Protectionism, same as it ever was.
Before Drug Prohibition, There Was the War on Calico
In 18th century France, wearing the wrong fabric could get you in big trouble.
On a shopping trip to the butcher's, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.
Another young woman stood in the door of her boss' wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.
It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes—in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins—had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.
. . .
To the mercantilist argument that permitting domestic calico production would be good for French industry, economic liberals added a novel point. The law was unjust, penalizing the many for the benefit of the few. "Is it not strange," wrote the Abbé André Morellet in a 1758 tract against the ban, "that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, & does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying in Geneva at 22 sous what he was able to sell in Grenoble for 58?"
