Luxury as an Eighteenth-Century Language of Reform of Society Between France and Italy

This chapter explores the reflections on luxury as a political language aimed at the reform of the ancien régime society, focusing on France and Italy through the thinking of J. F. Melon, A. Genovesi, and G. M. Butel-Dumont. The ideas of the three authors, who wrote on the subject at different moments between the 1730s and the 1770s, makes it possible to follow and highlight a fundamental change in ways of discussing reform and luxury. Starting in particular from the 1750s a significant shift began in the language of luxury as it moved from being solely a language concerning economic reform to a language of the reform and, later, of the critique of the social structure of the ancien régime.