From Charles-Eléonor Dufriche de Valazé
ls: American Philosophical Society
<Essey in Normandy, December 10, 1779, in French: I admire
you and your countrymen to such a degree that I shall allow
myself to give you some frank advice, brother to brother.
Doubtless, you will win your independence and shake the yoke
of three hundred years of tyranny but you should beware of
another, ever so seductive yoke: luxury. You are aware of its
pitfalls, of course, but let me remind you of its destructive
power. Luxury enters and corrupts society through women, its
natural victims. Greed and corruption soon follow, and violence.
Farms are abandoned for cities, unnecessary goods are
manufactured, marriages fail, population decreases, the nation
is threatened by envious neighbors.
As to the dividing line between the necessary and the superfluous,
for a country it is growing enough food and extracting
enough iron to survive; for a household, a minimum of furniture
and cooking utensils. Yes, but what about the citizens
thrown out of employment by such a reform? Send them back
to the fields, make them replace the oxen and the horses, thus
reducing the need for pastures and freeing land for agriculture.
Worse yet than private luxury is the bad example set by the
heads of state who have replaced laurel wreaths by gold crowns,
and rough-hewn triumphal arches by magnificent monuments.
It is up to the government to set a good example and you are
the man to inspire a new order.
One last word, but crucial: beware of hereditary nobility, the
seed of dissension, hatred, and domestic wars. Whoever acts
righteously in order to obtain a recompense is unworthy of the
republic and of humanity.>
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