Adam Smith, the Duke of Buccleuch and Colbert de Castlehill as ‘Strangers’ in Toulouse

Recent scholarship on the French Enlightenment has discovered an intriguing figure, Colbert de Castlehill, who played a significant role in the early stage of the French Revolution. He not only bridges the Enlightenment and the Revolution in France, but also the French and Scottish Enlightenments worldwide. In the context of the study of Adam Smith, Colbert has been known merely by his name, but the situation has gradually been changing. Compared to the highlighted scene of Smith’s encounter with François Quesnay and other Physiocrats in Paris, the days Smith and his pupil the Duke of Buccleuch spent in Toulouse and Southern France during the first half of their Grand Tour was considerably ignored. In Southern France, it is David Hume’s friend Colbert de Castlehill who was possibly of the greatest importance to Smith’s landing on local societies. Colbert had a kind of Humean talent cultivated in Parisian sociable settings before arriving in Toulouse, whose sociability would have not merely been practically useful to Smith and Buccleuch, but also essential to moral education for the young duke. The chapter particularly illustrates his “Voltairian” spirit characterised by his public interventions with the polemical issues of the age that were accompanied by the morally impartial perspective.