on the reception of John Law’s efforts to reform public finances and colonial trade in France. Allusions to the mysteries of transubstantiation and transmutation abounded in cultural productions of the period, which depict Law’s new banknotes and company shares as giving rise to unimaginable riches seemingly overnight. Professor Coleman will argue that a Eucharistic-alchemical complex lent itself not only to describing the function of these instruments, but also to rendering intelligible their myriad effects on private and public affairs. The spiritual desideratum of inexhaustibility underwrote popular participation in Law’s system, which demanded that French subjects invest themselves with abandon in the dream of limitless accumulation.

Charly Coleman is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on early modern and modern Europe, as well as in the Core Curriculum. He received his PhD in history at Stanford University. Before coming to Columbia, he taught at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis. Coleman specializes in the history of 18th-century France, with a particular emphasis on the intersections between religion and Enlightenment thought. His first book, The Virtues of Abandon (Stanford University Press, 2014; awarded the 2016 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies), fundamentally recasts the French Enlightenment as a protracted struggle to fix the self’s relationship to property in its myriad forms. In so doing, it uncovers a wide-ranging, coherent, and influential culture of dispossession, the partisans of which fought to strip the self of its property, its personality, and even its very existence as an individual. Coleman has further elaborated the stakes of this anti-individualist history of the period in a series of articles and book chapters, including pieces for The Journal of Modern History and The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment. His most recent research has turned to the crucial role played by economic theology during the long 18th century in France, with an eye to revealing a distinctly Catholic ethic that animated the spirit of capitalism at its inception.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.